Innholdsfortegnelse for March 14, 2016 i The New Yorker

Sarah Stillman (“The List,” p. 50) has won several awards for her reporting on social issues, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She runs the Global Migration Program, at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Michael Schulman (The Talk of the Town, p. 28) will publish his first book, “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep,” in April. Jelani Cobb (“The Matter of Black Lives,” p. 34) received the 2016 Justice Trailblazer Award from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, for his work on the justice system’s impact on African-Americans. Damon Tabor (“The Greater the Sinner,” p. 42) has written for Harper’s and Rolling Stone. This is his first piece for The New Yorker. Chris Ware (Cover) is the author of “Building Stories.” He is one of sixteen artists featured…

L’immédiat The French director, artist, and performer Camille Boitel stages the New York première of his kinetic spectacle. The show combines theatre, circus, and acrobatics to create a live experience that swings over the edge of chaos into something barely categorizable: seven aerialists perform soaring stunts and lurching pantomime, interacting with shifting, tangled props that litter the stage, including piles of junk, worn wooden furniture, and clusters of lights. Boitel is a veteran in the schools of magic and contortionism, who began his work at age twelve, busking in the streets of Montauban. He’s recently toured this unruly production across Europe, Asia, and South America. (N.Y.U. Skirball Center, 566 LaGuardia Pl. nyuskirball.org. March 9-12 at 8 and March 13 at 3.) St. Patrick’s Open Day The Irish Arts Center…

THE OTHER DAY, in Echo Park, in Los Angeles, palm fronds swayed in the breeze and shirtless dudes hoverboarded around a man-made lake. Out on a wooden dock, two scruffy guys in baseball caps checked out a pigeon, which had waddled up to them. “He’s a good-looking bird,” one of the guys, Phil Matarese (whose cap read, “Captain”), commented. “They’re healthy out here,” said the other, Mike Luciano (cap: “The Critic”). Matarese and Luciano, Brooklyn transplants, are the co-creators of “Animals,” a weirdly tender animated series about New York City’s fauna—sex-crazed rats, feral felines with catnip bongs, lice—featuring the voices of comedians including Jon Lovitz, Molly Shannon, Wanda Sykes, Aziz Ansari, and Nathan Fielder. Jessica Chastain plays an Eastern European turkey. Eastern European turkey. The show is the result of…

One morning in 2007, Leah DuBuc, a twenty-two-year-old college student in Kalamazoo, began writing an essay for English class that she hoped would save her life. She knew that people like her had been beaten, bombed, shot at, killed. The essay aired details about her past that she’d long tried to suppress; by posting it on her class’s server, where anyone who Googled her name could find it, she thought she might be able to quiet the whispers, the threats, and possibly make it easier to find a job. Her story, she warned, “is not a nice one, but hopefully it will have a happy ending.” DuBuc had grown up in Howell, Michigan, a small town of berry and melon farmers. In high school, she had thrived. She had earned…

The Clavells weren’t the sort to play pranks, so the printed invitation to their annual Christmas party arrived after what Gerald and Charlotte’s son, Timothy, would call a “heads-up,” sent by e-mail, letting them know that both were invited to the event, at the Clavells’ apartment, on West Fifty-sixth Street. Gerald hadn’t seen Charlotte since their divorce, thirty-one years before, and this was the first time he’d seen her e-mail address. Whether she was on any social media he wouldn’t know, as he was not. It was a rather jaunty message from the Clavells, who were not jaunty people. Intellectually, they were clear thinkers, and, as for jauntiness, Rorra Clavell had never totally recovered from a hip replacement years earlier, and her husband constantly fretted about why anyone would read…

The new Terrence Malick film, “Knight of Cups,” sets off in hearty English style. We hear the voice of Sir John Gielgud, intoning the opening lines of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and the celestial cadences of Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” Short of arranging for tea to be served during screenings, there’s not much more that Malick could do to establish his Old World credentials. It comes as a surprise, therefore, that the next two hours are spent entirely on the West Coast: Los Angeles, to be precise, with a brief excursion to Caesar’s Palace, in Las Vegas, where the progress of even the most steadfast pilgrim would be brought to a lurching halt. Only by reading about the film, after the event, did I discover that…

