Innholdsfortegnelse for December 16, 2013 i The New Yorker

PHILIP GOUREVITCH (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 23) is a staff writer. His new book, “You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know,” is due out next year. ELIZABETH KOLBERT (“THE LOST WORLD: PART ONE,” P. 28) is the author of “The Sixth Extinction,” which will be published in February. NADINE GORDIMER (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 24) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. “No Time Like the Present” is her latest work of fiction. REBECCA MEAD (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 39) is a staff writer, whose new book, “My Life in Middlemarch,” comes out in January. GEORGE PROCHNIK is the author of “The Impossible Exile,” which will be published in May. NURUDDIN FARAH (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P.…

ONE OF THE LUMINARIES of classic-era Hollywood, George Cukor won his only Oscar, for Best Director, at the age of sixtyfive, for the screen adaptation of “My Fair Lady,” from 1964. But, as the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of all his feature films (running Dec. 13-Jan. 7) proves, he had been directing versions of the Pygmalion story—most of them based on the lives and passions of actors—since the start of his movie career, in the early thirties. In 1932, Cukor made one of the first and best movie-business dramas, “What Price Hollywood?,” starring the sassy and subtle Constance Bennett as a waitress who rises to stardom under the tutelage of an alcoholic director on his way down. It was the template for William Wellman’s 1937 classic, “A Star…

BAR TAB THE KING COLE 2 E. 55th St. (212-339-6857) If you would like to know where the well-maintained go for an after-work drink, enter the lobby of the centuryold St. Regis hotel, circumnavigate the awkwardly placed restaurant and its pulsing club beat, and proceed to the end of the hall, where you will find this charming bastion of decorum, recently reopened after a five-month renovation. Forget that it’s packed and enjoy the scenery—particularly the newly sparkling thirty-foot-wide Maxfield Parrish mural above the bar, restored to remove decades’ worth of grime. In it, the Welsh nursery-rhyme character Old King Cole (bearing the face of John Jacob Astor IV, who commissioned the work in 1906) sits on a throne, smirking, surrounded by subjects who are caught mid-reaction to the ribald act…

To have lived one’s life at the same time, and in the same natal country, as Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a guidance and a privilege we South Africans shared. I also knew the privilege of becoming one of his friends. I met him in 1964, during the Rivonia Trial, when he was being tried for acts of sabotage against the government, and I was present in court when he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1979, I wrote a novel, “Burger’s Daughter,” on the theme of the family life of revolutionaries’ children, a life ruled by their parents’ political faith and the daily threat of imprisonment. I don’t know how the book, which was banned in South Africa when it was published, was smuggled to Mandela in Robben Island Prison.…

On April 4, 1796—or, according to the French Revolutionary calendar in use at the time, 15 Germinal, Year IV—Jean-Léopold-Nicholas-Frédéric Cuvier, known, after a brother who had died, simply as Georges, delivered his first public lecture at the National Institute of Science and Arts, in Paris. Cuvier, who was twenty-six, had arrived in the city a year earlier, shortly after the end of the Reign of Terror. He had wide-set gray eyes, a prominent nose, and a temperament that a friend compared to the exterior of the earth—generally cool, but capable of violent tremors and eruptions. Cuvier had grown up in a small town on the Swiss border and had almost no connections in the capital. Nevertheless, he had managed to secure a prestigious research position there, thanks to the passing…

Hand-me-down verb of hand me My scallop shell of quiet, hand Me down my walking cane. Pressed palm to palm in the Eastern Gesture of a center, the Western Gesture of appeal or submission. Extended palm down in the fascist Signal of obedient numbers, palm Up in the urgency of need. The Brush-off, the Fig, the Finger. Backhand brushing the chin for Fuck you, I hereby pull your beard. The little backward Italian wave Of the Pope. A snap. Hard to believe Mastery of an instrument Or tool resides in the cortex, not As musicians say under the fingers. Raised cupped at ear toward the brain To amplify hearing, or raised cupped At mouth toward the voice box To amplify speech. And how still When death the eternal wise-ass will…

