Innholdsfortegnelse for October 14, 2013 i The New Yorker

MARGARET TALBOT (COMMENT, P. 37), the author of “The Entertainer,” has been a contributor to the magazine since 1997. JOHN SEABROOK (“THE DOCTOR IS IN,” p. 44) is a staff writer. JEREMY DENK (“PIANO MAN,” P. 48) received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship. His recording of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations was released in September. AKASH KAPUR (“RUSH,” P. 59) lives in South India. His book, “India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India,” is out in paperback. NICOLE HOLOFCENER (“CAUGHT NAPPING,” p. 66) is a screenwriter and a film director. “Enough Said” is her latest feature. NATHAN HELLER (“BAY WATCHED,” p. 68) is a staff writer. AMY POEHLER (“TAKE YOUR LICKS,” p. 74), the actor, writer, and producer, currently stars in the TV series “Parks and Recreation,” and…

THAT A MAJOR MIKE KELLEY retrospective opens this week at MOMA’s PS1 annex, in Long Island City, rather than at the museum’s West Fifty-third Street basilica feels disrespectful. It might have pleased Kelley, who gloried in being an underdog and chafed at his international fame as the artist laureate of the punk generation. His last years suggested an inverse ratio of worldly success to personal happiness. He committed suicide in January, 2012, at the age of fifty-seven. The loss still hurts. Whether you like or dislike him, as you might by turns, he felt as indispensable as a compass in the darker woods of contemporary experience. Kelley, who lived for thirty-four years in Los Angeles, grew up in a suburb of Detroit and marinated in the music scene that gave…

HAS THERE EVER BEEN A better time to eat a sandwich? Recently, a Post reporter wrote a story about her bargain to make three hundred sandwiches in exchange for a marriage proposal from her boyfriend. It went viral. As with a haiku, the strictures for a sandwich are few and straightforward (bread, filling, condiment), the possibilities endless. Glady’s, a new restaurant in Crown Heights, opened by several Franny’s alums, seems determined to do for the sandwich what Franny’s helped to do for pizza, elevating it from pedestrian fast food to something worth sitting down and waiting for. A meal in the airy turquoise dining room might start with a custom cocktail—the Greenwich Sour, flush with bourbon, lemon, Cointreau, and Lambrusco—and then a bowl of sweet pickled beet, radish, fennel, and…

“Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. . . . On the roads it was a white-line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways.” This solemn synopsis, the narrator’s at the beginning of “The Road Warrior,” George Miller’s 1981 sequel to “Mad Max,” came to mind last week, amid a mood of civic abandonment. Gangs on the highway: a six-and-a-half-minute video posted online of a swarm of motorcyclists chasing a man in a Range Rover on the Henry Hudson Parkway summoned visions of Miller’s Humungus and his outback marauders. The video, from a camera atop a biker’s helmet, is reminiscent of Mad Max’s high-speed chases. You see the S.U.V.…

Of the countless reasons that congressional Republicans hate the Affordable Care Act enough to shut down the government, the most politically potent is the claim that it will do untold damage to the economy and cripple small companies. Orrin Hatch has said that Obamacare will be “devastating to small business.” Ted Cruz argues that it is already “the No. 1 job killer.” And the vice-president of the National Federation of Independent Businesses called it simply “terrible.” So it comes as some surprise to learn that Obamacare may well be the best thing Washington has done for American small business in decades. The G.O.P.’s case hinges on the employer mandate, which requires companies with fifty or more full-time employees to provide health insurance. It also regulates the kind of insurance that…

I hear James but can’t see him so I call out his baby name, Jamey-James, and he pops up from behind a plow bank. We walk down the driveway past the barn to the fenced-in garden, iron rail, green metal grid, red thread for the deer. The black mama cat with the extra toes comes running past us. “The ones buried in snow are insulated,” James tells me, as if quoting from “The Pruning Book.” He might be. “If you cut a butterfly bush down to nothing it grows back the next year twice as high.” There are five or six tall stumps of the flat variety, and eight or nine low curly ones. We fill a plastic popcorn bowl and leave as much behind still growing.…

