Innholdsfortegnelse for December 23, 2013 i The New Yorker

JEFFREY TOOBIN (COMMENT, P. 37) has written six books, including “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court.” ELIZABETH KOLBERT (“THE LOST WORLD: PART TWO,” P. 48) is a staff writer and the author of “The Sixth Extinction,” which will be published in February. KATHERINE ZOEPF (“SHOPGIRLS,” P. 58), a research fellow at the New America Foundation, is working on a book about young women in the contemporary Arab world. Reporting for this piece was facilitated by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. CORA FRAZIER (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 68) is a writer and editor living in New York. TAD FRIEND (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 43), a staff writer, is the author of, most recently, “Cheerful Money.” emily eakin (“the civilization kit,”…

23 Commerce St. (212-924-2212) IF ALESSANDRO BORGOGNONE, THE OWNER of this new West Village sushi restaurant, hadn’t seen the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” after a late shift cooking at his parents’ Bronx Italian restaurant Patricia’s, Sushi Nakazawa would not exist. The film shows the octogenarian sushi master Jiro Ono at work in his tiny bar in Tokyo’s Ginza subway station, where he dourly serves pristine thirty-minute omakase (chef’s choice) meals starting at three hundred and fifty dollars. Meanwhile, his middleaged son and other apprentices try to demonstrate, to no avail, a similar dedication to perfection. One of those apprentices, Daisuke Nakazawa, tells of how he was brought to tears when—after two hundred attempts to make tamago, a delicate cooked egg custard—he finally won Jiro Ono’s praise. Borgognone tracked Nakazawa…

Pity the modern executioner. The Supreme Court has burdened him with obligations that reflect considerable ambivalence about his profession. (States generally do not release the names of executioners, but they appear to be almost all men.) The underlying task has remained unchanged throughout history, but over the years the Court has mandated that executions be conducted with some finesse. In 1890, the Justices said that the process could not include “torture or a lingering death.” Accordingly, in 2008, the Court rejected a challenge to execution by lethal injection—the prevailing method in the thirty-five states with prisoners on death row—because, as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his opinion, the procedure did not present a “substantial risk of serious harm.” In other words, death is required, but harm is forbidden. Clear?…

What makes an athlete? Webster’s demands “physical skill and strength,” while the O.E.D. cites the Greek: an athlete must “contend for a prize,” like an olive wreath, or a big silver cup from which to chug Labatt Blue. The Department of Homeland Security has its own definition—“skill and recognition substantially above that ordinarily encountered”— for doling out its “athlete visa,” known bureaucratically as the P-1A. Such visas have been reserved, traditionally, for Finnish goalies and Argentine point guards, but this summer the government performed enough semantic gymnastics to begin offering P-1As to professional video gamers. Given the recent struggles of New York’s professional sports teams—as of last week, all had losing records, and the D.H.S. might do well to reconsider whether Andrea Bargnani, of the Knicks, has demonstrated the requisite…

A women’s revolution has begun in Saudi Arabia, although it may not be immediately evident. This fall, only a few dozen women got behind the wheel to demand the right to drive. Every female Saudi still has a male guardian—usually a father or husband—and few openly question the need for one. Adult women must have their guardians’ permission to study, to travel, and to marry, which effectively renders them legal minors. It took a decree from King Abdullah to put tens of thousands of them into the workforce. For the first time, they are interacting daily with men who are not family members, as cashiers in supermarkets and as salesclerks selling abayas and cosmetics and underwear. One afternoon in late October, at the Sahara Mall, in central Riyadh, the Asr…

On most Wednesdays, the Pope gives a general audience, and this one was packed. It was a balmy October morning, and more than a hundred thousand pilgrims, tourists, and Romans had funnelled into St. Peter’s Square. It was the first of three large gatherings Pope Francis presided over that week for a celebration of the family during the Catholic Church’s “Year of Faith.” Wooden railings imposed order in the square. I was about thirty yards from the Pope. In front of me were a pair of Vatican ushers in white tie and tails, several clergy, a short man in a yarmulke, and a handsome couple holding hands. Beyond them, Francis, seventy-six years old, in his stark-white cassock and skullcap, seemed energized by the festive crowd. A large man with a…

