Innholdsfortegnelse for May 27, 2013 i The New Yorker

Elizabeth Kolbert (Comment, p. 23) writes about the environment for the magazine and is the author of “Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.” Dana Goodyear (The Talk of the Town, p. 25) recently published “The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard,” a book of poems. Her next book, “Anything That Moves,” about American food culture, comes out in the fall. Jane Mayer (“A Word from Our Sponsor,” p. 30) is a staff writer based in Washington, covering politics. “The Dark Side” is her latest book. Jeffrey Toobin (“Rights and Wrongs,” p. 36) is the author of “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court,” which comes out in paperback in June. Jeffrey Toobin (“Rights and Wrongs,” p. 36) is the author of “The Oath: The Obama…

It’s a truism by now to say that the Internet has made music placeless and ubiquitous; Andrew Lustman, known professionally as FaltyDL, is a perfect example of this principle. His work is a combination of garage and early-nineties electronica, genres that grew out of an exchange between American and British artists. Lustman, who is at the Sullivan Room on May 27, has caught the ear of Thom Yorke, among others, and has a new album called “Hardcourage” on Ninja Tune. What makes him an interesting figure is that he has taken the populist thump of garage and wound a spiral around it, sometimes hewing closely to the accessible bass lines and soft propulsion of the music, sometimes weaving in cloudy sounds and detached, narcotized snatches of singing. Like Yorke, Lustman…

READINGS AND TALKS HUFF AND PUFF June 6 Joan Acocella, who wrote about fairy tales in this magazine last year, joins Peter Wortsman, whose translation of “Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm” was recently published by Archipelago Books, for a talk titled “Nature Is Not Kind,” at the Community Bookstore, in Brooklyn. (718-783-3075.) CLASSICAL MUSIC BROOKLYN BOLD June 8-9 Alan Pierson’s Brooklyn Philharmonic is asserting itself as a leader in the borough’s increasingly vibrant new-music scene. The composer Ted Hearne, the neo-soul diva Erykah Badu, and Bed-Stuy’s home-town star Yasiin Bey collaborate with the orchestra in two evenings of classical-hip-hop fusion at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. (bam.org.) THE THEATRE: TELL IT June 18 Austin Pendleton and Chuck Cooper star in a new play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, “Choir Boy,”…

Police say a woman told a 69-year-old Florida man she was a vampire before biting off chunks of his face and part of his lip. [The man] told St. Petersburg police Thursday he was sleeping in his motorized wheelchair on the porch of a vacant Hooters when the attack happened. —Associated Press. For a long time I used to go to bed early on the porch of a vacant Hooters. Often my eyes would close so quickly, after I turned out my little reading light, that I did not have even a moment to wonder at the strangeness of my surroundings; for in those days the demand of mine that I be put to bed with a good-night kiss from Mamma, and only on the porch of a vacant Hooters,…

In 1978, the year that I graduated from high school, in Palo Alto, the name Silicon Valley was not in use beyond a small group of tech cognoscenti. Apple Computer had incorporated the previous year, releasing the first popular personal computer, the Apple II. The major technology companies made electronics hardware, and on the way to school I rode my bike through the Stanford Industrial Park, past the offices of Hewlett-Packard, Varian, and Xerox PARC. The neighborhoods of the Santa Clara Valley were dotted with cheap, modern, one-story houses—called Eichlers, after the builder Joseph Eichler—with glass walls, open floor plans, and flat-roofed carports. (Steve Jobs grew up in an imitation Eichler, called a Likeler.) The average house in Palo Alto cost about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Along the…

The two main rivers of Central Asia, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, originate in the mountains near China’s western border and run into the Aral Sea—or at least they used to, before the Soviets diverted them to irrigate cotton fields. The Greeks knew the two rivers as the Oxus and the Jaxartes. An Islamic hadith holds that they are two of the four rivers that flow into Paradise. “Two Rivers” is Carolyn Drake’s photographic record of many visits to this region over the past five years. Drake’s Central Asia is a place where political allegiances, ethnic bonds, national borders, and even physical geography are in such flux as to seem, at times, like fictions. Following the two rivers, she traces a vast ecosystem of stories, nature, money, and…

Bunker Hill, by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking). The Battle of Bunker Hill, bloodier than any in the eight years of war that followed, serves as a prism through which Philbrick examines the tenacity of the Boston patriots who were determined to maintain autonomy from the British Empire. Philbrick focusses on Joseph Warren, a doctor who was president of the Provincial Congress and a major general in the army, and who was killed on Breed’s Hill— which is adjacent to Bunker Hill, and where the fighting actually occurred. Warren left behind a nascent country, a grieving fiancée, who mythologized his death in her poetry, and, possibly, a pregnant mistress hidden away in a tavern. Occasionally, Philbrick leans too heavily on conjecture in order to advance his narrative, but he captures the drama—martial…

