Innholdsfortegnelse for September 23, 2013 i The New Yorker

JANET MALCOLM (“NOBODY’S LOOKING AT YOU,” p. 52) is a staff writer. Her most recent books are “Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial” and “Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers,” which was published in May. AMY DAVIDSON (COMMENT, P. 41), a senior editor at the magazine, writes the Close Read blog on newyorker.com. ANNA ALTMAN (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 48) is a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff. JAMES SUROWIECKI (THE FINANCIAL PAGE, P. 50), the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” covers economics, business, and finance for the magazine. ETHAN KUPERBERG (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 64) is a writer and director living in Los Angeles. A. E. STALLINGS (POEM, P. 58) has published three collections of poetry, including “Olives,” and…

IN MARCH 2012, THE COMPOSER and singer Xenia Rubinos, who is twenty-eight, returned to Brooklyn after a trip to Hallandale, Florida. She had gone there to move her father, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, into a nursing home. Using a Nord keyboard that her family had given her for Christmas and a Boss looping pedal, she started to make what she calls “stupid songs.” Although she had studied music in college for three years, and wrote notated music for orchestral instruments like trombones, she hadn’t created a pop song since high school. She discovered that all of her training fit into a compact form. “Writing music at that moment was like lighting myself on fire,” she said. Later that year, at Bushwick Open Studios, she played keyboard and sang at…

RENE MAGRITTE WAS A POP-CULTURE MEME years before there was an Internet. In 1951, when CBS aired a new logo—a stylized eye hovering in a cloud-clotted sky—it bore an uncanny resemblance to his painting “The False Mirror” (1928). (The sky was later removed by the network.) Over the years, Magritte’s art has been hijacked for designs ranging from the Beatles’ record label to a Volkswagen ad to a bowler-hat light fixture. The Belgian Surrealist, who died in 1967, at age sixty-eight, is still going viral: in April, an anonymous artist started a Tumblr called Super Magritte, reimagining the artist’s works as 8-bit designs by Nintendo. In one case, the locomotive that floats indelibly in the fireplace of the painting “Time Transfixed” (1938) is replaced by Super Mario’s slow-moving bullet. Magritte’s…

In the final days before last week’s primary elections, the mostly lacklustre and occasionally embarrassing mayoral race was flattered by an analogy to the 2008 Presidential contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The idea was that the suddenly surging campaign of Bill de Blasio was reminiscent of Obama’s, to the extent that it was tinged with populism, in support of a liberal idealist who had little in the way of real management experience: a lightweight, to his critics. The longpresumed front-runner-in-waiting, Christine Quinn, was Hillary, by contrast: not just a woman but a proven power broker who, whatever your misgivings about the term-limits shuffle, could be trusted to command respect from realists and goo-goos alike. (Anthony Weiner, if we’re to extend the metaphor, must have been John Edwards, a…

Bill de Blasio, with his victory in last Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary, became the locus of New Yorkers’ hopes and fears. His supporters believe that he will be the first mayor in decades to do something about inequality, which he has called “the central issue of our times.” His detractors raise the spectre of class warfare. But decrying inequality on the campaign trail is one thing. Actually doing something about it is infinitely harder. In part, this is because New York’s economy is absurdly dependent on its main driver of inequality—the finance industry. Finance accounts for roughly forty per cent of all the wages paid in Manhattan, and almost a quarter of the city’s G.D.P. (That’s not even to mention the myriad businesses—high-priced law firms, say—that service the financial hub.)…

This spring, Jenny Hollander, a twenty-three-year-old Columbia Journalism School student, sent out her résumé for summer internships. “Where didn’t I apply?” Hollander, who is from the U.K., said recently. “BuzzFeed, Mashable, the Fiscal Times, a lot of very small county papers all over the U.S.; California Watch, which is an investigative thing in California; the L.A. Times; the Huffington Post—twice.” She was either rejected or ignored by all of them. Then she came across a notice, on a Columbia Listserv, for a “writing internship” at an unnamed startup. The job paid fifty dollars a day. “It was all a little bit cloak-and-dagger,” Hollander said. She knew nothing about the company, but she applied anyway, and was delighted when she was hired. On her first day of work, instead of going…

