Innholdsfortegnelse for February 1, 2016 i The New Yorker

With the Iowa caucuses looming, Presidential hopefuls who have already inundated the e-mail inboxes of voters—the “spray and pray” technique, in P.R. parlance—may want to rethink their strategy. In the home stretch, campaign volunteers might benefit from a refresher course in the lost art of picking up the phone. At 9 A.M. one recent Friday, in a conference room fifteen floors above Third Avenue in midtown, a group of aspiring (apolitical) cold-callers convened. They had each paid $199.99 to attend a Telephone Prospecting Boot Camp led by David Fischer, who owns a Sandler Training sales-instruction franchise. Fischer, who is forty-three and brawny, has been in business for three years. “Prior to that, I worked for seventeen years at Pfizer,” he said. “The way we sold was just so arrogant. We’d…

The hundredth anniversary of the readymade, Marcel Duchamp’s name for the common manufactured objects that he converted into works of art by choosing and inscribing them, was celebrated on January 15th at the Museum of Modern Art. About forty invited guests met in a gallery of paintings by Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, and other contemporaries, where they were outnumbered by swarms of uninvited visitors—it was Free Friday, with no admission charge after 4 P.M. Ann Temkin, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, welcomed everyone in her brief remarks. Standing near Duchamp’s bicycle wheel mounted on a kitchen stool (“Bicycle Wheel”), and under his snow shovel hanging from a wire (“In Advance of the Broken Arm”), Temkin recalled the letter that Duchamp had written from New York in mid-January,…

A few months ago, a crowd of curious onlookers gathered on a newly built highway overpass in downtown Portau-Prince. It was a humid afternoon, too hot to linger outside, but Haiti’s President, Michel Martelly, was scheduled to appear, and any appearance by Martelly was bound to be entertaining. Before being elected President, in 2011, Martelly was Sweet Micky, an extroverted singer of the ebullient dance music called konpa. A popular and bawdy showman, he appears in one typical video clip in a night club, dancing for the camera in a red bra and a yellow sarong. At one point, he feigns masturbating a giant phallus, then hoists an imaginary breast and licks it. At the overpass, jeeploads of riot police fanned out, and workmen set up a red carpet and…

Last June, a woman walking her dog on Deer Island, in Boston Harbor, came across a black plastic garbage bag on the beach. Inside was a very little girl, dead. The woman called for help and collapsed in tears. Police searched the island; divers searched the water; a medical examiner collected the body. The little girl had dark eyes and pale skin and long brown hair. She weighed thirty pounds. She was wearing whiteand-black polka-dot pants. She was wrapped in a zebra-striped fleece blanket. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said that no child matching her description had been reported missing. “Someone has to know who this child is,” an official there said. But for a very long time no one did. A forensic artist fed a morgue…

I fly an average of twice a month these days, usually for work, and although I spent much of my life afraid of airplanes, I now chase them with an addict’s need. If it has been a while since I have been aloft, I’m restless, peevish, mindless, tired—useless as a human being. The start of a flight heralds a game afoot. The rush is skittish and improbable. A freighted mass of metal rattling down the runway gains a sudden burst of speed and, in a small, miraculous gasp, loses its weight, rises, and soars, enacting careful turns and radio coördinations that accrue toward effortlessness. On the ground, on landing, it’s again a metal hulk; the metamorphosis reverses itself. A part of me is sure I’ll die at every takeoff, yet…

THE RESTORER’S ROLE In discussing the digital component of the artist Josh Kline’s work, which relies on technology that doesn’t yet exist, Ben Lerner makes a comparison to the computer-generated restoration of the “Harvard Murals,” a suite of paintings by Mark Rothko (“The Custodians,” January 11th). In the early nineteensixties, as an apprentice in the conservation department of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, I was among the crew that worked with Rothko on the installation. Lerner describes the murals’ recent exhibition at the Harvard Art Museum, in which color that was fading was made more vivid by the projection of computergenerated hues. Lerner suggests that the original art may not be necessary if projectors could produce the same effects. As the former head of conservation at the Harvard University Art…

