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PRICE $8.99 MAR. 26, 2018 MARCH 26, 2018 6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 17 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Amy Davidson Sorkin on White House mayhem; Allbirds’ moral fibres; Trump’s Twitter blockees; Sheila Hicks looms large; #MeToo and men. ANNALS OF THEATRE Michael Schulman 22 The Ascension Marianne Elliott and “Angels in America.” SHOUTS & MURMURS Ian Frazier 27 The British Museum of Your Stuff ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS Hua Hsu 28 Hip-Hop’s New Frontier 88rising’s Asian imports. PROFILES Connie Bruck 36 California v. Trump Jerry Brown’s last term as governor. PORTFOLIO Sharif Hamza 48 Gun Country with Dana Goodyear Firearms enthusiasts of the Parkland generation. FICTION Tommy Orange 58 “The State” THE CRITICS A CRITIC AT LARGE Jill Lepore 64 Rachel Carson’s writings on the sea. BOOKS Adam Kirsch 73 Two new histories of the Jews. 77 Briefly Noted THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony Lane 78 “Tomb Raider,” “Isle of Dogs.” POEMS J. Estanislao Lopez 32 “Meditation on Beauty” Lucie Brock-Broido 44 “Giraffe” COVER Barry Blitt “Exposed” DRAWINGS Roz Chast, Zachary Kanin, Seth Fleishman, William Haefeli, Charlie Hankin, P. C. Vey, Bishakh Som, Peter Kuper, Carolita Johnson, Tom Cheney, Emily Flake, Edward Koren SPOTS Miguel Porlan CONTRIBUTORS The real story, in real time. Connie Bruck (“California v. Trump,” Hua Hsu (“Hip-Hop’s New Frontier,” p. 36) has been a staff writer since 1989. p. 28), a staff writer, is the author of “A She has published three books, among Floating Chinaman.” them “The Predators’ Ball.” Jill Lepore (A Critic at Large, p. 64) is Michael Schulman (“The Ascension,” a professor of history at Harvard Uni- p. 22), the theatre editor of Goings On versity. Her new book, “These Truths: About Town, is the author of “Her A History of the United States,” will Again: Becoming Meryl Streep.” be published in September. ANNALS OF DIPLOMACY TRUMP, PUTIN, AND THE Lucie Brock-Broido (Poem, p. 44), who Ian Frazier (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 27) NEW COLD WAR died earlier this month, was the author most recently published “Hogs Wild: What lay behind Russia’s interference in the of four poetry collections, including, Selected Reporting Pieces” and is work- 2016 election—and what lies ahead? most recently, “Stay, Illusion.” ing on a book about the Bronx. By Evan Osnos, David Remnick, Joshua Yaffa MARCH 6, 2017 ISSUE Sharif Hamza (Portfolio, p. 48), a pho- Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 17), tographer living in New York City, has a staff writer, is a regular contributor contributed to Vogue, V Magazine, and to Comment. She also writes a column Dazed. His work focusses on youth for newyorker.com. culture in fashion, music, and cinema. Tommy Orange (Fiction, p. 58) is the Dana Goodyear (Portfolio, p. 48), a staff author of the novel “There There,” writer, is the author of three books, in- which comes out in June. He teaches cluding “Anything That Moves.” in the M.F.A. program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Adam Kirsch SUBSCRIBE (Books, p. 73), a poet and critic, published “The Global Novel: J. Estanislao Lopez (Poem, p. 32) lives Writing the World in the 21st Cen- in Houston and attends the M.F.A. tury” last year. program at Warren Wilson College. NEWYORKER.COM Stay current with our award- Everything in the magazine, and more. winning writing on politics and international aff airs, culture and entertainment, business and technology. Plus a nearly unlimited supply of cartoons. newyorker.com/go/today PHOTO BOOTH VIDEO Hua Hsu writes about Sharif Hamza discusses his George Rodriguez’s portrait photographs of young Americans of a Los Angeles divided. and their guns. Available on iPad and iPhone 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.) RODRIGUEZ/COURTESY GEORGE BY PHOTOGRAPH LEFT: COUCEIRO CRISTIANA & BEARD PRESS; RIGHT: HAT 4 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 26, 2018 YOUR PASSIONS. THE MAIL OUR EXPERTISE. STRANGE GUESTS bringing pests from elsewhere is never Making our fault but somehow that of the or- I have zero interest in brown marmorated ganisms themselves. They are blamed New York stinkbugs; in fact, I’d rather be entirely for doing what all organisms do—at- ignorant of them (“Home Invasion,” tempt to reproduce and survive. As loath- Better March 12th). But, on reading the first some as they might smell, act, or be, they few sentences of Kathryn Schulz’s arti- are not the villains in these environmen- for All cle about them, understanding what I tal dislocations; we are. was in for and wishing to avoid it at all Daniel Lewis New costs . well, I simply could not tear The Huntington Library myself away. That she was able to lure San Marino, Calif. Yorkers me in and keep me reading to the very end is proof of her spell-weaving ability. Forty-five years ago, for The Atlantic, I Ken Horowitz wrote “Wings of the Rhinoceros,” an ac- Stamford, Conn. count of the campaign against the co- conut