Innholdsfortegnelse for November 11, 2013 i The New Yorker

ANNE APPLEBAUM (“ANTI-SEMITE AND JEW,” P. 28) is the author of “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956” and “Gulag,” for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004. PATTI SMITH (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 27), the singer-songwriter and poet, is the author of “The Coral Sea,” “Woolgathering,” and “Just Kids,” which won a 2010 National Book Award. JOHN CASSIDY (COMMENT, P. 21) writes the Rational Irrationality blog on newyorker.com. “How Markets Fail” is his most recent book. MICHAEL SPECTER (“CLIMATE BY NUMBERS,” P. 38), the author of “Denialism,” is a staff writer, covering science and global public health for the magazine. SEAMUS HEANEY (TRANSLATION, P. 34), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, died earlier this year. His translations of the poems of…

“A CRISSCROSS OF SECRET HISTORIES” is how the Whitney curator Jay Sanders describes the fugitive art actions—an amalgam of dance, theatre, music, magic show, standup comedy, cinema, and, in the case of Vito Acconci, masturbation and stalking—that were staged in the alternative spaces, private lofts, and public streets of downtown New York in the seventies. These clandestine performances are the subject of Sanders’s revelatory show “Rituals of Rented Island.” In the summer of 1974, Laurie Anderson played the violin outdoors, wearing skates whose blades were frozen in blocks of ice; when the ice melted, the performance was over. Soon after that, John Zorn invited small groups to his attic at midnight to witness the Theatre of Musical Optics, a one-man show in which tiny props (chicken bones, bits of electronic…

64 Frost St., Brooklyn (718-384-8902) The Black River, a cocktail at Battery Harris, in Williamsburg, is so well advertised (“rum, cinnamon syrup, splash of Coke, Angostura bitters, lime”) and so sexily served (in a rocks glass, with a cinnamonstick swizzle) that you might not realize, until you take a sip, that it’s a dressed-up rum-and-Coke. This works as a metaphor for the bar itself: you might not realize, until you explore the expansive back patio, just how close it is to the B.Q.E. (It used to be a gas station.) Inside, the vibe is beachy, with tiki furniture, thatched ceiling fans, and a dollar-a-game pool table; the owners, who grew up in the Rockaways, named it for a bunker at Fort Tilden. The kitchen serves excellent Jamaican-Latin fare, including flaky…

New York is often described as a liberal city, but it is a long time since it has had an avowedly liberal Democrat as mayor. David Dinkins governed as a moderate, and so did Ed Koch. Abe Beame, who held office before Koch, was a Brooklyn clubhouse pol of the old school. (John Lindsay, Beame’s predecessor, was a liberal, but he was a Republican when he entered City Hall—as was the great Fiorello LaGuardia.) Now comes Bill de Blasio, who, on the eve of the election, was trouncing the Republican candidate, Joe Lhota, by almost forty per cent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. From Pelham Bay to Staten Island, New Yorkers seemed to be ignoring Lhota’s warnings that a de Blasio victory would return their neighborhoods to the days…

Couple of questions: How many of us can honestly say that we maintain ample inventories of oat groats and golden flaxseed, corn berries and wildflower tea, dried spilanthes and organic einkorn? At afternoon-treat time, are we adequately prepared to heed our children’s requests for goat’s-milk caramels and artisanal almond-pistachio nougat bars? Early last month, the Ceres, a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot, manifestly homemade, mainly plywood, twin-masted sailing barge, departed from Ferrisburgh, Vermont, on Lake Champlain, bearing fifteen tons of Vermont-and New York-grown foodstuffs (see above)—mostly non-perishable, the rest fall storage crops—bound for New York City. Aboard was a crew of three, assisted by a land-based logistical team of six. Under the flag of the Vermont Sail Freight Project (“a zero-emissions food-trading network that builds community”), the Ceres made ten stops on its way…

IN A HUDDLE The wobbly crossing gate shuts with a creak And the road is blocked. In a huddle by the fence Neighbour women, hard at the usual talk: About so and so who could be whoever’s twin. About wine that costs the earth and isn’t worth it. This government; this latest bad infection. About the little one; the big one nearly twenty; About the pig that feeds but doesn’t thrive. As the black train goes clanging past them Their gaze is far away and meditative. WASHERWOMEN Out in a field half-fallow and half-furrowed, A plough is standing, no oxen-team in sight, Forgotten looking, half-hid in a mist-cloud. From the mill-pond comes the wet slapping and surge And rhythmic rinsings of the washerwomen, Each splish-splash keeping time with their sing-song…

