January 11, 2016
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PRICE $7.99 JAN. 11, 2016 JANUARY 11, 2016 5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 17 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Amy Davidson on extreme weather; lightsabers; after “Downton”; David Bowie; James Surowiecki on taxing corporations. Katherine zoepf 22 SISTERS IN LAW Saudi Arabia’s first female attorneys. Simon rich 28 DAY OF JUDGMENT NICK Paumgarten 30 THE WALL DANCER A rock-climbing prodigy. TAD Friend 36 THE MOGUL OF THE MIDDLE A studio head tries to reinvent Hollywood. BEN Lerner 50 THE CUSTODIANS The Whitney’s conservation methods. FICTION ANNE Carson 60 “1 = 1” THE CRITICS A CRITIC AT LARGE THOMAS Mallon 63 The rise of the radical right. BOOKS 69 Briefly Noted MUSICAL EVENTS ALEX Ross 70 Igor Levit and Evgeny Kissin. POEMS Frank x. Gaspar 27 “Quahogs” Jane VanDenburgh 56 “When Grace at the Bliss Café Calls” marcellus hall COVER “The Great Thaw” DRAWINGS Kim Warp, Farley Katz, Will McPhail, Benjamin Schwartz, Liana Finck, Charlie Hankin, Edward Steed, Joe Dator, Paul Noth, William Haefeli, Roz Chast, Tom Cheney, Tom Chitty, David Borchart, Tom Toro, Barbara Smaller, David Sipress, Jack Ziegler SPOTS Pablo Amargo THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 1 CONTRIBUTORS Katherine Zoepf (“SISTERS IN LAW,” P. 22) is a fellow at New America. Her first book, “Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World,” comes out this month. Reporting for this piece was facilitated by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Sarah Larson (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 20)is a roving cultural correspondent for newyorker.com. Her recent interview with Aziz Ansari can be heard on Episode 11 of “The New Yorker Radio Hour.” Tad Friend (“THE MOGUL OF THE MIDDLE,” P. 36) has been a staf writer since 1998. He is the author of “Lost in Mongolia” and “Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor,” a memoir. Ben Lerner (“THE CUSTODIANS,” P. 50) is a 2015 MacArthur Fellow. His monograph, “The Hatred of Poetry,” will be out this summer. Jane Vandenburgh (POEM, P. 56), a novelist, is the author of five books, including “A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century: A Memoir.” Nick Paumgarten (“THE WALL DANCER,” P. 30) has been writing for The New Yorker since 2000. Anne Carson (FICTION, P. 60) will publish “Float,” a collection of performance pieces and other writings, later this year. thomas Mallon (A CRITIC AT LARGE, P. 63) is a novelist, an essayist, and a critic. He is the author of, most recently, “Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years.” Simon Rich (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 2) has written several works of fiction, including “Spoiled Brats,” a collection of stories. marcellus Hall (COVER), an illustrator and a musician, lives in New York. NEWYORKER.COM Everything in the magazine, and more than fifteen original stories a day. ALSO: POETRY: Jane Vandenburgh and PODCASTS: On the monthly Fiction Frank X. Gaspar read their poems. Podcast, Rivka Galchen reads Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “The Cafeteria” THE FRONT ROW: Notes on movies, by and discusses it with Deborah Treisman. Richard Brody. On Politics and More, George Packer speaks with Omer Mahdi, an Iraqi VIDEO: Ashima Shiraishi, the teen-age translator and refugee who is now a champion rock climber, on overcoming doctor in Indiana. self-doubt and failure. Plus, the latest episode of “Shorts & Murmurs.” HUMOR: Benjamin Schwartz draws a Daily Cartoon on the news. Plus, ELEMENTS: Our blog covering the Andy Borowitz and the Shouts & worlds of science and technology. Murmurs blog. SUBSCRIBERS: Get access to our magazine app for tablets and smartphones at the App Store, Amazon.com, or Google Play. (Access varies by location and device.) 2 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 THE MAIL THE MAN ON THE RIVER man—even though he would argue that “there are no men like me”—but The piece by Ben McGrath was a beau- what he accomplished from his canoe tiful remembrance of Dicky Conant, was quite extraordinary. He was a man who made it his life’s work to navigate who had his flaws, as we all do, but he a long-distance canoe using a road atlas did touch a great many people in a very and river maps (“The Wayfarer,” De- positive way. Maybe that is his legacy. cember 14th). Everyone Conant met His was a story that deserved to be was captivated by his personality and told, and I am grateful that McGrath impressed by his courage. My brother was able to write it. What warms my Peter was a part of Catfish Yacht Club, heart the most is that the article shows