Some fascinating stuff in this issue. The article by Adam Entous and Evan Osnos about China’s suspect courtship of Jared Kushner makes its point pretty early and then goes on longer than I had patience for it. But three other stories had me from start to finish.
Nick Paumgarten’s “Getting a Shot” tells about the amazing experience director Madeleine Sackler had making her prison film “O.G.” at a maxium-security state prison in Indiana, employing guards (correctional officers) and inmates (offenders) as actors, including Theothus Carter (pictured above with Sackler, photo by Krisanne Johnson), a twentysomething guy serving a 65-year sentence, who plays one of two leads opposite Jeffrey Wright.
In “Remainders,” Kathryn Schulz tells how a chance purchase in a junk shop of an inscribed volume of Langston Hughes’s poetry led her to discover a fascinating black writer neither she nor I had ever heard of, William Melvin Kelley, who spent his life mostly writing about white people thinking about black people. (In the course of the piece Schulz also casually outs herself as having a female partner, information I’m always delighted to learn.)
And the great Calvin Tomkins profiles Danh Vo, a 42-year-old Vietnamese-born artist (above, photographed by José Luis Cuevas) who grew up in Copenhagen and now lives in Berlin and Mexico City. Vo, who has a survey show opening at the Guggenheim February 9, is himself surprised to be one of those artists whose work can sell for a million bucks apiece. My favorite passage of the article (and the issue):
The demand for what he does led a Dutch collector to sue him for not producing a promised work. A Dutch court ruled against Vo, saying he must deliver a large new work in the style of his recent pieces; Vo offered the collector a text piece that would read, in large letters, “Shove it up your ass, you faggot!,” which happens to be the title of one of his sculptural collages. In the end, that wasn’t necessary, because his legal team managed to reach a settlement, and the collector dropped the suit.
another eye opens 