Innholdsfortegnelse for Jul-06-15 i The New Yorker

Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead Simulcast Twenty years ago, the Grateful Dead played its last show as a full group, at Soldier Field in Chicago. One month later, the collective’s co-founder and front man Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack. Though there have been both full and partial reunions since, none have been so anticipated as their return to Soldier Field, which is being billed as the final concerts that the remaining “core four”—Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann—will ever play together. Trey Anastasio, Jeff Chimenti, and Bruce Hornsby will join them. The shows will be available as a Pay-per-View broadcast and to stream online, but why watch at home when you can join fellow-fans? (The following venues will have…

“The cane is good,” Twyla Tharp said to a middle-aged man who had presented himself for her inspection. He was one of some hundred people of varying ages and shapes who showed up at a storefront space in Battery Park City on a humid Saturday afternoon with the intention of performing as a dancer that very night. For eleven seconds, precisely— Tharp is nothing if not precise, although she did concede that there would be a few seconds more of glory if one counted the time spent taking a bow. Tharp, one of the great choreographers of the modern age, is celebrating her fiftieth year of making dances with a program of new material and, come fall, will take a company of dancers on a tenweek tour that culminates at…

Ever since you were placed in the 99th percentile I’ve been trying to be exceptional— I made you the father of my dolls. I made you my in case of emergency. When we walked down the street I was the stranger. You were whatever moved you. Either you were a thoroughbred glistening through clay or you spoke a language you made up by the minute. Then you drove away to join the normal. O Lawyer, let me compose you. Let me leave you in the prodigal field, back between boyhood and the prematurely old. You gave me up for the word lovely. Listen, the North is kicking out at the door for you to be familiar.…

Five American families, each harboring a grave secret, took their seats around a vast dining table at the home of David Bradley, a Washington, D.C., entrepreneur who owns the media company that publishes The Atlantic. It was May 13, 2014, and in the garden beyond the French doors, where magnolias and dogwoods were in bloom, a tent had been erected for an event that Bradley’s wife, Katherine, was hosting the following evening. The Bradleys’ gracious Georgian town house, on Embassy Row, is one of the city’s salons: reporters and politicians cross paths at off-the-record dinners with Supreme Court Justices, software billionaires, and heads of state. The families weren’t accustomed to great wealth or influence. Indeed, most of them had never been to Washington before. Until recently, they had not known…

PREDICTING THE FUTURE Tad Friend’s portrait of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and his ilk is enlightening, if also somewhat disturbing (“Tomorrow’s Advance Man,” May 18th). The V.C.s of Silicon Valley are, after all, the financial engineers of the vast capital flows that are transforming the way the economy operates. But these people are not investing in the wheel, the internal-combustion engine, or the telephone. Playing roulette with other people’s money and, on occasion, hitting it big with a Web portal, a software platform, or a cell-phone app is not exactly “changing the world,” in the traditional sense. I am not convinced that data analytics and online-marketing tools can ever insure human rights or change the infrastructure for distributing water, food, or energy. I hate to be cynical, but…

The list of athletes who act is long, the reviews mixed. Kareem stole “Airplane!,” Shaq made “Kazaam,” and, somewhere in between, Michael Jordan, in “Space Jam,” was the best human actor in the scenes he shared with Bugs Bunny. “The challenge is getting them comfortable being silly,” Judd Apatow said the other night at the Beacon Theatre, where he was preparing to do standup with Amy Schumer, the writer and the star of his new movie, “Trainwreck.” Apatow has given cameos to athletes before—several Philadelphia Flyers hit on his wife, Leslie Mann, in “This Is 40”—but “Trainwreck” hands an entire role to LeBron James. “I wrote LeBron’s name into the script because he was the only basketball player I knew,” Schumer said. “And because I thought it would get Judd…

If someone uses Uber to get to the airport, is the driver an Uber employee, or an independent contractor using Uber to find customers? For companies in the so-called sharing economy—Lyft, Postmates, TaskRabbit, Instacart, and so on— there may be no more important question. A couple of weeks ago, a California labor commissioner gave her answer: she ruled that an Uber driver who had filed a claim against the company was, in fact, an employee. The ruling applied only to that particular worker and the only upshot was the reimbursement of the plaintiff’s car expenses. But, if other regulators and courts were to follow that decision, it isn’t just the future of Uber that would be transformed. The U.S. job market would be, too. We hear a lot these days…