(Homer’s Odyssey, Book 17: 260-327) Meanwhile Odysseus arrived along with the swineherd. They stopped in front of the palace, and all around them echoed the sound of the lyre; it was Phemius striking the chords of the prelude as he began his song. Odysseus took hold of the swineherd’s hand, and he said, “This house right here must be Odysseus’ palace. How splendid it is, and how easy to pick it out at a glance from a hundred others. One building leads into the next, and the courtyard is very well built, with its corniced wall, and the double doors are so solid that no enemy could break through. A crowd must be feasting inside now. I can smell the roast meat, and I hear the lyre, which the…

Archy Marshall turned nineteen last month, but he has already received the kind of attention most musicians never receive in a lifetime. In July, Beyoncé posted one of his songs on her Facebook page. Frank Ocean and Earl Sweatshirt have praised him in public. And what does Marshall do? Under the name King Krule, he plays confessional songs that “document” (a favorite word) his life at the moment he writes, something he’s done almost every day since his early teens. He estimates that he’s composed about a thousand songs. His sound isn’t hip or trendy. The references he makes in conversations can’t be found anywhere on the current American indie-music map. While sitting in Madison Square Park last week, Marshall, who is mumbly and skeletal, with red hair, mentioned rockabilly…

The images are gray, rain-streaked, and richly dank, and always in super-sharp focus. “Prisoners,” a sombrely impressive thriller in the style of “Mystic River” and “Zodiac,” was shot by the British cinematographer Roger Deakins, a master of bleakness (he also did “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men”). Dreariness has its own kind of poetry—it certainly colors the mood of this harrowing tale, which is set in a Pennsylvania suburb. It’s a seemingly normal, quiet place, where fervid religion and rage against God exist side by side; it also has a history of missing children. Written by an American, Aaron Guzikowski, and directed by a Canadian, Denis Villeneuve, “Prisoners,” like “Mystic River” and “Zodiac,” is a thriller that digs into the dark cellars of American paranoia and aggression. Two couples,…

A RESPONSE TO SYRIA Steve Coll’s piece about the Obama Administration’s proposal to retaliate against the Bashar al-Assad regime misperceives the most difficult issue in formulating American policy (Comment, September 9th). It is not about the quantum of proof needed to justify military action. That is part of the discussion in Congress, as it was in Britain’s Parliament. The more serious concern is the efficacy of the proposed response. Proponents of military action assert that it will both express the moral outrage of the American people and deter Assad and his henchmen from further violations of the international social contract. Does recent history provide a reasonable expectation that this tactic will work—especially as a deterrent to further transgressions? Absent broader international consensus, expressing vehement disapproval might be the best…

BAR TAB CENTER BAR 10 Columbus Circle, Time Warner Center, 4th floor (212-823-9482) At 8:46 on the morning of 9/11, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, Michael Lomonaco, the executive chef of Windows on the World, was in the building’s belowground concourse, where he had stopped to get his glasses fixed. Seventy-nine of the restaurant’s employees were already at work; they were all lost. Lomonaco has since helped raise $22 million for their families. Last year, adjacent to his steak emporium Porter House, Lomonaco opened Center Bar—with chrome finishes to resemble a yacht, and a spectacular view down Fiftyninth Street. “The great cocktail, the small plate of food—Joe Baum did this at Windows with the Hors d’Oeuvrerie,” Lomonaco said. “There is a tribute aspect to Center Bar.”…

IN THE SUMMER OF 1967, Christiane Kubrick, the wife of Stanley Kubrick, happened to hear a broadcast of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Requiem on BBC radio. The gorgeous strangeness of the sound and the dense swirl of voices in microscopic counterpoint struck her as ideal for her husband’s latest film project, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” He promptly obtained recordings of Ligeti’s music, and ended up placing four works by the composer—then a leader of the European avant-garde—on the “2001” soundtrack. Discarding a score by the Hollywood veteran Alex North, Kubrick used preexisting classical recordings throughout, juxtaposing Ligeti’s otherworldliness with the Viennese grace of Johann Strauss II’s “On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” the post-Wagnerian bombast of Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” and the Soviet-era melancholy of the Adagio from Khachaturian’s “Gayane.” Unfortunately, Ligeti’s…

