Innholdsfortegnelse for February 22, 2016 i The New Yorker

IF YOU THINK that Friday and Saturday nights at the Metropolitan Museum are ladies’ nights, you may have met Walter Martin. In 1994, when Martin was nineteen, he worked at the Met as a visitor-services assistant. He sold tickets and helped operate the switchboard. He had spent a year in college in Colorado and had come back East— he is from D.C.—to play in a band called Jonathan Fire*Eater, and later in a band called the Walkmen, which made seven records between 2002 and 2012, then, according to its Web site, went on hiatus in 2013, but is probably broken up, Martin says. Martin is tall, with a narrow face and hair like a field that has been battered by the wind. He has a new record, called “Arts &…

JENNIFER THALASINOS lay motionless across the altar steps, her head and upper body covered by a white prayer shawl. Around her, the Shiloh Messianic congregation, eighty or ninety strong, sang and prayed. Worshippers turned toward Jerusalem, their arms raised. The pastor, Bruce Dowell, strummed a guitar and, in a warm baritone, sang, “These are the final days.” The shawl that covered Thalasinos had belonged to her husband, Nicholas. He and thirteen others were killed by gunfire in the December 2nd attack on a county workers’ holiday party in San Bernardino, California. Nicholas Thalasinos was fifty-two. He was a restaurant inspector who, according to his widow, loved Godzilla— he once took his two sons to a Godzilla convention in Chicago. Raised in New Jersey, Thalasinos had been a county health inspector…

Three weeks ago They plowed it to the curb— This continental shelf of ice and snow, Undisturbed Until a thaw’s Revealed the sparrow corpse, The butts and coffee lids and bloodied gauze, How salting warps The flow of freeze A confetti of plastic scraps Is buoyed on, and how the neighbor’s Maltese Has charted maps Of piss on treads The garbage trucks had made. And still atop each drift a pinhead Serenade— An oily mange, Sewage smuts and pocks— Of notes almost delicately arranged, A paradox To which clings, Read rightly—what? A Tattered score of Beethoven’s melting “Spring Sonata.”…

In 2004, in the Times, my colleague Kelefa Sanneh wrote a tart takedown of “rockism,” the fetishization of realness that haunts music criticism. “Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star,” he wrote. “Lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.” It’s the bias, in other words, that lets people sneer at Lady Gaga doing an homage to David Bowie, as if her alien act were self-evidently disposable while his was made to last. As Sanneh noted, the problem with rockism isn’t loving Bruce Springsteen. The problem is that it makes rock itself (and jazz and punk and indie rock) seem cranky and pompous, not to mention…

FRAMING THE STORY As a forensic-DNA professional, I enjoyed Kathryn Schulz’s article on “Making a Murderer,” the Netflix series, by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, about the police investigations of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey in the murder of Teresa Halbach (“Dead Certainty,” January 25th). However, Schulz repeats the prosecutor’s problematic statement that DNA from Avery’s perspiration was found in a vehicle belonging to the victim. Forensic identification of body fluids is limited to blood, saliva, semen, and urine; there is no test for sweat. The continued mention of this as a source of DNA calls into question other statements made by the prosecutor. Karl Reich Lombard, Ill. Schulz writes that “the point of being scrupulous about your means is to help insure accurate ends, whether you are trying…

WILL RAWLS WAS waiting in the Lorimer Street subway station one recent Sunday, trying to get to a rehearsal in Chelsea—Rawls is the choreographer for a new opera about Robert Moses, the dictatorial city planner, and Jane Jacobs, the populist city un-planner—when he had a thought. The L train wasn’t coming, and pretty soon, with repairs threatening to suspend service between Brooklyn and Manhattan for more than a year, the train wouldn’t be coming at all. “I was, like, this shit is always broken,” Rawls said, after arriving in Chelsea. “I almost want Robert Moses 2.0 to come back and fix the M.T.A.” “That’s a very human emotion, to want a Moses-like figure to come in and fix everything,” Joshua Frankel, the opera’s director, said. “What did Moses do about…

A WEEK AGO SUNDAY, one of the two eventual winners of the New Hampshire primaries assailed the power of corporate lobbyists over the U.S. government, labelling them “bloodsuckers.” He attacked defense contractors for forcing the government to buy missiles it didn’t need. He blasted oil companies and insurers. And he vowed to use the bargaining power of the U.S. government to drive down drug prices. Surprisingly, this was a speech not by the democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders but, rather, by the self-proclaimed billionaire Donald Trump. Even before the Trump and Sanders victories in New Hampshire last week, the surface parallels between the men had attracted lots of comment: both are insurgents, channelling widespread political disaffection. Less apparent, but more interesting, is the fact that they’re also channelling profound disaffection with three…

On the way to Money, Mississippi, we see little ghosts of snow, falling faint as words while we try to find Robert Johnson’s muddy maybe grave. Beside Little Zion, along the highwayside, this stone keeps its offerings—Bud & Louisiana Hot Sauce—the ground giving way beneath our feet. The blues always dance cheek to cheek with a church— Booker’s Place back in Greenwood still standing, its long green bar beautiful, Friendship Church just a holler away. Shotgun, shotgun, shotgun— rows of colored houses, as if the same can of bright stain might cover the sins of rotting wood, now mostly tarpaper & graffiti holding McLaurin Street together— RIP Boochie—the undead walk these streets seeking something we take pictures of & soon flee. The hood of a car yawns open in awe,…

ONE OF THE reasons Kanye West inspires such a devoted following is that, despite all of the changes in his life and in his music, we can still recognize him as the same character he was when his story began. He is his own muse. When West débuted as a solo artist, in 2004, he came across as an Everyman striver whose petty arrogance masked a deeper set of insecurities. Puffing his chest one moment, self-scrutinizing the next, he seemed to offer a novel archetype: the grounded hiphop star. He was never a great rapper, but he made a style of his enthusiastic clumsiness, surrounding his verses with proud soul samples, on “The College Dropout” (2004); high-res orchestrations, on “Late Registration” (2005); and arena-size triumphalism, on “Graduation” (2007). As fame…

