Innholdsfortegnelse for February 29, 2016 i The New Yorker

Evan Osnos (“Father Mike,” p. 36) reports from Washington. His book “Age of Ambition” won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction. Dana Goodyear (“The Stress Test,” p. 46) is a staff writer and the author of “Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture.” Jeffrey Toobin (Comment, p. 17), a staff writer, is the author of “Urban Guerrilla: The Wild, Strange Saga of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army,” which comes out in August. Anna Heyward (The Talk of the Town, p. 20) is a writer and reporter living in New York. Nick Paumgarten (“The Scold,” p. 22) has been writing for The New Yorker since 2000. Ira Sadoff (Poem, p. 31) is the author of the poetry collection…

ON THE DAY of the Golden Globe Awards, in January, the composer David Lang, who teaches at the Yale School of Music and won a Pulitzer Prize for his radiant choral work “The Little Match Girl Passion,” found himself in a Chevy Suburban on a side street in Beverly Hills, creeping toward the Beverly Hilton. He had been nominated, in the Best Original Song category, for a piece called “Simple Song #3,” which appears in Paolo Sorrentino’s film “Youth.” His competitors were Sam Smith, Brian Wilson, Wiz Khalifa, and a team led by Max Martin. Lang was at a far remove from the Manhattan new-music world where he has long been a fixture, notably as a co-founder of the Bang on a Can collective. Lang, who is fifty-nine and has…

LAST MAY, STEPHANIE GARRY, the chief administrator at the Plaza Jewish Community Chapel, a funeral home at Ninety-first Street and Amsterdam Avenue, was scrolling Indiewire in her office when she came across an article about “Son of Saul,” a Hungarian film by the director László Nemes. She gasped, and immediately paged Géza Röhrig, a forty-eight-year-old employee, who was downstairs with a body. Since 2001, Röhrig has been a shomer, or watcher, at the chapel; according to traditional Jewish custom, a body should not be left alone before a funeral. “ ‘Son of Saul’?” Garry said, incredulously. “Oh, you found out,” Röhrig replied. Röhrig is the star of the film, which had just won the Grand Prix, at Cannes. In January, it won the Golden Globe Award for the Best Foreign…

I never loved a shiny car, longed forholidays in the Azores, cashmere sweatersto make life matter more. I don’t needthat great Cabernet, though Chateau Montelenasends me back to a pond, a vineyard picnic—the woman I’m with—she’s a different story.I always saw my family life as a sinkholeI tried to climb out of. But moreit was a vacuum, a grave that needed dirtto fill it in. So stuck I was, I wanted onlyto hold on to someone for the ride.I’m still not sure how to conduct myself.Does anyone? So many selves cravingto be seen and cared for. Once in a whileI drive to a mall to peer in shop windows,to see what the excitement’s about.A mother tries a dress on her daughter,a young man chooses between TV screens.They seem at home…

YOSHIKI SASAI WAS known as “the brainmaker.” One of Japan’s foremost developmental biologists, he made discoveries that illuminated the formation of the embryonic nervous system, and, using stem cells, he grew the optic cup, parts of the cerebral cortex, and the rudiments of a cerebellum. Calm and precise in the lab, Sasai was cultivated and erudite outside it, with a reputation as a gracious host who escorted visiting colleagues to onsen spas and prepared sushi for lab parties. “There are not too many people in our field who like to discuss Goethe,” Christof Niehrs, a prominent biologist, told me. “His talks were exquisite. He was a perfectionist in whatever he did.” In 2000, during a period of explosive growth in his field, Sasai helped found the Center for Developmental Biology,…

THE TITANIC SANK on April 15, 1912. Nine days later, Thomas Hardy composed a poem about the disaster called “The Convergence of the Twain.” Many poets were mourning the dead; Hardy took a different approach. He asked readers to contemplate the accident’s prehistory: to imagine how, even as the great ship was being built, the iceberg—its “sinister mate”—had also been growing. “No mortal eye could see / The intimate welding of their later history,” Hardy wrote. But, even so, “They were bent / By paths coincident / On being anon twin halves of one august event.” The poem’s theory of history—as something that unfolds through fated convergences—is also a theory of leadership. For leadership to exist, a leader must cross paths with a crisis; an exemplary person must meet her…

