Innholdsfortegnelse for Nov-30-15 i The New Yorker

Michael Davies and Roger Bennett, better known to American soccer fans as Men in Blazers, spend their days in an almost comically cramped studio in lower Manhattan. There they produce a weekly podcast ostensibly about soccer and a half-hour highlight show for NBC Sports. But last weekend they ventured out to Brooklyn to meet their fans, who’d gathered for a celebration of soccer that the Men in Blazers had dubbed BlazerCon. The two often call soccer “America’s sport of the future— as it has been since 1972”; BlazerCon was organized on the notion that this future had finally arrived. More than a thousand people from sixteen states and across Europe showed up at the Brooklyn Expo Center, in Greenpoint, to hear Davies and Bennett interview players, TV commentators, club owners,…

It’s a hundred years this month since Albert Einstein completed his general theory of relativity, and don’t imagine that the people at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, where Einstein spent the last twenty-two years of his life, aren’t marking the occasion. “It’s a theory that needed a hundred years to come to full bloom— which is great for science, but less if you are the individual,” Robbert Dijkgraaf, the institute’s director, said the other evening, in the lobby of the Richardson Auditorium. It was the opening night of a twoday conference celebrating Einstein’s discoveries. “There are some people in the audience who are good candidates to be the next Einstein,” Dijkgraaf said. First on the program was the première of “Light Falls,” a multimedia work written by Brian…

They say you may have caughttuberculosis from the peasantswho came to Melikhovoto be seen by you. Hearing themcoughing in the hall you put downyour pen and rose from your desk.Short of breath, they had travelledall night to arrive by dawn, drawnby rumors of your kindness.While you warmed the stethoscopein your hands and the old farmerbared his chest, your characterstood patiently on the doorstep,holding a letter of introductionyou had yet to write. The longeryou spent away from the storythe harder it would be to finish it,but the hall was long, the lineout the door, and you would turnnone away, knowing how farthey had come for the comfortof having someonelisten to their lungs and say itsounded better than it soundedwhile you stood breathingin their sighs of relief,saying, softly, “Next.”…

There is no greater opportunity for a pop star than repentance—the chance to rise again after a self-inflicted downfall. Much of Kanye West’s genius, for instance, lies in his ability to withstand his own occasional demise and to orchestrate a subsequent triumph. For former child stars, the cycle comes with the territory: the standard foibles of young adulthood play out in public, creating an opportunity for a young singer or actor to emerge, mature and recovered, on the other side. In an era when many stars are incubated at Disney or Nickelodeon, this process has become almost a spectator sport. Viewed this way, Justin Bieber’s recent path of destruction has the potential to set him up for unprecedented success. Bieber achieved fame by putting a twist on pubescent infatuation, creating…

DAD RIOT David Remnick wrote an online Cultural Comment, “Bob Dylan and the ‘Hot Hand,’ ” about Dylan’s creative streak from early 1965 to the summer of 1966. Here are some of the responses we solicited from readers: No one had a hot streak like Frank Loesser. Think “Guys and Dolls,” “The Most Happy Fella,” “Greenwillow,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” Also, can Cole Porter be forgotten in such a list? Harry Schaffner La Quinta, Calif. From 1971-74, Neil Young recorded “Harvest,” “Time Fades Away,” “Tonight’s the Night,” and “On the Beach.” Sean Eldon Ann Arbor, Mich. Don’t disagree with your list, but am deeply concerned over an obvious omission. Good God, man: Elvis Costello! Mike Cochrane Walnut Creek, Calif. It’s clear that Remnick is in…

“Is it ‘Ee-lah’ or ‘Eye-lah’?” a patron at this Upper East Side bar asked a few nights ago, starting a conversation with some syllables. “It’s ‘Eye-lah,’ ” Michael, the owner and bartender, replied. As a Dundonian and a whiskey expert, his word was final. Islay is the renowned Scotchmaking island off the western coast of Scotland, and its name is set in golden letters above one of the five sections of the bar’s dark wooden shelves. Each holds the distillations of a different region of the country; the lower shelves harbor whiskeys from Japan, Tasmania, and Taiwan and some other non-whiskey spirits. “Are you double fisting, or, as we call it in Scotland, drinking?” Michael joked, as he served a creamy pint of Belhaven ale alongside a smooth and sweet…

The other day, a black town car with tinted windows pulled up to the David Zwirner gallery, on Nineteenth Street, and the actor Dennis Quaid, an hour late, emerged from the back seat. “Sorry! It’s been a whirlwind,” he said. “I was in Cannes, France, fortyeight hours ago.” He pronounced the city’s name “Ken”; “France” rhymed with “tents.” He flashed his familiar grudge-deflating grin, the creases around his mouth forming right angles, and added that he’d spent the previous evening with his twenty-three-year-old son, Jack (mother: Meg Ryan), who is also an actor. “We stayed up till three,” Quaid, who is sixty-one, boasted. He kept his mirrored sunglasses on as he entered the gallery, which featured works by Isa Genzken—mannequins in Technicolor ensembles and wigs were scattered about. He peered…