1 Would my life be like a letter to you then? We never wrote letters. I’m passing the signs we slipped by together. There goes Soda and Swine. That name is funny because it’s a joke we shared about alliteration, right? If I can describe the feeling of your absence precisely, which means using the names of things 2 St. Didacus’ bells’ ditty reminds us of itself, something old and automated, dividing before from now again and again, these two for a moment still similar…

The Book of Job, in the Old Testament, opens with words both majestic and once-upon-a-time-ish: “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.” Job has ten children, three thousand camels, seven thousand sheep, and many servants. He is the richest man in the East. He doesn’t take his good fortune for granted. Always, the Bible says, he gets up early and makes burnt offerings to God. As the action begins, God is being visited by angels, together with Satan, who at this point in the Bible is not the agent of all evil but a sort of officer of God. (Some translations call him “the Accuser”; a note in the…

My first brush with existentialism came not through my college-era reading list—Kierkegaard, Kafka—but when I first heard Burt Bacharach. This was in the old country of childhood. A teen-age sister played Dionne Warwick hits—composed by Bacharach—and I felt as though I’d been dropped down a well. I did not know the way to San Jose—to life. Did you? Of the almost two hundred songs that Bacharach wrote with the brilliant lyricist Hal David between 1962 and 1970, thirty-four amount, for me, to a crash course in alienation, especially when it comes to love, or the dream of love. With substantial interpretative help from Dionne Warwick—whose range allowed her both to sing contralto low notes and to soar as a soprano—the duo produced two dozen masterpieces in the early sixties alone,…

FAMILY TIES Rachel Aviv writes about the placement of a child with a foster family after his mother leaves him unattended in his crib, and the termination of the mother’s parental rights in order to establish a stable home life for the boy (“Where Is Your Mother?” December 2nd). As an adoptive mother, I can attest that private adoption agencies likewise create pressure to place children in permanent homes. In 2006, my husband and I applied to adopt a child through a reputable agency. We met a four-year-old Korean boy and his mother, but felt that they were attached to one another and that the mother did not want to give up her child. When we decided against adopting the boy, we were told that our application was on…

Holiday Carolling The Morgan Library and Museum, which is currently displaying Charles Dickens’s original manuscript of “A Christmas Carol,” has singers from Mannes College The New School for Music roaming its halls, performing seasonal fare on Dec. 13 and Dec. 20 from 6:30 to 8:30 and on Dec. 15 and Dec. 22 from 3 to 5. (themorgan.org.) “Unsilent Night,” the composer Phil Kline’s long-running, boombox-powered community march through Greenwich Village (which now also takes place in cities around the world) kicks off on Dec. 14 at 6:45, at the arch in Washington Square Park. (unsilentnight.com.) The Grace & Spiritus Chorale of Brooklyn, a seventy-five-member community chorus, enlivens a tree-lighting ceremony on the Brooklyn Promenade, at the end of Montague Street, on Dec. 18 at 5:30, after which it will…

WHEN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY WAS PUBLISHED, in 1966, the composer Virgil Thomson wrote his own jacket blurb: “Salty, witty, warm, and beautifully written . . .Virgil Thomson’s memoirs are authentic Americana.” The same could be said of “The Mother of Us All,” the second of the two operas Thomson wrote with Gertrude Stein, and which the Manhattan School of Music Opera Theatre presents this week. Thomson hasn’t always been taken seriously by classicalmusic insiders. Many think that his music, in which the hymn tunes and folk songs of his Missouri childhood are coupled with spare textures and ironic distance, was performed only because of the composer’s power as the longtime music critic of the New York Herald Tribune. Thomson’s catalogue does contain its share of trivialities. But the Stein operas are…

For months before Nelson Mandela’s death, the world was fed news of his health in dribs and drabs; it was suggested that we pray for his speedy recovery. On the first day of April, one of the headlines read, “MANDELA OO SOO KABANAYAA,” meaning that he was “mending,” as if he had broken a bone and would be getting better. Many people felt that, with his passing, our world would come apart at the seams and expose us to untellable woes. Mandela was much adored; his entering a room created a stir, and his exit would leave a momentary quiet, as those he left behind took a collective breath to regroup. He had done more than his fair share to pull South Africa from the precipice of war and lead…

