Innholdsfortegnelse for January 6, 2014 i The New Yorker

ADAM GOPNIK (COMMENT, P. 17), a staff writer, is the author of “The Table Comes First” and “Winter.” JONAH WEINER (“THE IMPOSSIBLE BODY,” P. 22) is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and a contributing writer at the Times Magazine. PAUL RUDNICK (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 29) published his first young-adult novel, “Gorgeous,” in April. CALVIN TRILLIN (“TAMALES ON THE DELTA,” P. 30) has been writing for The New Yorker since 1963. “Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin” is his latest book. CHASE TWICHELL (POEM, P. 33) won the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize for “Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been.” MICHAEL SPECTER (“THE GENE FACTORY,” P. 34), the author of “Denialism,” is a staff writer covering science and global public health. MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ (“A MISSION…

THE CINEMA’S CONQUEST of the twentieth century finds its exemplary symbol in the character that made Charlie Chaplin famous, the Little Tramp. Chaplin came up with the costume and the mannerisms in February, 1914, just a few weeks into his movie career; Film Forum celebrates the centenary with a weeklong series, “The Tramp 100” (Jan. 1-7). Joining Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio in December, 1913, after a successful run in vaudeville, Chaplin created the persona in reaction to the chase comedies in which he was placed. The first Tramp film to be released—“Kid Auto Races at Venice”—features Chaplin on location at a real-life soapbox-derby competition, as a down-and-out swell cantankerously intruding on the newsreel camera crew filming the action. The template was instantly set: the Tramp’s self-conscious artifice launched Chaplin’s comic…

WHEN YOU RUN a not-for-profit space devoted to the performing arts, personal attractiveness helps. But it’s a tricky thing to handle. You want to be a star in order to attract other stars—and get them to work for practically nothing—but your charisma can’t be so overwhelming that it makes your performers self-conscious about their own capabilities, or allure. Then there’s your board. Influential people join boards to be even more influential, and if your job is to excite them about seeing new artists in new ways you have to not only wear a don’s robes but also carry a cheerleader’s brightly colored pompoms—to be enthusiastic and informed, all at once. Since 2005, the ebullient, Australian-born Vallejo Gantner has been the Artistic Director of Performance Space 122, in the East Village.…

Avenues, a private school that opened last year in Chelsea, intends to turn out young people who will be “architects of lives that transcend the ordinary,” according to its mission statement. Graduates of Avenues are to be “accomplished in the academic skills one would expect; at ease beyond their borders; truly fluent in a second language; good writers and speakers one and all; confident because they excel in a particular passion; artists no matter their field; practical in the ways of the world; emotionally unafraid and physically fit; humble about their gifts and generous of spirit.” Co-founded by Chris Whittle, the serial education entrepreneur, Benno Schmidt, the former president of Yale, and Alan Greenberg, the former publisher of Esquire, and charging forty-two thousand dollars a year in tuition, Avenues has…

Nathan Myhrvold, the technologist and the author of “The Photography of Modernist Cuisine,” a twelve-pound volume that sells for a hundred and twenty dollars, was scrunched in a chair in the dimly lit lobby of the Ace Hotel. He was trying to capture the perfect shot of a pumpkin muffin with his Nokia phone. “It’s all about the inverse-square law,” Myhrvold, who has twinkly eyes and a beard flecked with white, said. “The amount of light that hits the subject is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. So here’s the muffin, it’s one unit away from me. And the edge of the table is”—he paused to measure it roughly—“six units away. So the ratio of light hitting the edge versus the muffin is smaller by a factor of…

I doubt if many people think that the hot tamale alone can bring Greenville, Mississippi, back to its glory days, but every little bit helps. Last year, before the first annual Delta Hot Tamale Festival, Greenville declared itself the Hot Tamale Capital of the World and later registered that title with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The registration may have been an unnecessary precaution. It’s true that for more than a century the hot tamale, which might be described as a third cousin once removed of the Mexican tamale, has been eaten throughout the Delta—the alluvial plain along the Mississippi River which, according to its best-known description, “starts in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.” But Greenville, the largest…

