Innholdsfortegnelse for Aug-24-15 i The New Yorker

The beloved thirty-three-year-old lower-Manhattan mainstay—decorated with duck decoys, a moose head with hard hats on its antlers, and the double-rifles video game Big Buck Hunter—has long been a watering hole that attracts the whole village. Bankers, writers, ponytailed tough guys, women in tight pants, men with braids like Axl Rose: everybody sits side by side, drinking their fireballs and Honker’s Ale, as the jukebox flows amiably from the Pure Prairie League to Jane’s Addiction to 2 Chainz. One night this spring, after the Tribeca Film Festival, a young filmgoer said that his father used to drink there, and the bartender, Blaze Nowara, said that his dad, the owner, might have met him. Nowara also said that the bar was threatened with extinction: a developer wanted to raze the Raccoon Lodge…

Jemaine Clement was early for the dance in the church basement. The gap-toothed actor and mainstay of the tongue-in-cheek band Flight of the Conchords had put on a loose shirt and shorts and grown a broody, two-day beard in preparation for the unlit “No Lights, No Lycra” jam at a Lutheran church in Greenpoint. But the door—posted with rules that included “No watching,” “No breakdancing,” “No cell phones,” and “Sh-h-h!”—wouldn’t open till 8:15 P.M. The “No Lights, No Lycra” craze originated in Australia, in 2009, and soon migrated to Clement’s native New Zealand, where he heard about it from two friends. “One loved it,” he reported. “One said it made her feel dizzy.” In L.A., he’d sought out the Cimmerian revels but failed to pinpoint the appeal, so now he…

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or U.N.F.C.C.C., has by now been ratified by a hundred and ninety-five countries, which, depending on how you count, represents either all the countries in the world or all the countries and then some. Every year, the treaty stipulates, the signatories have to hold a meeting—a gathering that’s known as a COP, short for Conference of the Parties. The third COP produced the Kyoto Protocol, which, in turn, gave rise to another mandatory gathering, a MOP, or Meeting of the Parties. The seventeenth COP, which coincided with the seventh MOP, took place in South Africa. There it was decided that the work of previous COPs and MOPs had been inadequate, and a new group was formed— the Ad Hoc Working Group on…

Unique, I think, is the Scottish tartle, that hesitation when introducing someone whose name you’ve forgotten. And what could capture cafuné, the Brazilian Portuguese way to say running your fingers, tenderly, through someone’s hair? Is there a term in any tongue for choosing to be happy? And where is speech for the block of ice we pack in the sawdust of our hearts? What appellation approaches the smell of apricots thickening the air when you boil jam in early summer? What words reach the way I touched you last night— as though I had never known a woman—an explorer, wholly curious to discover each particular fold and hollow, without guide, not even the mirror of my own body. Last night you told me you liked my eyebrows. You said you…

February 3rd was a dark and dank day: cold spitting rain all morning and a low, steel-gray sky in the afternoon. At four, Jim persuaded his wife, Annie, to go out to do her shopping before full darkness fell. He closed the door behind her with a gentle wave. His hair was thinning, and he was missing a canine on the right side, but he was nevertheless a handsome man who, at thirty-two, might have passed for twenty. Heavy brows and deep-set, dark-lashed eyes that had been making women catch their breath since he was sixteen. Even if he’d grown bald and toothless, the eyes would have served him long into his old age. His overcoat was on the hall tree beside the door. He lifted it and rolled it…

NAGASAKI, by Susan Southard (Viking). Through the stories of five survivors, or hibakusha, from Nagasaki, Southard presents a poignant and complex picture of the second atomic bomb’s enduring physical and psychological tolls. Eyewitness accounts are visceral and haunting: the heat was “like a slow execution” within a “monochromatic soundless hell.” But the book’s biggest achievement is its treatment of the aftershocks in the decades since 1945. Particularly compelling is Southard’s presentation of the ways in which hibakusha chose whether to publicly confront the trauma or (the more prevalent choice) to keep quiet. “On the inside, their self-imposed silence helped contain their grief, guilt, and devastating memories of the bombing,” she writes. “Living this divided life allowed them to move on.” NICOLAS NABOKOV, by Vincent Giroud (Oxford). From 1951 to…

