Innholdsfortegnelse for October 21, 2013 i The New Yorker

ALICE MUNRO (FICTION, P. 72) won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. “Dear Life” is her latest short-story collection. She has published fifty-seven stories in the magazine since 1977. HENDRIK HERTZBERG (COMMENT, P. 27) is a senior editor who writes a blog for newyorker.com. MARGARET TALBOT (“GONE GIRL,” P. 32) has been a staff writer since 2003. ari shavit (“lydda, 1948,” p. 40) is a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. His book “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel” will be published in November. BILLY COLLINS (POEM, P. 42) was the United States Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. His next collection, “Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems,” comes out later this month. D. T. MAX (“TWO-HIT WONDER,” P. 48) is the author of “Every Love…

THE NOTION THAT THEATRE is universal is specious, given the world of difference that can separate the productions in New York’s uptown and downtown theatres. In the nineteen-fifties, Off Broadway established itself in legendary downtown venues such as the Theatre de Lys and the Orpheum, and with shows as diverse as Marc Blitzstein’s version of Brecht and Weill’s “Threepenny Opera” and the composer Rick Besoyan’s “Little Mary Sunshine.” (Judith Malina and the Living Theatre had been doing it their own way, and brilliantly, since 1947, but they were so far out that they were beyond the reach of capitalism.) Since then, theatres below Fourteenth Street have generally been where you go to get away from the commercialism of the Broadway stage, which, traditionally, plays to our desire to be satiated…

JEWISH AND JAPANESE are not words or cuisines usually associated with each other. Shalom Japan, the name of a new restaurant in South Williamsburg, sounds almost like the punch line to a joke—“A Jewish guy and a Japanese woman walk into a bar . . .”—but the married couple Aaron Israel and Sawako Okochi, the Jewish guy and the Japanese woman who opened the place, are far from kidding around. At its best, their food is fusion in the truest sense, seamless and utterly convincing. Matzah Ball Ramen (trend alert: Dassara, in Carroll Gardens, serves a version as well) belongs in the canon of soup: clear chicken broth; a single, perfect matzo ball; a tangle of springy ramen noodles; fat chunks of carrot, celery, and parsnip; a delicate but explosively…

Last weekend, moviegoers lined up to see Tom Hanks held at gunpoint by Somali pirates, in “Captain Phillips.” As the pirates boarded the ship and alarm bells clanged, viewers could be forgiven for experiencing deja vu: hadn’t we spent the past week enduring our own hostage crisis, with House Republicans trying to hijack the ship of state? The threat—of debt default and economic chaos—was to our 401(k) accounts, not to our lives. But, as the shutdown wore on, and negotiations stalled, you couldn’t help but relate to Hanks’s captain. SOS! Hostage negotiators are the new political analysts. Sam Farina, a former Rochester, New York, deputy police chief and the president of the New York Association of Hostage Negotiators, said that the standoff on Capitol Hill presented a classic stalemate. This…

Elizabeth Smart sat backstage in a ballroom ofthe Washington Hilton hotel, where, in a few minutes, she would be telling an audience of sixteen hundred teen-agers her story of survival. It has been eleven years since a vagrant abducted Smart from her family’s home, in Salt Lake City, when she was fourteen. After nine months of captivity, during which she was repeatedly raped and threatened with murder, she was rescued by the police, in Utah. Smart’s speech was the keynote address ofthe annual conference of Key Club International. It was a steamy July day, but Smart looked composed in a ruffle-collared black dress, her blond hair in a chignon. She had no notes. I told her that I liked her red shoes, which reminded me of the ruby slippers that…

If only I had not listened to the piece on the morning radio about the former asylum whose inmates were kept busy at wooden benches in a workshop making leather collars and wristbands that would later be used to restrain them. And if only that had not reminded me, as I stood facing the bathroom mirror, of the new state prison whose bricks had been set by prisoners trucked in from the old prison, how sweet and free of static my walk would have been along the upland trail. Nothing to spoil the purity of the ascent— the early sun, wafer-white, breaking over the jagged crest of that ridge, a bird with a bright-orange chest flitting from branch to branch with its mate, and a solitary coyote that stopped in…