TOPICS AND QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. When the author’s agent initially asked the author who he thought the readers of his proposed book would be and he defensively replied, “Everyone,” do you think the author should have immediately realized that there is a thin line between everyone and no one? 2. Did the agent’s pitch that the proposed book “brilliantly bridges genres” give the author license that caused him to, in the later words of his agent, “miss the boat” completely, by failing to inhabit any genre whatsoever? 3. Did the negligible advance justify the author’s contention that he could “write what I liked,” without regard to the book’s marketability, plausibility, or legibility? 4. Why do you think the agent stopped returning the author’s phone calls? 5. Do you think…

On March 12, 2013, James R. Clapper appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to discuss the threats facing America. Clapper, who is seventy-two, is a retired Air Force general and Barack Obama’s director of National Intelligence, in charge of overseeing the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and fourteen other U.S. spy agencies. Clapper is bald, with a gray goatee and rimless spectacles, and his affect is intimidatingly bureaucratic. The fifteen-member Intelligence Committee was created in the nineteenseventies, after a series of investigations revealed that the N.S.A. and the C.I.A. had, for years, been illegally spying on Americans. The panel’s mission is to conduct “vigilant legislative oversight” of the intelligence community, but more often it treats senior intelligence officials like matinée idols. As the senators took turns…

One Saturday afternoon in summer, Levinson, self-proclaimed refugee from the big city, sat at his favorite sidewalk café on Main Street, sipping an iced cappuccino and admiring the view. He felt, without vanity, the satisfaction of a man who knows he has made the right choice. This was no boring backwater, as his friends had warned, no cute little village with one white steeple and two red gas pumps, but a lively, thriving town. Women in smart dresses and broadbrimmed straw hats sashayed past within reach of his arm. Over the café railing, he watched husbands in baseball caps pushing baby carriages with one hand and leading dogs with the other, while wives in oversized sunglasses gripped the handles of bright-colored shopping bags stuffed with blouses and bargain jeans. There…

FOSSE, by Sam Wasson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). As a child, Bob Fosse wrote Fred Astaire a fan letter, asking his shoe size. But Fosse, who grew up to choreograph “Chicago” and “Cabaret,” did not develop Astaire’s wholesome charm. At sixteen, he became the youngest m.c. on the seedy Chicago burlesque circuit, and was both inspired and traumatized by “the girls, the failures, and the slimeballs.” Girls are the shaping force in Wasson’s thorough and lively biography, and, in seven hundred pages, there are many. Fosse’s second wife got him out of night clubs and made him a choreographer; his third pushed him to become a director. Although he pioneered a distinctive and witty style of dancing, his biggest fear was that his “razzle-dazzle” would be exposed as a con. THE…

PINA BAUSCH became famous as the master of dance theatre, in which the performers are less likely to dance than to brandish guns or take baths or swing from ropes. But Bausch had serious modern-dance training, and in the nineteen-seventies she plied that art. She died in 2009, and her company is now salvaging what it can of her older work. In 1975, she created a grave, dreamlike piece, “Wind from the West,” set to Stravinsky’s “Cantata.” In bits of film that survived, the dancers look like ghosts, and the work looks like a ghost of modern dance. This week, “Wind from the West” has its U.S. première at the Juilliard School, where Bausch trained—a tender homecoming. Pictured above is Daphne Fernberger, a dancer in the new production. OPENING…

THE JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE—actually a North American native, and not an artichoke at all, but a flowering plant with a potatolike tuber—is everywhere on the menu at Piora. Sunchokes, as they’re also known, are dehydrated into a crisp and puréed into a spread, for an amuse; ground into a crispy “soil” to form the base of a market-vegetable plate; and roasted to caramelized oblivion before being topped with crispy hazelnuts and saba vinegar, as a side dish. The waitstaff push the roasted sunchokes, but no hard sell is required; all you need to know is that the dish’s starchy sweetness makes it as satisfying as late-night pommes frites slathered in mayonnaise. The chef, Chris Cipollone—who made his name with incongruously inventive cooking in a midtown hotel lobby at Tenpenny—says sunchokes are…

