Innholdsfortegnelse for February 8, 2016 i The New Yorker

George Packer (Comment, p. 35), a staff writer, is the author of “The Unwinding,” which won the 2013 National Book Award for nonfiction. Elif Batuman (“Cover Story,” p. 42) is working on her first novel, entitled “The Idiot.” Hallie Cantor (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 49) wrote for the third season of Comedy Central’s “Inside Amy Schumer.” She lives in Brooklyn. Matthew Desmond (“Forced Out,” p. 50) is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard. His book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” will be published next month. James Surowiecki (The Financial Page, p. 40) writes a column on economics, business, and finance for the magazine. Hagit Grossman (Poem, p. 44) lives in Tel Aviv. Her poetry collection “Trembling of the City” is…

Lunar New Year Parade and Festival Sara D. Roosevelt Park is one of the Lower East Side’s treasures, a bright stretch of green tucked into the shadow of Pace University High School. Residents of nearby Chinatown frequent the park for refuge from downtown’s grit, and it will burst with even more color than usual for the annual Lunar New Year festival, as more than five hundred thousand fireworks float above elaborate choreographed performances and venders serving a bevy of traditional dishes (Feb. 8). On Feb. 14 at 1, a parade will begin on Mott St. at Canal St., and snake through Little Italy and Chinatown, past the Manhattan Bridge, and back up toward the park, to ring in the Year of the Monkey. (Sara D. Roosevelt Park, E. Houston…

AS THE Blizzard of ’16 approached the city gate, Ricky Jay, the sui-generis conjurer, scholar, storyteller, actor, antiquarian collector, and incorrigible perfectionist, knew what not to do. A couple of weeks earlier, he and his wife, Chrisann Verges, had arrived from Los Angeles at their pied-à-terre on the Upper West Side. They’d been all over town, and the only remaining item of business before heading home was the opening party, a few days later, of “Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger’s Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The more Fargo-like the view from the living-room window, the more determined Jay was to stay put until it felt safe to summon Uber. On an icy, windy morning last winter, a misstep on Lafayette Street had left him…

If a friend calls out to you late at night from beneath your windowNever send him on his way. And if you’ve sent him away and stillInsist on rigid rules, regain your composure after a momentAnd run to the window and shout his name: “Come, Merhav!Come back! I’ve got some corn cooking! Come eat something.”And he’ll placidly retrace his steps and gladly acceptThe key you toss down from your window,Will come upstairs to the first floor and will be impressedBy the large pictures on the walls.He’ll sit and wait for you to slip into a clean shirt and you’ll put onThe movie in the kid’s room and your baby daughterWill rush to the kitchen and come back with a red pepper for him.He’ll decline the warm corn and say he’s…

IT’S 2:49 A.M., more or less my bedtime, and I’m about to put on my Sleep Shepherd hat, a device designed to help the wearer go gentle into unconsciousness ($149.99). The hat is a stretchy black beanie, but where you might normally find a pompom there’s a plastic box the size of a Triscuit. If I were an alien, this would be the port through which I’d receive my instructions from the mother ship. The box has an on-off switch, and I’m going to turn it on so that the mechanism can commune with my head. The hat measures activity in my cerebral cortex through three sensors sewn into the fabric—one covering each ear and a third handling the forehead. There are also built-in speakers that emit pulsing tones mimicking…

The tree is dead, in my neighbor’s yard,the branches empty of leaves and the owl’s nestnaked and derelict it seems. We sat withour winter picnic and watched for the pairwho haunted our block. The male much smallerand loud, calling his dominion just after dark.The female usually close by. They seemed likeglamorous friends, distant but always there.I’d seen one only once during the day.I stood at the curb, talking to the handyman, whenthe female owl came low out the alleyway flyingsoundless, so close I could see her eyein her pale face, the beak curved and clear,but her eye, a killer’s, make no mistake, told meif by any chance of size or opportunity she would.I will not think this was some kind of portent,that she was a harbinger of all that followed.The…