BORDER CROSSINGS William Finnegan’s article about Mark Lyttle, an American citizen deported by his country, depicts a rare and unfortunate case dating back to 2008 that is in no way representative of our agency’s record (“The Deportation Machine,” April 29th). In the years since, ICE has implemented stringent safeguards to protect against the possibility of a citizen’s detainment or removal, including a new nationwide policy to insure that detainees with mental conditions or disorders are identified, and appointed qualified counsel to represent them in removal proceedings. Reforms also include the establishment of a twenty-four-hour, multilingual, toll-free hotline for detained individuals. To ignore this progress paints an inaccurate picture, and discredits the hardworking men and women who dedicate their lives to upholding our nation’s immigration laws. John T. Morton Director, U.S.…

The historical and mythic themes of Anselm Kiefer’s epic canvases aren’t as compelling as they once were, when he made a redemptive difference in the world by disentangling Germanic culture from the sinister pathos and catastrophic effects of the Third Reich. Since then, his titanic spins on exalted subjects (medieval philosophy, the Kabbalah, the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann) have seemed more pretext than passion. In a new show at Gagosian, he evokes the Morgenthau Plan, a grotesquely vengeful wartime scheme, proposed by F.D.R.’s Treasury Secretary, to reduce conquered Germany to a primitive agricultural state. (After being fitfully applied, the policy succumbed to imperatives of the Cold War, if not to common decency.) The allusion, expressed in written phrases, feels incidental to standard Kieferian imagery of blasted or flowering fields in…

COMMENT: LINES IN THE SAND A lot of what’s known about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be traced back to a chemist named Charles David Keeling, who, in 1958, persuaded the U.S. Weather Bureau to install a set of monitoring devices at its Mauna Loa observatory, on the island of Hawaii. By the nineteen-fifties, it was well understood that, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, humans were adding vast amounts of carbon to the air. But the prevailing view was that this wouldn’t much matter, since the oceans would suck most of it out again. Keeling thought that it would be prudent to find out if that was, in fact, the case. The setup on Mauna Loa soon showed that it was not. Carbon-dioxide levels have been monitored…

“I don’t love trials,” Judge Shira Scheindlin said recently. “They are not a good way to tell a story. They are not efficient. And they are often so tedious— you saw that today.” Scheindlin was sitting at a conference table in her chambers in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan building, off Foley Square, in lower Manhattan, after a long day of presiding in Floyd v. City of New York, which is the latest legal challenge to the stop-and- frisk practices of the New York Police Department. “What I really like to do is write opinions,” the Judge said. “There you get to do what you think is right, what you believe in. You’re pushing the margins of the envelope, being willing to be creative.” It was after seven o’clock in the…

Manhattan, the vertical city, greets newcomers as a sheer rockface. To even begin the ascent requires agility, nerve, and a secure base camp. If you can’t establish that base—the right apartment—the plunge is swift: you bounce to a friend’s couch, then to a squat in Bushwick, and suddenly you’re at the Port Authority holding a sign for bus fare home. In the spring and summer of last year, people from all over—from Brazil, Norway, Spain, South Africa, Bangladesh, Japan, even the Upper West Side—pounced on a Craigslist ad for a base camp in Chelsea: a twenty-five-hundred- square-foot loft with two large bedrooms and two baths. When they visited, Apartment 6-E at 211 West Twentieth Street proved even better than advertised. The ceilings were eleven feet high, and the windows and…

I have thirteen wives. We all live together in a sprawling Queen Anne house with half a dozen gables, two round towers, and a wraparound porch, not far from the center of town. Each of my wives has her own room, as I have mine, but we gather for dinner every evening in the high dining room, at the long table under the old chandelier with its pink glass shades. Later, in the front room, we play rummy or pinochle in small groups, or sit talking in faded armchairs and couches. My wives get along very well with one another, though their relation to me is more complex. People sometimes ask, “Why thirteen wives?” “Oh,” I always say, putting on my brightest smile, “you can’t have too much of a…

People can’t seem to let go of the Divine Comedy. You’d think that a fourteenth-century allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Italian vernacular and in accord with the Scholastic theology of that period, would have been turned over, long ago, to the scholars in the back carrels. But no. By my count there have been something like a hundred English-language translations, and not just by scholars but by blue-chip poets: in the past half century, John Ciardi, Allen Mandelbaum, Robert Pinsky, W. S. Merwin. Liszt and Tchaikovsky have composed music about the poem; Chaucer, Balzac, and Borges have written about it. In other words, the Divine Comedy is more than a text that professors feel has to be brushed up periodically for students. It’s one of…