I was twenty-four years old and living in New York. I wanted to be a screenwriter. I’d heard about a job that sounded perfect for me. A friend knew of a Mr. Stone who’d once worked at Columbia Pictures doing God knows what. He’d just retired, but the studio was going to pay for him to have a secretary for another year. I went to the Coca-Cola Building, on Fifth Avenue, wearing my most secretarial outfit that didn’t include stockings but should’ve. I met Mr. Stone, who was cold, officious, and intimidating. I learned that while he would rarely be in the office, I was to answer his phone and handle his insurance claims. I would make five hundred dollars a week (a fortune!) to sit at a desk and…

On an April morning in Manhattan last year, Steven Davis, the former chairman of the law firm of Dewey & Le-Boeuf, reached for his ringing cell phone. He was sitting in the back seat of a taxi, on the way downtown to renew his passport. Dewey & Le Boeuf, which was often referred to in the press as a global “super firm,” was largely his creation. In 2007, he had engineered the merger of a profitable but staid midsized specialty firm—Le-Boeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae—with a less profitable but much better-known firm, Dewey Ballantine. (Thomas E. Dewey, the former Republican Presidential nominee, was for many years the guiding partner.) “Dewey married money, Le Boeuf married up” was how some characterized the union. It was the largest merger of New York…

It all began in the American West, where a few pioneering robber barons embarked on a real-estate spree. But it takes more than money and privilege and cronies in all the right places to ransack Nature’s bounty for the private pleasure of the demanding few, to obliterate what has always existed and make out of it what never existed before, and then to flank it with “No Trespassing” signs. It takes a vision. It is a vision that sees molehills made into mountains—and to hell with the moles. Take, for example, the World’s Longest Fireplace (above). In the Wyoming ranch house built by the arson-insurance baron F. F. Formica, custom-quarried blocks of ancient stone from Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and the Great Wall of China went into building the mile-long fireplace…

“Meet the new Assistant President,” James Reston wrote, in the Times, in October, 1941. “His decisions in the next few months or years will undoubtedly affect your job, your rent, and the price of your groceries. And, what’s more important, his decisions may determine the outcome of the war and the basis of the peace.” Reston was describing Vice-President Henry Wallace, the farmer-intellectual from Iowa, who had taken charge of economic planning on the eve of America’s entry into the Second World War. Wallace’s Washington career had begun just eight years earlier, when Roosevelt appointed him Secretary of Agriculture. Disciplined and visionary in equal measure, Wallace had established himself as one of the stars of the New Deal, helping to restore order to the farm business. He was also considered…

The British director Paul Greengrass makes two kinds of movie. The first kind is the thriller about people for whom life is already a cavalcade of thrills—Jason Bourne, for instance, a man so busy jumping through windows and driving head on into approaching traffic that it takes him three whole films to find out that his real name is David. The second kind is the thriller about people whose lives are, for the most part, extremely unthrilling, and who, given the choice, would prefer to keep it that way. In the case of “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93,” the choice is not theirs to make, and the mood of those emerging from the cinema at the end could hardly be more different from the joyous exhaustion of a Bourne fan.…

A PATH TO THE MIDDLE CLASS James Surowiecki asserts that Bill de Bla sio’s plan for universal pre-K education “may be good social policy, but it’s not going to create jobs,” even though the addition of pre-kindergarten has clear positive implications for job creation and for the middle class (The Financial Page, September 23rd). My children’s preschool employs two full-time administrators, nine full-time teachers, and several part-time specialists, substitutes, and after-school-care staff members. Many of these jobs could be a gateway to the middle class. Owing to free child care, New York City would likewise become a more desirable place for middleclass families to live. Michael Silverstein Los Angeles, Calif. CASES FOR EQUALITY As Ariel Levy demonstrates, Edith Windsor’s life story and four-decade relationship with Thea Spyer made her…