A few months ago, the Spanish Embassy in Havana arranged a party to celebrate the state of literature in Cuba. The event, held in the Palacio Velasco Sarra, a neocolonial building at the edge of the Old City, was a study in caution. Fidel Castro had shut down the Embassy’s cultural center in 2003, fearing that it was cultivating subversion, and it had just begun to reinstate its programs. The Ambassador described the evening as part of “the classic diplomatic work we needed to adapt to the Cuban reality.” The highlight was a talk by Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a short, dark, solid-looking man with a beard fading to white and the inscrutable look ofa canny country priest. Padura is an unusual figure in contemporary Cuba: a novelist, a journalist, and…

On May 12, 1907, toward the end of the annual meeting ofthe German Bunsen Society, which was held that year in Hamburg, a distinguished chemist named Walther Nernst insulted a not so distinguished junior colleague named Fritz Haber. The topic of the put-down—the synthesis of ammonia at very high temperatures—was, even by Bunsen Society standards, abstruse, but the gibe was strongly worded, so everyone at the meeting understood Nernst’s intent. Haber, who suffered from a variety ofnervous ailments, was mortified. When he returned home to Karlsruhe, his skin broke out in hives. Before Nernst’s attack, he hadn’t been all that interested in synthesizing ammonia. The insult had the unintended consequence of stiffening his resolve. Haber threw himselffull time into proving that ammonia could indeed be cooked up in the laboratory,…

The New Zealand singer Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s first show in the U.S. was in August, at the small Greenwich Village night club (Le) Poisson Rouge. Yelich-O’Connor, who is sixteen, performs and records as Lorde, a name that she chose because, she told the Daily Beast, it felt “kind of masculine.” The show was packed, and the V.I.P. area was unusually full, especially with older men. I’d never seen such clamor or crowding at this venue. Dressed in a black vest over a sheer black floor-length dress, Lorde played with the drummer Ben Barter and the keyboardist James McDonald. Her voice is low, casual, and it sounded strong and effortless, neither dramatically loud nor tentative in pitch. She displayed no visible nervousness, and there was a sense of mutual testing, as if…

HEALTH CONSCIOUS Atul Gawande, in making his case for the Affordable Care Act, writes about Paul Sullivan, who had a successful business and owned a home and three cars (Comment, October 7th). In spite of his financial well-being, Sullivan chose not to purchase health insurance. A health crisis ultimately drained his resources so completely that he was forced to sell his possessions and move to a homeless shelter. This story is a tragedy and a cautionary tale of life’s vagaries. It may even be a reflection of the out-of-control cost of health care. It is not, however, an argument for or against the A.C.A. We do not “as a society have a duty to protect people like Paul Sullivan,” as Gawande suggests. Our society has a duty to make…

IN THE LATE twentieth century, a lot of avant-garde performance work was very long. The Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera “Einstein on the Beach” (1976) lasted, notoriously, for five hours, though you were invited to get up and go to the bar or the bathroom during the show. Often, with the length, came repetition. Laura Dean’s dancers spun forever; Lucinda Childs’s company performed the same phrase, or close to it, again and again. The Europeans joined in. When Pina Bausch, in 1984, started bringing her Tanztheater Wuppertal to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, you were decidedly not invited to wander in and out during her long pieces. Some of these works made you want to die. In others, you passed through boredom into the zone. As Robert Wilson said of “Einstein…

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. —Amendment XIV, Section 4. By the time that long-obscure, lately apposite sentence became part of the Constitution, on July 9, 1868, the insurrection that occasioned it had been thoroughly, and bloodily, suppressed. Throughout the Civil War and afterward, Republicans in Congress had enacted some of the most forward-looking legislation in American history: a national currency, the Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, support for higher education, the definitive abolition of slavery—all thanks to the extended absence of delegations from the self-styled Confederate states. Now that era was about to end. The party ofLincoln, grand but not yet old,…

The filmmaker Nicole Holofcener pulled up to the corner of Eighty-second and Broadway, where, seconds earlier, Tony Kushner had been walking his dog. Holofcener, who lives in Los Angeles, was in town in connection with her new film, “Enough Said,” a love-after-divorce comedy starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini, and wanted to visit her old neighborhood. “The doorman that was here when I was growing up has died,” she said, approaching a canopied building, where she lived until she was eight. “He used to call me Nicolasa, and he’d go like this”—she knocked her companion gently on the head—” “Nicolasa linda. Coo-cool’ Which, I guess, means ’pretty Nicole,’ or something like that.” What was his name? “Shit,” Holof-cener said, and poked her head inside the lobby. “I’m blanking on my…

