Innholdsfortegnelse for Oct-12-15 i The New Yorker

Just after the sun came up one recent Sunday, a group of people assembled on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue. They were cooks. Several had chef’s jackets rolled up under their arms like sleeping bags. They were about to be escorted into the United Nations to prepare a “working lunch” for forty world leaders. Except for the heads of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and for John Kerry, the leaders were Presidents. A lunch with so many Presidents was an exceptional event. So, too, was the menu. It was garbage. It was made with ingredients that would otherwise have been thrown away. “These people, these world leaders, are used to eating for pleasure,” one of the meal’s organizers, Sam Kass, said. Until last year,…

What with a former peanut-company owner, Stewart Parnell, being sent to prison for knowingly selling salmonella-tainted peanut butter, and Volkswagen’s C.E.O., Martin Winterkorn, resigning after revelations about the cheat software in the firm’s diesel-powered cars, it took a special magnitude of corporate misbehavior to make the business-news headlines in the past couple of weeks. But Martin Shkreli, the C.E.O. of Turing Pharmaceuticals, managed it when his company said it was raising the price of a sixty-two-year-old lifesaving drug from $13.50 to seven hundred and fifty dollars a pill. The move quickly became a major scandal; Shkreli was called “the most hated man in America.” Yet the true scandal of Turing’s profiteering scheme was that it was entirely legal. Daraprim—which is used to treat toxoplasmosis, a condition that afflicts AIDS patients,…

Early on a Monday evening in June, Reid Hoffman, the founder and executive chairman of the business-oriented networking site LinkedIn, met Mark Pincus, the founder and chief executive of the gaming site Zynga, for dinner at a casual restaurant in Portola Valley, California, a wealthy residential town at the western edge of Silicon Valley. Breakfasts and dinners are a big part of Hoffman’s life. He recently published two books on how to be successful in business, and is finishing a third, whose working title is “Blitzscaling.” His business is based on the idea of managing your career through relentless networking, which is something he enjoys. If someone told you that Hoffman was the equipment manager for a Pearl Jam tour, it wouldn’t seem like a casting error. He is a…

The atmosphere during the first week of the new Metropolitan Opera season was less dire than it was this time last year, when a twenty-two-million-dollar deficit loomed, management and labor had all but come to blows over a threatened lockout, and busloads of vitriolic protesters tried to shut down John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer.” This fall, politicians have spared us thoughts about operas they have not seen; mutinous mutterings, whether from unions or donors, have subsided; and Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is enjoying a flurry of good press, following the announcement that the deficit has given way to a million-dollar surplus. To be sure, this correction resulted from cuts in expenses, not from gains in attendance. No one believes that the crisis is over; an air of…

THE WITCHES Stacy Schiff ’s piece on Puritans convicting people of sorcery brought to mind my family history (“The Witches of Salem,” September 7th). Rebecca Nurse and Mary Easty, my aunts many times removed, were hanged in the Salem witchcraft trials, and a third relative, Sarah Cloyse, was imprisoned in chains for thirteen months. Salem, founded in 1629, was then a deeply troubled place. There were bitter fights over the hiring of church ministers and land disputes that pitted neighboring families against one another. The witchcraft trials began when a young woman named Tituba, who had been brought from the West Indies and enslaved, taught a group of young girls about palmistry, fortune-telling, necromancy, magic, and spiritualism. When the girls were asked about their strange behavior, they pointed to…

museum shows of african tribal art often suffer from double binds of aesthetics and ethnography: objects that stun but bewilder and educational material that informs but devitalizes. Not “Kongo: Power and Majesty,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibits and texts in this show combine to unfold an enthralling, epic tale, which spans more than four centuries, from the late fifteenth to the early twentieth, in the Central African regions that are now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, and Angola. You will come away with vivid memories of the art—some hundred and fifty wonderful pieces—both for what it is and for what it say When the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão arrived at the mouth of the Congo River, in 1483, and erected a…

The other afternoon, Kenneth Pattengale stood by the stage door of the Town Hall, on West Forty-third Street, eating a sandwich, while Joey Ryan was across the street at a Starbucks. Ryan and Pattengale are the twopiece band called the Milk Carton Kids. They each play guitar, and their voices are warm and blend well, more in a Northern way (like Simon and Garfunkel) than in a Southern way (like the Everly Brothers). Onstage, their manner is deadpan and mildly rivalrous, as if they were related. They performed at the Town Hall that night, but beforehand, looking to kill an afternoon, they played a problem-solving game on the twelfth floor of a building on Thirty-first Street. They walked there down Broadway. Ryan, who is tall and has long brown hair,…

My mother and I are on the front porch lighting each other’s cigarettes as if we were on a ten-minute break from our jobs at being a mother and son, just ten minutes to steal a moment of freedom before clocking back in, before putting the aprons back on, the paper hats, washing our hands twice and then standing behind the counter again, hoping for tips, hoping the customers will be nice, will say some kind word, the cool front yard before us and the dogs in the back yard shitting on everything. We are hunched over, two extras on the set of “The Night of the Hunter.” I am pulling a second cigarette out of the pack, a swimmer rising from a pool of other swimmers. Soon we will…

I always thought they were small— my breasts. But they filled my baby’s mouth. & my lover’s tongue loves them, & my memory is filled with all the pleasure they gave over the years, while my mother’s 100-year-old breasts still hang waiting. For what? For the tongue of God? For the spinning Fates to release them into the clouds so she can remember how to paint again? The sky awaits, & earth itself. She used to say, we all go back to earth & become beautiful tomatoes, peas, carrots. She was an ecologist before the term was invented. O Mother I love you despite everything. Peas, carrots, cauliflower. Even cabbage.…