FIFTEEN YEARS HAVE passed since “Zoolander”—fifteen summers, with the length of fifteen long winters! How we have ached to see once more those noble features. And here they are, in “Zoolander 2,” bearded, sadder, and yet somehow no wiser than before. Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller), who embodied everything that we look for in a male model, managed to lose his career, his wife, the custody of his son, and his ineffable mojo. Since then, he has dwelt alone, “as a hermit crab,” in a hut among snowy mountains. Thence he is summoned to rejoin the fray, on the orders of Alexanya Atoz (Kristen Wiig), the most lordly designer of the moment. Although a blizzard is howling, he sets off, unbowed, like a polar explorer, and trudges all of ten feet…

By night, Lauren Worsham is a silver-voiced soprano who has sung with the Philharmonic and on Broadway. (She was nominated for a Tony for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.”) By late night, she fronts an impish indie band called Sky-Pony with her husband, Kyle Jarrow—who also has another career, as a writer for stage and screen. At Ars Nova, they perform “The Wildness” (in previews; opening Feb. 29), a “rock fairy tale” that channels the couple’s penchant for dragons, ritual, and geeky-glam style. THE THEATRE Estate Value Discovering a Russian master. IT WAS THE late actress Kim Stanley who alerted me to Chekhov’s greatness. Years ago, I was trying to write a piece, for this magazine, about the fabled performer, a process that led to a number…

TWO OLD FRIENDS met for coffee last week, after dropping the kids off at school. Were the other people in the café aware that the taller one was Opioid-Induced Constipation Man? Apparently not. No one snickered, or asked him to sign a bottle of Vicodin pills. This was four days after the Super Bowl—four days after Opioid-Induced Constipation Man had made his début in an advertisement, during the first half of the game, for a drug that supposedly alleviates opioid-induced constipation, or O.I.C. (Actually, the ad, paid for by the pharmaceutical giants AstraZeneca and Daiichi-Sankyo, didn’t mention the drug. It addressed the condition, not the cure. For the latter, you’ll have to have a conversation with your doctor.) Depending on your point of view, the ad was offensive, confusing, gross,…

THE CLOCK ON the wall in the cafeteria at Winnacunnet High School, in Hampton, New Hampshire, is mounted behind a wire cage that protects its face from the likeliest weapons (French fries, foam balls) deployed in the uprisings of adolescents (food fights, dodgeball). Or maybe that was to prepare it for politics. Two weeks ago, the day after the Iowa caucuses and one week before the New Hampshire primary, a makeshift stage had been built at the far end of the cafeteria, catercornered from the caged clock. Its backdrop was an American flag; a campaign poster, an “H” with an arrow running through it; and three rows of Granite State citizens, a political Greek chorus positioned behind the lectern, awaiting the candidate. Minutes passed. The slender black hand of the…

IN THE EARLY-MORNING hours of February 15, 2014, Ray Rice and his fiancée, Janay Palmer, stepped into an elevator at the Revel hotel and casino, in Atlantic City. Palmer and Rice, a running back for the Baltimore Ravens, were arguing as the doors slid shut. When the elevator arrived in the lobby, Palmer was lying unconscious, face down, on the floor. According to a former security supervisor at the Revel, nearly eighteen hundred cameras streamed video to a pair of monitoring rooms on the mezzanine floor. After guards responded to the incident in the lobby, several surveillance officers gathered and wondered aloud if a tape of Rice and Palmer could be sold to TMZ—the Web site that, since its inception, in 2005, has taken a merciless approach to celebrity news.…

He was a man shaped by money. He’d made an early reputation by analyzing the profit impact of natural disasters. He liked to talk to me about money. My mother said, What about sex? That’s what he needs to know. The language of money was complicated. He defined terms, drew diagrams, seemed to be living in a state of emergency, planted in the office most days for ten to twelve hours, or rushing to airports, or preparing for conferences. At home, he stood before a full-length mirror reciting from memory speeches he was working on about risk appetites and offshore jurisdictions, refining his gestures and facial expressions. He had an affair with an office temp. He ran in the Boston Marathon. What did I do? I mumbled, I shuffled, I…

THE BIGGEST STORY of the past fifty years in American politics has been the ascendancy of the right, and it’s a story of apostasy. At each stage of the conservative movement’s long march to power, crucial aid was provided by heretics from the left. Progressives recoiled from the New Deal and turned reactionary; ex-Communists helped to launch National Review, in the nineteen-fifties; recovering socialists founded neoconservatism in the sixties and seventies; New Left radicals turned on their former comrades and former selves in the Reagan years. Ronald Reagan, whose Presidency brought the movement to its high-water mark, was himself once a New Deal liberal. In the course of a lifetime, the prevailing political winds are westerly—they blow from left to right. Try to think of public figures who made the…

Wreck and Order, by Hannah Tennant-Moore (Hogarth). This astute, restless début novel follows Elsie, a “pretty, damaged woman” in her twenties, who is confronting “the question of what to do” in life. The novel glows with the malaise of the Bush years: Elsie gets obsessed with Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and heads to Sri Lanka—“a tropical paradise that was also a recent war zone.” In her wearied pursuit of meaning, she toys with the idea of becoming a translator or a Buddhist nun, an English teacher in a foreign country, a “trophy wife.” Although Elsie makes rash decisions, her thoughts about intimacy and desire are searching and considered, and Tennant- Moore depicts even her most startling fantasies with analytical froideur. The Blizzard, by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Jamey…