Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-21-15 i The New Yorker

Good Riddance Day Look around your apartment, dig through your desk, flip through your wallet—it shouldn’t take too long to find a physical relic of 2015 you’d like to leave behind. In a truly cunning instance of self-promotion, the information-destruction servicer Shred-It is offering New Yorkers the chance to purge their unwelcome artifacts before the ball drops by handing them over to be permanently and securely shredded in the middle of Times Square. The remains will be recycled, unlike the año viejos dummies of Latin America, whose annual stuffing and burning are the inspiration for this event. (Broadway Plaza, between 46th and 47th Sts. timessquarenyc.org. Dec. 28 at noon.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The auction houses close out the season with a medley of sales. Sotheby’s kicks off with an…

“King Charles III,” which is currently playing at the Music Box Theatre, imagines the state of Britain and of the British monarchy shortly after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The play, by the thirty-five-year-old British playwright Mike Bartlett, is rife with Shakespearean references: aptly billed as a “future history play” and written in blank verse, it features an unsteady monarch, a scheming Duchess, and an exhortatory ghost who sows familial discord. What, then, might a Shakespeare scholar make of Bartlett’s effort? Enter James Shapiro—the Larry Miller Professor of English, at Columbia University, and the author of “The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606”—who was invited to attend a recent performance. “My first impression was to consider what’s Shakespearean about it, and I started reading it the wrong way,” Shapiro,…

On the afternoon of February 26th, Avijit Roy was in Dhaka, finishing a column for BDNews24, a Bangladeshi Web site of news and commentary. Its title, in Bengali, was “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?,” and it adapted ideas from his new book, a primer on cosmology. For Roy, who was forty-two, science trumped religion. He took after his father, Ajoy, an emeritus physics professor at Dhaka University and an ardent rationalist. “I don’t bother about whether God exists,” Ajoy Roy told me. “Let him do his business, and let me do my business.” Avijit, even more vocal than his father, liked to compare faith to a virus—infecting human beings and impelling them into conflict. He once wrote, “The vaccine against religion is to build up a scientific approach.”…

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek wrote a letter to the Royal Society of London, in 1683, announcing the discovery of something extraordinary in his mouth. He was a haberdasher by trade, in the Dutch city of Delft, but he was known for his enthusiastic work with microscopes, which he made himself. By modern standards, Leeuwenhoek’s devices were rudimentary, and fickle in their operation. They were nearly flat, consisting of a tiny magnifying glass sandwiched between metal plates, with an adjustable spit to hold the sample being viewed. But they could be effective, particularly when an unsqueamish eye was at the peephole. Leeuwenhoek had already examined eels’ blood, dogs’ sperm, and the bile of elderly rabbits, among other substances. Now he had turned his attention to dental plaque. Leeuwenhoek had an intensive routine…

This Christmas we are staying in,Skyping en masse with all our kinAnd friends linked up in cyberspace,Slipping the surly bonds of place,And traffic on the Tappan Zee,Cross Bronx, and Hutch, and B.Q.E.To keep us alert and itchin’,The brake lights we put in the kitchenAre set on Hazard. They look gay,Flashing throughout the holiday.So—greetings, all! Pull up a screen!You’re coming through quite well, we mean.And we are, too? That rocks! That’s great!Hi there, Paul Rudd! No, you’re not late.Pope Francis, too! Pope, Paul; Paul, Pope.You will become great friends, we hope.And now, with Skype cascades of chimes,More folks stop in to join our rhymes:The Zuckerbergs, with daughter Max;Rihanna, from a lounge at LAX;Masaharu Morimoto(The Iron Chef); Sonia Sotomayor,our own Bronx-born jurist;Rolf, a New York City tourist(Good thing we’ve got eight screens,…

“I promise that I won’t touch you until I get your genuine consent,” the sinister Kilgrave (David Tennant) announces, on “Marvel’s Jessica Jones,” the latest tentacle to emerge from the Marvel universe. It’s a villain’s line, but one that carries a throb of multiple meanings. It’s Kilgrave’s vow not to hurt a woman he’s already brutalized. It’s delivered as a romantic seduction. And it seethes with modern ironies, as if culled from a freshman handbook aimed at preventing sexual assault. Jessica Jones (played with a traumatized glare by Krysten Ritter) has, like her peers, supernatural gifts: extreme strength and the ability to jump enormous heights. (Her flying abilities aren’t quite there yet.) But she’s damaged goods, as the jerks might put it, having been scarred by her time in the…