The past is no more past than the future, or so said Moradian, the unlikely seer of my senior shop class. I’ll call him John, although he was never a John or even a Juan or a Jack, although his surname— Moradian—ended with “i-a-n,” which is Ian in Scotland, the Gaelic version of John. Our John, John Moradian, gone sixty-seven years ago from our schoolboy class into the wider world of war where his one-way ticket got punched. I would start this again if I could, start quietly with a Dougie or an Alan, both of whom made it into their thirties, though neither ever spoke of the past being anything but over with. What they actually thought I’ll never know. One spring day the whole class went by bus…

Imagine that tomorrow morning you woke up and discovered that the familiar rock pigeon—scientifically known as Columba livia, popularly known as the rat with wings—had disappeared. It was gone not simply from your window ledge but from Piazza San Marco, Trafalgar Square, the Gateway of India arch, and every park, sidewalk, telephone wire, and rooftop in between. Would you grieve for the loss of a familiar creature, or rip out the spikes on your air-conditioner and celebrate? Perhaps your reaction would depend on the cause of the extinction. If the birds had been carried off in a mass avian rapture, or a pigeon-specific flu, you might let them pass without guilt, but if they had been hunted to death by humans you might feel honor-bound to genetically engineer them back…

Ronald K. Brown, the most acclaimed choreographer now working with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, was born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn in 1966. He knew from childhood that he would grow up to be a dancer. When he was six, he took lessons sponsored by the Police Athletic League. For a second-grade black-history assignment, in which students dressed up as inspirational African-Americans, he wore a white T-shirt and black tights, the costume that Arthur Mitchell had worn in his most famous role, in Balanchine’s “Agon.” Brown also spent a summer studying with Mary Anthony, a celebrated teacher of modern dance. At the age of nineteen, he founded his own dance company, Evidence. Soon, like other young African-American choreographers, he was travelling regularly to Africa to work with its…

PARTY FOUL Jeffrey Toobin explores flaws in the Constitution, but he never really questions the division between Republicans and Democrats (“Our Broken Constitution,” December 9th). The two-party duopoly, which is partly an artifact of single-member districts, makes it irrational for people to join or to support minor parties, further insulates the two parties from competition, and may well make the electorate appear more divided and extreme than it is. Letting the House and the Senate control their own election rules, and exempting the parties from the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, gives the parties undue influence. Shouldn’t my senator and representative be answerable foremost to their constituents, rather than to party leaders? The Constitution should be used to emancipate both voters and politicians from the parties’ tyranny. David…

132 Greene Ave., Brooklyn (718-576-3584) IF YOU HAPPEN TO LIVE close to Aita, on a quiet corner in Clinton Hill, where the dining scene is still catching up to the real-estate boom, consider yourself very lucky. It’s the ultimate neighborhood restaurant, the type of place where the food hits the sweet spot of being good (not to mention affordable) enough to warrant regular visits by locals but not so outstanding or in vogue that those locals find themselves vying for space with the destination-eating hordes. On weeknights, there’s hardly ever a wait for a table in the elegantly homey dining room, and when there is you’re invited to have a drink at the marble bar or at the adjoining candlelit speakeasy, the Mayflower. The list of craft cocktails is long,…

New York Boat Show They say that the two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day the craft is bought and the day it’s sold. This annual gathering at the Javits Center gives would-be buyers a chance to extend that initial pleasure, as it presents hundreds of fibreglass wonders, from motor yachts to sailboats. A number of activities are planned, too, including appearances by Captain Dave Carraro, from National Geographic’s series “Wicked Tuna,” and by Jeff Quattrocchi, who calls himself the Swampmaster and who will handle an eight-foot, two-hundred-pound alligator armed with nothing more than his hands and a clip-on microphone. There will also be an interactive boating simulator, hands-on workshops about engine repair, rope-tying tutorials, fishing seminars, and presentations about financing and insurance. (655 W.…

Sign-language interpreters, like air-traffic controllers, usually attract attention only when they screw up. Part of the job is to blend in, even if you’re standing in front of eighty thousand people. That is not what happened last month in Johannesburg, when Thamsanqa Jantjie, the interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, was revealed to be an impostor, having translated the words of President Obama and other dignitaries into the signing equivalent of “Jabberwocky.” Although the details surrounding Jantjie grew progressively weirder and darker—he said that he had been having a schizophrenic episode during the service and was hallucinating angels; he has a criminal past—New Yorkers may have been reminded of Lydia Callis, Mayor Bloomberg’s interpreter during Hurricane Sandy. Callis’s emotive facial expressions during official press conferences made her a local star…

