Innholdsfortegnelse for March 7, 2016 i The New Yorker

Dexter Filkins (Comment, p. 17), the author of “The Forever War,” joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2011. Ian Frazier (The Talk of the Town, p. 20) will publish “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces” in June. David Owen (“Dirty Hands,” p. 22) is working on a book about water, based on his article “Where the River Runs Dry,” which appeared in the May 25, 2015, issue of the magazine. Seamus Heaney (Poem, p. 27) was a poet and a translator, who died in 2013. His translation of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, excerpted in this issue, will be published in the U.S. in May. Peter Hessler (“Living-Room Democracy,” p. 30) is a staff writer living in Cairo. “Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West” is one…

Four days before the Academy Awards, Russell Simmons’s newmedia company, All Def Digital, hosted its own movie-awards show, a D.I.Y. response to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign. “We were watching the controversy around the Oscars unfold, and it occurred to us that every Wednesday night, yards away from where the Oscars are held, we run a standup-comedy night,” Sanjay Sharma, All Def Digital’s president, said last week. Tony Rock, a younger brother of Chris Rock (this year’s Oscar host), emcees. The first thought was to do an Oscars-themed night, but “that quickly snowballed and took on a life of its own.” Sharma and his team put together the awards show in ten days, after making a quick deal with the Fusion network to air it opposite the Academy Awards. All Def’s standup…

IN ANTONIN SCALIA’S thirty years on the Supreme Court, his name became a byword for social conservatism. And when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the Senate would refuse to consider any replacement President Obama nominates it was natural that opponents of samesex marriage and abortion were relieved. Yet Scalia’s death will have only a limited impact on the culture wars, because regarding many social issues he was already in the minority on the Court. But there is one area where the question of his replacement has huge consequences: business. As a member of the Court’s conservative majority, Scalia played a key role in moving American law in a more corporate-friendly direction. Now that majority is gone, and a huge amount rides on what happens next. Under Chief Justice…

When we recognize we “think again” without knowing what or if we thought before. I confuse copper with brass. To recognize is almost always a pleasure; perhaps it is pleasure itself. I confuse Melissa with Melissa. To recognize is not only to give something a name but to give it the very name that was waiting for it somewhere as if thing and name had been sad without each other. That’s a woman in an arctic-fox costume singing, “Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, baby.” I confuse worry with * Darkness in the shape of leaves flows over a building; black ellipses on the bay slipping and falling into place…

A stoner comedy about two woke girls, created by the best friends Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, “Broad City” launched, in 2009, as a set of shaggy, self-produced Web sketches. In 2014, it evolved into a confident sitcom début on Comedy Central, produced by Amy Poehler. From the start, the show attracted blazing devotees. Two years ago, when Jacobson and Glazer performed at the Bell House, in Brooklyn, the crowd around me was screaming as if we were at a Beatles concert, which maybe we were. In a post-“Louie” world, in which all the best sitcoms deal in melancholy and rage, “Broad City” offers something zany, warmhearted, and sweetly liberatory, like a piñata spilling out Red Hots, Plan B, and pot snickerdoodles. In the grand TV-sitcom tradition, Jacobson and Glazer…

Mr. Splitfoot, by Samantha Hunt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). This gripping novel alternates between two story lines: in one, the budding con artists Nat and Ruth struggle to survive in an abusive Christian foster home; in the other, set some years in the future, Ruth, inexplicably rendered mute, leads her niece, Cora, on a journey across New York State on foot. The narratives, which twist together into a shocking dénouement, are marked by ghost stories, from Nat and Ruth’s forays into the world of mediums and séances to Cora’s struggle to piece together her aunt’s past. “History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other,” one character tells Cora, and the novel’s pleasures lie in the intersections between the two. The Past, by Tessa Hadley (Harper). An extended family…

THE DANGER OF CHEAP OIL James Surowiecki provides an effective tutorial on the correlation between oil-price ups and downs and the state of the stock market (“Tanking,” February 8th & 15th). But in concluding that, on balance, low oil prices help the economy, Surowiecki stops short of making a larger point: more affordable oil may seem like a boon for the economy now, but, when climate change is taken into consideration, it will ultimately have a negative effect. Low prices stimulate an increase in oil use and an intensification in greenhouse-gas emissions. Promoting fossil-fuel consumption after the climate-change conference in Paris could damage the fragile international momentum that it fostered. The United States’ proposed carbon-reduction policy focusses on power-plant coal combustion, but oil accounts for an even greater share…

