Innholdsfortegnelse for September 9, 2013 i The New Yorker

Seamus Heaney (Poem, p. 55) received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in Castledawson, Northern Ireland, on April 13, 1939, and died on August 30th. This poem first appeared in the June 25, 1979, issue of the magazine. Steve Coll (Comment, p. 29), the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, is the author of seven books, including “Ghost Wars,” for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005. Alec Wilkinson (The Talk of the Town, p. 34; “Cape Fear,” p. 42) is a longtime New Yorker contributor. He has published several books, including “The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration.” David Finkel (“The Return,” p. 36), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post, received a Mac-Arthur…

How does Julie Taymor, the creative genius behind “The Lion King,” follow the circus—technical difficulties, actors’ injuries, rewrites, and scathing reviews, which culminated in Taymor’s ultimate firing, lawsuits, and countersuits—of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”? She goes back to her roots. This fall, Taymor directs Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the inaugural show at Theatre for a New Audience’s new home in downtown Brooklyn, the Center for Shakespeare and Classical Drama (previews begin Oct. 19). Taymor first worked with the company in 1984; nearly thirty years later, she brings not just her love of Shakespeare (her films include “Titus” and “The Tempest”) but her love of spectacle—there’s a cast of thirty-three, and there will, of course, be flying. Taymor isn’t the only familiar face turning to Shakespeare: Elizabeth…

The last time American Ballet Theatre danced in the home of its rival, New York City Ballet, the year was 1976 and the building was called New York State Theatre. When the company returns this fall (Oct. 30-Nov. 10), it will be to the David H. Koch Theatre, which, since the departure of New York City Opera, two years ago, has welcomed more and more dance troupes to its stage, which was built for ballet. Its new name isn’t unfamiliar at A.B.T.—Koch is a vice-chairman of the company’s board and the chief underwriter of this season’s big première, Alexei Ratmansky’s one-act version of “The Tempest.” Shakespeare’s play is notoriously difficult to translate into ballet, but its humanist fantasy, and an evocative Sibelius score, should play to several of the…

One of Hollywood’s greatest directors, Howard Hawks was also, in eff ect, one of its most ingenious casting directors. In the twenties, he made Louise Brooks an international star; later, he discovered Lauren Bacall and Montgomery Clift, launched Carole Lombard and Angie Dickinson, revealed the comic gifts of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn and the dramatic talents of John Wayne, and, in the mid-sixties, gave James Caan his first starring role. Hawks shaped their personae with his subtly stylized direction. An adventurer and an outdoorsman, a friend of Ernest Hemingway (whose novel “To Have and Have Not” he filmed) and William Faulkner (who co-wrote that script), Hawks devised a spare yet spacious visual prose that is the cinema’s closest equivalent to Hemingway’s work. Hawks was a master of genres,…

When James Murphy, the pop musician, disbanded LCD Soundsystem, in 2011, he made a public remark or two about wanting to spend more time with his coffee. This was shorthand for a happier and more grownup life—Murphy was then forty-one, and a little frayed—but he also meant what he said. A year later, he took a two-day course, in London, with Gwilym Davies, who had recently won the World Barista Championship; he also began to consult with other coffee professionals about creating his own espresso blend. In time, Murphy met James Freeman, the founder of Blue Bottle Coffee, which has coffee shops in California and New York. Freeman is a former classical clarinetist with a priestly air. A few weeks ago, they arranged a formal coffee tasting, or “cupping,” at…

The way it worked was that they joined the Army because they were starry-eyed or heartbroken or maybe just out of work, and then they were assigned to be in the infantry rather than to something with better odds, like finance or public affairs, and then by chance they were assigned to an infantry division that was about to rotate into the war, and then they were randomly assigned to a combat brigade that included two infantry battalions, one of which was going to a bad place and the other of which was going to a worse place, and then they were assigned to the battalion going to the worse place, and then they were assigned to the company in that battalion which went to the worst place of all.…

On a muggy June morning, in a sprawling, unnamed, and unnumbered red brick building near downtown Charlotte, North Carolina—which serves as the headquarters for Showtime’s political-thriller series “Homeland”— tornado warnings were being broadcast on TV. Outside, torrential rain brought traffic to a standstill on the highway. Inside, the cast and crew of “Homeland” were hard at work by 8 A.M., calmly building their own storm for the first episode of the much awaited third season (which will première on September 29th). In the finale of Season 2, the characters had survived “the worst terrorist disaster since 9/11”: a car bombing at C.I.A. headquarters that killed more than two hundred people. The emotional weather buffeting them now was contained within a behemoth enclosed wooden set, where the homes of the show’s…