One of the worst things I’ve ever been to has to be the Hawaiian luau I went to last month. Or should I say “so-called” Hawaiian luau? First of all, when I went to the pickup point, where we were supposed to be carried to the beach by native Hawaiian bearers, I was instead beaten on the head and shoved into the trunk of a car. After a long drive, I was finally let out, but when I asked where my lei was I was told to shut up and was knocked to the ground. There were no “hand-woven grass mats” to sit on, and I was never offered a “tall, refreshing pineapple drink.” It would have been hard to sip on anyway, because I was tied up. Eventually, I…

Jack Dorsey, the tech entrepreneur, takes the No. 1 bus to work, and he likes to catch the 7:06. It carries him nearly from one side of San Francisco to the other—down California Street almost to Market. A ride costs two dollars, but Dorsey has a monthly pass, so the actual price, he told me on a recent commute, is closer to a dollar seventy-five. “If you buy it in bulk, it saves you a little bit of money,” he explained. As we got on, he added, “I love the bus. It’s consistent, and it runs every few minutes. But it’s also express. If I took another bus, it’d be stopping.” The offices of Square, his mobile payment-processing service, just moved. He used to follow his bus ride with a…

Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to his wife’s strange tirades with an absent-minded smile. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and her mother’s political activity was probably the reason. Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics—though she…

Like the rest of us, Donna Tartt ages; J but her fiction is going the other way. Her new novel, “The Goldfinch” (Little, Brown), is a virtual baby: it clutches and releases the most fantastical toys. Its tone, language, and story belong to children’s literature. Consider the following two passages. In the first, a thirteen-year-old boy makes his way to a dusty antique shop in a big city. His mother has died in an awful explosion at a museum, and, because his alcoholic father is long estranged, the boy has become a near-orphan. During the confused aftermath of the explosion, an old man, fatally wounded, hands the boy a heavy gold ring, and entrusts him with a priceless seventeenth-century painting. The dying man tells the boy to go to “Hobart…

The strikingly thoughtful new edition of the venerable Carnegie International, an exhibition staged every few years at the Carnegie Art Museum, in Pittsburgh, starts outdoors, with two smart bangs. The first dramatizes a change in public art that has been fostered by big biennial-type exhibitions, which now number about two hundred worldwide but were scarce during most of the century that followed the birth of the original, the Venice Biennale, in 1895, and ofthe Carnegie International, a year later. It involves “Tip,” an immense jungle of boards wrapped with scraps of wire mesh, slathered with cement and paint, and festooned with strips of brightly colored cloth, by the British sculptor Phyllida Barlow. The work swarms a hundred and thirty-one feet across a plaza, almost to the museum’s front doors, passing…

AL HIRSOHFELD (pictured in a self-portrait from 1980) began his career in motion pictures, but soon turned to Broadway, and, over the next eight decades, became an icon with his trademark swooping-line drawings. An ardent playgoer (his namesake theatre currently houses “Kinky Boots”), Hirschfeld specialized in drawing show-biz folks. Though he’s often labelled a caricaturist, his work conveys respect as well as capturing the essence of a performer’s virtuosity. He drew (including for this magazine) until his death, in 2003, six months before his hundredth birthday. This week, “The Line King’s Library,” a rich and glamorous history of twentieth-century theatre, opens at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. ART MUSEUMS SHORT LIST METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)-“Balthus: Cats and Girls-Paintings and Provocations.” Through…

Honk NYC! Festival It might seem to some who live in the city that there are too many horns blaring too often. But not to the folks behind this gathering, though they take a decidedly more festive approach by bringing in brass bands from around the country and the world for five days of concerts and parades. Highlights of the seventh annual event include appearances by Perhaps Contraption, an “avant-pop marching band” from London, and Os Siderais, “funk-rock fosionists” from Rio de Janeiro. (Oct. 15-19. honknyc.com.) “Concert of the Mind” The noted magician Asi Wind, who has counted among his fans Woody Allen and Paul Newman as well as insiders of the New York publishing world, displays his remarkable mental powers in this limited-run show. He promises to solve…