Nialls Fallon, a proprietor of Maiden Lane— America’s only tinned-seafood bar—grew up eating canned tuna and oysters, which he would heap with cream cheese on saltines. Working late nights as a general manager at Torrisi Italian Specialties, Fallon found himself repurposing the childhood snack as the perfect post-work bite: nutritious, inexpensive, exceptionally storage-friendly. “It makes sense that it’s sailor food,” Nialls said, explaining that the establishment’s name is a nod to the congregational hub of sailors in port cities around the world. On a recent wintry Friday, the concrete wraparound bar filled up with a leather-jacketed thirty-something set while a d.j. spun Teddy Pendergrass next to a parked pram. The baby, a three-month-old who did not object to old-school R. & B., gazed contentedly at the pineplanked ceiling while her…

THE ACTRESS ALISON PILL sat at the bar at Karaoke Boho on a slow Monday night in the West Village, paging through binders of songs. “I’m looking for something new-country that fits my voice,” she said. There was no rush: the only other customer had used the restroom, then left. She went on, “I moved here from Toronto at eighteen to act better and more, but I looked like I was twelve, so I smoked to seem sophisticated—and it lowered my voice to a mezzo.” Did it also make her more sophisticated? “Yeah!” How could she tell? “When I started dating men in their thirties.” Pill, now thirty herself, and married to a man who’s forty, had come from the set of her new ABC drama, “The Family,” which débuts…

IN 2010, Lotan Fisher and Ron Schwartz—Israeli bridge players in their early twenties—were members of the team that won the World Junior Teams Championship. The following year, their team won the European Youth Bridge Team Championships and they were invited to compete in a number of tournaments that included most of the world’s top players. During the next few years, they finished at or near the top in a remarkable number of those tournaments. Bridge is a card game for four people. Like doubles tennis, it’s played two on two—although at a bridge table the partners sit opposite each other. (The seats are designated by compass points: North-South versus East-West.) There are many millions of players worldwide, and major tournaments attract thousands of entrants, but the arrival of new talent…

America’s war in Afghanistan, which is now in its fifteenth year, presents a mystery: how could so much money, power, and good will have achieved so little? Congress has appropriated almost eight hundred billion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan; a hundred and thirteen billion has gone to reconstruction, more than was spent on the Marshall Plan, in postwar Europe. General David Petraeus, a principal architect of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, encouraged the practice of pumping money into the economy of Afghanistan, where the per-capita G.D.P. at the time of the invasion was around a hundred and twenty dollars. He believed that money had helped buy peace during his command of American forces in Iraq. “Employ money as a weapons system,” Petraeus wrote in 2008. “Money can be ‘ammunition.’ ” The…

In 2005, the Seattle rapper Macklemore released his début album, “The Language of My World.” Its impact was modest, confined mostly to the Northwest. In a song titled “White Privilege,” he examined the tensions of his life as a white rapper: “Where’s my place in a music that’s been taken by my race / Culturally appropriated by the white face?” It was an honest, questing attempt to face the guilt of the gentrifier, wary of what he embodies yet pleased with the new view. The song also seemed to suggest that Macklemore was somehow different, blessed—or burdened—with slightly more self-consciousness than other white hip-hop artists or fans. “So where does this leave me? / I feel like I pay dues but I’ll always be a white MC / I give…

New York’s flourishing repertory-film scene is getting even more ambitious with the opening, this Friday, of Metrograph, a new two-screen venue on the Lower East Side. The theatre will offer new independent and foreign films along with classic fare, programmed by Jake Perlin and Aliza Ma. The inaugural series, “Surrender to the Screen,” features movies in which moviegoing looms large, including Tsai Ming-liang’s “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show,” and Brian De Palma’s “Femme Fatale.” CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera Otto Schenk’s 2006 production of Donizetti’s farce “Don Pasquale”—a slapstick affair created and heretofore presented as a showcase for the irresistible charms of Anna Netrebko—provides a vehicle for the company début of the Italian soprano Eleonora Buratto. Joining her in the small ensemble cast are the…