I won’t feed birds, but, if you must, then you should do so in Frederiksberg Gardens. There are tame herons in Frederiksberg Gardens, and by placing the park’s benches at some distance from one another the park authorities hope to avoid attracting too many birds to one area. There are problems at the end of the park where the alcoholics sit, especially with ducks, but I never go that way, and you can see the herons everywhere. Of the heron itself, one can say only that from a distance it looks impressive, but this doesn’t apply when you get close up. It’s too thin, and the tame herons in particular look malnourished. Most likely all that bread gives the herons of Frederiksberg Gardens bad stomachs and is to blame for…

Good myths turn on simple pairs—God and Lucifer, Sun and Moon, Jerry and George—and so an author who makes a vital duo is rewarded with a longlived audience. No one in 1900 would have thought it possible that a century later more people would read Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson stories than anything of George Meredith’s, but we do. And so Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek,” despite the silly plots and the cardboard-seeming sets, persists in its many versions because it captures a deep and abiding divide. Mr. Spock speaks for the rational, analytic self who assumes that the mind is a mechanism and that everything it does is logical, Captain Kirk for the belief that what governs our life is not only irrational but inexplicable, and the better for being…

CRIME BUSTERS Ken Auletta’s profile of Mayor Bloomberg mentions the downward trend of violent crime during the administrations of both Bloomberg and Rudolph Giuliani (“After Bloomberg,” August 26th). It seems only fair to mention that the decrease in crime under Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani was a continuation of the decline that began during the administration of Giuliani’s predecessor, David Dinkins. David Jenkins New York City THE FULL TREATMENT Meghan O’Rourke’s essay on the onset and diagnosis of her autoimmune disease highlights a number of health-care issues (“What’s Wrong with Me?,” August 26th). Our health-care system is reactive in nature and biased toward immediate or terminal illnesses characterized by discrete symptoms. Long-term diseases under the autoimmunity umbrella are often treated on a trial-and-error basis and plagued by a long lag…

One can never step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus said, but Sting’s latest project, “The Last Ship,” has him returning to the place of his birth, Wallsend, England, on the River Tyne. Wallsend was known for its shipyards (the R.M.S. Mauretania was built there), and Sting grew up in the shadows of massive hulls rising. The yards are now closed, and “The Last Ship,” which is both a new album (his first collection of original material in nearly ten years, out Sept. 24) and the name of his play slated to hit Broadway next year (Joe Mantello is the director), concerns their turbulent final days, centering on the story of a wayward son who comes home to bury his father. The music is folksy and dark, drawing…

“We’re having a lounge.” So said a Lincoln Center staff er, guiding a visitor to a recent post-concert event that anyone else would have called a reception. That earnestly laid-back vibe will continue through this fall’s White Light Festival, a catchall that groups together important concerts with a “spiritual” theme—everything from a Beethoven-Messiaen program given by the Cleveland Orchestra (Nov. 4) to a performance (held in near-total darkness) by the JACK Quartet of Georg Friedrich Haas’s String Quartet No. 3 (Nov. 19). Most of the concerts will, indeed, come with lounges, at which audience members can sip water or wine. Further events include concerts by the St. Thomas Boys Choir of Leipzig (Nov. 12) and a musical exploration of the Balkans with Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI (Nov. 3).…

Early in 1987, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi President, decided to clear out scores of Kurdish villages, in order to undermine separatist rebels. He asked Ali Hassan al-Majid, a general and a first cousin, to lead the project. In tape recordings later produced by Iraqi prosecutors, Majid told Baath Party colleagues that the novelty and the terror of chemical weapons would “threaten” the Kurds and “motivate them to surrender.” On April 16th of that year, Iraq became the first nation ever to drop gas bombs on its own citizens; the gassing campaign lasted two years and killed thousands of people. “I will kill them all with chemical weapons!” Majid told his colleagues. “Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! The international community and those who listen to…

“Don’t call it a comeback,” Keith Olbermann said last week, quoting LL Cool J. “I’ve been here for years.” But what else to call it? And how many comebacks does one man get? This was the première of Olbermann’s new sports talk show, on ESPN2, a network he helped launch in the early nineties and did not expect to work for again. “My presumption would be that [ESPN] would not have me back were the building on fire and I the only possessor of a fire bucket in the world,” Olbermann said, after leaving the network. Many in the building thought that he had started the fire himself. (One executive: “He didn’t burn bridges here. He napalmed them.”) Olbermann had since left ashes at MSNBC and Current, and now, somehow,…