WHAT IS YOUR MENTAL AGE? 1. What’s the word for the stuff you sprinkle on your food but it’s not pepper? No, not salt, but like salt but supposedly better for you because it doesn’t have salt in it. 2. What’s that thing that you put in the thing? The thing you take pictures with. That thing. What’s the thing you put inside that? 3. What’s the car that’s not a Toyota Camry? 4. Who’s the guy who isn’t Robert De Niro? 5. What is the little plastic person you used to play with called? 6. How do you spell the drink that’s made with rum, lime juice, and sugar, and comes with a tiny umbrella? 7. Off the wagon? On the wagon? Which is the good one, and by…

After so many study guides, so many practice tests and proficiency and achievement tests, it would have been impossible for us not to learn something, but we forgot everything almost right away and, I’m afraid, for good. The thing that we did learn, and to perfection— the thing that we would remember for the rest of our lives—was how to copy on tests. Here I could easily ad-lib an homage to the cheat sheet, all the test material reproduced in tiny but legible script on a minuscule bus ticket. But that admirable workmanship would have been worth very little if we hadn’t also had the all-important skill and audacity when the crucial moment came: the instant the teacher lowered his guard and the ten or twenty golden seconds began. At…

On September 6, 2006, a score of masked gunmen stormed into a night club in Uruapan, Michoacán, fired at the ceiling, and tossed five severed heads onto the white-tiled dance floor. Being narcotraficantes—members of one of the brutal drug cartels that effectively ruled large swaths of Mexico in the early years of this century— they also left a note. In towns along the border, boastful, taunting, and tendentious banners and placards, or narcomantas, were routinely hung up next to piles of corpses. This one read, “The Family doesn’t kill for money. It doesn’t kill women. It doesn’t kill innocent people, only those who deserve to die. Know that this is divine justice.” The assassins, or sicarios, as they’re called in Mexico, were members of La Familia Michoacana, a cartel that,…

JULY 2015 WEDNESDAY 1ST 8TH THURSDAY 2ND 9TH FRIDAY 3RD 10TH SATURDAY 4TH 11TH SUNDAY 5TH 12TH MONDAY 6TH 13TH TUESDAY 7TH 14TH LIANNE LA HAVAS BOASTS a rich and velvety alto, but the half-Greek, half-Jamaican performer has more to offer than a pretty voice. The twenty-five-year-old London native is a polished guitarist and an inventive songwriter who fuses soul, jazz, R. & B., and folk, and her fans include Prince, who chose the living room of her flat for an impromptu gig and a press conference announcing his London shows last year. Though La Havas’s first album, “Is Your Love Big Enough?,” from 2012, nabbed a Mercury Prize nomination, it didn’t quite push her into the spotlight. Her forthcoming follow-up effort, “Blood,” which is heralded by the breezy…

THE GREATEST AMERICAN POLITICAL FILMMAKER, John Ford, gets a twentyfilm retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image (July 3-Aug. 2), which spotlights the links between two of his crucial obsessions: mob violence and racial hatred. The series opens with “Young Mr. Lincoln,” from 1939, in which the fledgling attorney and future President, played by Henry Fonda, defends two poor young white men wrongly accused of murder—but only after physically saving them from being lynched by the angry townsfolk. In “Judge Priest” (July 4-5), from 1934, set in a Kentucky town in 1890, Ford depicts the official of the title (played by Will Rogers) protecting Jeff (Stepin Fetchit), a black workingman, from unjust prosecution. Perhaps twisting history but also defying segregationists of his own day, Ford shows the judge warmly welcoming…

299 Sands St., Brooklyn (347-689-4211) “Times down here ain’t what they used to be when the old stuff was flowing from the still,” a clay-pipe-puffing Vinegar Hill resident told the Times, in 1894. He went on, “The fellows who had luck have all moved up town, where they are living in brownstone houses, wearing diamonds, and driving fast horses.” The “fellows” were those who’d prospered from vast illicit distilling operations, until raids shut them down. Now new hooch flows in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, near former bootlegging battlefields; on summer Fridays and Saturdays, in the pleasant garden of the Kings County Distillery, one can enjoy a mint julep or a John Collins (apologies to Tom—it has bourbon in lieu of gin). The distillery is in a brick building with the…

