Culture // The New Yorker
In 1993, seven years before his death, at the age of eighty-two, Jacob Lawrence recast the title and most of the captions of a stunning suite of sixty small paintings that he had made in 1941. The pictures, in milk-based casein tempera on hardboard, detailed the exodus that began during the First World War of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The original title, “The Migration of the Negro,” became “The Migration Series.” The prolix captions were condensed and clarified, with only five of them left unedited, including the last, a swelling coda to the sequence’s rhythmic montage: “And the migrants kept coming.” Art historians quail at alterations of canonical works, even by their creators. But Lawrence wasn’t working for art history, even if he was making it. He wanted to change the world. A profoundly moving show of all sixty paintings in “The Migration Series” at the Museum of Modern Art—the installation, by the curator Leah Dickerman, includes contemporaneous works by other artists, photographers, musicians, and writers—stirs reflection on the character and the relative success of that aim. The work’s originality calls for a term other than “history painting”: sociology painting, perhaps, which defines not only a bygone era but a deeply conditioned and persistent yet quaking ground of common cultural experience and political consequence. The pictures remain the same. The eyes that behold them—ours—both do and don’t.
Five-Borough Freestyle: Bruk Up
When we think of dance performance, we often think of careful choreography. But in New York, where cultures collide and tradition exists alongside the avant-garde, there’s a whole world of dance based around the purely improvisational. In our new bimonthly video series “Five-Borough Freestyle,” we’ll cross the city to explore styles that form the cutting edge of New York’s ever-evolving dance scene. We will look to street culture and classical studios, to dance veterans and rising stars.
“Mad Men” Cartoon Countdown: The Seventh- and Sixth-to-Last Episodes
The first and second installments of a very thorough series of recaps of AMC’s “Mad Men,” the final season.
Hillary for President: No Joke
If you’re old enough to remember the beginning of the first Clinton Presidency, in 1993, you may remember a joke that circulated at the time. It went something like this: Bill and Hillary Clinton are driving near her home town. They stop to get some gas, whereupon Hillary recognizes the station attendant as a high-school boyfriend. After they drive off, Bill tells her, smugly, “See, if you’d married him, you’d be working at a gas station.” Hillary smartly replies, “If I’d married him, he’d be President.”
Kate McKinnon’s Genius Hillary Impersonation
Hillary Clinton’s official announcement that she is running for President is great news for comedy. It means that, among other things, there will be months and months, and perhaps years and years, of Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.” The thirty-one-year-old McKinnon has played Clinton just three times, most notably last month and then again this past Saturday night, but her Clinton is already among the best impersonations of a politician ever to appear on the show—joining a list of greats that includes Dana Carvey as George H. W. Bush, Phil Hartman and Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton, Will Ferrell as George W. Bush, and Tina Fey as Sarah Palin.
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The English comedian Simon Amstell is reedy and pale, with a brown mop of curls and the demeanor of a bullied schoolboy: head bowed, hands awkward. But he has built his career in the U.K. with comedy based on an aggressive subverting of social convention. As an interviewer of celebrities on British television, where he began his career in the early aughts, Amstell, who is openly gay, once flirted brazenly with the reggae singer Beenie Man, who had been criticized for homophobia in his lyrics. (When Beenie Man attempted to rebuff the advances by asking if Amstell wanted to go out after the show and pick up women, Amstell responded by handing the singer a banana scrawled with his phone number.) In a memorable episode of the music-trivia panel show “Never Mind the Buzzcocks,” where Amstell served as presenter from 2006 to 2008, Samuel Preston, of the punk pop band the Ordinary Boys, stalked off the stage after Amstell began reading excruciating extracts from the biography of the singer’s wife at the time, the model Chantelle Houghton.
In this week’s magazine, William Finnegan writes about gold mining in the ramshackle town of La Rinconada, in the Peruvian Andes. In stark contrast to large-scale, mechanized modern mining operations, the gold mines of La Rinconada are, Finnegan writes, “small, numerous, unregulated, and, as a rule, grossly unsafe.” The Peruvian government is attempting to crack down on unregulated mining and “formalize” the industry. But for now, when the price of gold is high, individuals flock to the town to try their luck digging gold from the mountain’s quartz veins, and stave off disaster by offering gifts to the mountain deities. As Finnegan writes, “The raw investment of time, effort, heart’s blood, and personal risk poured into a search through mountains of useless, infuriating rock for tiny flecks of precious metal might leave anyone obsessed.”
Of the many passages that gave me pause when I first read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” in high school, the one I remember the most clearly is this conversation between Connie, Clifford, and the Irish writer Michaelis:
“I find I can’t marry an Englishwoman, not even an Irishwoman…”
“Try an American,” said Clifford.
“Oh, American!” He laughed a hollow laugh. “No, I’ve asked my man if he will find me a Turk or something…something nearer to the Oriental.”
Connie really wondered at this queer, melancholy specimen.