CLAIM: When we are at the mall you say that you have walked so much that you need to be carried, because your legs are “all stretched out.” FACT: While hyperextension of muscles, tendons, and joints is a real and serious problem among certain demographics (manual laborers, professional athletes), it is rarely seen in anyone four and a half years old. CLAIM: Walking backward is better than walking forward. FACT: Traditionally, human beings have walked forward rather than backward because their eyes are on the front of them and therefore can look ahead and help them see where they are going. Walking backward, as you are doing now, increases the likelihood that you will—O.K., maybe now you understand what I am trying to tell you, because you have walked backward…

Late summer, and at midnight I smelt the heat of the day: At my window over the hotel car park I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake And watched a young crowd leave the discothèque. Their voices rose up thick and comforting As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up That evening at dusk—the slimy tench Once called the doctor fish because his slime Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it. A girl in a white dress Was being courted out among the cars: As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs I felt like some old pike all badged with sores Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life. Danes in July, 2013. “I loved discovering the camera,” she said of her first…

Toward the end of “The Sports Gene” (Penguin/Current), David Epstein makes his way to a remote corner of Finland to visit a man named Eero Mäntyranta. Mäntyranta lives in a small house next to a lake, among the pine and spruce trees north of the Arctic Circle. He is in his seventies. There is a statue of him in the nearby village. “Everything about him has a certain width to it,” Epstein writes. “The bulbous nose in the middle of a softly rounded face. His thick fingers, broad jaw, and a barrel chest covered by a red knit sweater with a stern-faced reindeer across the middle. He is a remarkable-looking man.” What’s most remarkable is the color of his face. It is a “shade of cardinal, mottled in places with…

Carnival, by Rawi Hage (Norton). Brought up in the circus, by “the loving nature of freaks,” the protagonist of this dreamlike tale is a voracious reader by day and a taxi-driver by night. He goes by the name of Fly, and cruises the crime-ridden streets of a nameless city at carnival time. He encounters a sequence of strangers, some of whom make several appearances, while others pay their fare and vanish into the night. “I am a wanderer,” he informs the reader early on. Fly is a kind of flâneur, and his story is a meditation on a drifting life. Sights are insignificant to Hage; what matters are people and their stories. “I and the likes of me are the carriers of this world, the movers and the linkers,”…

THIS WEEK THE THEATRE BLUE MOON The monologuist Mike Daisey mounts a series at Joe’s Pub called “All the Faces of the Moon,” in which he presents a different show every night for twenty-nine nights, one for each lunar phase. Jean-Michele Gregory, his wife, directs, for the Public. (See page 13.) NIGHT LIFE IT TAKES TWO Aluna Francis and George Reid, two Londoners who craft glossy, impossibly catchy R. & B. as AlunaGeorge, released their first album, “Body Music,” in July. They’re now on their first tour of the U.S., making their New York City début at the Bowery Ballroom and the Music Hall of Williamsburg. (See page 15.) ART PRESENT COMPANY Black artists are pivotal figures in the history of performance art, from Benjamin Patterson, the pioneering co-founder…

In 2010, Isa Genzken romanced New York with a long-stemmed rose—a twenty-eight-foot-tall sculpture installed on the façade of the New Museum. But don’t expect hearts and flowers from the German artist’s retrospective at MOMA, her first in the United States, which will travel to Chicago and Dallas. Genzken’s multifarious output in the four decades since she made her solo début, at Düsselfdorf’s legendary Konrad Fischer gallery, has defied categorization, from the long wooden “Ellipsoids” that she made in the heyday of minimalism to the flotsam-and-jetsam assemblages for which she’s best known. (The influence of these radically hybridized pieces on younger artists is incalculable.) It’s tempting to view Genzken’s career as a feminist deflation of the power dynamics of the male-dominated art world, but to do so would be to…

432 Sixth Ave. (212-677-8626)—It’s a risky move, opening a burger joint in a burger town. Like its pizza and its bagels, New York’s most beloved burgers are diverse and many-numbered, each with devoted multitudes. It’s downright bold to open a burger joint that purports to blow them all out of the water. “New York has some O.K. burgers,” Adam Fleischman said last spring, before launching the first East Coast outpost of his popular California restaurant, Umami Burger, in Greenwich Village. His would be better, thanks to his focus on ramping up the umami flavor (the hard-to-pinpoint fifth taste, after sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, best exemplified by MSG) in almost every component of his sandwiches. For the first couple weeks after the restaurant débuted, in July, New Yorkers had to…