mentioned in the story, through which the soul of the man and recognizes that the Conant brothers and their friends which was good. explored the Nauraushaun Brook in a Joseph Conant small boat. The excitement of those Peachtree City, Ga. childhood summer adventures stuck 1 with the boys. My brother joined the TROUBLED REFUGE Coast Guard, Chris Kelly carries his membership card to this day, and Dicky I commend Rachel Aviv for telling continued to seek pleasure along the the story of Nelson Kargbo, a refugee river. As he wrote, “The experience it- from Sierra Leone who got tangled up self is the reward.” in the United States’ deportation sys- Nancy Wieting tem (“The Refugee Dilemma,” De- Chicago, Ill. cember 7th). Nelson’s devastating tra- jectory reflects a complex and violent If even only part of what Conant pattern of deportation that began with claims he did was true, he lived a life the passage of the Illegal Immigration that won’t be replicated and quite pos- Reform and Immigrant Responsibil- sibly was never lived before. When I ity Act of 1996 and has intensified met him, I knew that he was spe- since the September 11th attacks. I cial. McGrath’s insight into his psy- spent a year researching deportation che helps me to partly understand how as a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar he was able to cope with the mental in Mexico, and I can attest to the dam- demands of his journeys. I know that aging efects of U.S. immigration pol- there is convincing evidence that icies in America and beyond. Record- Conant is no longer alive, but I choose high deportations from the U.S. dis- to think that he got too much recog- mantle the lives of deportees and their nition and just stepped away; he’s of families. As with the experience of on another part of the trek. He is still Kargbo, the aftermath of detention and out there, on behalf of me and every deportation is invisible to most policy- other rat in the race, those of us who makers and members of the public. Until live as much as we can but not as much there is political will to reform Amer- as we could. Sometimes when I am ican immigration laws, millions of peo- cold and wet or hot and uncomfort- ple will continue to be caught in a sys- able on one of my own excursions— tem that is startlingly unjust. Dick would laugh at my stolen over- Deborah A. Boehm nighters and short fishing trips—I think Reno, Nev. about him and what he did. Robert E. Cooper • Demopolis, Ala. Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be I talked to McGrath in the course of edited for length and clarity, and may be pub- lished in any medium. We regret that owing to his reporting on my brother Dicky. By the volume of correspondence we cannot reply most standards he was an ordinary to every letter or return letters. THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 3 JANUARY WEDNESDAY • THURSDAY • FRIDAY • SATURDAY • SUNDAY • MONDAY • TUESDAY 2016 6TH 7TH 8TH 9TH 10TH 11TH 12TH The Public Theatre takes its art-for-all mission seriously, and, since 2005, its “Under the Radar” festival has been an essential showcase of the avant-garde. Programmed by Mark Russell and Meiyin Wang, it NIGHT LIFE | THE THEATRE has welcomed artists from places as far-flung (and free-expression-averse) as Belarus; this year’s festival, movies | DANCE | art Jan. 6-17, features companies from Chile, Japan, and Rwanda. But you don’t always need to look abroad to classical music find perception-altering voices. The South Asian trans performance duo DarkMatter was formed by two ABOVE & BEYOND New Yorkers, Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian. In “#ItGetsBitter” (at Joe’s Pub, Jan. 12-14), they offer a cheeky radical-queer critique of the gay-rights movement, employing spoken word, fractured FOOD & DRINK nursery rhymes, and fluorescent lipstick: an urgent, funny dispatch from the margins. photograph by Zane Zhou NIGHT IFE Rock and Pop “Be Real” for a primer on what he Alan Licht years ago, she was playing bebop Musicians and night-club proprietors does best. Mustard played hits before This experimental guitarist and music on Fifty-second Street; today, she’s lead complicated lives; it’s advisable he made them, and specializes in the writer (his exquisite coffee-table book, one of the high priestesses of clas- to check in advance to conrm sounds of summer—if the unsea- “Sound Art,” traces the convergence of sic cabaret, serving up standards engagements. sonable mildness holds, you might music and the visual arts) is celebrating burnished bright by way of her hit Output’s rooftop for one of its the release of a genial new album called marvellous musicianship and noble Classic Album Sundays: treasured slushies.