ANDY HUNG AND Ben Power released their first single as Fuck Buttons, “Bright Tomorrow,” in 2007. The DNA of the band was embedded in the song’s simple structure: a single, pulsing ostinato, surrounded by signals of unknown origin, then obliterated by wide blankets of white noise. The track charted a path between visceral, coarse rhythms and a textured, colorful tonality. Their first album, “Street Horrrsing” (2008), was psychedelic rock rendered with cheap synthesizers and gear picked up from junk sales, to approximate the sound of a full rock band. In the beginning, the music was ill-tempered and thrilling—long, sharp drones accompanied by vocals that sounded like they’d been driven through a small speaker to the point of disintegration. Over time, all singing was dropped, and the beats became less leaden.…

28 Greenwich Ave. One of the reasons the rest of the country caricatures New York City is that space is so tight that we do things like open bars in alleyways. This is not a Manhattan Mini Storage ad but, rather, the most romantic bar to open in the West Village since Gottino, which is a few doors down. Virgola, a six-foot-wide Italian wine bar, obliterates any of the negative associations of alleys and their accoutrements (trash cans, rats), while retaining a sense of history, even subterfuge, with atmospheric touches like an antique cast-iron gate, black walls, and flickering candles in sconces. The red quilted-leather banquettes make not cuddling a near-impossibility, and, in a nod to the date-heavy clientele, the unusually generous happy-hour deal—a free bottle of Prosecco or Vermentino…

John F. Martin is, in no particular order, a cardiologist, transatlantic academic, specialist in gene therapies for treating heart attacks, clinician, and published poet. From time to time, he also publishes research papers with titles that tend to be studded with spelling-bee serial killers (Ganciclovir, glioma, sitimagene ceradenovec, megakaryocyte). He summarized an article of his in a recent issue of Nature, the result of twenty years spent scrutinizing the cellular structures of platelets, as “arguing that strong archaic forces in evolution come into play to cause a heart attack.” As a poet, he’s pursued a parallel exploration of the rhythms and mysteries of the human heart. A professor of cardiovascular medicine at University College London, Martin is also an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Medicine. What began five…

Unlike Dr. Dre, that other fauxmedical badass beatmaker, Dr. Luke is a white guy. He lives in Los Angeles now, but he talks like the New York City hustler he once was. He “vibes” well, an invaluable skill in the song-making trade, where the writer needs to connect with the artist as soon as she walks in the room. Dr.Luke is slight of build and dresses in T-shirts and beltless jeans that hang low on his backside, exposing colorful briefs. His blue-green eyes droop at the outer corners, giving his face at rest a melancholy cast. Lukasz Gottwald—his given name—has co-written or co-produced more than thirty Top Ten singles since 2004, a run to rank with the greatest hitmakers in pop-music history: Phil Spector, the Beatles, Michael Jackson. At forty,…

MISTRESS: Stop! Get off me! MAN: What’s wrong? MISTRESS: I can’t keep doing this. It just feels so dirty, meeting here every week. MAN: Dirty? This is one of the nicest villas in Vesuvius’s shadow! MISTRESS: And I keep having this fear that someone is going to find out about us. MAN: What are you talking about? This place is half empty. You know all the Samnites go to the Sarno this time of year. MISTRESS: You would never take me to the Sarno. MAN: You live in a different hamlet! It’s a six-day walk, not including stops for cattle castration! MISTRESS: But you would take your wife there. MAN: Don’t make this about Debbie. MISTRESS: You said you would tell her about me. MAN: And I will! It’s just…

The way to meet up with Johnny Hwin, one of the best-connected kids in San Francisco, is to stand at the garage door of a small repair shop in the iffy section of the Mission District and dial his cell phone until it stops ringing into voice mail and the call goes through. This takes a while, sometimes, because Hwin silences his phone and forgets about it. In the meantime, there’s a lot going on at the corner—commuters edging by with messenger bags, shirtless men in dire straits wandering past. After half an hour, maybe a lot sooner, Hwin will call you back and tell you to stay right where you are, because he’s just leaving his place. It’s unclear from which direction he is coming, or how far, and…

