Innholdsfortegnelse for December 9, 2013 i The New Yorker

DOUGLAS STARR (“THE INTERVIEW,” P. 42) is the co-director of the Graduate Program in Science Journalism at Boston University. His most recent book is “The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science.” STEVE COLL (COMMENT, P. 27), the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, has written seven books, including “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.” JEFFREY TOOBIN (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 30; “OUR BROKEN CONSTITUTION,” P. 64), a staff writer, is the author of, most recently, “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court,” which is available in paperback. JAMES WOOD (“WHY?,” P. 34) is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard. “The Fun Stuff,” a collection of essays, is his latest book.…

AS LONG AGO as the nineteen-nineties, a group of young performers—Sarah Jessica Parker, Billy Crudup, and Ethan Hawke among them—entertained audiences with a new style of acting. It was as nervous as the work we’d seen Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton perform so masterfully, but the younger actors had different things to say about their epoch. It was a post-Woodstock world filled with contradictory signs: grunge was good, but so was Wall Street; “Wayne’s World” was one kind of buddy film, but so was “Chasing Amy.” We saw those contradictions in the work of Parker, Crudup, and Hawke, former rising stars who have attained iconic status, and who are currently playing grownup roles in a number of this season’s high-profile productions. Of the three, Parker started the earliest. At…

SINCE THE NINETEEN-SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES, New York’s experimental-theatre scene has toned down its wildman character, but Lee Breuer, who, at seventy-six, is the grand old man of the movement, still works with the primary materials of mid-century theatrical modernism: mixed media, puppetry, irrationality, anachronism, miscellany, transgression, politics, and—very important in Breuer’s case—a carnivalesque spirit, a sense of people having a good time. In his “Lear” (1990), the king was played by a woman. His 1981 production of “The Tempest” had eleven Ariels. (“I started looking at art differently after doing peyote and LSD,” he recalled in a 2007 interview.) Such shows have won him a lot of Obies and a number of uncomprehending reviews in the mainstream press. The Times likened his “Tempest” to a “drunken picnic.” Later this week,…

Partisan politics shut down the federal government this fall, but it may be a source of reassurance that the official monitors of food safety remained ever vigilant. Consider the recent case of a French émigré named Benoît de Vitton. De Vitton grew up in Normandy, where his father insisted on strict adherence to local culinary tradition. “My dad would go crazy if we ever skipped the cheese at the end of a meal,” he said the other day, at a coffee shop near his apartment, on the Lower East Side. De Vitton moved to Strasbourg to study political science, but he nurtured an early passion for life on the other side of the Atlantic. A term as an exchange student in Montreal led to a job in New York with…

Last year, I went to the memorial service of a man I had never met. He was the younger brother of a friend of mine, and had died suddenly, in the middle of things, leaving behind a wife and two young daughters. The program bore a photograph of the man, above his compressed dates (1968-2012). He looked ridiculously young, blazing with life—squinting a bit in bright sunlight, smiling slightly, as if he were just beginning to get the point of someone’s joke. In some terrible way, his death was the notable, the heroic fact of his short life; all the rest was the usual joyous ordinariness, given form by various speakers. Here he was, jumping off a boat into the Maine waters; here he was, as a child, larkily peeing…

One evening in late May, four senior employees of Merck, the pharmaceutical company, sat in the bar of a Hilton Hotel in Rockville, Maryland, wearing metal lapel pins stamped with the word “TEAM.” They were in a state of exhausted overpreparedness. The next morning, they were to drive a few miles to the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration and attend a meeting that would decide the future of suvorexant, a new sleeping pill that the company had been developing for a decade. Merck’s team hoped to persuade a committee of seventeen, composed largely of neurologists, that suvorexant was safe and effective. The committee, which would also hear the views of F.D.A. scientists, would deliver a recommendation to the agency. If the government approved suvorexant—whose mechanism, inspired partly by…

I’m trying to remember the name of the mountain where the monkeys lived and how it looked from the window of the train. Seasonal bonfires stacked and burning in the shape of the Chinese character for “luck.” And perfect, in the time that remains, the corpse pose, also maybe the frog and the wheel and the boat. While visualizing the goldfish in the bowl on our table— O O O, her perpetual look of surprise. Like me are you surprised to find yourself in this chair/bus station/room by the sea? Walking in some city on uneven pavement wearing clogs. Wondering whatever happened to long summer nights listening to Dylan’s bootlegged sessions complete with barking dog. Whatever happened to the dogs, the string of cars with bad batteries and the hills…