Around six years ago, the singer-songwriter Neko Case began thinking about buying a place of her own. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted since I could remember, a home that was mine,” she said recently. Case grew up poor, and, after a decade of scraping by with “country noir” albums, made with her band, Neko Case & Her Boyfriends, she broke through commercially with the album “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” in 2007. That was followed, two years later, by “Middle Cyclone,” with the memorable photo of Case perched on the hood of a Mercury Cougar holding a sword. (She is also a longtime member of the Canadian band the New Pornographers.) It was the first time she had had some money, and, she said, “I was in a state of…

There is a wish shared by women who consider themselves serious that the clothes they wear look as if they were heedlessly flung on rather than anxiously selected. The clothes of Eileen Fisher seem to have been designed with the fulfillment of that wish in mind. Words like “simple” and “tasteful” and colors like black and gray come to mind along with images of women of a certain age and class—professors, editors, psychotherapists, lawyers, administrators—for whom the hiding of vanity is an inner necessity. The first Eileen Fisher shop opened in 1987, on Ninth Street in the East Village. Today, Eileen Fisher is an enterprise with nearly a thousand employees. The clothes sell in department stores and catalogues as well as in six Eileen Fisher shops in Manhattan and fifty-five…

The National Museum of African American History and Culture, on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is a little more than two years away from its scheduled opening. When I visited the site in June with David Adjaye, the Ghanaian-British architect who won an international competition in 2009 to design the building, it was a five-acre hole in the ground. Construction din made conversation impossible, so Adjaye asked the foreman to drive us to the other end, where we sat under a tree on a grassy bank. Behind us was the Washington Monument, shrouded in scaffolding for repairs and maintenance. Adjaye is forty-six, young for a profession that favors age and experience, and he projects a youthful and frequently joyous self-confidence. Just over six feet tall, with a clean-shaved head and…

Rag & Bone is one of a number of newer fashion labels that have attracted investment from Andrew Rosen, the founder of Theory (profiled on p. 86). The partners in the company, Marcus Wainwright and David Neville, were friends at school in England and came to New York in 2001 and 2003 respectively. Neither of them had a background or any training in fashion. They started with a line of men’s jeans, produced their first men’s collection in 2004, and added a women’s collection the following year. In 2010, they were named Menswear Designers of the Year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America.…

“Did you read today about what America is doing?” one of the Indian characters in Rohinton Mistry’s “Such a Long Journey” asks. “CIA bastards are up to their usual anus-fingering tactics.” The novel is set in 1971, the year that India intervened in Pakistan’s civil war and helped create a new nation-state—Bangladesh—from the Bengali-speaking province of East Pakistan. Like Mistry’s characters, Indians were confused and incensed by President Richard Nixon’s support for Pakistan’s military rulers and by his hostility toward India. After all, Pakistan had launched a murderous campaign against the Bengalis, leaving India’s impoverished and volatile border states to cope with ultimately some ten million refugees fleeing the carnage. The total number of the dead is unknown, but Bangladesh’s official estimate is three million. (Pakistan’s clearly understated figure is…

WHEN NEWS GOT OUT that the eminent British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage was writing an opera about the life of the Playboy model and would-be heiress Anna Nicole Smith, it was greeted with the same you’ve-got-to-be-kidding gossip that bloomed when people heard that John Adams was going to put music in the mouths of Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung. But “Anna Nicole,” if less profound than “Nixon in China,” is brilliantly entertaining—and surprisingly sympathetic to its heroine (Sarah Joy Miller, above). BAM stages it, in a co-production with the financially imperilled New York City Opera. ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Barclays Center 620 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn (800-745-3000)—Sept. 20: Vampire Weekend’s third album, “Modern Vampires of the…

What is currently New York’s only beer-tasting menu is served in the back room of a pub in the heart of Polish Greenpoint. Inevitably, it attracts beer fanatics from all over, but there are just twenty-six seats—along with three cooks, and, on any given night, five beers. The first is often It’s Alive! Rhubarb, a sour Belgian ale brewed for Luksus by the cult Copenhagen brewer Mikkeller. On a recent evening, a craft-beer novice said that it tasted a little like grownup Martinelli, but was careful to whisper, because the other twenty-five diners had adopted a hushed reverence—the kind that comes with an extremely competitive reservations process and a long pilgrimage involving the G train. In an era of unprecedented restaurant din, “Have you read ‘The Corrections’?” was the only…