Surveying my motley history of impromptu efforts to make money, I see something like a vast mural by Hieronymus Bosch in which all the victim characters distributed across the terrain of Hell are me. Many of my employers were decent people. Some were demons, but mostly my discomforts came from the nature of the work itself. After college, and after I had determined on being a writer, my choices of stopgap employment were shaped by the need to preserve free time to write. It was my bad luck to learn absolutely nothing from any category of work. Wait, that’s wrong. I did learn that picking cherries for a week turns your hands almost indelibly black, and that my wife could pick cherries as fast as my brother and me combined.…

When I was a child, I had a family of doll people. They lived in a red shoebox painted to look like a house, with a dark-brown roof and yellow awnings. Inside the house, there was a set of plastic toy furniture, plus some random household items: a matchbox television, a mirror crafted from a piece of foil, and a thick rug secretly cut out of my old sweater. I also had a few plastic farm animals—a cow, a pig, a goat, and a very large (larger than the cow) chicken, which lived outside the shoebox. The family itself consisted of the following individuals: One pretty little doll, made of soft plastic, with painted-on hair and dress, who, in my games, represented me. One naked, bald, vaguely female doll, made…

In early-nineteenth-century England, a good way to get rid of your husband was with arsenic. A medical examiner usually couldn’t tell whether the poison was involved, because the symptoms—diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain—are much like those of other disorders. Nor could he necessarily place you at the murder scene. The dying typically took hours. Also, you could administer the poison gradually, a little bit every day. In the mid-century, arsenic poisoning was commonly the resort of women. (In 1851, the House of Lords tried to pass a law forbidding women to buy arsenic.) But unpleasant husbands were not the only people you might want to eliminate. During this period of feverish social mobility, a young person might be waiting impatiently for an inheritance, and there was Uncle Ted, sitting on all…

IN THIS CITY, you often have to know someone who knows someone to get into any place worthwhile, be it a popular restaurant or a powerful boardroom. But, each fall, Open House New York makes everyone an insider. Its annual weekend event, which runs Oct. 12-13 and is in its eleventh year, provides access to countless out-of-the-way, and typically off-limits, spaces, from the top of the Little Red Lighthouse, in Manhattan, to the Citi Bike Warehouse, beneath the Gowanus Expressway. To find out about other unclassifiable curiosities around town each week, see Above & Beyond. MUSEUMS SHORT LIST METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800.” Through Jan. 5. MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9400)—“New Photography 2013.” Through Jan. 6.…

MOMA’S ANNUAL SERIES “To Save and Project” (running Oct. 9-Nov. 12) gathers notable restorations from archives and cinémathèques around the world—almost all in the original 35-mm. or 16-mm. format. Some of the restored films are distinguished more by their scarcity than by their beauty, but many in the series are important additions to the repertory—and the rare chance to see them projected on a big screen emphasizes their merits. That’s especially so for a trio of films made in three different eras which were shot in striking locations by directors whose diverse ways with landscape are central to their artistry. Karl Brown, who worked on D. W. Griffith’s camera crew, was a special-effects pioneer. But for his first film as a director, “Stark Love,” from 1927, he blazed a trail…

Around the National Mall in Washington last week, signs of the government shutdown were unavoidable. Some were actual signs, like the ones posted in front of museums and monuments that are free and open almost every day of the year, saying those sites were now closed “due to the federal government shutdown.” Outside the National Air and Space Museum, a family of Japanese tourists took pictures of one another standing by the sign. Solitary joggers replaced the noisy busloads of kids who would ordinarily be swarming the Mall. The Library of Congress was closed; even its Web site was shut down. The Capitol police weren’t being paid, but they were on duty, and, fortunately, the crowds were sparser than usual when, on Thursday afternoon, a driver who had rammed a…