A Lower East Side bar where you don’t have to fight to get in—or be heard—is nothing short of a miracle. Garfunkel’s, a cozy new speakeasy, goes one step further. At its best— when you’re curled into a highbacked chair sipping a Quill (a richer and more bitter Negroni, thanks to Punt e Mes) and listening to Nina Simone’s velvet tones—Garfunkel’s is the most intimate bar in New York City. To enter, ring the buzzer marked “G,” climb to the second floor, and let the bartender usher you into his candle-lit living room. On a recent winter evening, the only guests were a first-time patron busy falling in love with a TNT—a spicy tamarind take on a margarita—and Esmerelda, the owner’s girlfriend, sitting barefoot on a couch in the corner…

One chilly morning last week, at a Pret a Manger on the edge of Union Square, the Roca brothers came in from the cold. They were visiting New York on a twenty-four-hour furlough from El Celler de Can Roca, their dining establishment in northeast Spain, which, according to the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, a list issued annually by Restaurant magazine, is currently the best on the planet. Joan (head chef), Josep (sommelier), and Jordi (desserts) were dressed in dark parkas that did not look quite up to the weather. The plan had been to visit the Greenmarket across the street, but they were hesitating. “It’s cold in Spain this time of year,” Jordi said, nibbling nonjudgmentally on a Pret croissant. “But not like this.” The Rocas were in town for…

These young women will last forever, posed like greyhounds, trapped in the silver crust of the frame. You can’t tell one from another, the breed is so pure. They will never run. Each one aloft on a frozen wave of white cotillion lace to resemble marriage, to resemble fate. I remember July sun pouring down in a prickly meadow, and a garter-snake skin laid out like fairy lingerie on a stone wall. This was Connecticut, there would be a stone wall. Crickets were scraping marrow from the day. I was young; I’d been alone for weeks. I painted the meadow morning and afternoon trying to capture the crackling sound with my brush. I was reading “Oedipus Rex.” I understood neither the snake skin nor the play. “Your life is one…

1. All day I aim at date palms. The hood’s covered with dried stains: dip, coffee I’ve spit. Dalton always yelling from the hole, Not on my truck, dick. Dust, here. Dust there. How many duds don’t blow, I don’t know. Inside the Kevlar another song stuck. Even over the constant mosque music. I’m into having sex. Not into making love. (But I’m not having. Not making … Dalton says it’s my anthem.) 2. My wish: to make Devices Exploded Improvised. I keep both thumbs on the butterfly. This camouflage keeps my vitals very much part of the sand I stare down all day. Lt. says, The Fifty should make people unhappy. At home, they don’t know all I do is aim at date palms. 3. Been hit with a…

In the English-speaking world, we are used to thinking of our greatest writer as an enigma, or a blank. Though there’s enough historical evidence to tell us when Shakespeare was born and when he died, and more than enough to prove that he wrote the plays ascribed to him, the record is thin. Indeed, the persistence of conspiracy theories attributing Shakespeare’s work to the Earl of Oxford or other candidates is a symptom of how little we actually understand about his life. His religious beliefs, his love affairs, his relationships with other writers, his daily routine—these are permanent mysteries, and biographies of Shakespeare are always mostly speculation. To get a sense of how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dominates German literature, we would have to imagine a Shakespeare known to the…

The title character in “Jane Got a Gun” is Jane Hammond (Natalie Portman), who lives with her young daughter in the New Mexico Territory. The year is 1871. Jane has a husband, Bill (Noah Emmerich), who has been gone awhile; now he returns, half dead, with bullets in his back. He tells her that he has tangled with “the Bishop boys,” who are coming to exact revenge. The sensible course of action, at this point, would be for Jane to get out of there like a jackrabbit. Being more cussed than sensible, however, she stands her ground—farming the child out to a friend for safekeeping, then hunkering down to fortify the homestead and to prepare for attack. As watchers of Westerns, we know what to expect next. A stranger should…