Mary Jo White, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has a personal page on the New York Road Runners Club Web site, which records a battery of figures (Pace per Mile, Age-Graded Performance Percentage, and so on) for each of the official events she has completed. There are two hundred and seven entries since the first one, which was recorded a week before her fifty-sixth birthday, in 2003, seven of them since she began working in Washington, late last year, just as she was turning sixty-five. Friends and colleagues characterize White as the most competitive and driven person they have ever encountered. In the nineties, when White was the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, she would arrive in her office, a few blocks…

In the late nineteen-fifties, when she was in her seventies, Marianne Moore became a star. She went on the “Tonight Show” to talk about the Brooklyn Dodgers with Jack Paar. The elderly poet was profiled in Sports Illustrated and featured on the cover of Esquire, with Jimmy Durante, Joe Louis, and others. George Plimpton picked her up in a limousine at her home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and escorted her to a game at Yankee Stadium. Plimpton also introduced her to Norman Mailer, whom she adored, and to Muhammad Ali, at that time Cassius Clay. It is hard to imagine any other high modernist—Ezra Pound, say, or Wallace Stevens—writing the liner notes for Ali’s spoken-word record, “I Am the Greatest,” as Moore did. Only occasionally did the attention become too…

In the fiftieth episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” two pathetic drunks, Dennis and Mac, brainstorm about an online personal ad for their deadbeat friend Charlie. When they get to his favorite food, Charlie tells them that it’s “milk-steak.” They stare at him, dumbfounded. “Just put regular steak,” Mac says. “Don’t put steak, put milk-steak,” Charlie says with confidence. “She’ll know what it is.” Since it débuted, in 2005, “Always Sunny” has become the milk-steak of sitcoms: the perfect food that no one has ever heard of. In a fairer universe, it would be heralded as not merely the best sitcom on television but one of the most arresting and ambitious current TV series, period. And yet it rarely enters into the Golden Age debates, even as we all…

When the hero of “About Time,” the hapless Tim (Domhnall Glee son), comes of age, his father (Bill Nighy) reveals the secret of their clan. “The men in the family can travel in time,” he says. Or, rather, “The men in the family can”—long pause, brief wince—“travel in time.” Why the pause? Partly because Nighy, whose delivery is as unmistakable as Mick Jagger’s, likes to bite his dialogue into small pieces and chew them in his slow, patrician drawl; but also because he is telling us, as politely as possible, that what we are about to hear is bull. To be fair to Richard Curtis, who wrote and directed “About Time,” there is no delay in starting the engine of the plot. Nor is there anything complex in its mechanism:…

HELPING THE HOMELESS Ian Frazier’s article about the crisis of homelessness in New York City states that most New Yorkers do not realize how extensive the problem of homelessness is because they do not see it (“Hidden City,” October 28th). This is because there has been tremendous success in street outreach programs by community organizations. Since 2007, the Goddard Riverside Community Center has moved more than 1,175 homeless people from the streets into permanent housing, with a retention rate of ninety-two per cent. In order to continue to make real progress, the city’s next administration must be willing to expend political and financial capital. As the United to End Homelessness coalition advocates, homelessness and affordable housing must be a top priority, including core policies on ending homelessness and creating…

THE OPENING MINUTES of Georg Friedrich Haas’s Third String Quartet, which unfolds in total darkness and can last more than an hour, are so unsettling that the members of the JACK Quartet—who have performed the piece almost twenty times, and will play it again on Nov. 19, as part of the White Light Festival—prep the audience with a “practice run” beforehand. The lights are turned off briefly, and anyone who feels too uncomfortable with the plunge into pitch-blackness can leave before the music begins. Occasional adverse reactions are understandable: it’s like being buried alive. But the sounds that Haas elicits from the quartet—a minutely varied array of musical cries, whispers, songs, and sighs—gradually allow the ears to map a space that the eyes cannot see. The musicians are positioned around…

ONE COULD ARGUE that New York City is the birthplace of standup comedy in America: nearly a hundred years ago, the vaudevillian Frank Fay, who served as the master of ceremonies at the Palace Theatre, on Broadway, started telling jokes directly to the crowd, in a conversational manner. Fay’s innovation has been extended through the years, most recently by the New York Comedy Festival. Created and overseen by Caroline Hirsch, the founder of the standup institution Carolines, the festival celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, with more than sixty shows at small clubs and large theatres. “Most of these headliners appeared at Carolines, and went on to greater success, to the point where they’re too big to play a club,” Hirsch said. “We built this festival as a way of…

These days, there’s a specialist for every crisis. When Barneys, the Madison Avenue department store, was accused of harassing black customers recently (the tabloids called the fracas “shop and frisk”), management promised to hire a civil-rights expert to conduct “a thorough review.” So last week Michael Yaki flew in from San Francisco. A former adviser to Nancy Pelosi and to the Obama campaign, he is serving his second term on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. “Are you caught in a sea of red tape?” his consulting firm’s Web site asks. “In battle mode because of threatened government action? Need someone to take the P.R. reins during a crisis? . . . We believe there is always a ‘win’ available in any scenario.” Yaki was brought in after two…