As the president and C.E.O. of AMC Networks, which now operates AMC, WE tv, IFC Films, and the Sundance Channel, Joshua Sapan—sixty-two, tall and lanky, with bushy brows—has amassed a pile of successes: “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men,” “The Walking Dead” (AMC); “Top of the Lake” (Sundance); “Portlandia” (IFC); “Braxton Family Values” (WE). But he also collects a lot of what you might call garbage. “Some of my crap,” he said recently, gesturing around his dim, cluttered office, across from Penn Station. “I arranged with art schools that I could go on locker-cleanup day. I went with a moving van. At the Art Students League, things were in Hefty bags.” Sapan glanced lovingly at a painting, hanging above a television, of an American flag to which toy soldiers had been glued…

I was saved the first time from financial ruin by a stroke of luck—I entered a piano competition, in London, and won third prize. Years of grad-school indulgences (liquor, Chinese takeout, kitchen appliances) had left me with a Visa bill of forty-five hundred dollars, and I was able to erase it in a flash. All that remained of my glorious prize, of all those months of practicing, was a photograph of Princess Diana handing me my award onstage at Royal Festival Hall, which I faxed to everyone I knew. At the time, my hair resembled hers. This close shave made me wonder: How could I convert my high thoughts about Mozart into hard cash? Within a year, I decided to leave the Midwest for New York, in search of a…

It was early on a summer day, the sun was still soft, and traffic was thick on the East Coast Road, in the South Indian village of Kadapakkam. In the center of the village, trucks and auto-rickshaws and taxis coalesced into a mess of diesel fumes and honking horns. Two buses met at a right angle at an intersection; each refused to yield, vehicles piled up, and for a moment this agricultural and fishing hamlet of some three thousand people was witness to the unlikely spectacle of a traffic jam. K. Ganesh, a twenty-seven-year-old photographer from the village, stood outside his studio and grimaced. Ganesh was born and reared in Kadapakkam. He could remember when a motor vehicle was a rare sight in these parts. It wasn’t so long ago…

I was seventeen and sticky. It was the summer of 1989, and I was off to college in a few months. The Massachusetts town where I grew up was decidedly blue collar, filled with teachers and nurses and the occasional sales manager. My friends and I fell asleep to the sound of our parents arguing about car payments and tuition. It was our soundtrack, this din of worry. If you were young, you were expected to have a part-time job. I got one, scooping ice cream at Chadwick’s, a local parlor that specialized in sundaes and giant steak fries. Summer jobs are often romantic; the time frame creates a perfect parenthesis. Chadwick’s was not. Hard and physical, the job consisted of stacking and wiping and scooping and lifting. At the…

In 1951, when I was fourteen, I landed a job in an Oklahoma City laundromat. The pay was respectable—fifty cents an hour, up from forty-five. In a swampy, bunkerlike back room with a large concrete center drain, I had to mix bleach and water together in brown glass bottles for the customers to use. It was sweaty and dank, but I got to listen to a faraway radio, faint but distinct, playing music by the likes of Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, and Faron Young. One day, I saw a news item about the murder of a nurse in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A photograph of one of the teen-age killers showed him in handcuffs, being escorted by police. He was wearing what looked to me like white Levi’s. White Levi’s! What…

And what was King Kong ever going to do with Fay Wray, or Jessica Lange, but climb, climb, climb, and get shot down? No wonder Gulliver’s amiably chatting with that six-inch woman in his palm. Desire’s huge, there’s really nowhere to put it in our small world that it will stay put: might as well just talk. Rage also, and fear, and elation are windswept summits, your poor mind half the time an F6 tornado that could drive a blade of grass through armor plate. But a lit match inches from your eyes? Unwavering. Out there, in the world we call Real, is calm. When you stalk down Broadway, fifty feet tall and building like a thunderhead, your clothes tattering and whirled away like leaves, you can nonchalant it, you…

MADDADDAM, by Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese). “There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.” Many stories are told in this fantasy novel, the last in a trilogy. After the Waterless Flood pandemic, a group of surviving humans must combat the brutal Painballers on a planet populated by feral pigoons and man-made species including the gentle Children of Crake, who have been engineered to replace mankind. Atwood peppers this imagined world with the familiar: Biblical references, the all too recognizable threat of bioterrorism, and simple human emotion. THE AFFAIRS OF OTHERS, by Amy Grace Loyd (Picador). This moody, sensual début centers…