Annie Baker’s “John” (a Signature Theatre Company production, at the Pershing Square) is so good on so many levels that it casts a unique and brilliant light. It’s a handsome object, “old” in structure. While most new plays run for two hours or less—about the length of a TV movie—Baker’s fourth full-length original script clocks in at three hours and fifteen minutes, the running time of, say, a short, late-career Eugene O’Neill drama. By not rushing things—by letting the characters develop as gradually and inevitably as rain or snowfall—Baker returns us to the naturalistic but soulful theatre that many of her contemporaries and near-contemporaries have disavowed in their rush to be “postmodern.” With “John,” Baker has done something exceptional on a political level, too: she has declared her ambition. The…

INDEFENSIBLE SYSTEM Rachel Aviv presents a compelling story about a miscarriage of justice: the conviction of Rodricus Crawford, which took place in a setting redolent of Gothic Dixie and involved a prosecutor whose behavior was so erratic that colleagues speculated that he had a brain tumor (“Revenge Killing,” July 6th & 13th). But readers should not think that spectacular elements are required before a wrongful conviction can occur. The Crawford conviction was constructed from a set of mundane errors, occurring within a troubled system. A medical examiner leaped to an unwarranted conclusion, a man with a criminal record was targeted, an overzealous prosecutor overreacted under pressure. Everyone involved in the case was responsible to some degree, either by making a mistake or by failing to anticipate or intercept someone…

INGRID BERGMAN EXCELLED AT PLAYING strong-willed, independent-minded women; she herself was one, and she paid a higher price for her artistic ambition and personal freedom than did any other movie star. Her centenary is being celebrated in retrospectives at MOMA (Aug. 29-Sept. 10) and BAM Cinématek (Sept. 12-29), which feature her greatest films (including all those mentioned here) and her most infamous ones—and some that manage to be both. In her early years in Hollywood, Bergman was directed by such luminaries as George Cukor (“Gaslight”) and Alfred Hitchcock (the thrillers “Spellbound” and “Notorious,” and the Gothicerotic drama “Under Capricorn”). In 1948, she wrote to the innovative Italian director Roberto Rossellini and offered to work with him. Bergman had a child with Rossellini while they were filming in Italy, and before…

Joel Carben attended his first professional baseball game in 1980, at Yankee Stadium, as a five-year-old. He and his father sat in the upper deck, in right field, “way, way up in barely-see-it-ville,” he recalls. He remembers a man sitting behind them with a jug of moonshine, yelling vulgarities at Reggie Jackson, and he remembers his father admonishing him to keep his eyes on the ball, a lesson that he has internalized with nearfanaticism. Today, when he attends a game, as he often does, he tracks foul balls: where they land, their angle of approach. He is not interested in what this might reveal about the players producing the foul balls, or in how teams might improve their performance, using his data. “I kind of feel like a bit of…

ME: Hey, everyone, thanks for coming. This meeting is just to check in, get updated about what everybody’s been working on in the first quarter of the day, and see how we’re feeling about the future. Coffee, wanna kick us off? COFFEE: Sure, thanks. So, my team’s been pretty active in Q1. We started out with our regular one cup, and, you know, we weren’t seeing immediate results. We’re attributing that to a number of factors. Our target is developing a tolerance owing to her unemployment, plus we all know there’ve been some hiccups in the new sleep schedule— (Sleep snorts. Coffee pauses.) COFFEE: —but we’re hoping to hit the ground running in Q2 with the second-cup initiative, and build on the foundation that Antidepressants set up. ANTIDEPRESSANTS: Yeah, thanks,…