At Robben Island Prison, a former leper colony and animal-quarantine station off Cape Town, Nelson Mandela—Prisoner 466/64—was kept by South Africa’s white-supremacist regime for eighteen years in an eight-foot-by-seven-foot cell. He was allowed to send one letter and to receive one letter every six months. On June 23, 1969, Mandela wrote to his daughters, Zenani, who was ten, and Zindziswa, who was eight. (Zeni and Zindzi, he called them.) “My darlings,” he began. “Once again our beloved Mummy has been arrested and now she and Daddy are away in jail.” Mandela was serving a life sentence for conspiring to overthrow the government by force as the leader of the armed wing of the African National Congress, and his then wife, Winnie, an A.N.C. activist, had just begun what would be…

In April, as joyful chants of “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, dead, dead, dead!” reverberated through the streets of Glasgow, where I live, I heard the echo, as all South Africans surely did, of the floppy-bow-tied Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, calling the African National Congress a terrorist group. Nelson Mandela became a byword for virtue all the same. Every schoolchild knows of his contribution to democracy in South Africa, of the sacrifices he made, of his status as an icon of reconciliation. Mandela’s image, banned in South Africa during the years of his incarceration, circulated throughout the world. But what did he look like? There were no photographs of him from prison. The A.N.C. released images of a pugnacious young lion. There is the one of a boxer foregrounding his gloved fists…

Kirsten Gillibrand, the junior senator from New York, needs to pick up her five-year-old son, Henry, from his after-school program by 6 P.M. For every minute she is late, the school charges ten dollars. At 5 P.M. on November 12th, a Tuesday, Gillibrand still had two votes to cast and a meeting with Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader. Her husband, Jonathan, a financial consultant, works in New York City during the week, and, on short notice, she couldn’t find a sitter who was available before six-thirty. She ducked out of the Capitol and returned shortly afterward with Henry. She sat down with him in Reid’s office, where he busied himself with chicken fingers, chocolate milk, and a game of tic-tac-toe. At five-thirty, the Senate convened a procedural vote on…

On the night of January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei, a resident of Padua, walked onto his balcony and tipped his telescope toward space. He spotted three stars near Jupiter and graphed their positions in a notebook. Six days later, he looked through his telescope again and found the same stars—but their positions had shifted. They were, he realized, moons orbiting Jupiter. Galileo had long believed Copernicus’ theory that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Now he had proof. Two months later, a publisher in Venice printed Galileo’s findings, in a booklet ten inches tall, seven and a half inches wide, and sixty pages long. As was customary, the sheets were initially left unbound. Galileo called his work the “Sidereus Nuncius,” or “Starry Messenger.” In addition to offering…

David O. Russell’s “American Hustle,” an intentionally overripe comedy about corruption, duplicity, loyalty, and love, is a series of astonishments. Russell, rewriting a script developed by Eric Singer, takes off from the Abscam affair—the bizarre criminal investigation of the nineteen-seventies in which the F.B.I. called on a swindler named Mel Weinberg to help ensnare public officials. (Six congressmen and a senator were among those ultimately convicted.) The bureau’s elaborate sting involved two “Arab sheikhs” (both F.B.I. employees) eager to invest in Atlantic City’s nascent casino industry and willing to bribe officials in order to procure operating licenses. (“Abscam” was short for “Abdul scam.”) Russell has both simplified and juiced a tale that is already close to preposterous; he has created a fantasia told from the point of view of two…

When Forbes writes that you were the highest-paid female performer of 2012, it’s hard to call your new album a comeback. If you’re Britney Spears, you were also the biggest-selling female artist of the aughts. So her new record, “Britney Jean,” which was released last week, isn’t a comeback album as much as it is a clever repositioning. Spears is a durable idol, but the former child star has long faced the spectre of becoming old in pop years, and she now has formidable competition. (Pop: come for the sexism, stay for the ageism.) In the nineties, when Spears débuted alongside her fellow Mickey Mouse Club members Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera, dancing was central to her appeal. Trained by the manager Lou Pearlman’s teen-pop empire, which operated simultaneously out…