On Sunday morning, I rose early. I had decided the night before to go to the ocean, so I slipped a book and a bottle of water into a sack and caught a ride to Rockaway Beach. It felt like a significant date, but I failed to conjure anything specific. The beach was empty, and, with the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy looming, the quiet sea seemed to embody the contradictory truth of nature. I stood there for a while, tracing the path of a low-flying plane, when I received a text message from my daughter, Jesse. Lou Reed was dead. I flinched and took a deep breath. I had seen him with his wife, Laurie, in the city recently, and I’d sensed that he was ill. A weariness shadowed her…

A tentative $13 billion settlement between JPMorgan and the Justice Department was a result of extensive personal outreach from Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive, to the Justice Department. —NYTimes.com. JAMIE DIMON: Is Eric there, please? RECEPTIONIST: May I ask who’s calling? DIMON: Jamie Dimon. RECEPTIONIST: Did you say, “Jamie”? DIMON: Yes. RECEPTIONIST: I’m sorry, isn’t that a girl’s name? DIMON: It can be a boy’s name, too. Is he there, please? RECEPTIONIST: Please hold. (A beat as Dimon is placed on hold. Music is heard—the Clash’s rendition of “I Fought the Law.” After a minute or so . . .) ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: This is Eric. DIMON: Eric, it’s Jamie Dimon. HOLDER: Jamie. Hey. That’s weird. My assistant said there was a girl named Jamie on the phone.…

Behind the door labelled Studio Four, where “Doctor Who” is filmed, it smells of glue and paint. Industrial-gauge steel chains hang from the ceiling, which is painted black and is so impossibly high that it feels more like a night sky than like the underside of a roof, the chains like falling stars. The only light is artificial, slanted, and green. The concrete floor is speckled and spattered. Surrounding the set, cameras, lights, and microphones stand on tripod legs of smeared chrome like an army of giant arthropod invaders, patiently waiting. In the stillness, a stagehand wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and black cargo pants rummages through a Tupperware storage box, making an awful clatter. He pulls out something metal and rusted, cradling in his tattooed hands the part that…

In 1348, the Black Death, the most devastating epidemic in European history, swept across the continent. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), at the beginning of his famous Decameron, describes its effects on his city, Florence. Many people just dropped dead in the street. Others died in their houses, often unattended by their families. Husbands and wives, fearing infection, sat and prayed in separate rooms. Mothers walked away from their children and closed the door. In the words of a new translation of the Decameron (Norton), by Wayne A. Rebhorn, a specialist in Renaissance literature at the University of Texas, the Florentines carried the bodies of the recently deceased out of their houses and put them down by the front doors, where anyone passing by, especially in the morning, could have seen them…

Harold Pinter’s artistic vision focussed less on love than on the con. Born in 1930, Pinter grew up Jewish in modest circumstances in London’s East End, the beloved only child of hardworking parents, whose own forebears had emigrated to escape the pogroms in Poland and Russia at the turn of the last century. In 1939, Pinter, along with twenty-four other kids from his school, was evacuated to a mock-Gothic castle in Cornwall. He called this separation from his parents “traumatic,” and, in Michael Billington’s ample 1996 biography, he described a heart-wrenching pilgrimage that the couple made to see him during his exile on the coast. “When they left to get the bus it was a long way back to the lodge for me to walk,” Pinter, who died in 2008,…

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)—“Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938.” Through Jan. 12. MOMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens (718-784-2084)—“Mike Kelley.” Through Feb. 2. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 89th St. (212-423-3500)— “Robert Motherwell: Early Collages.” Through Jan. 5. WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART Madison Ave. at 75th St. (212-570-3600)—“Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970-1980.” Through Feb. 2. BROOKLYN MUSEUM 200 Eastern Parkway (718-638-5000)— “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk.” Through Feb. 23. AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY Central Park W. at 79th St. (212-769-5100)—“Dark Universe.” Through Oct. 19.…

YOU KNOW HOW YOU ALWAYS want beef jerky to be something it’s not? Chewy enough to test your molars, but also flavorful in a way that suggests more than just smoke? There’s a dish at Hunan Manor—a Manhattan outpost of Hunan House, in Flushing—that begins to approximate what beef jerky could be, if it tried harder. It’s called white-chili preserved beef, and it looks like run-of-the-mill stir-fry. The dish is aromatic, redolent of ginger and scallions, but there’s no sauce. Instead, an intense heat emanates from the white peppers, which have been boiled and sun-dried. They are shrivelled, almost translucent, and vaguely wraithish in appearance—an appropriate visual cue to their dangerous burn. The preserved beef has the oddly pleasing texture of shoe leather, and there’s so much to taste here:…