By the time Vickie Lynn Hogan was twenty-six, she had made a name for herself, having modelled for Guess jeans and appeared on the cover of Playboy. The name was Anna Nicole Smith. A native of Houston, Texas, Smith worked at a fried-chicken restaurant (the cook became her first husband) and a strip club before marrying her second husband, the eighty-nine-year-old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, in 1994. The marriage, and the legal wrangling over Marshall’s estate after his death, earned Smith a quintessentially modern kind of fame: untethered to talent, buoyed by reality television, burnished by tragedy. She died, in 2007, of a prescription-drug overdose. Her idol was Marilyn Monroe. To Richard Thomas, a native of Birmingham, England, she was closer to Madame Butterfly. Thomas is the librettist…

Let’s say it’s a recent afternoon, with the sky as blue as a paint sample. Forget the sky, though. You’re in the Bronx, in a trailer beside the Harlem River, off 173rd Street, with several city officials and consultants who are about to tour the interior of the High Bridge, the steel-and-stone footbridge that connects the Bronx and Manhattan and is the city’s oldest bridge. The High Bridge closed sometime in the early nineteen-seventies. (Nobody is sure exactly when.) Sixty-one million dollars is being spent to restore it, and it opens next year. The restoration is described as a rehabilitation, as if it were a question of the bridge’s character. This may have to do with the High Bridge’s having a shadowy past. A lot of people believe that the…

When I was a child, growing up summers in Wellfleet, people said that there couldn’t be sharks in the water, because the water was too cold. They had apparently not read Thoreau. In “Cape Cod,” published in 1865, he writes that he saw “the relics of a human body, mangled by sharks.” A wrecker—someone who scavenged shipwrecks—told him that he had caught a “maneating shark fourteen feet long” where Thoreau had just swum. “Man-eater” is a bygone name for a great white shark; scientists simply call them white sharks. They were also called “white death.” Their undersides are white, and their tops are gray, and a modern name for them is “the men in gray suits.” They are solitary animals, and in the Atlantic they are sufficiently uncommon that no…

Last May, during final exams, John Sexton, the president of New York University, approached a pale, thin freshman leaning against the wall of Bobst Library, smoking. “What can I do to make you stop?” he asked. The student, Fletcher Nightwine, quickly took out his earbuds. “Your hands are shaking!” Sexton said. “Come on—don’t be nervous!” Sexton, who is seventy years old, asked Nightwine how he had enjoyed his first year of college, and then urged him to smoke less, a plea that he frequently makes to students. If Nightwine cut down, Sexton said, he would take him to a Yankees game: “Does that sound fair? Is that a pact?” Nightwine agreed. “Can I give you a hug?” Sexton asked. They embraced, and then Sexton began walking toward a public-safety van,…

“Mr. President, I hope you’ll be happy here,” William Taft said to Woodrow Wilson as he left the White House on the day of Wilson’s Inauguration, in 1913. “Happy?” Wilson asked. He had hardly thought of happiness. Taft had been miserable, his Presidency soured by grudges and squabbles and a rift caused early on by his having fired most of Theodore Roosevelt’s Cabinet. (T.R., for his part, said that Taft was “one of the best haters he had ever known.”) “I’m glad to be going,” the twenty-seventh President of the United States told the twenty-eighth. “This is the loneliest place in the world.” Few American Presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson. During his eight years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—years darkened by the death of his…

In “The Grandmaster,” kung-fu warriors fight as the rain falls in torrents. It’s like a forties noir, but every raindrop in this movie appears to shine, by some digital-spiritual miracle, in iridescent glory. The writer-director Wong Kar-wai, in the past a maker of romantic-erotic drama (“Happy Together,” “In the Mood for Love”), has turned back to martial-arts movies, after reworking an early effort (“Ashes of Time”) that didn’t quite satisfy him. He has created a gorgeous, entirely aestheticized spectacle. The men fight at night, in chic black suits, crashing into doors and windows; the black-on-black color design, with its sparkle of water and broken glass, is a glamorous delight. The movie begins in 1936, when the Japanese have moved into Manchuria, and China is on the edge of a murderous…