At half past nine in the evening, on Friday, November 13th, Matthieu, a thirty-three-year-old resident of Paris, was eating dinner outside with friends at Le Petit Cambodge, a restaurant in the Tenth Arrondissement, near the Canal Saint-Martin. The Canal is a cosmopolitan neighborhood, and a favorite destination for the city’s twenty- and thirty-somethings. The restaurant serves Cambodian food in an atmosphere of industrial chic, with long tables, lots of brushed steel, and naked light bulbs. The evening was mild. Across the street, at a comfortably dingy bar called Le Carillon, patrons were mingling on the sidewalk with their drinks. A car screeched to a stop a few feet from where Matthieu was sitting and a man jumped out, firing a Kalashnikov. For a moment, Matthieu thought he was watching a…

Several years ago, I fell at the gym and ripped two tendons in my wrist. The pain was excruciating, and within minutes my hand had swollen grotesquely and become hot to the touch. I was reminded of a patient I’d seen early in medical school, whose bacterial infection extended from his knee to his toes. Latin was long absent from the teaching curriculum, but, as my instructor examined the leg, he cited the four classic symptoms of inflammation articulated by the Roman medical writer Celsus in the first century: rubor, redness; tumor, swelling; calor, heat; and dolor, pain. In Latin, inflammatio means “setting on fire,” and as I considered the searing pain in my injured hand I understood how the condition earned its name. Inflammation occurs when the body rallies…

In December of 1948, Patricia High-smith was a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring writer with a murderous imagination and an outsized talent for seducing women. Her first novel, “Strangers on a Train,” was complete, but it would be more than a year before it was published. A Texas native with thick black hair and feral good looks, Highsmith made a habit of standing at attention when a woman walked into the room. That Christmas season, she was working behind the toy counter at Bloomingdale’s, in Manhattan, in order to help pay for psychoanalysis. She wanted to explore the sharp ambivalence she felt about marrying her fiancé, a novelist named Marc Brandel. Highsmith was a Barnard graduate, and, like many sophisticates at the time, she viewed homosexuality as a psychological defect that could be…

ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER HAS, to great profit, devised music for phantoms, felines, Argentine icons, Norma Desmond, and Jesus Christ. Surely he can handle a few fourth graders. His new musical, “School of Rock,” is based on the 2003 movie that starred Jack Black as a hard-living loser who takes over a prepschool classroom and transforms its students into an ass-kicking rock band. At the Winter Garden, where “Cats” once prowled, Alex Brightman—no relation to the composer’s onetime muse Sarah Brightman—will step into the role, surrounded by a plucky ensemble of child rockers. Directed by Laurence Connor, the musical (now in previews; opening Dec. 6) has lyrics by Glenn Slater and a book by Julian Fellowes, the mastermind behind “Downton Abbey.” Who said the British Invasion was over? NIGHT LIFE…

The Brooklyn Bluegrass Bash Park Slope’s Old First Reformed Church served more than two hundred thousand meals for storm victims left stranded after Hurricane Sandy. In the summertime, the church hosts a respite shelter for homeless men, and its doors have stayed open for Brooklyn residents seeking momentary refuge from city stir. The roof suffered significant damage in 2012, and organizers set out to raise money for repairs. The Fourth Annual Brooklyn Bluegrass Bash delivers some all-star talent, including Michael Daves and the Goodbye Girls; proceeds will go toward restoring the sanctuary. (The Bell House, 149 7th St., Brooklyn. 718-643-6510. Nov. 29.) Brooklyn Holiday Bazaar In one of the year’s more stinging losses, New York City’s largest nocturnal flea market/food court/concert venue, Brooklyn Night Bazaar, shuttered in May. The…

Jancis Robinson, the British wine writer and the editor of “The Oxford Companion to Wine,” is also a member of the Royal Household Wine Committee, which meets for tastings in the cellars of Buckingham Palace. Recently, she happened to be in New York on a weekend when there was an advertised opportunity to camp out overnight in a vineyard in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At nine o’clock on a Saturday evening, at the end of a week filled with sommeliers, tastings, and Mario Batali, Robinson put on her down coat, took a taxi to Brooklyn, walked up to the top of a former warehouse, and went out onto its fifteenthousand-square-foot roof, which is leased to a company called Rooftop Reds. “It’s jolly cold, isn’t it? I mean, God,” she said.…

They dropped him from I.R.C. so early the sky was black. He walked until he found himself stranded on the median of a freeway entrance, cars streaming toward him with their blinding lights, like a video game where the enemies come right at you, motherfuckers just keep coming straight at you one after the other, bam bam bam. He faced the traffic, the cars racing by, machines with people in them who were not him. He was the one not in a machine, the one dumped before dawn from the county jail, and where were all these people going so early? No one stopped for him. Not a single car. He got himself west and north. A bus, he thinks, but that part is hazy in his memory, although there…

BLACK FLAGS, by Joby Warrick (Doubleday). This account of the emergence of ISIS examines in painful detail the consequences of the Bush Administration’s misadventures in Iraq. Trying to justify the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government publicized the activities of the previously obscure Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Warrick charts Zarqawi’s rise from booze-swilling Jordanian street tough to one of the most brutal jihadists in the world. He demonstrates how much the militants of the Islamic State owe to Zarqawi, who was killed in 2006—not only their ideology but even the color of the jumpsuits that prisoners wear in execution videos. The militants of ISIS, one of Warrick’s sources explains, are the “children of Zarqawi.” THE DICTATOR’S LAST NIGHT, by Yasmina Khadra, translated from the French by Julian Evans (Gallic).…