Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2, 2013 i The New Yorker

IAN JOHNSON (“IN THE AIR,” P. 32) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of “Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China.” He divides his time between Beijing and Berlin. NICK PAUMGARTEN (“DEALER’s HAND,” P. 38) is a staff writer. AMY DAVIDSON (COMMENT, P. 21), a senior editor at the magazine, writes the Close Read blog on newyorker.com. CALVIN TRILLIN (“MOZZARELLA STORY,” P. 26) has been writing for The New Yorker since 1963. “Dogfight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse” is his most recent book. TOM O’DONNELL (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 30) is a freelance writer. His young-adult novel, “Space Rocks!,” comes out in February. MARY JO BANG (POEM, P. 42) has published six volumes of poetry. The paperback edition of her translation of Dante’s Inferno…

SHORT AND MUSCULAR, elegant and acrobatic, the French silent-comedy star Max Linder was one of the cinema’s great prodigies. Hired by a major producer in Paris in 1905—at the age of twenty-one—and quickly tapped to write, direct, and star in his own films, the conservatory-trained actor soon became the new medium’s biggest international celebrity. After he was wounded in the First World War, Linder came to the United States, where he directed his three features, jewels of the silent era. After his death, in 1925, he was largely forgotten, and most of his five hundred films were lost. The retrospective of his work at French Institute Alliance Française (Dec. 3-17) is a welcome reminder of his place in the pantheon. The series offers six of Linder’s prewar short films, which…

ROUGH TRADE is best known as the seminal British punk and post-punk label that released singles and albums by such artists as Scritti Politti, the Fall, the Smiths, and Young Marble Giants. But before it was a label, it was a store, a modest and beloved establishment that opened in West London in 1976. Now, the stores—which have been decoupled from the label since 1982—are coming to America. The company has converted a former film-prop warehouse in Williamsburg into a fifteen-thousand-square-foot retail space. Over the years, Rough Trade has opened and closed shops in San Francisco, Paris, and Tokyo, and the risks seem higher than ever before. Album sales have been falling for years, and one is as likely to find a giant record store in a major city as…

FIXER-UPPER Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life at 20 Maresfield Gardens, a handsome red brick house in the North London neighborhood of Hampstead. He installed himself there in September of 1938, after fleeing the Nazi occupation of Vienna, and he died there the following September. Suffering from cancer of the jaw, he took a fatal dose of morphine administered by a doctor at his request. Freud had found the house a comfortable refuge. “We have it incomparably better than at Berggasse,” he wrote to a friend, although he complained that “British deficiencies in overcoming the heating problem are clearly evident.” Freud had managed to bring with him most of his household belongings, including his analytical couch, a Victorian chaise longue that was given to him by a…

You could say that Joe’s Dairy and I go way back. I was a regular when there was still a Joe on the premises. I can’t picture Joe now; he went back to Italy in 1977. But I can picture the mozzarella he made fresh every day in that tiny store—across Sullivan Street from St. Anthony of Padua, which has looked after the spiritual needs of the Italian South Village since the late nineteenth century. Joe’s mozzarella was a bit smaller than a softball, with one end twisted into a sort of knob. I remember wondering, in desperate moments, if, using the knob as a handhold, I could stand right there at the counter and devour one of those balls of mozzarella, as if chomping away at a large and…

Here I am again and what brings me here to the same wooden bench preaching to the city of Lambertville surrounded by mayapples? For who in the hell is going to lie down with whom in the hell, either inside or outside? And you know it’s amazing to watch flies lie down with feces or mosquitoes lie down with blue bloods and over there is a double house you call a twin and when the one on the right burned down in under a minute the one on the left refused to budge, not even an inch. I’m not saying a French horn with a trombone or a fleabane with a fleabane or in one case wood as fuel with wood as a god. And I’m not saying it doesn’t…