WET SOUNDS LIKE A harbinger of a pop future that’s tantalizingly close. The trio formed, in 2007, as New York college students whose musical interests drifted between lo-fi folk, brainy electronica, and slowburn R. & B. In 2013, they stirred those three disparate sounds into an arresting self-titled E.P. On its four tracks, the lead vocalist and songwriter, Kelly Zutrau, sings about heartbreak, dishing out honeyed, firstcrush platitudes (“My baby, he don’t love me no more”) over the ruminating laptop compositions of her bandmates, Joe Valle and Marty Sulkow. Wet’s high-low dexterity—a Billboard brain with a D.I.Y. body, Brandy by way of Björk—has loyalists pining for its self-produced major-label début, “Don’t You.” The band will celebrate the release with two engagements, at Bowery Ballroom (Jan. 28) and Rough Trade…

Blooks: The Art of Books That Aren’t Mindell Dubansky, a book conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exhibits her collection of blooks—objects that look like books but aren’t—at this American bibliophile society. Since the nineteenth century, designers have produced a myriad of flat-printed objects that feign the three dimensions of a bound book: menus, advertisements, invitations, greeting cards, pamphlets, and more. Dubansky proposes that the motif lends a sense of permanence and significance to these items, which she’s gathered from across the country. Gag books, sold in novelty shops in the nineteen-thirties, forties, and fifties, play up the visual pun: “Crime Does Not Pay,” a fictional author named Dusty Evsky warns on the cover of a mock crime novel, before the flip, which features a woman wearing only…

When Derek Trucks, the guitar wizard, was in the Allman Brothers Band, and they were playing one of their perennial stands at the Beacon Theatre, on the Upper West Side, he always walked to the gigs, sometimes with long cigar detours through Central Park. “Gotta walk off the night before,” Trucks said recently. He and his wife, the singer Susan Tedeschi, were walking east on 133rd Street, up from the Hudson into Harlem and a frosty headwind. There’d been no night-before this time, save for sushi and sake downtown, but they wanted to poke around the neighborhood, in anticipation of an engagement at the Apollo Theatre this week with their own group, the Tedeschi Trucks Band. “I remember the first time I came up here, like twenty years ago,” Trucks…

When I realized that New York was a cesspit filled with the viscera of broken dreams, I decided that the time had come for me to move to beautiful, sunny Los Angeles. When I arrived in L.A. and realized that it was creatively dead, had a withered husk for a soul, and considered ombré the height of culture, I took the first plane back to New York. Of course, my plane landed in a sea of overstressed, overworked rat kings fornicating with cockroaches and three of my exes. So I bought a used Prius and drove cross-country straight to L.A., because in L.A. people go on hikes. On my first hike in L.A., I had to talk to someone who’d never read Joan Didion and who’d had—get this—plastic surgery. Before…

OUR SYSTEM A philosopher had spent his lifetime pondering the nature of knowledge and was ready at last to write down his conclusions. He took out a sheet of white paper and a pen. But he noticed, upon lifting the pen, a slight tremor in his hand. Hours later he was diagnosed with a neuromuscular disorder that promptly began ravaging his body, though apparently, according to the doctor, not his mind. He lost the use of his muscles one by one, first in his fingers, then in his toes, then in his arms, then in his legs. Soon he could only whisper weakly and flutter his right eyelid. Just before losing the power of speech entirely, he designed with his son’s help a system by which he could communicate, through…

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON, by Elizabeth Strout (Random House). Much of this beautifully unsentimental novel takes place over five days in a New York hospital, where Lucy Barton, the narrator, is recovering from surgery. Her estranged mother is also there, filling the room with endless unspoken memories about Lucy’s deeply poor, troubled childhood. Strout, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Olive Kitteridge,” writes of a powerful, imperfect familial love. “Lucy comes from nothing,” one character says. But Lucy knows that no one comes from nothing: we’re haunted by our past every day. “This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world,” Lucy reflects. “Half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true.” ALL THE HOUSES, by Karen Olsson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Helen,…