THIS WEEK: THE THEATRE THE WAY WE LIVE Marianne Weems, of the Builders Association, directs “Sontag: Reborn,” based on journals that Susan Sontag kept from her teen years until her thirties. Moe Angelos adapted and performs, at the New York Theatre Workshop. (See page 10.) NIGHT LIFE: GOOD GENES The singer-songwriter Laura Stevenson grew up playing punk music on Long Island, but she comes from a family of more traditional musicians—her grandfather was the composer and arranger Harry Simeone, who is best known for “The Little Drummer Boy,” and her grandmother sang with Benny Goodman. Her more recent work skews toward country rock, and she’s wrapping up a national tour with a show at the Bowery Ballroom. (See page 12.) ART: PAPER WEIGHT Edward Hopper’s paintings are American icons, but…

181 Thompson St. (212-254-3000)—A lot of new restaurants are like freshmen: they try too hard. Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, the men behind the super-deli Torrisi Italian Specialties, spent a year touring the five boroughs’ classic red-sauce restaurants to round up the ingredients of a high-toned homage. An Elio’s for downtown, you might say. They were looking not only for culinary secrets and delights but also for what Carbone has called “moves”—endearing idiosyncratic gestures that turn service into performance and tops into tips. They brought all this to a Thompson Street space that had belonged, for decades, to Rocco’s (authentic, tired) and gave it a name that, unfortunately, is shared by another Carbone (authentic, tired) near Port Authority. A place can seem over-move-y, especially when it is new and when…

Last fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an exposé of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called “Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream.” It was scheduled to air on PBS on November 12th. The movie had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation. “Park Avenue” is a pointed exploration of the growing economic inequality in America and a meditation on the often self-justifying mind-set of “the one percent.” As a narrative device, Gibney focusses on one of the most expensive apartment buildings in Manhattan— 740 Park Avenue—portraying it as an emblem of concentrated wealth and contrasting the lives of its inhabitants with those of poor people living at the other end…

I don’t remember how I hurt myself, The pain mine Long enough for me To lose the wound that invented it As none of us knows the beauty Of our own eyes Until a man tells us they are Why God made brown. Then That same man says he lives to touch The smoothest parts, suggesting our Surface area can be understood By degrees of satin. Him I will Follow until I am as rough outside as I am within. I cannot locate the origin Of slaughter, but I know How my own feels, that I live with it And sometimes use it To get the living done, Because I am what gladiators call A man in love—love Being any reminder we survived.…

One candidate swears he’ll import artists from Paris to paint every voter’s portrait, but the wiretap reveals that, of the six masked balls and two bullfights he promised, he only planned to pass out free twelve packs of Guaraná Antarctica on Election Day. One candidate skips town when someone catches him digging up a body and reburying it beneath the courthouse. Another rumor says he was caught tattooing women after curfew, inking diabolical love letters onto their ankles. He was part of a conspiracy of windmills, others claim. They say his chickens accused him of unspeakable things. When you arrive to cast your ballot, the soldiers at the polls hand you a picture of the general leading the charge against the Bolivian Army and a picture of the President’s house…

In 1993, when the French duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo released their first record, as members of the rock band Darlin’, an English journalist described the music as “a daft punky thrash.” Shortened, this became the name of their next project, a not very punk dance act. Daft Punk’s début single, “The New Wave,” from 1994, was a fast, thumping techno track built from drum machines and synthesizers. Twenty years later, Daft Punk hasn’t so much changed dance music as dominated it. The group laid the groundwork for the growing contemporary dance genre by making music that was slightly rougher and almost comically synthetic— the latter symbolized by their habit of wearing robot helmets in their public appearances. “Discovery,” from 2001, is perhaps the most influential dance record…

When we last saw Celine and Jesse, at the end of “Before Sunset” (2004)—the second film in Richard Link later’s trilogy about a French-American romantic alliance—they were in Celine’s Paris apartment, and Celine (Julie Delpy) was softly swaying to Nina Simone, while Jesse (Ethan Hawke) watched her, enchanted, and missed his flight home to his wife and child in New York. That final scene delivered a promise that the two would be a couple at last, a promise that has been fulfilled, for better and for worse, in the third film in the trilogy, “Before Midnight.” It’s been a long journey. The on-again, off-again relationship began in 1995, with the first film, “Before Sunrise,” when the characters were in their early twenties. In that movie, Jesse, a footloose American, meets…