A succinct retrospective of twentytwo works by Robert Ryman has just opened at the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea, and it offers a tacit reproach to today’s art-world circus. Ryman, now eighty-five, has been making all-white abstract paintings, in square formats of different sizes, for most of the past six decades. He appeals more to cognoscenti than to popular audiences, but no museum collection of painting since the nineteen-sixties can be authoritative without an example of his work. His art’s phlegmatic allure involves qualities of different paint mediums, applied dead smooth or textured by brushstrokes, on canvas, board, paper, aluminum, and other surfaces. At times, the main—or, really, only—event is an emphasis on the way a work is attached to a wall: by bolts, staples, brackets, or flanges. Always, Ryman…

MIND AND MACHINE Nick Bostrom’s work on superintelligence, as described in Raffi Khatchadourian’s article, envisions the Singularity involving an “intelligence explosion”—the development of A.I. that can improve itself and rapidly achieve intelligence greater than that of humans—and weighs the potential effects for good or ill (“The Doomsday Invention,” November 23rd). But there may be much more likely scenarios. In order to reach an intelligence explosion, there would have to be an incremental advancement of A.I.—before we get to the super A.I. brain, we will need to develop a lot of mediocre A.I. brains. What if humanity finds A.I. mediocrity good enough? What if something fundamental in humanity itself prevents A.I. from getting to the point of an intelligence explosion in the first place? Or, what if adversarial groups of…

One recent blustery evening at this Lower East Side bar, a slight man in a white T-shirt came to the rescue of a woman battling a wind-jammed door—he ushered her in, pulled out a stool, and caressed the crease out of her menu. The man was Kenta Goto, who spent seven years buttoned up in vest and tie, shaking cocktails at the ritzy Pegu Club. Now in his own cozy, chic establishment, he attends to everything: he ferried okonomiyaki—savory pancakes stuffed with things like pork belly, octopus, or mushrooms—and other snacks to diners; as final drops of drink (Yuzu-Calpico Fizz, with fermented milk soda) after glorious drink (Sakura Martini, with gin, sake, maraschino liqueur, and a brined cherry blossom) vanished, there he was, tableside. A twenty-fifth-birthday party convened beneath a…

Five times a day, devout Muslims perform wudu, a purification ritual. (From the Koran, Sura 5:6: “When you rise up to prayer, wash your faces and your hands as far as the elbows, and wipe your heads and your feet to the ankles.”) In Moroccan cities, the ritual is often performed at bathhouses called hammams. People with more upmarket tastes might visit “the first authentic luxury hammam in New York City,” on the seventh floor of the Trump SoHo Hotel, on Spring Street. The hotel’s spa offers facials, pedicures, and massages, but “the hammam is sort of what we’re known for,” an attendant said last week. “We’ve had several Middle Eastern guests tell us that ours is as good as the ones in Morocco.” The Spa at Trump SoHo announced…

When Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook, announced that he would be donating ninety-nine per cent of his Facebook stock to a new nonprofit organization, he got his share of positive headlines. But the move was also dismissed as a tax-avoidance scheme, a public-relations gambit, a way to boost Facebook’s profits under the guise of doing good, and the latest expression of the “white savior industrial complex.” The economist Thomas Piketty, the author of “Capital,” said simply that the donation “looks like a big joke.” The backlash is no surprise. The sheer size of Zuckerberg’s grant, currently valued at forty-five billion dollars, shows just how concentrated wealth has become, and the earnest rhetoric of his mission statement, couched as a public letter to his baby daughter, reinforced a sense of…

When they choose to take material form they will resembleDragonflies, not machines. Their wings will shimmer.Like the chorus of Greek drama they will speakAs many, but in the first person singular.Their colors in the sky will canopy the surface of the earth.In varying unison and diapason they will dance the forgotten.Their judgment in its pure accuracy will resemble grace and inTheir circuits the one form of action will be understanding.Their exquisite sensors will comprehend our very dustAnd re-create the best and the worst of us, as though in art.…

John Kerry, the sixty-eighth Secretary of State of the United States, was born to a temperament of wintry rectitude. He is descended from the Winthrops, who helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the Forbeses, a Brahmin clan that made its money in railways and in exporting tea, silver, and opium to China. His father was a diplomat. Kerry attended St. Paul’s and Yale (where he was in Skull and Bones) and, as a naval officer in Vietnam, earned three Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star, and the Silver Star. He dated Jacqueline Kennedy’s half-sister, sailed with J.F.K., and married twice into substantial fortunes. Despite the codes of his class, however, Kerry was never entirely subtle about his ambitions. When he was in prep school, his classmates used to play “Hail…

The Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre doesn’t have an office, use a computer, or draw formal blueprints. He sketches his plans on a wall or transmits them orally to his associates. Since 2005, Mamani and his firm have completed sixty projects in El Alto, the world’s highest city, which sits at nearly fourteen thousand feet, on an austere plateau above La Paz. In the past twenty years, the economy there has burgeoned, along with an enterprising, mostly indigenous population. Mamani earned his fame building mixed-use dream houses for the city’s nouveaux riches. Like most of his clients, and like some 1.6 million of his fellow-citizens, Mamani is an Aymara. His people have been subject to successive waves of conquest and dispossession, first by the Inca, then by the Spanish. As…

GIRL GROUPS OF THE NINETEEN-SIXTIES helped cement themes in American pop that have stuck to this day: glamour, adolescence, scandal, and the tension between capturing old, universal sentiments and instituting new ones. Ronnie Spector, of the pivotal group the Ronettes, was, and still is, an easy choice for poster girl. At seventy-two, she remains sinuous and spritely; sharpened by adversity, she is emblematic of those volatile sixties, which look more familiar with each turbulent, new headline. These days, Spector sits between songs, but her exuberant performances are a lesson in pop history. She promises the “Best Christmas Party Ever” at City Winery, Dec. 22-23; with standards like “Be My Baby” and classic renditions of “Sleigh Ride” and “Frosty the Snowman,” it’s a hard holiday evening to beat. CLASSICAL MUSIC…

“This is the most Kubrickian room,” Lin-Manuel Miranda said the other night, sweeping into the seventh floor of the New Museum, on the Bowery. The room was long, very white, with two glass walls, facing south and east, and in a corner was a curved white leather couch, to which Miranda led his party. Miranda, the creator and star of “Hamilton” and “In the Heights,” asked for coffee—very sweet, very light, por favor. He is a sleep-deprived new parent, and he was about to perform for the Mac-Dowell Colony’s Chairman’s Evening, in the museum’s basement theatre. As he drank his coffee, Miranda showed, on his phone, a video of his baby son to the evening’s host, the novelist Michael Chabon, and his wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman, who have four…

The city of Miami Beach floods on such a predictable basis that if, out of curiosity or sheer perversity, a person wants to she can plan a visit to coincide with an inundation. Knowing the tides would be high around the time of the “super blood moon,” in late September, I arranged to meet up with Hal Wanless, the chairman of the University of Miami’s geological-sciences department. Wanless, who is seventy-three, has spent nearly half a century studying how South Florida came into being. From this, he’s concluded that much of the region may have less than half a century more to go. We had breakfast at a greasy spoon not far from Wanless’s office, then set off across the MacArthur Causeway. (Out-of-towners often assume that Miami Beach is part…

Monday evening, 10:30. Thomas is sitting on the sofa with his laptop, reading for work. Mary has been talking to a friend on Skype. If he is going to work all night, I may as well go to bed, Mary decides, and goes upstairs without a word. Thomas joins her at midnight, when she is sound asleep, face to the wall. Tuesday evening, 10:45. Mary decides that their dog, Ricky, needs a late walk. Thomas, who has been watching a Champions League game in the old playroom, wanders back to the sitting room to find it empty. If she is out with the dog, I may as well go to bed, he decides. Mary joins him at midnight, when he is sound asleep, face to the wall. Wednesday evening, 11:00.…

AVENUE OF MYSTERIES, by John Irving (Simon & Schuster). In Irving’s fourteenth novel, Juan Diego Guerrero, an acclaimed middle-aged writer, takes a trip to the Philippines to honor a promise he made as a child. Guerrero is famous enough to attract a band of well-meaning fans and caretakers throughout his muddled trek; his main difficulty is remembering his medication. The most vivid passages are dreamlike flashbacks to his adolescence in Mexico, as a dump-picker scavenging for books and, later, as part of a ragtag circus. In both time lines, Irving’s characters grapple with faith and with the Catholic Church. Guerrero’s sister Lupe asserts, “We are the miracle— you and me. Not them. Just us.” THE SECRET CHORD, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking). This retelling of the story of the Biblical…