Storyboard P, a Brooklyn dancer, comes from the 1300 block of Eastern Parkway, on the border between Crown Heights and Brownsville. When he was five or so, his grandmother tugged him onto the dance floor at a family gathering and, as reggae played, got him moving for the first time. “I hated it,” Storyboard said recently. A shy child, he felt intensely exposed: “When you’re dancing, you’re revealing yourself—all these temptations, vulnerabilities, things you can’t see otherwise.” But he came to find the sensation addicting. Today, at twenty-three, he is a star of flex, a form of street dance characterized by jarring feats of contortion, panto-mime, and footwork that simulates levitation. Much in the way that Savion Glover infused tap dancing with visceral aggression, Storyboard has pushed street dancing in…

The twenty-mile drive from Hong Kong International Airport to the center of Shenzhen, in southern China, can take hours. There is customs to negotiate and a border to cross, but they aren’t the problem; the problem is the furious pace of commerce between the former British colony and one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Trucks, cars, vans, and buses cram the roadways, ferrying laborers of all kinds at all times. Until the nineteen-eighties, when Deng Xiaoping designated the area as China’s first special economic zone, Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing village. Suddenly, eleven million people appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; factories sprang up, often housed in hastily constructed tower blocks. Thirty years ago, there were a few guesthouses and little else. Today, a visitor can stay at…

“Lovey,” her husband said gently, which was his way. “It’s for you.” The velvet blackness of 2 A.M., of nearly death-deep sleep: the ringing telephone had been a fire alarm in her dream; reluctantly, she’d exited an unfamiliar building but not awakened, hovering in some liminal space. The building was filled with naked bodies, and she wished to return to them and their naughty party. “Lovey,” her husband said again, and she was livid with him, with his dull insistence, forcing her to attend to him when what she wanted to do was run back inside the burning building. “Lovey,” he said a third time, and then the light snapped on. On the phone was Bernadette, her former stepdaughter. Her ex-husband’s youngest and most difficult girl, who was busy apologizing,…

INSIDE THE DREAM PALACE, by Sherill Tippins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). This history explores the ups and downs of the Chelsea Hotel, where scores of the twentieth century’s greatest artists and writers lived. Opened in 1884 as one the first New York examples of a coöperative “home club” (a concept inspired by the French utopian philosopher Charles Fourier), it began as a community-minded, affordable residence where people from various classes and professions (but particularly artists) could live and create. Tippins tells riveting stories about the Chelsea’s artists, but she also captures a much grander, and more pressing, narrative: that of the ongoing battle between art and capitalism in the city. HENRY DARGER, by Jim Elledge (Overlook Duckworth). This famous outsider artist was an anonymous janitor until his death, in 1973,…

I haven’t seen Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “August: Osage County,” but people whose judgment I trust say that the piece worked powerfully in the theatre—which is, perhaps, where it should have remained. The play lasts for more than three hours; the movie version, starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, runs about two. Some character detail has been cut, but the structural lines of “Osage County” remain clear (boy, are they clear—virtually every scene cries, “This is a play!”), and the zingers that made it explosive are still there. Yet, despite the startling moments and some nasty fun, the movie sits awkwardly on the screen. Set near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, in 2007, the movie takes place mainly after Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard), a onetime poet and full-time alcoholic, has disappeared. A…

OF THE MANY ways to compensate for the excesses of the holiday season, none is more bracing than a swim in the ocean to ring in the New Year. Members of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, which was founded in 1903 by the early-twentieth-century publishing magnate and fitness guru Bernarr Macfadden, take the plunge every Sunday from November through April. It has become one of the city’s most beloved traditions for thousands of people to join them on New Year’s Day. Wondering about the benefits of dousing yourself in nearly freezing water at this time of year? The holiday swim is for charity, with donations going to Camp Sunshine, which serves children with life-threatening illnesses and their families. NOW PLAYING All the Light in the Sky The director…

41 E. 7th St. (212-982-4576) Like the Sistine Chapel, this East Village bar is decorated with murals with Christian themes (here, it’s monks getting into trouble) and is quieted, at intervals, by definitive shushing that seems to float down from On High. Unlike the Sistine Chapel, it serves beer, of a Belgian, Trappist focus, with a selection and quality that have earned faithful devotees. In the nineties, the bartenders wore monks’ robes and played a soundtrack of Gregorian chants; now it’s more of a reform situation, allowing for jazz and civvies. On a recent evening, Christian, a young bartender in a wool vest, served beers with a holiday flavor: Dupont Avec les Bons Voeux (tart, complex, originally the Christmas gift of the Dupont Brewery), Delirium Noël (Delirium Tremens’s seasonal cousin),…