A frequent complaint about President Obama’s Syria policy is that he keeps making matters more complicated. The photographs and the videos that began arriving from Ghouta, outside Damascus, on August 21st seemed clear enough: children crying as they struggled with the effects of some sort of gas; bodies wrapped in shrouds. Obama was ready, on his own authority, to launch air strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and an attack was expected within days, when the President surprised everyone by announcing that he had decided to seek congressional approval first. Then, last Tuesday night, in an address to the nation, he said that he’d asked Congress to delay the vote while he tried to make a last-minute diplomatic gambit work. That twist came after a reporter asked Secretary of…

Last month, the artist An-My Lê installed fifty-two photographs in the Coast Guard’s brand-new headquarters, in Washington, D.C. For federal construction projects, the General Services Administration allots half a per cent of the budget to art, so, three years ago, the G.S.A.’s Art in Architecture Program awarded two million dollars in commissions to three artists. One was Lê, who won a MacArthur fellowship in 2012. She has since travelled widely to take photographs of the Coast Guard’s activities—search and rescue, counter-piracy, fishery patrol. On a cold Wednesday earlier this year, Lê, who is petite, with blunt-cut black hair, was at the Coast Guard’s training facility in Cape May, New Jersey, to take some of the photographs for the commission. At 8 A.M., she accompanied new recruits for “hose training.” To…

1. Julie has published two novels and is engaged; Lisa works two jobs, and her landlord won’t let her buy a cat. Lisa feels ________ of her former roommate. (a) proud (b) begrudging (c) covetous (d) resentful (e) blind rage at the thought of attending the wedding 2. Susan couldn’t afford to pay for her dad’s expensive nursing home, but Jerry didn’t want his father-in-law to move into the room that he’d been using as a home office: ________ was ________. (a) compromise / impossible (b) hostility / inevitable (c) Jerry / selfish (d) Susan / completely unrealistic (e) All of the above. 3. If one side of a love triangle has a relationship length of sixteen months, and one side of a love triangle has an affair length of…

The stretch of Thirty-eighth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, in the garment district, is not one of Manhattan’s lovelier blocks. The loft buildings are coated in decades of grime, their large windows stuffed with rattling air-conditioners that drip onto the pedestrians below. Trucks, in various stages of unloading, clot the streets, and the sidewalks are overrun with men pushing handcarts. The gray streetscape has changed little in the eighty-odd years since the area was developed for industry, though a Citibike docking station has added an incongruous splash of royal blue. The city recently planted two skinny trees on Eighth Avenue; supported by splints, they shiver at the onrushing traffic, as ill matched to their environs as the girls in stilettos who teeter across the cobblestones of the meatpacking district.…

A child woke up in the dark. She seemed to swim up into consciousness as if to a surface, which she then broke through, looking around with her eyes open. At first, the darkness was implacable. She might have arrived anywhere: all that was certain was her own self, lying on her side, her salty smell and her warmth, her knees pulled up to her skinny chest inside the cocoon of her brushed-nylon nightdress. But as she stared into the darkness familiar forms began to loom through it: the pale outline of a window, printed by the street lamp against the curtains; the horizontals on the opposite wall, which were the shelves where she and her brother kept their books and toys. Beside the window she could make out a…

BLEEDING EDGE, by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press). In this noir farce, set in 2001, in the vortex of the dot-com boom, Maxine Tarnow is an Upper West Side mother, juggling two kids, a soon-to-be-ex husband, and a busy career as a fraud investigator. Her private-eye instincts lead her to a computer-security firm seeking control of the Deep Web, where, beyond the reach of search engines and other “surface crawlers,” a reality simulator called DeepArcher (say it out loud) offers a newly precious commodity: escape from the chaos of “meatspace,” also known as real life. The novel crackles with techno-geek jargon and Pynchon’s usual wordplay. But his techies “don’t do metaphysical,” and neither does the novel: like an Escher staircase, its dizzy complications lead nowhere. BURIAL RITES, by Hannah Kent…