On December 5, 2005, a three-year-old boy named Adam spent the morning in his crib, playing a handheld Spider-Man computer game and snacking on crackers. He began calling, “Mama help!,” a phrase he used when he couldn’t get his games to work. He repeated the phrase at least ten times, but his mother never came. He had been alone for ninety minutes when police officers arrived at the home, an oceanfront condominium in Huntington Beach, California. A fireman climbed a ladder to the second floor, where Adam’s cries could be heard, and pushed open the window. Adam was standing in his crib, his blond hair falling just below his shoulders. A policeman on the ground shouted up to him, asking him where his mother was. “Shopping,” he replied. After being…

DEATH OF THE BLACK-HAIRED GIRL, by Robert Stone (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). In this campus novel, the accidental death of a vivacious and impulsive student reverberates through the lives of those who knew her. The student is in love with her philandering adviser, and he attempts to break off their liaison before his pregnant wife arrives for the holidays. The student spirals out of control, much to the concern of her best friend, the school counsellor, and her father, an alcoholic widower. During the ensuing tragedy, these varying perspectives give Stone the means to examine thorny moral questions about love, fidelity, faith, fate, wasted opportunity, and “the temptation of oblivion.” DIRTY LOVE, by Andre Dubus III (Norton). The four linked stories in this discomfiting collection are set in old mill…

Do you know the art of Isa Genzken, the subject of a dazzling retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art? Or have you, like me, been only spottily aware of the work of this mercurial German artist? Genzken, now sixty-five, is a sculptor whose sporadic output, abrupt stylistic changes, and personal vagaries have kept her at the margins of art-world notice, until now. The show finds coherence in works that range from minimalist sculpture, charged with cryptic emotions, from the nineteen-seventies, to recent hilarious assemblages, featuring plastic toys and gussied-up mannequins, which secrete a steely aesthetic discipline. Unifying it all is a brash spirit that is strangely both celebratory and bedevilled. Genzken takes on the ideals of modern art and architecture along with the joys and the anxieties of life…

MOCK THE VOTE George Packer, in his analysis of the poor participation rates in the November elections, writes that voters are increasingly cynical (Comment, November 18th). I am one of those disillusioned voters. The municipal election here in Norman, Oklahoma, involved a single question, a yes-or-no vote to, yet again, pass a utility rate increase. I am sure that the city council debated the issue, and that the city planner’s office had input, along with local bankers, bond underwriters, real-estate developers, and the Chamber of Commerce. The argument in favor of an increase was that much of the change would be geared toward usage and was therefore fair. But usage is not strictly correlated to income: a wealthy person living alone in a mansion may end up paying proportionately…

14 Orchard St. (646-596-9142) This cocktail-and-oyster bar on the Lower East Side has an enviable pedigree: it shares owners (and a block) with the “seasonal British” fashion-crowd favorite the Fat Radish and a set designer with Wes Anderson. Order a hummus plate, and an elegant array of creamy dip, crispy flatbread, and delicate crudités (radish, cauliflower, top-on carrot) is delivered swiftly from across the street, in a waxed-cardboard box. There are also crab-avocado toasts, burrata, and four types of oysters, shucked on the premises. The room is a cave of carefully chosen curiosities, from the curved brass bar to the collection of vintage suitcases to the terrariums dangling in the bathrooms. The crowd, a young, stylish, international mix, might as well be extras. But the cocktails are unfussy and topnotch,…

COMMENT HEAL THYSELF Last Tuesday, at a forum put together by the Wall Street Journal, President Barack Obama told a group of C.E.O.s that he was relatively sure that healthcare.gov would be “functioning for the majority of people who are using it” by November 30th, two months after its disastrous launch. He acknowledged that the process had been “rough, to say the least,” and added that, once the site does work, “we’re going to have to obviously re-market and re-brand.” That’s not all he’ll have to do. In a CBS News poll released the next day, the President’s approval rating fell to thirty-seven per cent, the lowest it has ever been. The flawed rollout has put the rest of his policy agenda at risk and, with it, progressive ideas about…