Look earthward, angels! Here we are With eyes affixed upon the star, Winter moon, or Higher Power, Rising Dow, or Freedom Tower— With hearts uplifted, anyway, Waltzing through the holiday. We have hired a party planner, Opened the ancestral manor, So c’mon over! All invited! Here, chez nous, the luau’s sited. Pig in the ground and beer on ice, We do intend to celebrice, Or celebreeze, or celebrate— Get geezer-funky, at any rate— Cut a rug, freak out the children, Chuck the tsuris, loose the burden, Ditch the iPhones, scotch our reason, And sing praises of the season. The guest list rocks! Let’s say “Hi-dee!” To tattoo artist Kat Von D, Andy Samberg, Adam Sandler, Chelsea Clinton, Chelsea Handler, Helen Vendler, Steven Weinberg, Mayor Bloomberg, Gayfryd Steinberg, Marie D’Origny, James…

The historian John Lukacs, in “A Thread of Years” (1998), his collection of vignettes from across the twentieth century, imagines a few jazz fans listening to a cocktail pianist in New York in 1929. Then he talks about how this music—melodic swing at the beautiful, blurred boundary of jazz and popular song—defined a state of mind before the Second World War. Everybody “who responded to that kind of American music,” Lukacs states categorically, “hated the Nazis.” It’s a nice rejoinder to the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno’s insistence that the “monotony” and rhythmic seductions of jazz were a friend to fascism. And it trails a question. What was in this dance music, heard in short takes on scratchy 78s, that left its devotees devoted to some larger set of humane values?…

The hero of “Her” should be Him. Instead, he bears the name of Theodore Twombly, who sounds like the kind of nebbish that Preston Sturges used to dream up in his bath. Theodore is played by Joaquin Phoenix, complete with a tragicomic mustache and a selection of unwise shirts. Those are not his fault but the fashion of the day, like the high-waisted pants worn by all the men. Spike Jonze’s movie, which was shot in Los Angeles and Shanghai, is set in a near but dateless future, where the rough edges of existence have been rubbed away. The colors of clothes and furnishings, though citrus-bright, are diluted by the pastel softness of the lighting, so that nothing hurts the eye. People ride in smoothly humming trains, not belching cars.…

IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT One can only be dazzled at the prospect of a world of driverless vehicles, as Burk hard Bilger reports in his piece on the Google car (“Auto Correct,” November 25th). But it’s worth recalling that modern technology excels at finding solutions to problems we didn’t know we had, and that cars, even driverless ones, will still have a range of negative effects. In the past century, the automobile has diminished city life and despoiled the countryside. We are only now beginning to understand the profound health threats posed by a sedentary, auto-centric life style, and the only thing less energy-efficient than a single-passenger vehicle will be a zero-passenger vehicle. We still have a few humane streets, where a subtle wave or fleeting eye contact can…

365 Third Ave. (646-918-6553) “Gaelic Hospitality” is the official tagline of Grace, a new Irish pub in Kips Bay, and a promise that the manager, Rory Connellan, seems intent on keeping. When asked for directions to the rest room the other night, he gave them and then said—earnestly, and in a mild brogue—“Thank you!” As a counterpoint to the abiding masculinity of the pub scene, the owners named the place for Grace O’Malley, the sixteenth-century Irish pirate and folk hero, and commissioned the city’s fiercest female bartenders to design cocktails. The results are elaborate, and tend toward sweet, like the Belclare, from Franky Marshall, of the Tippler, which combines cognac, grapefruit liqueur, lemon juice, and absinthe to evoke a lemon drop with a deep licorice kick. The Westport, dreamed up…

A person pacing off the length of the salt mountains at the Atlantic Salt Incorporated docks, not far from the ferry terminal on Staten Island, walks a third of a mile before getting to the end of them. Their sides are sloped, about four stories high, and mostly covered with heavy vinyl tarps held down at regular intervals by sandbags filled with salt. Workers walk on a narrow path on top, and look small up there. Next to the salt mountains are the dove-gray waters of the Kill Van Kull, traversed by towering container ships, tugboats, and local industrial vessels. Gulls creak and wheel overhead, as do the clouds and winds and helicopters and flags and everything. After a while, if you lick your lips, you taste Chilean salt. A…