“WE ARE Kardashians,” Robert Kardashian (David Schwimmer) tells his four children, who bounce in a booth at L.A.’s ChinChin restaurant, giddy that their dad has been recognized from his appearances on cable news, sticking up for his friend O. J. Simpson. “And in this family being a good person and a loyal friend is more important than being famous. Fame is fleeting. It’s hollow. It means nothing at all without a virtuous heart.” Is there a force more caustic, and more propulsive, than mere irony? If so, that’s the substance flowing through “American Crime Story: The People vs. O. J. Simpson,” on FX, an addictive, miraculously well-cast dramatization of the 1995 murder case, created by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, and produced by Ryan Murphy and his longtime production partner…

IF THE id had an id, and it wrote poetry, the results might sound like “Widening Income Inequality” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Frederick Seidel’s sixteenth collection. The title borrows a current meme, while also suggesting Yeats’s apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming” (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer”). Seidel’s satanic refinement is expressed in poems at once suave and vengeful, their garish pleasures linked to the many splendid goods—Ducati motorcycles, bespoke suits, Italian shoes— that they describe. To encounter a poem by Seidel is therefore to be co-opted into his Ricardo Montalban aesthetic of creepy luxury. American poets like to think of their art as open, democratic, all-embracing; few aside from Seidel have imagined the lyric poem to be an exclusive haunt of…

The Portable Veblen, by Elizabeth McKenzie (Penguin Press). In this novel, a recently engaged couple in Palo Alto—a medical researcher, Paul, and rudderless Veblen—navigate the difficulties of family, new money, war, and ethical disagreement. The book alternates between Paul’s and Veblen’s perspectives, in a way that highlights the similarities and divergences of their backgrounds. Though the novel at times recalls the scope of Jonathan Franzen’s family epics, it is far quirkier; Veblen becomes obsessed with (and converses with) a squirrel. McKenzie is particularly good at making relationships seem real—attuned to the way that inside statements like “I can’t wait to go to Tacos Tambien as soon as you’re better” can be as meaningful as an affirmation of love. Mrs. Engels, by Gavin McCrea (Catapult). Friedrich Engels, the father of Communism…

MODERNITY AT THE MET Calvin Tomkins, in his article on the revitalization of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, mentions the early death of Thomas Hess, who had been hired to run the museum’s collection of contemporary art (“The Met and the Now,” January 25th). My late husband, Thomas Hoving, was the museum’s director until the late nineteenseventies. He believed that Hess, who had been the editor of ARTnews and an advocate of the Abstract Expressionists, could bring a fresh emphasis on contemporary art to the museum’s collection. He also felt that MOMA, since it focussed primarily on modern works, was not a true contemporaryart museum. He thought that the Met, as New York’s historical-art museum, should take over MOMA’s contemporary collection, leaving MOMA to focus…

THE LATEST stage in the decline of French civilization began in the summer of 2009 at a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles. Arash Derambarsh, a book editor and criminology student in Paris, was visiting his twin brother, Sia, who was in California working in film production. Derambarsh ordered chicken curry. It arrived in a bowl big enough to mix a cake. “After that long flight, I couldn’t eat it all,” Derambarsh recalled. “So my brother asked me, ‘You want a doggy bag?’ I thought, Is he talking about ‘Reservoir Dogs’? My brother said, ‘No, Arash, here in the United States, when someone can’t finish his meal he takes it home in a doggy bag and eats it at 2 A.M.’ ” Derambarsh was sitting in a café in the Seventh…

LAST MONDAY was all too typical of this year’s stock-market mayhem. Although a rally at the end of the previous week had raised investors’ hopes, the major indexes opened down and slid lower as the day progressed. By the market’s close, the S. & P. 500 had dropped 1.56 per cent, leaving it down eight per cent on the year. But there was something odd. The slide had not been occasioned by bad news on the corporate front; earnings reports were generally good. Nor was it a reaction to trouble in China, which has been a major source of anxiety for investors; the Shanghai index had finished up. Rather, the decline was a response to just one fact: the price of oil had fallen more than five per cent, to…

THE TREES along Pine Street that every spring bloomed purple flowers had bloomed purple flowers. So what? What was the big deal? It happened every spring. Pammy kept saying, “Look at the flowers, Ma. Ain’t them flowers amazing?” The kids were trying to kiss up. Paulie had flown in, and Pammy had taken her to Mother’s Day lunch and now was holding her hand. Holding her hand! Right on Pine. The girl who once slapped her own mother for attempting to adjust her collar. Pammy said, “Ma, these flowers, wow, they really blow me away.” Just like Pammy to take her mother to lunch in a sweatshirt with a crossedout picture of a machine gun on it. What about a nice dress? Or pants suit? At least this time Pammy…