PARTY PEOPLE Jill Lepore, in her article on the impact that communications technologies have on political parties, views the party system as one that can foster civic engagement and democratic governance, as opposed to causing an “atomizing of the electorate,” which is often the case in our current mediasaturated environment (“The Party Crashers,” February 22nd). It’s true that in the late nineteenth century American political parties acted as antidotes to an élite domination of politics, and helped inspire waves of electoral participation. By the midnineteenth century, as many as eighty per cent of the people who were eligible to vote in Presidential elections (white men) were doing so. But it was never clear that this participation— propelled by mass torchlight parades, which were similar to the drunken bacchanals that…

At half past five on Super Tuesday, as everyone awaited the returns from the primaries, Richard Nelson sat in a conference room at the Public Theatre. Nelson is a real-time playwright, best known for “The Apple Family Plays,” a four-play cycle about a fictional family in Rhinebeck, New York, where Nelson lives. Each play is set on a historic night—the 2010 midterms, the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the 2012 Presidential election, and the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination—and each opened on the day it takes place, with Nelson tweaking the script until the last moment, for verisimilitude. For the 2012 play, “Sorry,” he added material about Hurricane Sandy. “The trains were stopped at Croton—they didn’t go to Poughkeepsie for a while,” he said. “That was actually very helpful…

“I’m one big goose bump!” Peter Frampton said the other day, on visiting Electric Lady Studios, the music studio on Eighth Street, for the first time in decades. He found the control room where “Frampton Comes Alive!” was mixed, a little more than forty years ago. He remembered how Jerry Moss, a founder of A&M Records, sat at the console to listen to the mix of what was then a single disk. When it finished playing, Moss looked over the mixing board and said, “Where’s the rest?” “So we said, ‘You mean, you want a double album?’ ” Frampton recalled. “He said, ‘Yes, of course’!” Before “Comes Alive!,” Frampton had been an established British session musician (he had played guitar on George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass”), a member of…

On August 23, 2011, a magnitude-5.8 earthquake shook the Washington Monument for about twenty seconds, sending tourists on the observation deck down eight hundred and ninety-seven steps. One of the two strongest quakes ever recorded east of the Rockies, it fractured two dozen of the stone protrusions that hold up the marble slabs at the monument’s peak. That December, Congress appropriated half of the fifteen million dollars required to repair the obelisk, saying that the rest would have to be raised from private citizens. Within weeks, David Rubenstein, the co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm, announced that he would provide the funds. On June 2, 2013, Rubenstein joined the Secretary of the Interior and the head of the National Park Service to inspect the progress, atop the scaffolding.…

ALL THIS talk about diversity—in newspapers, on college campuses, at the Oscars—can be hard on a liberal white guy. How’s a sensitive Caucasian man—no Trumpite—supposed to deal with so much political climate change, so many “other” demands? Take women, for instance. They want equal pay. Shouldn’t they be in line for restitution, too? Then you have people of color lobbying for fair representation— whatever that means. And there’s the L.G.B.T. community, and— on and on. It’s enough to make you want to hand in your rhythm-challenged-dude card and light out for the territories, someplace where you can forget yourself. But you can’t, because you’re white, a stigmatized presence in a world that associates you with incomprehension, callousness, and a sort of confused humanity, if it sees you as human at…

“2 On,” Tinashe Kachingwe’s sinuous toast to late nights out, crashed the Top 40 in 2014. But early fans have a low tolerance for dismissive pop-starlet tags. Before her breakout, the Kentucky-born, L.A.-reared singer ditched a girl group to write and release three R. & B. albums from her bedroom while her Zimbabwean father and Iowan mother endured the thump from down the hall. Those hours paid off on “Aquarius,” Tinashe’s bold, protean label début, as will a decade of dance study, when she storms Webster Hall, on March 12. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Dean Blunt On a stray 2012 mix, the musicians Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland turned a sample of…

Every Friday night from 10:30 P.M. to 4 A.M., this subterranean dive bar on the Bowery morphs into an ecstatic, sweaty time portal to the swingin’ sixties. Drinks are beside the point, but they’re cheap enough (seven-dollar draft; fivebuck bottled Lone Star). Get something, finish it soon, and let the siren call of Chuck Berry seduce you onto the dance floor. The d.j. Jonathan Toubin has been spinning rare nineteen-fifties and sixties records weekly here since 2008, and the crowd is a melting pot of punk bartenders, twenty-somethings, and a couple of pepper-gray heads, who swivel and smile under the peeling disco ball. Few people recognize the roaring, crackling songs; even fewer can really dance the blues. It doesn’t matter. The evening’s not about proving you know the most obscure…