No one knows how he came to Istanbul: whether he caught the Orient Express in Munich or drove from Marburg to Genoa and boarded a ship for Athens. We know that he arrived in September, 1936, and was joined, two months later, by his wife and thirteen-year-old son. We know that he hadn’t wanted to go, and didn’t think that he would stay long. A year earlier, he had told a colleague that Istanbul University was “quite good for a guest performance, but certainly not for long-term work.” As it turned out, he stayed nearly eleven years, three of which were devoted to writing a book that helped define the discipline of comparative literature. That book, with its totemic one-word title, represented for many of its readers the apex of…

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, in their 1966 book, “Themes and Episodes,” scoffed at the fame that Benjamin Britten had attained in the mid-nineteen-sixties, when his “War Re quiem” became an international symbol of antiwar sentiment. In the previous century, Stravinsky and Craft noted, George Bernard Shaw had adulated the composer Hermann Goetz, calling him the equal of Mozart and Beethoven. The implication was that Britten was benefitting from similar hype, and would soon fall into Goetzian oblivion. Britten’s hundredth anniversary arrived on November 22nd, and the intensity of observances around the world has made it clear that Stravinsky missed the mark, as geniuses tend to do when they assess one another. Far from fading away, Britten is gradually entering the permanent repertory. Paul Kildea, in “Benjamin Britten: A Life…

CANNABIS CHARGES Patrick Radden Keefe’s piece on the creation of a legal marijuana economy in Washington State suggests that the state’s dithering bureaucrats hired the wrong consultant for residents who want legalized pot but loathe police surveillance (“Buzzkill,” November 18th). As Keefe’s article relays, many in Washington still accept the tired premise that marijuana consumption, along with beverage alcohol, is a “vice.” But “we the people” no longer think that ingesting or smoking marijuana applies. Keefe addresses some of the health benefits of marijuana, but he could have better highlighted the high arrest and incarceration rates for nonviolent drug crimes in the “war on drugs,” launched by President Nixon in 1971. The change in cultural attitudes toward marijuana may not reach Mayor Bloomberg before he leaves office, but once…

324 W. 46th St. (212-581-3130) The proprietors—and the regulars—didn’t want us to write about Bar Centrale. It’s hidden, with no sign, in a theatre-district brownstone. Past heavy blue velvet curtains is a quiet drawing room, run with such discretion that you’ll likely never realize how many of the other drinkers are showbiz luminaries. Joe Allen opened the place eight years ago, upstairs from his eponymous restaurant, which has been entertaining theatre folk for almost half a century and features posters of Broadway flops. Joe Allen is a boisterous hangout; Bar Centrale is almost ostentatious in its understatement. The black-andwhite photographs on the walls are of Joe’s friends, and musicians he likes (Billie Holiday, Eddie Condon). Until recently, there wasn’t even a cocktail list. “We’re just the kind of place where…

In 2005, Alaska Airlines fired nearly five hundred union baggage handlers in Seattle and replaced them with contractors. The old workers earned about thirteen dollars an hour; the new ones made around nine. The restructuring was a common episode in America’s recent experience of inequality. In the decade after 2000, Seattle’s median household income rose by a third, lifted by the stock-vested, Tumi-toting travellers of its tech economy. But at the bottom of the wage scale earnings flattened. Sea-Tac, the airport serving the Seattle-Tacoma area, lies within SeaTac, a city flecked by poverty. Its population of twenty-seven thousand includes Latino, Somali, and South Asian immigrants. Earlier this year, residents, aided by outside labor organizers, put forward a ballot initiative, Proposition 1, to raise the local minimum wage for some airport…

In 1965, Ingmar Bergman ferried a film crew to the island of Fårö, a Swedish military outpost in the Baltic Sea, to shoot the exteriors of “Persona.” The island is a place of harsh beauty and isolation; there is no respite from either in Bergman’s masterpiece. He was working, as usual, with a close-knit company of Swedish actors and technicians, but, for the first time, he had looked abroad for an actress to play opposite Bibi Andersson, a veteran of eleven Bergman films. The newcomer had to resemble her co-star closely enough to suggest a confusion of identities, and to possess a supremely expressive face—her character is a mental patient who refuses to speak. The little-known Norwegian whom he cast was the twenty-six-year-old Liv Ullmann. Ullmann will be seventy-five on…