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE In Jon Lee Anderson’s piece on Haiti’s former President Michel Martelly, he paints a bleak picture of the country, and in doing so describes its national language, Haitian Creole, as “a French patois” (“Aftershocks,” February 1st). Creole is native to the majority of Haitians and has a stan dardized orthography and a literature. Calling it a patois is like calling French “a Latin patois” or English “a Germanic patois.” Creole is historically connected to other languages— French and the Niger-Congo family— but this is true of all languages. Although French is spoken fluently by less than five per cent of the population, it is used most in schools. This is one reason that only two per cent of children will finish high school. The effective…

This historically seedy institution has been open for more than a century as some variation of raucous drinking establishment—its reputation once earned it the nickname the Bloody Bucket. (In 1910, the Times reported that a server was stabbed in the heart at the address, in a dispute over soup.) Its current New Orleans-inspired format is enjoying its tenth year in a rapidly gentrifying part of Chinatown. On a recent Thursday, when asked about the burgeoning restaurant scene nearby (Dimes is around the corner, Mission Chinese Food next door), Charles Hanson, the bar’s owner, claimed ignorance. “I don’t go outside,” he explained. And why would he? Inside is a cozy junk yard, orchestrated entirely according to his whims. There is a T-Rex mounted above the fireplace and a leopard-print pool table…

PAULA SCHER WALKED into Barnes & Noble in Union Square the other day and asked for the map section. The first female principal of Pentagram Design, Scher is responsible for some of the most recognizable graphics around, from Shake Shack’s green outline of a burger to the blue Citibank logo with the red arch. In her spare time, she paints maps. She rode the escalator to the third floor in search of a little inspiration. First, Scher pulled a tourist map of Egypt from a rack. She frowned. “Already, I can tell you I wouldn’t like this map,” she said, wincing at the stiff lamination. “Carrying this around is an unpleasant experience. And the type’s too small.” She eyed the broad V shape of the Nile Delta. “But this is…

Mr. Money Mustache, the father of Mustachianism, isn’t perfect. He allows himself occasional luxuries, gets drunk now and then, and admits to two regrettable “five-to-ten-dollar mistakes” in 2015. The first was buying his ten-year-old son, Simon, a mini-Rubik’s Cube, which broke when they tried to take it apart. Junk. The other was putting several slices of leftover mushroom pizza in the same Tupperware container as some plain slices, which Simon, citing the mushroom taint, then refused to eat. There was a thirty-dollar mistake, back in 2010: Mr. Money Mustache built a rig for a storage box attached to the rear of his Scion hatchback, but the heat of the muffler melted a hole in the box. He modified the design, then wrote about it on his blog. The post, called…

What are Squad Goals? People you want in your squad, or an idea your squad might come to embody, or simply a triumphal tag you affix to a picture of you and your pals looking glamorous. —Slate. When a squad is presented as a #squad, it is transforming itself, via the logic of media, from a social circumstance into a social product. … A #squad is a clique, commodified. —The Atlantic. TAKE LOTS OF pictures, so we will never forget the home we are leaving forever to go West by covered wagon. Coördinate our bonnets, so we will be recognizable in a large crowd of people fleeing severe drought. Limit our social-media posts to good, relevant messages, such as ones reassuring relatives that we have arrived at the next step…

Turmeric, rosemary: blend with rum.Winter is fading; spring will come,snow will melt, and leaves set in.Rosemary, turmeric: shake in gin.Turmeric, bourbon, rosemary:a blue-green bruise leaks toward my eye(a week ago I bumped my head).I swab and bathe it. The bruise will fadefaster with this concoctionrecommended by my son.Soak a cloth and wipe the place.Weapons are poised to fight in space.Refugees packed in lifeboats drown.Cyber attacks: the system’s down,an outage no one can repair.The turmeric has stained my hair.The pillow smells of alcohol.Wind and rain and petals fall.Sunday excursion: Hamilton Grange,the empty streets subdued and strange,the widowed house perched in its park.White petals gleam in the gathering dark.April this year is cool and slow.The stain seeps toward my left eyebrow.Care for the hurt place: soak, swab, wrap.And then, before I take…

The High Mountains of Portugal, by Yann Martel (Spiegel & Grau). Martel, the author of the best-selling and screen-adapted “Life of Pi,” rejiggers the formula to charming if familiar effect. Again, a family is sundered by death and migration. Again, a formidable but coöperative beast (in this case, a chimpanzee) brings comfort. Most Martellian is the boundless capacity for parable. The book is crammed with tales explicating Darwinism, the Zen of apes, and the banality of evil. Linguistic economy is no virtue: when someone gets out of a car, the other person “feels cast off, thrown away, abandoned.” But Martel knows his strengths: passages about the chimpanzee and his owner brim irresistibly with affection and attentiveness. The Heart, by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus…