Tamara Mellon, the co-founder of Jimmy Choo, has written a memoir called “In My Shoes,” and a party was held in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons the other week to celebrate its publication. The book tells ofMellon’s childhood in nineteen-seventies Los Angeles and Belgravia, when she was still Tamara Yeardye, the daughter of the co-founder of Vidal Sassoon; her party-girl years in London, snorting coke at Tramp, the night club for nobs; her marriage to and divorce from Matthew Mellon, a manic-depressive scion of the American banking dynasty; and her battles with business partners and family members. The book is full of lines like “Matthew and I went to Saint Tropez for the summer, staying on Valentino’s boat,” as well as “My mother’s raging lunacy flared up so…

In 1965, America’s big companies had a hell of a year. The stock market was booming. Sales were rising briskly, profit margins were fat, and corporate profits as a percentage of G.D.P. were at an all-time high. Almost half a century later, some things look much the same: big American companies have had a hell of a year, with the stock market soaring, margins strong, and profits hitting a new all-time high. But there’s one very noticeable difference. In 1965, C.E.O.s at big companies earned, on average, about twenty times as much as their typical employee. These days, C.E.O.s earn about two hundred and seventy times as much. That huge gap between the top and the middle is the result of a boom in executive compensation, which rose eight hundred…

The Middle East is imploding, the Arab Spring is a memory, Syria is a surreal nightmare, yet a new attempt, brokered by the Obama Administration, is under way to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Can this new drive succeed where previous attempts have failed? It’s possible that the answer can be found in the history of Lydda, a small Palestinian city, now known as Lod, which lies east of Tel Aviv and west of Ramallah and Jerusalem—the very epicenter of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Anyone striving for Middle East peace must acknowledge the tragedy of Lydda and comprehend its implications. In 1905, two years after Zionism first arrived in the Lydda Valley, a Jewish Russian entrepreneur built an olive-oil-soap factory, later named Atid (Hebrew for “future”), near the city.…

What is it exactly that you mean when you call me Your “huckleberry friend”? What if too soon you will go down Like a sheepdog who has tasted blood on a gentleman’s farm Far outside the coal belt, and I do not get to see your Inflorescence one more time, what then? Like a lantern-boat half on fire somewhere down The crazy river of your mind, Framed by endless strings of small whortleberry lights, ablaze, Still, I go on crossing you in style. My affection has always Had its girdled caveats— A mushroom-colored cummerbund sashing The waist of a dashing man, or my feeling formal knowing When to take the fork out of the toaster, at the very moment of The metalled tines contacting the one electric outlet in the…

The world has long since finished having its Norman Mailer conversation, but few writers in their day received as much attention. Mailer made himself into a figure about whom everyone felt the need to have a view, and there was a lot to have a view about. Mailer wrote fiction, drama, poetry, biography, journalism, screenplays, newspaper columns, and a “true-life novel.” His first book, “The Naked and the Dead,” came out when he was twenty-five, in 1948, and was a Times No. 1 best-seller for eleven weeks, and he had at least one book on the best-seller list in every decade after that until his death, in 2007. He won two Pulitzer Prizes—for “The Armies ofthe Night,” in 1969, and “The Executioner’s Song” (the true-life novel), in 1980. He directed…

BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY, by Helen Fielding (Knopf). In the weeks leading up to this book’s publication, fans were treated to some distressing revelations: Mark Darcy has been killed by a land mine in Sudan, leaving Bridget, aged fifty-one, to bring up the couple’s two children. At the start of the book, the family is infected with head lice. Later, Bridget finds a lover almost half her age, gets confused by the multiple remotes for the TV, and is perpetually late getting the kids to school. The novel has tender and comic moments, but there are cringe-inducing ones, too, as when characters say “You go, Girl!” unironically. The original Bridget Jones launched a genre because she captured the Zeitgeist; in midlife, she feels interchangeable with the characters…

The most striking image in “12 Years a Slave”—a film of many powerful moments and sequences—is of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a freeborn African-American kidnapped into slavery, hanging from a tree with a noose around his neck and one foot touching the muddy ground. Behind him, other slaves go about their labors—it’s a normal day on a Louisiana plantation in the eighteen-forties. Solomon was almost hanged for defending himselfagainst an overseer; now he’s left to dangle, halfway between stability and annihilation. That’s essentially his situation for a dozen long years. The movie is based on a true story, which Northup told in a book of the same title, published in 1853. Born in the Adirondack Mountains in 1807, he becomes a violinist, and lives a gracious life (which we see)…