DRILL, BABY, DRILL In Warsaw, the other week, a Filipino diplomat sobbed while addressing the U.N. climate summit; he had family in the typhoon-ravaged country. “We may have ratified our own doom,” he said, alluding to the slow pace of negotiations for curbing international emissions. He announced that he was starting a hunger strike, for the duration of the summit, and was given a standing ovation. But climate science is not all gloom and glaciers. Consider carbon capture and storage, sometimes known as “sequestration”: the prospect of burying our energy emissions in reservoirs of rock, so that we might continue to provide heat and air-conditioning for our cars without hastening the demise of island nations. It’s almost like a get-out-of-jail-free card for gratuitous trips to the mall. “It’s amoral,” the…

All right, gather around, everybody. Now, before we get out there and play, management has asked me to go over a few things with you. As you all know, this team has been receiving a lot of negative media attention lately as a result of recent events. The powers that be think that the warrior culture of our great American sport needs to be wussified. Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do. But the front office is breathing down my neck, so a few things are going to have to change around this locker room. First off, no more offensive racial epithets. I know, I know. You’re thinking, Coach, what are we going to talk about if we can’t use racial epithets? Honestly, I have no…

Very important people line up differently from you and me. They don’t want to stand behind anyone else, or to acknowledge wanting something that can’t immediately be had. If there’s a door they’re eager to pass through, and hundreds of equally or even more important people are there, too, they get as close to the door as they can, claim a patch of available space as though it had been reserved for them, and maintain enough distance to pretend that they are not in a line. Prior to the official opening of Art Basel, the annual fair in Switzerland, there is a two-day V.I.P. preview. In many respects, the preview is the fair. It’s when the collectors who can afford the good stuff are allowed in to buy it. After…

The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi I was a little apprehensive. Most of us living in the south of Sri Lanka had come to think of this town as the nerve center of terror. As Mr. Wahid, my first Malaysian client, said, in English even the name sounded brutal—like the kind of town where you could imagine a Clint Eastwood character striding in and notching the stock of his rifle with yet another senseless killing. In reality, Kilinochchi had been the capital of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam for years. Here the Tigers had had their civic center, their secretariat, their press conferences. This was the place where Tiger stamps, L.T.T.E. travel passes, G.C.E. school-exam papers, land mines, and black-stripe grenades were issued. The Eelam bank was here,…

In 1976, a music executive named Walter Yetnikoff launched a campaign that came to be known as Walter’s War. He had recently become president of CBS Records, the parent company of Columbia Records, and resolved to rally his troops by providing them an enemy. It was not enough that CBS should succeed; Warner Bros., its hipper rival, should fail. In “Hit Men” (1990), an unsentimental book about the music business in its prime, Fredric Dannen explained that the campaign began with an expensive gambit. Yetnikoff lured James Taylor away from Warner Bros., paying him two and a half million dollars in advance, and a million dollars per album. Two years later, Warner got its revenge, outbidding CBS for the services of Paul Simon, and offering Rod Stewart two million dollars…

THE STUDIO MUSEUM in Harlem’s new exhibition, “The Shadows Took Shape,” borrows its title from a poem by the jazz musician Sun Ra, whose visionary aesthetic—part sci-fi, part sorcery—was named Afrofuturism after his death. Twenty-six artists testify to the movement’s ongoing relevance and its global reach, from Nairobi, where Cyrus Kabiru made fantastical hybrids of eyewear and masks out of scrap metal, glass beads, and bottle caps, to Brooklyn, where Saya Woolfalk (pictured above, in the second row from the top, with other artists in the show) directed an inspired video, with music by D.J. Spooky, that seems to capture the color-splashed rituals of outer-planetary mystics who have landed on Earth. ART CLASSICAL MUSIC & DANCE MOVIES | FOOD & DRINK THE THEATRE | NIGHT LIFE THE HOLIDAYS PHOTOGRAPH…

5 King St. (212-235-7133) “WE JUST WANT TO BE your favorite neighborhood joint.” So says Charlie Bird, a new Italian-American restaurant off Sixth Avenue in SoHo, in a lengthy manifesto on its Web site. It also says that “Charlie Bird means New York,” and “Just like you, we dream of ditching work to sip rosé in the park and of hot summer nights all year long.” (Do New Yorkers, in fact, dream of hot summer nights all year long? Maybe the ones who don’t live in fourth-floor walkups do.) What does it mean these days to be a neighborhood joint in downtown Manhattan, where on a recent Friday night a twenty-something waiting at the bar held a slate-colored Kelly bag, and the preponderance of four-inch heels suggests a general lack…