Ever since the finale of “Mad Men,” I’ve been meditating on its audacious last image. Don Draper, sitting cross-legged and purring “Ommmm,” is achieving inner peace at an Esalen-like retreat. He’s as handsome as ever, in khakis and a crisp white shirt. A bell rings, and a grin widens across his face. Then, as if cutting to a sponsor, we move to the iconic Coke ad from 1971—a green hillside covered with a racially diverse chorus of young people, trilling, in harmony, “I’d like to teach the world to sing.” Don Draper, recently suicidal, has invented the world’s greatest ad. He’s back, baby. The scene triggered a debate online. From one perspective, the image looked cynical: the viewer is tricked into thinking that Draper has achieved Nirvana, only to be…

THE RICHEST MAN WHO EVER LIVED, by Greg Steinmetz (Simon & Schuster). In 1515, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I had a problem: two of his grandchildren were marrying two children of King Ladislaus of Hungary, but he didn’t have the money to pay for the party. He borrowed it from Jacob Fugger, the banker he also turned to for financing many of his military campaigns. Steinmetz lays out the fascinating story of a man who shaped modern business practices and the borders of Europe. Fugger, the child of cloth merchants, amassed a fortune worth two per cent of Europe’s G.D.P., along with corresponding political influence. The double wedding was contracted, Steinmetz writes, largely to protect Fugger’s copper-mining interests. THE REPROACH OF HUNGER, by David Rieff (Simon & Schuster).…

The ethos of the buzzy night spot Baby’s All Right—the relaxed atmosphere, expert music programming, and dollar tacos—has turned it into South Williamsburg’s very own Foot Clan hideout, a rare sort of venue that feels designed to engender good vibes. The stage, which is adorned with a site-specific light installation by John Cole, made from nearly four hundred backlit antique ashtrays, is a beacon for indie rockers looking for an intimate performance space: Beach House, DIIV, and Savages have played there. This weekend, on Oct. 10, the young writer and producer Danielle (Danz) Johnson, who performs sugary synth pop as Computer Magic (above), celebrates the release of her new album, “Davos.” The record is essentially her U.S. début, even though in Japan and France she’s already a star. CLASSICAL…

“Celebrate!! Amiri Baraka” The poet, author, and playwright Amiri Baraka, who died last year, will be remembered in a tribute concert in his home town of Newark. Baraka’s contributions as an artist, an advocate for African-American art, and a member of the local community (his son is now mayor of Newark) are reflected in the lineup. The longtime ABC reporter Art McFarland will read an excerpt from “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” Baraka’s last play, about the government investigation of W.E.B. Du Bois. Artists and activists, including the Grammy-winning R. & B. musician James Mtume, the poet-politician Felipe Luciano, and the poet-publisher Jessica Care Moore, will perform and discuss the impact of Baraka’s work. (Newark Symphony Hall, 1030 Broad St., Newark, N.J. 973-643-8014. Oct. 10 at 8.) AUCTIONS…

Eight years ago, Yehuda Duenyas directed the Thomas Bradshaw play “Purity,” at P.S. 122. It tells the story of two Columbia professors who go to Ecuador to buy a twelve-year-old girl. “There were some very graphic scenes,” Duenyas said last week. In the process of getting those scenes to land, he became adept at persuading actors to do things onstage that they might not even consider doing at home in the dark. Earlier this year, Bradshaw called Duenyas and explained that Ethan McSweeny, the director of his latest play, “Fulfillment,” needed help with the sexual material in the script. In several instances, the actors were expected to simulate intercourse onstage in such a way that would make them—and, Bradshaw hoped, the audience—uncomfortable. Would Duenyas lend a hand? “Like a sex…

If you attended a Bernie Sanders rally this summer, when his seemingly quixotic Presidential campaign began gathering force, you might have noticed a few surprising things about the crowd. One was the scarcity of nonwhite faces—a problem that the campaign would soon be confronted by, very publicly. Another was how many young people were turning out to see an irascible seventy-four-year-old senator from Vermont. But that’s a little like being surprised that some millennials appreciate Neil Young or Joni Mitchell at a time when it’s easy to find songs from different decades in a promiscuous jumble online. Young people who like Bernie Sanders like him because he sounds like an old record. He’s been talking about the injustices done to working people by unequal income distribution for more than forty…

The game on Sunday had a 2 P.M. start, and Usl was featured on the Jumbotron intermittently from 4:02 to 4:09. By eight-thirty, his home phone was ringing. His home phone never rang. It was a holdover from another time. His mother had told him that it was essential, a matter of safety—for hurricanes, or blackouts, or terrorist attacks. You never knew what could happen until it happened. She had insisted on paying the bill so that Usl would keep the landline. She had pleaded, “Please grant me permission to protect my child,” and so he had. The landline was ringing because Usl had become an Internet sensation. Usl had been sleeping when he appeared on the Jumbotron at the Yankees game; the cameras and the commentators had turned on…

In July, I went up to Bard College to catch a performance of “Oklahoma!,” directed by Daniel Fish, whose 2012 production “A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (after David Foster Wallace)” had met with critical acclaim. I wanted to see what Rodgers and Hammerstein’s legendary 1943 work would look like through the eyes of a director who had little, if any, direct relationship to the vanished America that produced it. The forty-eight-year-old Fish declared his production’s difference from the start. He had converted the theatre into a kind of barn: long wooden tables flanked the stage, bearing corn bread and drinks; gun racks hung from a wall; and when the performers moved they did so naturally, without the usual staginess of musical choreography. The…