Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-14-15 i The New Yorker

Animation Nights New York The New York-based animators Robert Lyons and Yvonne Grzenkowicz curate and host this small screening and networking event for area animators and fans alike. With local beer and wine from the in-house Market Bar on tap, attendees are invited to enjoy an evening of themed animated shorts. The latest installment is the second showcase of “NY Independents,” with irreverent clips from New York artists, including surreal, hand-drawn sequences and intricately detailed stop-motion choreography. A crowd will gather at the Fulton Stall Market at South Street Seaport; early arrival is encouraged. (207A Front St. fultonstallmarket.org. Dec. 9.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES As the end-of-year lull approaches, the auction houses roll out their most glittering jewels and finest Roman statues—just in time to wrap and put under the tree.…

The climate in Paris on November 27th was bleak. In the courtyard of Les Invalides, under skies of glacial gray, President François Hollande led a service of commemoration for those who had died in the terrorist attacks two weeks before. The chill, befitting the mood, refused to lift. In midafternoon, when Charlotte Rampling arrived at Le Rostand, a café beside the Jardin du Luxembourg, she was draped in many layers. Born in England, she is a longtime resident of Paris, and one of those rare performers who, like Jane Birkin and her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg, can slip with frictionless ease from English to French. “There really are things about the two languages that do not mix. And if they don’t, it means that the people themselves don’t,” she said. “We’re…

On July 28th, Mark Meadows, a Republican representative from North Carolina, walked to the well of the House and filed a motion to vacate the chair. It’s an obscure parliamentary tool that allows any member of the House to trigger a vote to oust the Speaker. The only other time it had been used was in 1910, during a rebellion by forty-two Progressive Republicans, the Party radicals of the day, against their Speaker, Joseph Gurney Cannon, who was accused of running the House like a tyrant. Meadows is one of the more active members of the House Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only group of about forty right-wing conservatives that formed at the beginning of this year. Since 2010, when the Party won back the chamber, the House has been engaged in…

In a scene from “Transparent,” the television series created by Jill Soloway, a women’s-studies professor stands before a room of listless undergraduates, haranguing them in the accusatory tone favored by a certain strain of academic. “Because women bled without dying, men were frightened!” the professor— played by Soloway, wearing a tent of a top and a pink dreadlock in her bun—says. “The masculine insists to cut things up with exclamation points—which are in and of themselves small rapes, the way an exclamation point might end a sentence and say, ‘Stop talking, woman!’ At the back of the classroom, Syd, played by Carrie Brownstein, turns to her friend Ali Pfefferman (Gaby Hoffman) “Actually, once I was gang-raped: question mark, exclamation point, and semicolon,” Ali replies. “That’s brutal,” Syd says stonily. “It’s…

In December, 2009, Harouna Touré and Idriss Abdelrahman, smugglers from northern Mali, walked through the doors of the Golden Tulip, a hotel in Accra, Ghana. They were there to meet with two men who had offered them an opportunity to make millions of dollars, transporting cocaine across the Sahara. Touré wore a dashiki, and Abdelrahman had on tattered clothes and a turban that hid much of his face. They tipped the guards at the entrance and then greeted Mohamed, a Lebanese radical, in the lobby. Mohamed took them up to a hotel room to see David, a drug trafficker and a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. “Hola, Colombiano,” Touré said, as he entered the room. Abdelrahman tried to call David “007” in Spanish, but said…

THE LOST LANDSCAPE, by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco). This intimate yet sweeping memoir of a writer’s development begins on a weather-worn farm in upstate New York. “It was a time of nerves,” Oates writes of her childhood, in the nineteen-forties, in a family in which “no one had (yet) gone beyond eight years of schooling,” with parents whose lives were shaped by a “premature and violent death.” We learn of Oates the graduate student, unhappy and “suffocated by books,” of her encounter with a fellow-student who became her husband, and of the couple’s tumultuous years in Detroit during the sixties. Most illuminating, however, are the portraits of those around her, old school friends and hardened relatives, “lives to be spoken of cautiously.” PEGGY GUGGENHEIM, by Francine Prose (Yale). Weaving together…

Easy, Chill, Combo, Bounce, and Sleep, and not forgetting Lebowski: just add “The Big” to any of those words and you’ve got yourself a ready-made film. The latest contender is “The Big Short,” directed by Adam McKay, and in this case the title, swaying on the verge of an oxymoron, is a perfect fit for the theme. There was nothing small about the disaster that struck the economy in 2008, and, as for shortness, the movie is peopled, from first to last, with the morally myopic and the emotionally stunted. Some characters are invented and some are all too real. You’ll love them. Meet Michael Burry (Christian Bale), who works for an investment firm named Scion Capital. He has a medical back ground, and prefers to be called Dr. Burry,…

GENETIC CONTROL I was thrilled to see Michael Specter write that “the central project of biology has been the effort to understand how the shifting arrangement of four compounds— adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine—determines the ways in which humans differ from each other and from everything else alive” (“The Gene Hackers,” November 16th). Though the article focussed on the potential medical and ethical implications of CRISPR gene editing, it is important to recognize that science exists not just to vanquish disease and invent technology but also to preserve our innate childlike wonder about how things work. To this end, many labs, including mine, seek to understand how genomes evolve to generate biological diversity. Historically, scientists have laboriously sought answers in just a few species amenable to experimental manipulation. CRISPR now…

Several heroes of John Irving’s novels are members or aspiring members of the New York Athletic Club, the limestone colossus on Central Park South. They love the club’s wrestling program and hate its dress code and sniffy protocols. A character from “In One Person” remarks, “That place is notoriously anti-everything. It’s anti-Semitic, it’s anti-black. . . . It’s an Irish Catholic boys’ club.” The protagonist of Irving’s fourteenth and latest novel, “Avenue of Mysteries,” a non-wrestling, pro-everything Mexican-American novelist named Juan Diego Guerrero, transects the club’s gravitational field only briefly. He stops at a hotel on Central Park South, then achieves escape velocity and flies to the Philippines for the remainder of the book. Not so Irving himself, a lifetime N.Y.A.C. member. He greeted a recent visitor to the club…