Comic Arts Brooklyn This gathering is organized by the store Desert Island, which created the successful but now defunct Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. Paul Karasik, a cartoonist whose work has appeared in these pages and who was an editor at the magazine Raw in the eighties, is directing the programming, which includes a panel discussion to mark the twentieth anniversary of the seminal graphic-novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s “City of Glass.” Auster and Karasik will be joined by the artists David Mazzucchelli and Art Spiegelman. Among the other events are a “Cartoonists Under 30” talk and a presentation by Jeff Smith, who will demonstrate how he created the art for his acclaimed series “Bone.” There will also be more than a hundred artists and publishers on hand. (Our…

On a recent Thursday morning, two amateur scholars of the life and work of Allen Ginsberg met at the Strand bookstore, on lower Broadway, to set off on a tour of the late poet’s haunts. Neither had done much research into where, precisely, Ginsberg had done this haunting, but that was O.K., because one of them was the twenty-four-year-old actor Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Ginsberg as a young man in the movie “Kill Your Darlings,” thus giving the expedition an air of legitimacy. As soon as he walked into the store, Radcliffe, dressed in a baseball cap, a black hoodie, and a pair of Vivobarefoot sneakers, got worked up at the sight of so many feet of books. “People have been telling me to come here for years, and I’m…

The day was chilly but clear, the crowd energetic. Some were in quasi-military uniform, others in hooded sweatshirts emblazoned with patriotic symbols. Dozens of flags fluttered in the breeze. The red-white-and-green tricolor of modern Hungary was prominent, but so was a flag with red and white stripes, remembered by most Hungarians as the symbol of the wartime Fascists. There were hundreds of banners bearing the word “Jobbik,” shorthand for Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom—Movement for a Better Hungary—the name of Hungary’s farright political party. Jobbik’s supporters had gathered outside the offices of the European Commission in Budapest to denounce the European Union. Like many other Euroskeptic parties, Jobbik objects to the multinational European project, and to criticisms of any sort from Brussels. Unlike others, Jobbik dresses up its attacks on Europe with…

It was nearly impossible to drive the back roads of southern Indiana this summer without being lulled into a trance by the monotonous perfection of the cornstalks. They lined every route, forming a canopy that stretched for miles, strong, straight, and taller than any Hoosier. In late August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture stated publicly what the growers had known for weeks: this year’s crop would almost certainly be the largest in American history. A year ago, that kind of bounty would have seemed unimaginable. In 2012, drought struck nearly eighty per cent of the nation’s farmland, and the growing season was the hottest and driest in decades. Perhaps worse, over the past half century there has been a sharp, sustained increase in the number of what farmers call “toad…

Now that his father was gone, and Benji was the only remaining male in the family, and having been bequeathed such an expansive estate, he’d do well to find himself a good woman, to marry her and take advantage of the family wealth, Mrs. Anyaogu explained to her guest. “A man must choose a wife and marry,” she said. “Even a man cannot go unmarried forever. People will begin to suspect.” Mrs. Anyaogu was wearing a yellow-gold head scarf, tied in the shape of a flower blossom. Benji, her son, was sitting across from her at the mahogany table. Much of the furniture in the house was mahogany, Mrs. Anyaogu’s choice of wood. Benji was not looking directly at his mother’s face but, rather, staring at a point somewhere behind…

ON PAPER, by Nicholas A. Basbanes (Knopf). This buoyant, encyclopedic history celebrates paper in all its forms. Basbanes, a former investigative journalist, goes to China, where paper was invented, two thousand years ago, and to Japan, to see traditional papermakers at work. He shows how paper advanced architecture and helped spark the American Revolution. He visits a factory that produces up to ten boxes of Kleenex a second, the heavily guarded paper mill where American money is made, and the N.S.A.’s pulping plant, where thirteen tons of secrets are turned daily into “grayish slurry,” which then becomes pizza boxes. He profiles librarians, an origami master, and a scholar of bureaucracy named Ben Kafka. Cassiodorus, the Roman statesman, had it right: paper “is the enemy of oblivion.” HANGING MAN, by…

How Russian is Ilya Kabakov, who has a show of seven paintings and, in collaboration with his wife, Emilia, one sculpture at the midtown Pace gallery? Utterly and profoundly, for those of us who have followed the career of the prolific installation-maker, painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and writer since he emerged from the Soviet Union, in 1987. Back then, as Communism buckled, we looked for a surge of liberated Russian genius. The revelations proved meagre, except for Kabakov’s. He vivified the soul-killing toll of long oppression with such labyrinthine environments as “Ten Characters,” first installed at the Ronald Feldman gallery, in 1988. The piece is a sort of ambulatory Russian novel, in which the cluttered rooms of a communal apartment bespeak tenants gone variously batty: a man who throws nothing…