We make the turn toward the new year this January with trepidation. Well, we make the turn toward every new year with trepidation, but added to the anticipatory jumps this year are what might be called the retrospective willies. You don’t have to have a very enlarged sense of history to remember what happened last time Western Civilization sped around the corner from ’13 to ’14. Not so good. The year 1913 had been full of rumbling energy and matchless artistic accomplishment—Proust kicking off, the Cubists kicking back, Stravinsky kicking out—and then, within a few months, the Archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo and the troop trains were running and, pretty soon, the whole positive and optimistic and progressive culture was on its way to committing suicide. The Great War left…

“Bowling during the day is so decadent!” Paul Rudd said, gazing in wonder at Lucky Strike’s empty lanes. At night, the Hell’s Kitchen bowling alley is the kind of swinging joint where you might find Brian Fantana, the Oui-era Casanova whom Rudd reprises in “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.” Fantana, a mustachioed television correspondent who slathers on Sex Panther cologne and carries condoms for every mood, would surely have a mocha-colored bowling ensemble. Rudd, not so much. The forty-four-year-old actor wore a flannel shirt, sported two-day stubble, and was scouring the place for a viable ball. “I had incredibly fat thumbs,” he explained, “so I always had the embarrassing thing of having to use the sixteen-pound ball. Later, I had thumb-reduction surgery, of course.” He finally secured a suitable house…

What percent of American men are gay? The question is notoriously difficult to answer. . . . More than one quarter of gay men hide their sexuality from anonymous surveys. The evidence also suggests that a large number of gay men are married to women. —The Times. In order to achieve a more accurate accounting of America’s gay population, male and female, the next national census will include the following, more sensitively phrased questions: 1. If you suddenly realized that you were making love to a person of your own gender, you would think: (a) That you’d fallen out of a plane and accidentally landed atop another naked heterosexual. (b) That you were attempting a nude Heimlich maneuver. (c) That you were merely celebrating Backward Day. 2. What do you…

One night in May of 2012, a Honduran police inspector received a phone call from an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, a man he knew as Tony. Tony told him to get his men ready. They were about to intercept a large cocaine shipment, one of many such missions that U.S. and Honduran forces collaborate on each year. At 8 P.M., four helicopters flew east from a base near the city of La Ceiba to a smaller refuelling base deep in the wet lowlands of La Moskitia, on the Honduran side of the Mosquito Coast. Along with the inspector, the helicopters carried ten D.E.A. agents, eighteen other members of the Honduran security forces, and eight Guatemalan pilots. Around 11 P.M., they lifted off again. Their target was a…

Dawn awoke and rose one person down that day. Across the Universe, the obituary and I Engulfed a granola-and-yogurt parfait. I found my focus in his rifle’s sights. I was crossed out in the list Of his next of kin, in Halifax black-and-white. He bowled frame upon frame of erect Jesuits. He changed his name. He synchronized Christ With deep time, a paleontologist turned priest. He taught the Inuit not to shiver or shout When they enunciated pure Canadian: They traded their own pelts for the cool E.S.L. He flew to Seoul, to the reggae gymnasium, To the icebreaker mojito outing, To twin Filipinas with my features. I stood sentry and watched my own reëntry, Expecting a theft, never expecting To witness myself absconded when I absconded, Both looter and…

In 2013, the Metropolitan Opera marked the bicentennials of Wagner and Verdi—the schismatic popes of nineteenth-century opera—by mounting new productions of their final masterpieces, “Parsifal” and “Falstaff.” On the surface, the two works seem radically unalike, confirming the stereotypical polarity between light-suffused Italianate values and the forest dusk of Germanic tradition. But there is common ground between them. Both are tales of fools: the “pure fool” of Wagner’s quasi-Christian allegory, who learns compassion and heals spiritual wounds, and the indomitable rascal of Verdi and Arrigo Boito’s Shakespeare adaptation, who, through wounds of a self-inflicted sort, teaches his companions that “the world is but a joke, man is born a clown.” Each work, in its way, looks past dull reality in search of shadowy truths. Franz Werfel summarized the continuity thus:…