ON A RECENT Friday, thirty-two people sat waiting on exercise bikes at SoulCycle’s West Village studio. Some pedalled slowly, a few stretched, and at least two women checked their lip gloss. Most wore a piece of Soul-Cycle branded clothing. They were there for SoulCycle teacher tryouts. The chain charges customers thirty-four dollars for a forty-five-minute session. Instructor jobs are coveted. (A wall in the studio bore the company’s motto: “ATHLETE LEGEND WARRIOR RENEGADE ROCKSTAR.”) In January, Chelsea Clinton hosted a fund-raiser at the Tribeca studio, which brought in more than seventy-five thousand dollars for her mother’s campaign. She handpicked Laurie Cole, an instructor who acts on HBO shows, to lead the class. “Auditions are ‘American Idol’ on a bike,” Julie Rice, SoulCycle’s co-founder and chief talent officer, said. When it…

ON FEBRUARY 18th, as part of the official recognition of Black History Month, President Obama met with a group of African-American leaders at the White House to discuss civil-rights issues. The guests—who included Representative John Lewis, of Georgia; Sherrilyn Ifill, the director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund; and Wade Henderson, who heads the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights— were intent on pressing the President to act decisively on criminal-justice issues during his last year in office. Their urgency, though, was tempered by a degree of sentimentality, verging on nostalgia. As Ifill later told me, “We were very much aware that this was the last Black History Month of this Presidency.” But the meeting was also billed as the “first of its kind,” in that it…

High spring. The sounds at theirutmost registers. I am buildinga language with my bike. Shamemakes the wheels go, shamepumps its sick jet fuel.I am flying over tiny hills with moatsof purple flowers. My fantasyis evidence. My fantasy is a white skullgleaming through a bed of mulch.I let go of the handlebars and beatmy chest with shame’s gorilla fistuntil the trees get in my way.Nancy Drew before me, Nancy Drewbehind me, Nancy Drew on allsides of me, Lord hear my prayer.…

I’m sure Nature has disapproved of mefor years, as if it had overheardone of my silent screeds against it,and my insistence that only the artificialhas a real shot at becoming morethan we started with, designed,revised, something completely itself.If it could speak, Nature might sayit contains lilies, the strange beautyof swamps, the architectural artof spiders, the many et ceterasthat make the world the world.Nothing man-made can compete,Nature might say. Oh Naturehas been known to go on and on.And if it wanted to push things further,it could cite our sleek perfectionof bombs and instruments of torture,our nature so human we hidebehind words that disguise and justify.But that’s as generous as I want to bein giving Nature its say. I’ve seen itrandomly play its violence card—natural, no-motive crimeswith hail and rain and vicious…

ON THE FIRST page of Neel Mukherjee’s “A Life Apart” (Norton), we see the hero, Ritwik Ghosh, standing in a line in South Calcutta, as if he were at the bank. In fact, he is at the crematorium, waiting for a turn for his mother. Her body lies on a stretcher alongside him, covered except for her lolling head. Finally, a furnace becomes available. The stretcher is pushed down the rails and into the flames, and the doors slam shut. An hour and a half later, Ritwik is handed an earthenware bowl containing, he is told, his mother’s navel. (According to Mukherjee, there is a folk belief among Hindus that the navel is indestructible.) He must now go behind the crematorium, to the edge of the Ganges—a “dark slurry of…

Dan, the muted young I.R.A. terrorist of “High Dive” (Knopf), Jonathan Lee’s achingly good new novel, allows himself a moment during the mid-nineteen-eighties to contemplate Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide. Even while in the murderous thick of it, he feels the sort of bafflement that non-Muslims tend to experience when considering the ancient estrangement of Shia and Sunni: “Despite believing in a similar God,” he reflects of the Irish, “their ancestors disagreed over the sufficiency of Scripture, the completeness of certain words in a book, the authority and office of the Pope.” Sixteen years into the Troubles, Dan realizes that the violence in Ulster has claimed “not only the victims’ lives but large parts of the witnesses too. You disintegrated into the recriminations, the headlines, the pictures. . . . It…

The Life of Elves, by Muriel Barbery, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa). In this fantastical novel by the author of the best-seller “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” two girls born at the same hour on a snowy November day have otherworldly gifts: Clara is an Italian piano prodigy, and Maria, in France, can commune with nature. The pair communicate telepathically and are tasked with defending humankind in a supernatural war. The novel is essentially a parable about the power both of art, which abolishes the “border between earth and mind,” and of women. The heroines thrive under female tutelage and inhabit a world where “all who enter will know that woman is sovereign there.” Here Come the Dogs, by Omar Musa (New Press). This début novel,…