In 1880, the inveterate traveller and journalist Lafcadio Hearn was living in New Orleans and writing for a couple of local papers, the Daily City Item and the Times-Democrat. Hearn sensed what so many before and after him have, that New Orleans exists in a state of insidious disintegration—“crumbling into ashes”—thanks to its perilous geography and its “frauds and maladministrations.” And yet, Hearn wrote to a friend, “it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.” New Orleanians have always resembled New Yorkers; they tend to share the sense that to live anywhere else would lead inevitably to a stultifying and pitiable existence beyond the bounds of understanding. In part, the spirit of New Orleans is rooted in the city’s below-sea-level…

sometimes I forget what country I’m in I could write poems in bed I think have some Americans look at your awful movie to tell you when you’re wrong & just racist. I got this bug bite that could be anything. Got no new information to send across. I’m willing to embrace new sorta crayony tone scribbled version of empty so it’s kind of full. A kid could draw this world it had been lived in so long. You forgot to call your family & now you’re ready to write an explicit bible of love. The ripple of experience is the only beauty here. My coloring book why not is so like a movie. And I just hand you this damp coloring book I say there. That’s my model. Not…

In the winter of 1969, Douglas Fairbanks Dollarhide, the recently elected mayor of Compton, California, travelled to Philadelphia to attend the annual meeting of the National Municipal League. For decades, the Los Angeles suburb had been admired for its affordable housing, its stable growth, and its prime location, between downtown and nearby Long Beach. The league had awarded Compton the coveted distinction of All-America City in 1952. But much had changed since then. The racist housing covenants that insured Compton would have an overwhelmingly white population had been overturned; the election of Dollarhide, the son of a former slave, was a symbol of Compton’s changing demographics. The city was now a beacon of middle-class possibility for its growing black population. Dollarhide had come to Philadelphia to campaign for another All-America…

Why make a film of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”? Who at Warner Bros. flicked the switch when the project got the green light? The demographics do not bode well. Teen-agers at the multiplex, knowing nothing of the TV show, which ran from 1964 to 1968, will glance at the title and go blank. Those of us who do recall the original will brace ourselves for a travesty. We have suffered through movies based on “Bewitched,” “Get Smart,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Scooby-Doo,” and “The Flintstones,” so why should the alchemy work now? One answer, I guess, is “Mission: Impossible”— the brand that will not die. That alone gives hope to studio executives, convincing them that there is no straw, however flimsy or antique, that cannot be spun into gold. The hook of…

AUGUST 2015 WEDNESDAY 19 TH THURSDAY 20TH FRIDAY 21ST SATURDAY 22ND SUNDAY 23RD MONDAY 24TH TUESDAY 25TH No one will ever mistake the Broadway actress Audra McDonald for an “ugly lump of a woman.” An extraordinarily versatile performer, McDonald exudes both vulnerability and toughness, glamour and earthiness. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival (through Aug. 23) McDonald transforms herself into Josie Hogan, the strapping farm girl at the center of Eugene O’Neill’s 1947 play “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” a companion piece to “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Barefoot and dust-smeared, McDonald masks her natural allure as she pumps water, fixes stew, wields a club, and attempts a clumsy seduction of her landlord, James Tyrone (played by Will Swenson, McDonald’s husband), whom she loves, desperately and hopelessly. Together, Josie and…

Days before Donald Trump helped draw twenty-four million viewers to Fox for the first Republican Presidential primary debate, Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, took to YouTube for a new-media gambit. Broadcasting from a drab Washington, D.C., apartment, the Brooklyn-bred Democratic candidate delivered a fifteen-minute speech, which was screened for a hundred thousand fans at gatherings around the country. Among the venues registered on the Sanders Web site: “a GMOfree restaurant in the same parking lot as Sapphires Strip Club” (Las Vegas, Nevada), “My Home in the Woods” (Burton, Ohio), and the “Schatsky Family Household” (New York, New York). “Welcome! Hope everyone got pizza,” eighteen-year-old Ronen Schatsky, a recent Trinity School graduate, said before the broadcast. It was dinnertime at his family’s Upper West Side condo, and Schatsky had procured ten…

In recent years, it’s become a commonplace that American companies are too obsessed with the short term. In the heyday of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, the argument goes, corporations had long time horizons and invested heavily in the future. But now investors care only about quarterly earnings and short-term stock prices, so companies skimp on R. & D. and waste hundreds of billions propping up their stock with share buybacks. This “tyranny of accountants” has damaged both the long-term prospects of companies and the U.S. economy as a whole. The latest public figure to embrace this diagnosis is Hillary Clinton. In a speech a couple of weeks ago, she unveiled a solution: changing the capital-gains tax in order to encourage investors to hold stocks longer. Right now, there are…