I DON’T KNOW why, exactly, but whenever I hear anything by or featuring Madlib, the protean, forty-two-year-old, Los Angeles-based self-described “d.j. first, producer second, and m.c. last,” I start thinking about black male fraternity, a subject that Madlib keeps coming back to directly and indirectly in his work, which is jumbled, cinematic, and layered in tone and style. Madlib has some sixty albums to his credit; in the past five years alone, he’s released thirteen and helped produce five. His collaborators on these projects, for the most part, have been men of color who, not unlike Madlib, are serious goofballs or smart knuckleheads, artists who aim to pervert hip-hop’s early stance— what Michele Wallace called the myth of “Black Macho”—while embracing their own deep nerdiness. The 2014 Madlib album “Piñata”…

“Beauty is truth,” wrote John Keats, and the curators of the Cooper-Hewitt clearly agree: beauty is the theme of its Design Triennial. Don’t expect Grecian urns when the show opens, on Feb. 12. The sixty-three participants champion innovation, from China’s Trace Architecture Office (TAO) to the Israeli jeweller Noa Zilberman, whose gold-plated “wrinkles” nestle in facial creases, to the American Haas Brothers, who teamed up with craftswomen in a South African township to create the beaded bestiary above. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera With operas like “La Traviata” getting a sexy, modernist twist at the Met, Puccini’s steamy “Manon Lescaut”—which has been playing at the house for thirty-six years in a rococo-accented production that looks decidedly antiquated—was due for an update. Richard Eyre’s new film-noirinspired staging features Kristine Opolais,…

One recent evening in Alphabet City, a clutch of twenty-somethings were looking for somewhere to grab a drink and, perhaps, a dance. “Berlin’s the new cool place,” one of them announced. “It’s full of beautiful boys—and models.” At the door, a behoodied man looked up from his iPhone. “It’s really packed down there,” he said. “Not sure if you guys are gonna get in.” Then he stage-whispered into his handset, “I don’t know them.” Four or five nervous seconds passed. “O.K., you guys can go in.” At the bottom of the stairs, in a barrel-vaulted watering hole, long lines of people waited for the bathroom from whence burst ebullient gaggles of young women and a madly coughing guy in a Thrasher hat. In the bar’s main concourse, young women swaddled…

SONIA SOTOMAYOR, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, says that she prefers to be called Sonia from the Bronx. Chances are nobody who meets her ever dreams of calling her anything so informal. When she came back to her native borough last week for an Evening of Conversation at the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit organization on East 161st Street that provides attorneys for about half the indigent defendants in the Bronx, the executive director, Robin Steinberg, greeted her and nearly fainted to see her, live and in person. The Justice wore mostly black—black capelike coat with dark imitation-fur collar, black dress, and an unbuttoned black below-the-knee sweater with two horizontal white stripes. Her face and hands stood out as in an old, mostly dark painting. The Bronx Defenders provides…

IN 1924, a year after founding the Turkish Republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the country’s new leader, abolished the Ottoman Caliphate, which had been the last remaining Sunni Islamic Caliphate since 1517. Having introduced a secular constitution and a Western-style civil and criminal legal code, Atatürk shut down the dervish lodges and religious schools, abolished polygamy, and introduced civil marriage and a national beauty contest. He granted women the right to vote, to hold property, to become supreme-court justices, and to run for office. The head scarf was discouraged. A notorious 1925 “Hat Law” outlawed the fez and turban; the only acceptable male headgear was a Western-style hat with a brim. The Ottoman Arabic script was replaced by a Latin alphabet, and the language…

SIA FURLER, the forty-year-old Australian artist who goes by her first name, is a pop star, but other labels are equally appropriate. She is both an industry veteran and a newcomer to stardom, a background figure and a ubiquitous force. She’s also a prankster and a provocateur, a peddler of cheap gimmicks and high-minded performance art. In the past two years, while making the rounds of talk shows, she hid under an oversized wig. She invited collaborators to serve as proxies onstage, and perform a series of dances to her hit “Chandelier.” Often, a tiny teenager named Maddie Ziegler danced while Sia, nearly out of sight, belted her song. If you were to watch these performances on mute, you might think you had happened upon a public-access broadcast of an…