’Tis the season for taking retirement benefits away from public workers. In Detroit, an emergency manager has steered the city into bankruptcy, in part to avoid its pension obligations. In Illinois, the legislature just passed a bill cutting pensions and raising the retirement age for state workers, in the hope of saving a hundred and sixty billion dollars in pension costs over the next thirty years. And these moves are only the most dramatic instances of a broader trend: between 2009 and 2012, forty-five states passed some kind of pension reform. Pensions are supposed to be dull and reliable. But they’re now the locus of bruising political battles. The reason is simple: though plenty of states and cities have managed to maintain healthy pension funds, in many places pension costs…

Barack Obama ranks 17th on the list of “The 25 Least Influential People of 2013.” —GQ. To the editors and staff of GQ: Sirs and madams, I was confused and, I’ll admit, disappointed when I saw the “25 Least Influential People of 2013” list. To my surprise, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, came in ahead of me, meaning that, by your determination, he is “less influential” than I am. In fact, I didn’t make the list at all. Common sense suggests that, by most measures—social-media followers, magazine covers, Nobel Peace Prizes won—Barack Obama would be more influential than I am, not less, and I wonder if something went wrong in your calculations. One thing comes to mind right away: the Supreme Court’s siding with the Obama Administration…

For Síofra (August 18, 2013) Energy, balance, outbreak: Listening to Bach I saw you years from now (More years than I’ll be allowed) Your toddler wobbles gone, A sure and grown woman. Your bare foot on the floor Keeps me in step; the power I first felt come up through Our cement floor long ago Palps your sole and heel And earths you here for real. An oratorio Would be just the thing for you: Energy, balance, outbreak At play for their own sake But for now we foot it lightly In time, and silently.…

Cats were dying. This happens, of course. But in this case they were dying in a gory way, one after another, and my nieces, who were six and seven years old, were witnessing the deaths, and it was Christmas, the most magical, horrible, spiritual, dark, and stressful time of the year, so we—my older sister and her husband, my younger twin brothers, my sister’s in-laws, our mother and our uncle, and the other relatives who were gathered at my sister’s house in Revelstoke for the holiday—were trying to prevent more cat deaths. My sister had had five cats. She’d adopted them from the pound, because they were going to be killed. She wanted every living being to be happy. I am telling this story to you, K, even though…

JOHNNY CASH, by Robert Hilburn (Little, Brown). When Johnny Cash appeared at Folsom Prison on January 13, 1968, he was trying to recover from an artistic slump and prayed that his voice wouldn’t give out. “I took more pills that morning than I ever had in my life,” he recalled. But, as Hilburn, who attended the concert, writes, in his meticulous biography, the performance produced one of Cash’s greatest albums. Hilburn gives a frank account of the singer’s life, including his struggles with drugs and alcohol, and his probable affair with his wife’s sister, Anita. But while he does not glorify Cash’s worst behavior—smashing chandeliers, throwing a typewriter out a window, setting his car on fire—he is at times too eager to offer an excuse in Cash’s defense. ROADS…

MARTIN SCORSESE’S NEW FILM, “The Wolf of Wall Street” (opening Dec. 25), stars Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of the real-life stockbroker Jordan Belfort. The movie, based on Belfort’s autobiography of the same title, runs nearly three hours and tells the turbulent story of his rise and fall—his founding of a brokerage, Stratton Oakmont, in 1989, which specialized in so-called penny stocks; his rise to great wealth through fraudulent schemes; his free-spending and decadent life style; his drug addiction; and his investigation by the F.B.I., resulting in his arrest, conviction, and imprisonment. Co-starring Jonah Hill, as Belfort’s business partner; Rob Reiner, as Belfort’s father; and Margot Robbie, as Belfort’s second wife. PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIGITTE LACOMBE MOVIES OPENING ALL THE LIGHT IN THE SKY Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening Dec. 20.…