ACTION Late last month, Jerome Bettis, a former Pittsburgh Steeler, racewalked into a meeting room above the cafeteria at ESPN headquarters. “They got me doing the shuffle,” he said, removing his suit jacket, loosening a purple polka-dot tie, and guzzling from a glass of water, as if rehydrating at halftime. Bettis had just taped a segment on “SportsCenter,” his second appearance of the day, and was now preparing for an hour-long film session with Barry Nash, an on-air performance coach employed by ESPN to help retired athletes become more proficient talking heads. Fans remember Bettis as “the Bus,” because he wasn’t much smaller than a Greyhound. Nash, who wore a plaid shirt and red tortoiseshell glasses, was slight enough to squeeze into half a seat. He cued up a clip…

LIFTOFF In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. The words belong to Mary Poppins, coaxing the Banks children into tidying their nursery, but they are equally true of film promotion. So it was with Emma Thompson, who was in town recently to talk about her new movie, “Saving Mr. Banks.” Thompson plays P. L. Travers, the persnickety author of the “Mary Poppins” books. (“Mary Poppins never explains anything,” Travers told this magazine, in 1962. “I don’t think explaining helps anything.”) Tom Hanks plays Walt Disney, who must persuade her to hand over the book rights for the sake of movie magic. “It took years for Walt Disney to get this character from her,” Thompson said. “She felt that he was going to make her…

In traditional Chinese architecture, a small wall stands a few feet in front of the entrance to a home. According to the principles of feng shui, this wall shields the occupants from malign energy forces. But in the city of Handan such walls have acquired another significance: as protection against acrid smoke billowing from the city’s factories. One summer evening in Sihoupo, a western suburb of Handan with three hundred residents, the glowing yellow flames of a coking plant erupted into the sky. Clouds swirled up around the factory, saturating the air with the smell of rotten eggs. Coking concentrates soft bituminous coal into hard briquettes that are used to smelt iron into steel, but it also produces carcinogenic emissions. “We can’t open our windows at night,” Hu Xuhui, a…

The rotational earth, the resting for seconds: hemisphere one meets hemisphere two, thoughts twist apart at the center seam. Everything inside is. Cyndi Lauper and I both fall into pure emptiness. That’s one way to think: I think I am right now. We have no past we won’t reach back— The clock ticks like the nails of a foiled dog chasing a faster rabbit across a glass expanse. A wheel of fortune spins on its side, stops and starts. The stopped time is no longer time, only an illusion that says, I can have this, and this, and this. Cyndi says nothing works like that. There is no all-purpose plastic totem that acts like a bouncer holding back the fact that at least once a day you look up: it’s…

The basic premise of “The Hunger Games,” the first volume in Suzanne Collins’s trilogy of young-adult novels, never made much sense to me. How could a totalitarian government keep its people down while forcing some of their children to fight to the death in a yearly competition? What could be a greater goad to revolution than the anguish of seeing children die? There were other mysteries and not a few hypocrisies: the filmmakers who adapted the book shrugged off the gladiatorial issues implicit in the spectacle. They wanted to create indignation over the horror—children forced to hunt one another with arrows, swords, lances—while staging the violence in the most anodyne manner possible to achieve a PG-13 rating. The teens I know accepted the combat as a given, while their elders,…

The study of government, like the government itself, is in a tight spot. In 2009, during a vote on a House appropriations bill, Tom Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, tried to abolish the National Science Foundation’s Political Science Program, which supports academic research in “citizenship, government, and politics.” The motion was tabled after the American Political Science Association staged a same-day e-mail campaign to oppose it. Last year, the measure met with success in the House; House members who have few qualms about closing the Centers for Disease Control are not, generally speaking, daunted by the prospect of stifling the pursuit of social science. And, earlier this year, when Coburn re-introduced his amendment in the Senate, it passed with no more quibbling than the addition of a proviso that…