For many readers, this exchange might have slipped by unnoticed. But, as a Turkish American, I couldn’t prevent myself from registering all the slights against Turkish people that I encountered in European books. In “Heidi,” the meanest goat is called “the Great Turk.”
Cover Story: Bruce McCall’s “Life in the Cuba of Tomorrow”
On this week’s cover, Bruce McCall imagines life in the coming age of friendlier Cuban-American relations. “I love Cuban cigars, and this sways me more than it should,” McCall says of his own feelings toward the country. “The island’s history—Spanish exploitation, then American exploitation, then the dismal Castro era—is tragic, but Cuban musicians and artists still rule, attesting to an unquenchable creative impulse that has thrived amid all forms of chaos.”
News // The New Yorker
Kalief Browder and a Change at Rikers
Last year, Kalief Browder allowed me to interview him many times about his experience in the New York City criminal-justice system. At sixteen, he had been arrested in the Bronx for a robbery that he insisted he hadn’t committed. He endured three years on Rikers Island before his case was dismissed. When I met him, a year ago, he was out of jail and not eager to revisit his time there—but ultimately he did, describing what it was like to spend months in solitary confinement, to miss the last two […]
Marco Rubio and the Three-Strikes Theory of Politics
Whatever happened to Marco Rubio? In February, 2013, his picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine, accompanied by the headline “The Republican Savior.” At the time, many political analysts—Bill Clinton reportedly among them—viewed the Florida senator as a big threat to the Democrats in 2016. Now, following his announcement on Monday in Miami, he’s officially in the race for the Republican nomination, but as a rank outsider. According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, just 7.5 per […]
A Life Sentence for a Blackwater Murder
Eight years ago, in Baghdad, American contractors working for the Blackwater USA security company were driving in a convoy near the Nisour Square roundabout, when they suddenly opened fire with automatic weapons. First, a Blackwater sniper, Nicholas Slatten, shot at a car and hit the driver, a medical student named Ahmed Haithem, in the head. Others in the convoy started shooting, too, and struck Haithem’s mother, who was riding in the front seat, next to her son, and died screaming for someone […]
Marine Le Pen’s Political Patricide
Back in 1987, when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French radical-right party the National Front, dumped his wife of more than a quarter century, Pierrette Lalanne, she took revenge by stripping and posing in French Playboy. Now their daughter Marine Le Pen is dumping the old man, in turn, for making a crude spectacle of himself—banishing him from the party she inherited from him just four years ago. The occasion for the rupture is that the father, who got his start in politics as a fascis […]
Gardner C. Taylor, Righteous Wingman
Numerous obituaries for the Reverend Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, who died on Easter Sunday at the age of ninety-six, have obliged the historical and journalistic requirements to compile his achievements. And those achievements were indeed awesome: Taylor, who spent forty-two years as the pastor of Concord Baptist Church of Christ, in Brooklyn, one of the most significant African-American pulpits in the nation, was called the “Prince of Preachers.” He delivered thousands of sermons and mentored hundre […]
American Vice: Bob Menendez’s Global Reach
At work and at play, Senator Robert Menendez, of New Jersey, is a man of the world. Departing the confines of Union City, where he grew up and where he first entered politics, Menendez rose to become the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, travelling frequently, receiving foreign dignitaries, and moving easily between English and Spanish. In the view of federal prosecutors, his capacious appetite for life beyond New Jersey has carried him past too many boundaries. On Apri […]
Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ Inequality Agenda
Following his appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend, when he declined to offer a full endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign bid, Mayor Bill de Blasio found himself on the front of New York City’s tabloids on Monday. “STABBED IN DE BACK,” blared the Daily News. The Post ran with “HILL’S FURY” and the subhead “Blaz won’t endorse as prez run official.” As a former newspaper headline writer, I could admire the “DE BACK” formulation, but I was also keen to read what d […]
Comment from the April 20, 2015, Issue
In “What Videos Show,” Amy Davidson writes about the police shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and argues that footage only matters when those who watch it make the right decisions. […]
The 2015 Masters: The Jordan Spieth Show
There’s an old saying that goes, “The Masters doesn’t really begin until the leaders start out on the back nine on Sunday afternoon.” This year, that was where the tournament more or less ended. When Jordan Spieth holed out from just off the green, to the left of the tenth hole, he moved six shots ahead of Justin Rose and Phil Mickelson. For a player of Spieth’s quality and steadiness, half a dozen shots is a huge lead, and despite the best efforts of the television commentators to insist that i […]
Hillary Clinton is ready for Hillary. That could be gleaned from the video officially launching her run for President in 2016, called “Getting Started,” which was posted on a new YouTube channel Sunday afternoon. It was a strange production: for the first few seconds, it seemed to be an ad that preceded the actual video; it could have been for auto insurance, or soap, or anything. “I’m getting ready for a lot of things—a lot of things,” a young mother says. A daughter starting kindergarten, a ne […]