The New Yorker

New Yorker Mag Reveals Trump Family’s Frenzy to Cash In on the White House

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“How much is Trump pocketing off the presidency?” That’s the question driving a major new investigation by journalist David D. Kirkpatrick in The New Yorker, which finds that the first family has been leveraging its place atop U.S. politics to rake in billions.

According to Kirkpatrick, Donald Trump and his immediate family have made $3.4 billion from his time in the White House, including more than $2.3 billion from various cryptocurrency ventures alone.

“What really surprised me about all this is just how fast they’re making this money. They seem to turn down no opportunity,” says Kirkpatrick. “It really sharpens the question of what a buyer, so to speak, might be getting for that.”

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The Musician Bringing the Bagpipes Into the Avant-Garde

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Brìghde Chaimbeul frees her instrument from the confines of kitsch.

The 27-year-old Scottish musician Brìghde Chaimbeul is considered one of the most skillful and interesting bagpipe players in the world. Chaimbeul grew up a native Gaelic speaker on Skye, an island in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides, in a family of artists. Since pivoting, as a teen-ager, from the Great Highland pipes to focus on the smallpipes, she’s won national folk competitions and released three solo albums (the latest, “Sunwise,” in June), but also made pilgrimages to places such as Bulgaria, where other pipe traditions have flourished; collaborated with the indie singer-songwriter Caroline Polachek; and played for a Dior runway show. “In doing so, she has redrawn the bounds of her instrument,” Elena Saavedra Buckley writes.

The Scottish smallpipe, which has roots that go at least as far back as the 15th century, was nearly lost to history. “These bagpipes had mostly been hidden away in the backs of cupboards,” the Lowland and Border Pipers’ Society journal explained in 1989, “or they had found their way, as curiosities of a former age, into museums, where they would lie dead and silent in display cases.” But, over the years, Scottish musicians advocated for smallpipes as a cultural corrective: something that could revive a lost, jubilant character of communal Scottish music, and that could help disrupt not only the regimented Highland piping culture but the kitschy idea of Scotland forged by English imperialism. Chaimbeul, lauded as a “musical genius” by her peers, is part of this lineage of bagpipe players who are luring tradition into the present. “It all stems from her tacit understanding of the tradition. It’s a kind of focus on the depth in our music, in which the layers of virtuosity are stripped away,” one of her collaborators said.

Read the full story by Elena Saavedra Buckley: The Musician Bringing the Bagpipes Into the Avant-Garde | The New Yorker

The Enduring, Incandescent Power of Kate Bush

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One secret of the singer-songwriter’s artistry is that she has never feared the ludicrous—she tries things that other musicians would be too careful or cool to go near

Female pop geniuses who exercise their gifts in rampant, restless fashion over decades, writing, performing, and producing their own work, are as rare as black opals. Shape-shifting brilliance and an airy indifference to what’s expected of you are not the music industry’s favorite assets in any performer, but they are probably easier to accept in a man than in a woman. And such a musician, even today, is subject to the same pressures that have always hindered women’s artistic expression. Like the thwarted writers whom Virginia Woolf described in “A Room of One’s Own,” the female pop original is “strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that”—by the refusal to please and accommodate that only a deep belief in one’s own gift can counteract. “What genius, what integrity it must have required in the face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society,” Woolf writes, “to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.” [ . . . ]
Continue at THE NEW YORKER

The Strange and Twisted Life of “Frankenstein” 

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Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley began writing “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” when she was eighteen years old, two years after she’d become pregnant with her first child, a baby she did not name. “Nurse the baby, read,” she had written in her diary, day after day, until the eleventh day: “I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it,” and then, in the morning, “Find my baby dead.” With grief at that loss came a fear of “a fever from the milk.” Her breasts were swollen, inflamed, unsucked; her sleep, too, grew fevered. “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived,” she wrote in her diary. “Awake and find no baby.”

Pregnant again only weeks later, she was likely still nursing her second baby when she started writing “Frankenstein,” and pregnant with her third by the time she finished. She didn’t put her name on her book—she published “Frankenstein” anonymously, in 1818, not least out of a concern that she might lose custody of her children—and she didn’t give her monster a name, either. “This anonymous androdaemon,” one reviewer called it. For the first theatrical production of “Frankenstein,” staged in London in 1823 (by which time the author had given birth to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit on ice), the monster was listed on the playbill as “––––––.”

“This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good,” Shelley remarked about the creature’s theatrical billing. She herself had no name of her own. Like the creature pieced together from cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, her name was an assemblage of parts: the name of her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to that of her father, the philosopher William Godwin, grafted onto that of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley were the sum of her relations, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, if not the milk of her mother’s milk, since her mother had died eleven days after giving birth to her, mainly too sick to give suck—Awoke and found no mother. [ . . . ]

Continue & listen to audio story at THE NEW YORKER: The Strange and Twisted Life of “Frankenstein” | The New Yorker