“Make Music Winter” The shortest day of the year might not be the quietest. Don’t be shocked to see gangs of people wielding electric guitars, hand bells, or boom boxes parading through Grand Army Plaza, SoHo, and Union Square on Dec. 21, as the public is invited to sing and dance along for “Make Music Winter,” a counterpart to the summertime event that brings more than a thousand outdoor musical performances to the five boroughs. This version has more than a dozen musical parades. In Spanish Harlem, the bomba and plena music group Los Pleneros de la 21 will lead the charge. The composer Daniel Goode heads the SoHo Gamelan Walk, in which hand clapping and tapping on cast-iron building façades are encouraged. The baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert delivers…

Alice Eve carries herself like she’s someone. She wears earrings the size of hubcaps, swaggers like Keith Richards, avoids apologies, radiates aplomb. One of her eyes is blue, one green, and you can’t tell which. People turn in her wake, half-recognizing her, but not quite enough to ask, as they might with Seal or Mitt Romney. Until now, the thirty-one-year-old actress made a forceful impression in frivolous roles: as Charlotte’s Irish nanny in “Sex and the City 2,” as the Vanity Fair writer on “Entourage” who profiles Vincent and then becomes his fianceé, as so often happens when a movie star meets a real live writer. This month, with the début of Neil LaBute’s film “Some Velvet Morning,” Eve’s accomplishments catch up to her aplomb. Her portrayal of Velvet is…

The Geological Society of London, known to its members as the Geol Soc (pronounced “gee-ahl sock”), was founded in 1807, over dinner in a Covent Garden tavern. Geology was at that point a brand-new science, a circumstance reflected in the society’s goals, which were to stimulate “zeal” for the discipline and to induce participants “to adopt one nomenclature.” There followed long, often spirited debates on matters such as where to fix the borders of the Devonian period. “Though I don’t much care for geology,” one visitor to the society’s early meetings noted, “I do like to see the fellows fight.” The Geol Soc is now headquartered in a stone mansion not far from Picca dilly Circus. On the outside, the style of the mansion is Palladian; inside, it leans more…

Marcin Jakubowski, the owner of a small farm in northwestern Missouri, is an agrarian romantic for high-tech times. A forty-one-year-old Polish-American, he has spent the past five years building industrial machines from scratch, in a demonstration of radical self-sufficiency that he intends as a model for human society everywhere. He believes that freedom and prosperity lie within the reach of anyone willing to return to the land and make the tools necessary to erect civilization on top of it. His project, the Global Village Construction Set, has attracted a following, but among the obstacles he has faced is a dearth of skilled acolytes: the people who show up at his farm typically display more enthusiasm for his ideas than expertise with a lathe or a band saw. Until quite recently,…

In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. “The Secret Life of Plants,” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, presented a beguiling mashup of legitimate plant science, quack experiments, and mystical nature worship that captured the public imagination at a time when New Age thinking was seeping into the mainstream. The most memorable passages described the experiments of a former C.I.A. polygraph expert named Cleve Backster, who, in 1966, on a whim, hooked up a galvanometer to the leaf of a dracaena, a houseplant that he kept in his office. To his astonishment, Backster found…

At two hours, a zombie movie provides a bracing shot of nihilism. Zombies aren’t so much monsters as they are math, after all—seething, surging, interchangeable integers. Some go fast, some slow. Some are funny, some scary. But if the premise stays pure no true happy ending is possible, and, before you’ve even had time to absorb that fact, everyone you loved will be dead or lost in grief forever. AMC’s zombie show, “The Walking Dead,” on the other hand, has been grinding on for forty-three hours, something I can attest to, because I watched every episode in less than two weeks. Binge-watching has become a popular way to enjoy television, but with a show as flawed as “The Walking Dead” it’s a dangerous drug, all spike-and-crash, as gorgeous surges of…

Conor McPherson’s “The Night Alive” (an Atlantic Theatre Company production at the Linda Gross, directed by the playwright) is about poverty, economic and otherwise. It’s also about the failure of realism. Or, more specifically, the struggle that artists like the forty-two-year-old McPher - son go through to make lyrical realism matter in a culture dominated by its various simulacra: issue-driven documentary films, memoirs, reality TV. First produced last summer, at London’s Donmar Warehouse, with the same cast, the almost two-hour show is performed without an intermission, but it is filled with pauses. The play’s eight scenes, which range from short to long to short again, are separated by blackouts or by the dimming of lights that pulsate like distress signals from a passing ship—but what is the danger? I can’t…