Worldwide Play-In Weekend The Associated Chamber Music Players prompt musicians around the world to host their own “play-in,” big or small, in the comfort of their homes or in a shared public space; the sum of these scattered private gatherings will be an indefinite performance unstageable at any one venue. Rizzoli Bookstore, serving as a local hub, has invited several chamber-music ensembles to play in its salon. The event also launches an ongoing music series presented by Rizzoli in collaboration with the A.C.M.P. that will feature a monthly showcase of live music meant to brighten bookshelf perusals. (1133 Broadway. 212-759-2424. March 6.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES It’s Armory Week in New York, so named after the giant international art fair—the Armory Show— that’s held yearly in gallery spaces filling two…

Marina Litvinenko’s husband, Alexander (Sasha) Litvinenko, was poisoned to death with a radioactive substance called polonium 210 in London in November of 2006. After his murder, as she told an audience at the Brooklyn Public Library recently, “I wanted to know who killed my husband.” She was speaking to the crowd via Skype, so the view of her on the screen at the front of the auditorium was from desk level. It showed a slim, red-haired woman in a brown jacket with a Nehru collar in front of a bookshelf in an apartment. At first, her eyelids kept almost closing; it was 7:45 p.m. in Brooklyn, 12:45 a.m. in London. Mrs. Litvinenko had just accomplished something that no one in power had encouraged her to do. Her husband, a former…

Elsewhere Anchises, Fatherly and intent, was off in a deep green valley Surveying and reviewing souls consigned there, Those due to pass to the light of the upper world. It so happened he was just then taking note Of his whole posterity, the destinies and doings, Traits and qualities of descendants dear to him, But seeing Aeneas come wading through the grass Towards him, he reached his two hands out In eager joy, his eyes filled up with tears And he gave a cry: “At last! Are you here at last? I always trusted that your sense of right Would prevail and keep you going to the end. And am I now allowed to see your face, My son, and hear you talk, and talk to you myself? This is…

Seen from the outside, AltSchool Brooklyn, a private school that opened in Brooklyn Heights last fall, does not look like a traditional educational establishment. There is no playground attached, no crossing guard at the street corner, and no crowd of children blocking the sidewalk in the morning. The school is one floor up, in a commercial building overlooking Montague Street. On the building’s exterior is a logo: a light-blue square, with rounded corners, bearing the word “alt.” It looks like an iPhone app awaiting the tap of a colossal finger. Inside, the space has been partitioned with dividers creating several classrooms. The décor evokes an ikea showroom: low-slung couches, beanbags, clusters of tables, and wooden chairs in progressively smaller sizes, like those belonging to Goldilocks’s three bears. There is no…

THE CHILDREN WANTED to play Buttony. “All right,” Miss Lewis said, and she clapped her hands five times, in the rhythm that meant they must be quiet and copy her. They were quiet and copied her. “All right,” she said, with that smile she reserved for the sleepy, silly midafternoon. “We’ll play. Joseph, get the button.” The children approved the justice of this appointment; that was apparent in the small, satisfied sigh they made together. They watched Joseph walk to Miss Lewis’s desk. Joseph was a compact, deliberate boy, and his straight black hair fell to his shoulders. He wore his uniform in a way that seemed gentlemanly but at the same time casual. He was both kind and beautiful, and they loved him. The button lay in a special…

I’m always somewhat surprised to discover how many of the writers and thinkers I’ve admired over the years grew up reading Eugene O’Neill with a passion equal to my own. For years, I thought of O’Neill, who spoke so deeply to my adolescent self, as a kind of private pleasure. So I experienced something of a jolt when, in 2006, Joan Did ion told me, during an interview, that as a girl she’d read all O’Neill’s works in one summer, captivated by his theatricality. Mike Nichols, in a 2016 PBS “American Masters” program, described how much O’Neill meant to him, too. What impressed me, as I watched Did ion’s and Nichols’s eyes light up at the thought of those maddening sexist, racist, restless, complicated, and important dramas, was how little…