If you’re like most hotheads, you’ve probably heard that there are herbal and homeopathic dietary supplements that will soothe your feelings of nonspecific but constant rage. You’ve probably searched the shelves of your local health-food store for more than a few minutes before rolling your eyes, sighing loudly enough to get the attention of the nearest clerk, and then, when he asks if he can help you, saying, “Thanks, but I have a real job to get back to, so why don’t you and your muttonchops go back to stacking those boxes of Ayurvedic massage soaps?” Then you storm out of the store, knocking over a rack of “not-paper” bags as you go. Sound familiar? It should. Because some nosy prick you met once at a lousy party saw the…

I sleep as always these dark days aquiver I awake atremble my limbs jerk I thrash like a gaffed shark no not shark too many sharks already fiscal financial that’s why gullible guppy I was I thought the boom wouldn’t bust the bubble not burst shred leave us hanging over this thorny dollarless void Markets staggered sales down the chute confidence off the cliff the aisles of the box stores and chains depeopled ghost towns even the parking lots empty the lane lines in martial formation like wings stripped of their feathers forlornly signalling for interstellar relief how not quiver not jerk and thrash? Wait don’t give up too soon here comes my mother back from beyond and she’s going to shop! Avid sharp-eyed alert gleaming and beaming as she…

Most of the presenters at the conference in Key West were somewhat old, and the audience was very old, which was something J was accustomed to, being among people considerably older than herself, since it is the older people, generally, who have money, and who thus support the younger people, who have youth. Or something. The young have something to offer. J had accepted the invitation to the writers’ conference in the middle of a cold February, because it had promised a warm idyll for the following January, and because she was promised a “plus-one.” When the time came, months later, to choose the plus-one, J had invited not her gentle husband but her stepmother, Q, to join her. Q’s latest business venture, an online Vitamins Hall of Fame,…

THIS IS THE STORY OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE, by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins). No one could ever accuse Patchett’s wideranging fiction of being overly autobiographical, as she acknowledges in this sparkling collection. It’s a point of pride for her, as a writer who has always seen fiction as her art, and articles for magazines and newspapers as a means to support her art. The pieces gathered here cover diverse subjects: a passion for opera; the experience of passing the entrance exam for the L.A.P.D.; the story of her unhappy first marriage and of her stabilizing second one; an assignment to “infiltrate RV culture” in a rented Winnebago out West. But there is a through line, which is Patchett’s commitment to craft and her recognition of both the vicissitudes and the…

The most significant incarnation of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play “Waiting for Godot” I’ve ever seen was staged outdoors, in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. The year was 2007—two years after Hurricane Katrina—and the show was produced by the artist Paul Chan and directed by Christopher McElroen, with Wendell Pierce and J. Kyle Manzay as Vladimir and Estragon. Like Susan Sontag, who staged the play in war-weary Sarajevo, in 1993, the collaborators presumably found some truth in the bleak, science-fiction-like devastation that surrounded them, a real-life metaphor for Vladimir’s observation, near the end of the play, that “in an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.” In the midst of our “nothingness,” I could smell the stench of the nearby Mississippi. I saw…

BARBARA STANWYCK, BORN in Brooklyn in 1907 and abandoned at the age of four, brought a hard-knocks urbanity and an upward striving to her roles. Film Forum’s retrospective of her work (Dec. 6-31) captures the strength of character that she displayed in a wide range of genres, such as melodrama, effervescent comedy, film noir, bittersweet romance, and the modern psychological Western. The series also reveals the deepening of her art, from the flinty lyricism of the nineteen-thirties to the sharp-edged command of the nineteen-fifties. Victoria Wilson, the author of a new biography of Stanwyck, “Steel-True”—a thousand pages long and the first of two volumes—will be on hand for several discussions. ALSO PLAYING AFTER MIDNIGHT Brooks Atkinson, 256 W. 47th St. 877-250-2929. BETRAYAL Ethel Barrymore, 243 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200.…