The singer and activist Victoria Ruiz leads Downtown Boys with a sharp tongue and a hoarse throat, growling through the Providence outfit’s riotous début album, “Full Communism.” The tracks speed by with hardcore kineticism, but Ruiz’s lyrics squeeze your hand through the pit: she’s lucid and blunt, shouting down cops, traders, and any other impediment to justice that she can spot. There’s something distinctly post-punk about the Boys, who play Baby’s All Right on Feb. 27. It could be the saxophone, but it’s probably the spirit. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera Richard Eyre’s new film-noir-inspired staging of “Manon Lescaut” moves the action from the twilight of the ancien regime to German-occupied France in the nineteen-forties, reimagining the opera’s naive and vivacious heroine as something of a femme fatale—even though…

“That Physics Show” The professional physics demonstrator David Maiullo, a professor at Rutgers, brings real-world applicability and outer-world theatrics to this Off Broadway production, in which he conducts segments on motion (seven-hundred-mile-perhour Ping-Pong balls), energy (flames dancing to sound waves), and more. As a member of the Physics Instructional Resource Association, Maiullo has brought the lab to life for audiences across the country, but this is his act’s first trial as a staged play. “We not only do the experiment, and show something kind of fantastic, but we make sure that they understand the physics behind it, too,” Maiullo explained to his campus paper. “We don’t want to be magicians.” The producer Eric Krebs, who’s worked on and off Broadway for forty years, promises a blend of “Stomp” and…

“NEXT TIME YOU go to jail, David, ask for a kosher meal. They have to give it to you, and the food is better.” This was the advice that Diane Goldstein, a retired police officer, gave to David Bronner, an activist in the movement to legalize marijuana, over dinner one night at an Upper East Side organic vegan restaurant. Bronner, an athletic-looking fortytwo-year-old with a ponytail, has been locked up three times (once for planting hemp seeds on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s lawn). Until recently, he was the president of Dr. Bronner’s Soaps, the company that his German-immigrant grandfather founded, in 1948, after escaping from an Illinois mental institution. Bronner now calls himself C.E.O., for Cosmic Engagement Officer. Last year, the company sold ninety-five million dollars’ worth of products, including…

I WAS STARING AT a brown sky. Just moments earlier, a researcher from the United Nations Ornithological Department had told me that fecal particulate from the city’s open sewage system made up an alarming proportion of the atmosphere in Kabul. The researcher was the sort of person who would say, “If you really want something to write about . . .” or “You’re looking for a story? What if I were to tell you . . . ,” as if, before meeting him, you had lived in darkness, scribbling claptrap of zero consequence to anybody. He’d invited me to lunch because he had some urgent information regarding birds. Something to do with the great migrations above the Hindu Kush, the desertification of Iranian wetlands, mass extinction. “Have you ever seen…

RIGHT NOW, THERE are hundreds, maybe thousands, of excellent ballet dancers in the United States, but interesting ballet choreographers are very, very rare. Of those who regularly show their work on these shores, only three are in the top tier: Alexei Ratmansky, the artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre; Christopher Wheeldon, the artistic associate of London’s Royal Ballet; and Mark Morris, who now and then takes time off from being the country’s foremost modern-dance choreographer to give us a ballet. In the past few years, though, one reason to go to New York City Ballet has been to watch a new choreographic talent, Justin Peck, inching upward. Peck joined City Ballet, as a dancer, in 2007, when he was nineteen. The following year, he took a dance-criticism course at Barnard, and…

TWO YEARS AGO, on a weekly BBC 1Xtra radio show, the American producer Diplo introduced his British listeners to a rising star from Norway. “His name is Kygo—you might have heard him,” Diplo said. “He keeps it around one hundred b.p.m.s. He keeps it sexy.” To anyone not accustomed to categorizing pop songs by tempo, a hundred beats per minute may seem fast, but, by the standards of electronic dance music, or E.D.M., which generally thumps along at one-twenty or more, Kygo’s languorous productions and remixes sound unexpectedly slow, better suited to swaying than to dancing. After this introduction came one of his most popular tracks: an unsolicited—which is to say, unauthorized— remix of “I See Fire,” by Ed Sheeran, the English strummer and warbler. Some electronic-music producers think like…