Mark Vanhoenacker became a pilot late, after descents into academia and management consulting, but he became a pilot, steering Airbuses among the capitals of Europe, before he became a writer. In 2008, having logged more than three thousand hours in the cockpit, he published his first article, in Sanctuary, the journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. It was about shopping, not birds. He wrote more. He switched to 747s. Now he has eight thousand five hundred and thirty hours and forty-three minutes, and a book out, “Skyfaring.” It traverses wind, air, water, light, home, away, between, and how Mariah Carey got her name (from the gold-rush musical “Paint Your Wagon,” which features the Maria, a fictitious California gale). Vanhoenacker flies long-haul routes for British Airways: LHR to JFK, YVR, CPT,…

A week after his son turned one, Rodricus Crawford woke up a few minutes before 7 A.M. on the left side of his bed. His son was sleeping on the right side, facing the door. Crawford, who was twenty-three, reached over to wake him up, but the baby didn’t move. He put his ear on his son’s stomach and then began yelling for his mother. “Look at the baby!” he shouted. Crawford was lanky, with delicate features, high cheekbones, and a patchy goatee. He lived in a small three-bedroom house with his mother, grandmother, uncle, sister, and a younger brother in Mooretown, a neighborhood in Shreveport, Louisiana, bordered by a stretch of factories and next to the airport. His mother, Abbie, a housekeeper at the Quality Inn, rushed into the…

Last April, in New York City, three thousand people gathered for THRIVE, yet another TED-style ideas conference offering mental and spiritual rejuvenation to the business world. It was organized by the “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski and the new-media mogul Arianna Huffington, and conceived, Huffington said, to correct a problem that she had perceived in herself and other harried strivers. According to the event’s Web site, “The relentless pursuit of the traditional measures of success—money and power”— had resulted in an “epidemic of burnout”: stress-related illnesses, relationship problems. In addition to frantically pursuing the traditional measures, it was time to introduce a “ ‘Third Metric’—a combination of well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.” THRIVE’s speakers included women with expertise in the first two metrics: Katie Couric, Tory Burch. But a keynote…

On a freezing noon hour in April, people gather in Central Park, as they do each year, to read and listen to Shakespeare’s sonnets, complete, out loud, and in sequence. Together, the readers narrate, episodically, one of the strangest love stories on record. First, the poet urges a handsome young man to get married and have sex with a woman not from love or even lust, the woman remaining unnamed and unpictured, but, weirdly, from a selfish desire to make more kids as good-looking as he is. Then the poet confesses that he is in love with the young man, while trying to convince himself that good looks have a good moral effect in the world. The next set is all about the poet wanting desperately to have sex with…

THE BOOK OF ARON, by Jim Shepard (Knopf). Set in the Warsaw ghetto, this haunting novel imagines the relationship between the influential pediatrician and educator Janusz Korczak and Aron, a boy perpetually at odds with the world around him. “I had figured out that most people didn’t understand me and that those who did wouldn’t help,” Aron tells us. His only friends are delinquents who teach him how to steal. Together, they begin a successful enterprise smuggling goods in and out of the ghetto. After Aron betrays one of them and is cast out of his home, Korczak takes him into his orphanage. Shepard, narrating from Aron’s point of view, employs a matter-of-fact voice that can describe horrific events with chilling precision. THE LOVED ONES, by Mary-Beth Hughes (Grove…

At first glance, it is a mystery how the prosperously rustic town of Ojai, California, came to host one of the world’s great festivals of modern music. Tucked away in a lush valley at the edge of Los Padres National Forest, sixty-five miles northwest of Los Angeles, Ojai is not the sort of place where one would expect to find an aesthetic of musical experiment. Its crisp air, sycamore groves, and mountain views have long attracted millionaires, spiritual seekers, and bohemians. In the nineteen-twenties, the Indian guru Jiddu Krishnamurti and various personalities connected with the Theosophical movement took up residence in Ojai. More recently, the town has attracted a smattering of Hollywood celebrities, who seem to pass through its streets unmolested. Amid the self-discovery talks, spa treatments, and rounds of…

The pilot for Lifetime’s “UnREAL” culminates in an act of manipulation so skilled that the villains of “Dangerous Liaisons” might hiss in envy. Rachel (Shiri Appleby), a producer on a “The Bachelor”-like reality series, is struggling to extract an exit interview from Britney, who has been booted from the competition in the first round. But Britney won’t give in: she’s determined to deny the editors the requisite humiliating meltdown. “He’s such a great guy—and I’ve had a lovely time on the show,” she purrs, then drops the act, her eyes gone cold. “And I’m going to repeat that on loop until you let me go home.” “Stop rolling!” Rachel mutters, putting on a charade of her own, behaving as if she were so disgusted that she’s about to quit. “Can…