132 W. 44th St. (212-997-5262) MADELEINES, THOSE ENDURING SYMBOLS OF NOSTALGIA, are on the menu at the Lambs Club, and the choice seems appropriate: the three-year-old bar and restaurant, which occupies the ground floor of a landmarked building that once housed the theatre club of the same name (Charlie Chaplin, John Wayne, and Lionel Barrymore belonged), feels like a shrine to things past. The opulent chrome-and-crimson dining room is a nineteen-sixties set piece, with leather banquettes and mid-century club chairs, Art Deco light fixtures, and torchiere floor lamps. Framed head shots of several Lambs, as members were known, line the walls. The largely male waitstaff, dressed in formal wear, practices a style of seen-and-not-heard hospitality that went out of vogue with Dover sole—which, as it happens, is available at dinner,…

Ways to annoy a British aristocrat: fail to leave the moor after a shooting accident, high-five the butler, be French. But those offenses pale in comparison with the recent treachery of Lady Liza Campbell, a member of the Hares, a group of highborn women who are campaigning to overturn the right of male primogeniture. An acquaintance warned her that her involvement amounts to “a social-suicide note.” Another suggested, “You’re very good at Scrabble—why don’t you stick to that?” “In their minds, I’m some shouty lesbian madwoman,” Campbell said the other day over tea, in London. “Someone e-mailed me just going, ‘Hahahahahaha,’ and cc’ing all his male relatives.” Campbell, whose forebears massacred the MacDonalds at Glencoe in 1692, did not seem bothered by the stigma. “Everything is connected, from this sort…

When it comes to health care, all anyone can talk about these days is Obamacare. And, while that may be understandable, the political furor over the program has obscured a quieter but arguably more consequential development: healthcare costs in this country may finally be coming under control. As a new report from the Council of Economic Advisers details, after half a century in which medical spending has well outpaced G.D.P. growth, something has changed. From 2007 to 2010, per-capita health-care spending rose just 1.8 per cent annually. Since then, the annual increase has been a paltry 1.3 per cent. The slowdown in spending is due in part to the recession and the tepid recovery—but not as much as you’d think. A recent paper by the Harvard economists David Cutler and…

On December 14, 1955, Darrel Parker came home for lunch from his job as a forester in Lincoln, Nebraska. A recent graduate of Iowa State, he had moved to Lincoln with his wife, Nancy, who worked as a dietician for a flour-and-noodle company and had a cooking show on the local television station. He found her dead in their bedroom. Her face was battered, her hands and feet were bound, and a cord had been knotted around her neck. The medical examiner later determined that she had been raped before the murder. Parker called the police and spent the next several days in a fog of grief and sedation. After the officers questioned him, he took his wife’s body home to Iowa for burial. Several days later, while mourning with…

If there is a single point of consensus in this heated political moment, it’s that everyone loves the Constitution. “Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists,” Barack Obama wrote, in “The Audacity of Hope.” Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, who emerged as a principal antagonist of the President’s during the government shutdown, has often said much the same thing. The Founding Fathers, Cruz said, “fought and bled for freedom and then crafted the most miraculous political document ever conceived, our Constitution.” These homages are more than rhetorical tropes. Most politicians consider the validity of the Constitution off limits as a subject for debate. The Constitution, and the structure of government that it established, provides the backdrop, but never the subject, for every controversy. Obama, who taught constitutional law…

The new Coen brothers film, “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is set in the biting winter of 1961. The story takes place in New York, with a brief excursion to Chicago, and lasts no more than a few days. They are hardly redletter days: more of a rough, pencilled scrawl, as Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) goes about his ordinary business. This consists of begging friends for money and a place to sleep; getting into trouble, or making it from scratch; trying to keep warm; and, when required—or, more reluctantly, when asked—sitting down with his guitar to sing. Llewyn is a folk singer. He sports a beard, a mop of springy hair, and, for want of a coat, a scarf looped and knotted around his neck. He lurks in Greenwich Village. He performs…

Despite my profession, there’s plenty of television I don’t watch: cooking shows and Fox News, the sixteen post-Vegas seasons of “The Real World,” sports that are not the Olympics. Before I had children, I also didn’t watch children’s television. Luckily, by the time that became a requirement, the genre was in full, crazy flower, from trippy delights like “Yo Gabba Gabba!” to the witty “Phineas and Ferb.” These were shows that were easy to recommend, bright and sophisticated. An adult could even watch them alone, just for fun. Occasionally, however, I’d stumble upon a show intended for kids slightly older than my own—tweens, that hideous word—and feel a dank chill. Clearly, there was an alternative universe of children’s TV out there, and these series appeared to be the sort of…