Sunday evening, evening gray. All day the storm did not quite storm. Clouds closed in, sulked, spat. We put off swimming. Took in the chairs. Finally (about seven) a rumbling high up. A wind went round the trees tossing each once and releasing arbitrary rivulets of cool air downward, this wind which came apart, the parts swaying out, descending, bumping around the yard awhile not quite on the count then a single chord ran drenched across the roof, the porch and stopped. We all breathed. Maybe that’s it, maybe it’s over, the weatherman is often wrong these days, we can still go swimming (roll call? glimpse of sun?) when all at once the sluices opened, broke a knot and smashed the sky to bits, which fell and keep falling even…

In the damp late spring of 1985, Jelly picked up the handset of her pink plastic Trimline phone and the dial tone hummed into her ear. She tilted the earpiece slightly away from her and heard the sad buzz of a distant sound seeking a listener. How many times had she fallen asleep after saying goodbye and not managed to get the thing on the cradle? The little lag when he had hung up but she was still on the line, semiconnected, in a weird half-life of the call, followed by the final disconnection click, then silence, and then, if she didn’t hang up, sharp insistent beeps. These were the odd ways in which the phone communicated: urgent beeps to say, “Hang up”; long-belled rings to say, “Answer”; rude blasts…

IF ALTRUISM IS the new orange, Devonté (Dev) Hynes wears it well. As the recording artist and songwriter Blood Orange, formerly Lightspeed Champion, he’s enjoyed a warm reception downtown and beyond, for his sharp style and affectionate mastery of nineteen-eighties pop tropes, as well as for his influential collaborations with musicians like Florence and the Machine, the Chemical Brothers, FKA Twigs, and more. “At this point in my life, all that matters to me is giving back to communities and making people happy,” he said, of his Dec. 12 engagement at the Apollo, “Blood Orange and Friends.” All proceeds will go to the Opus 118 Harlem School of Music. “If it wasn’t for the chance to play cello or piano when I was a kid growing up in Essex,” he…

Ever since Winter Miller was a teenager, she has cherished an unusual alternative-career fantasy. “If I could choose a different profession, it would be to be an abortion provider,” she said the other day. “I would really, truly love to offer that service to people.” Miller, who is forty-two, did not follow a medical path. Instead, she became a playwright; the Public Theatre produced Miller’s play “In Darfur,” which was set in a refugee camp. Lately, she has been developing “Spare Rib,” a non-Aristotelian, nonlinear, quasicomic drama about abortion. Last month, Ellen McLaughlin, the actor and writer, who first encountered Miller’s work while judging submissions for a Shakespeare’s Sister Fellowship, enlisted Kathleen Chalfant, the actor, to host a reading at her house in Brooklyn Heights. Eight Broadway and Off Broadway…

“Try the chicken feet,” Eddie Huang, the restaurateur and television personality, said to Dan Auerbach, the rock musician, one recent Saturday afternoon. The two friends were sitting in a Chinatown dim-sum parlor, with three members of Auerbach’s new band, the Arcs. Auerbach did not try the chicken feet. “O.K., fine,” Huang said, and proceeded to ply his skills as an expediter, which he learned long ago from his father, also a chef. Expediting involves shouting instructions, in Chinese, toward the back of the restaurant about which dishes to bring and the order in which to bring them. Auerbach and Huang had come from playing basketball at a playground court in Brooklyn with the band members. Huang was still in white shorts and a T-shirt, but Auerbach had changed into a…

You can’t shove your mind into their little mean hooves no matter what you do Running at night surrounded by hair ticks and twin brothers On sucked pavement Broken dishes If I flick my tail will you flick your tail and everyone flicks their tails before the air resettles our ears A bestiary hangs from the roof of my mouth Eating grass in pharmaceutical fields Head down in the sicko green * Curves through the deer crossing and slow down for children A wet ribbon Sometimes pinballs for eyes tongue in a drain and a crossed-out stomach Soft as butter Your legs are soft as butter Unbroken necks twitch followed by one hundred backsides disappearing into white clouds and canal trash Streaming through broken apples Apple cider A girdle full…

In the fall of 1963, not long after Vincent T. DeVita, Jr., joined the National Cancer Institute as a clinical associate, he and his wife were invited to a co-worker’s party. At the door, one of the institute’s most brilliant researchers, Emil Freireich, presented them with overflowing Martinis. The head of the medical branch, Tom Frei, strode across the room with a lab technician flung over his shoulder, legs kicking and her skirt over her head. DeVita, shocked, tried to hide in a corner. But some time later the N.C.I.’s clinical director, Nathaniel Berlin, frantically waved him over. Freireich, six feet four and built like a lineman, had passed out in the bathtub. Berlin needed help moving him. “Together, we pulled him up, threw his arms over our shoulders, and…

Ah Jean Dubuffet / when you think of him / doing his military service in the Eiffel Tower / as a meteorologist / in 1922 / you know how wonderful the 20th Century / can be.” That’s how Frank O’Hara began his poem “Naphtha.” The lines, befitting the offbeat charisma of the great French artist, come to mind regarding “Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet,” at the American Folk Art Museum. It’s a fascinating show of outsider art from a collection with which Dubuffet (1901-85) sought to beget a climate change in the artistic cultures of Europe and, not least, the United States, where the collection resided from 1951 to 1962. Starting in 1945, he sought out, acquired, and documented works by untutored prisoners, children, people hospitalized…