rhinoceros beetle, an invasive spe- Each year, the number of stinkbugs in- cies that was destroying coconut-palm vading my home grows. In the fall, there plantations in Micronesia. My black bee- were thousands of them crawling on the tle was colossal compared with the brown The New York Community Trust back of my building, trying to get inside. stinkbug, and had a huge horn on its can help you start The best way to deal with them is to head. But in both cases biological con- a charitable fund drop them into soapy water. The addi- trols—where a natural enemy organism that fits your timeline, tion of a drop or two of dish detergent is introduced to counter the invader— giving level and will break the surface tension; the bug turned out to be a useful tool, and the personal interests. will sink just below the surface and drown war between human and insect ended in quickly. I keep cups of water on every stalemate. These stories are advisories on level of my home. Outside, I use a wide human hubris: the insects will survive WEÕRE HERE TO HELP YOU paintbrush to sweep them into a larger us. Schulz makes one mistake, though, container of soapy water, thereby killing in suggesting that long bills evolved to • DECIDE ON YOUR hundreds at a time. I won’t squash them, reach nectar as a way around plant de- GIFT: $5,000 OR but beyond that I show no mercy. fenses. Long bills and nectar coevolved $5 MILLION. Reading Schulz’s piece, I was reminded for their mutual benefit. The plant does • START A FUND of the invasion of purple loosestrife, a not defend the nectar. It offers it. TODAY — OR PLAN magenta weed that was taking over all Ken Brower A GIFT FOR LATER. our wetlands and choking out many nat- Berkeley, Calif. ural species. To combat the problem, bee- • GIVE TO THE ISSUES tles that dined on loosestrife were intro- What a disgusting story, brilliantly writ- THAT MATTER MOST TO YOU. duced. Now the weed is under control. ten: Stephen King meets Rachel Car- How easily we forget biological catastro- son. Has anyone in the U.S. considered phe, and also biological solutions. processing stinkbugs for food, as they Dave Thompson are used in Southeast Asia, or for phar- Imagine Ann Arbor, Mich. maceuticals (cancer drugs? antibacteri- als?)? Cows eat our crops; we eat cows. Your Impact As Mark Twain noted, “Nature knows Even rapeseed was toxic until crop breed- Learn more at no indecencies; man invents them.” ers transformed it into canola. Schulz relies on the same highly milita- David Waltner-Toews www.GiveTo.nyc rized and villainizing language that’s Kitchener, Ont. widely used to describe other so-called invasive species. These critters have ar- • rived in their new homes not of their Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, own agency but through careless (and address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited sometimes intentional) handling by hu- for length and clarity, and may be published in nycommunitytrust.org mans. Our breathtaking sense of excep- any medium. We regret that owing to the volume tionalism insures that our errant ways in of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter. THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 26, 2018 5 MARCH 21 – 27, 2018 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN In the fourteen years since “Mean Girls” came out—introducing the world to such bons mots as “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen”—the lives of teen-age girls have become only more fraught, with Snapchat chronicling every after-school power play. A musical adaptation, with songs by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin and an updated script by Tina Fey, who wrote the enduringly witty 2004 screenplay, is in pre- views at the August Wilson, directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw. Will “fetch” finally happen? PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH RENSTROM masterworks—is an international secret agent who confounds powerful men with her charms and subju- gates them with her intelligence. She’s summoned by MOVIES the British government to deliver to a Middle East- ern sheikh a shipment of diamonds that’s sought by 1 the arch-criminal Gabriel (Dirk Bogarde). Aided by ses and creative self-recognitions into confessional her able sidekick, Willie Garvin (Terence Stamp), a NOW PLAYING monologues, pugnacious discussions, and luminous working-class guy turned high-flying playboy, Mod- aphorisms. His tightrope-long takes of scenes filmed esty darts from Amsterdam (the site of some daz- Annihilation in settings ranging from the picturesque to the banal zlingly intricate aquatic plots) and London (in full In this numbingly ludicrous science-fiction drama, (restaurants and apartments, café terraces, Mediter- sixties swing) to the posh island lair that Gabriel written and directed by Alex Garland, a talented cast ranean beaches) have an intricate dramatic construc- shares with the stylishly bloodthirsty Clara Fothergill of actors play undeveloped characters delivering tion, replete with glittering asides and wondrous co- (Rossella Falk).