Innholdsfortegnelse for Jan-27-14 i The New Yorker

ELIZABETH KOLBERT (COMMENT, P. 19), a staff writer, is the author of “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” which will be published next month. LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE (“IN COLD MUD,” P. 24) is a writer for The New Yorker and an editor of The Talk of the Town. REBECCA MEAD (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 22) has been contributing to the magazine since 1997. Her new book, “My Life in Middlemarch,” comes out this month. PAUL RUDNICK (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 31) is the author of “Gorgeous,” his first young-adult novel. PAIGE WILLIAMS (“DROP DEAD, DETROIT!,” P. 32) teaches narrative nonfiction and edits Nieman Storyboard, at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. ALFRED CORN (POEM, P. 54) will publish “Unions,” his eleventh book of poems, in March. His second novel,…

IN 1990, THE AMERICAN photographer Carrie Mae Weems staged a series of black-and-white scenes at her own kitchen table, starring herself, alone and with other models. These weren’t straight-up self-portraits any more than Cindy Sherman’s “Film Stills” were outtakes from movies. Alternating the pictures with framed panels of folkloric text, Weems distilled complexities of race, class, and gender into the story of a black Everywoman who was defined not just by her relationships—as a lover, mother, breadwinner, friend—but by her comfort with solitude. In the process, she elevated the sapless polemics of identity politics to the lush realm of neorealism. Weems is now sixty. Since that careermaking project, her gimlet-eyed, starkly lyrical meditations on what constitutes ideas of difference have earned her a MacArthur “genius” grant, a Medal of Arts…

IN 1987, WHILE WORKING as an assistant in the Village Voice’s art department, I came across a strikingly laid-out book. It had photographs of unknown black people mixed in with photographs of movie stars like Ingrid Bergman, Clark Gable, and Judy Garland. It was a memoir, of sorts, called “People Who Led to My Plays,” by Adrienne Kennedy. I had never heard of her. This was the first paragraph: “More and more often as my plays are performed in colleges and taught in universities, people ask me . . . who influenced you to write in such a nonlinear way?” The book itself—a gorgeous amalgamation of black-American history, culture, and dreams—was nonlinear. I had never read such a representation of what it must be like for my sisters to live…

There are many things to fear in the apartments of strangers—the smell of weird food, the hair on the bar of soap, the petulant cat, the tumbleweeds of dust and lint. Yet Airbnb, the short-term home-rental company that was started in 2008, has prospered (2012 valuation: $2.5 billion) by connecting potential guests with some three hundred and fifty thousand hosts, managing around five hundred and fifty thousand properties, in thirty-four thousand cities. Hosts determine rates; Airbnb gets a transaction fee and posts guest-generated reviews on its Web site (and, for hosts, ratings of guests). It’s as simple as subletting on Craigslist, with a lower risk of bunking with a murderer. But legislators and hotel lobbyists have accused some New York hosts of violating a 2010 law that prohibits people from…

For decades, junior bankers and Wall Street firms had an unspoken pact: in exchange for reasonably high-paying jobs and a shot at obscene wealth, young analysts agreed to work fifteen hours a day, and forgo anything resembling a normal life. But things may be changing. Last October, Goldman Sachs told its junior investment-banking analysts not to work on Saturdays, and it has said that all analysts, on average, should be working no more than seventy to seventy-five hours a week. A couple of weeks ago, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said that analysts are expected to have four weekend days off a month. And, last week, Credit Suisse told its analysts that they should not be in the office on Saturdays. These changes may sound small, but, in the context…

For the past twenty-one years, L. Brooks Patterson has governed Oakland County, a large, affluent suburb of Detroit. Oakland County embodies fiscal success as much as Detroit does financial ruin, and Patterson, the county executive, tends to behave as though his chief job in life were to never let anyone forget it. One week in September, he gave me an extended tour of his empire, in a chauffeured minivan. Near the end of the first day, we headed toward Lake St. Clair, at the mouth of the Detroit River, for a party on a yacht. Patterson sat in the front passenger seat. Over his shoulder, he said, “Anytime I talk about Detroit, it will not be positive. Therefore, I’m called a Detroit basher. The truth hurts, you know? Tough shit.”…

Where do slackers go to get their jollies? Where do they spend hours every day? Where commit their most moronic follies? In the Grünewald Café. The dull-eyed types who sit alone? They’re boozers Who dose their coffee with Grand Marnier. No one ever tells them they are losers In the Grünewald Café. You hadn’t seen the mobster’s girlfriend. Tasty, But are you sure her goon has gone away? It’s not so wise to come on overhasty In the Grünewald Café. You sidle up and say, “Can I get you a drink?” She’s shuffling cards and seems to want to play. A smile means “Try your luck, guy,” don’t you think, In the Grünewald Café? Card game done, why not get down to cases? Up close her blue-green eyes seem less…

THE GUTS, by Roddy Doyle (Viking). In the decades since Jimmy Rabbitte got together the Commitments, the band that, in Doyle’s first novel, brought American soul music to nineteen-eighties Dublin, he has carved out a grand life for himself. He has a lovely, intelligent wife, great kids, and a neat job helping long-lost Irish bands make money off their cult status. But when a cancer diagnosis makes him confront his mortality, his comfortable existence threatens to come apart. Although the novel leans heavily on staples of midlife crisis (an extramarital affair, reconnection with old friends), Doyle’s dialogue and his depictions evoke the warmth and vigor of a complicated but joyful family life. FAMOUS WRITERS I HAVE KNOWN, by James Magnuson (Norton). In this satire of the creative-writing industry, Frankie…

“Machinal” (a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at the American Airlines) is hard to get a handle on and often hard to handle, because it’s a flop and a hit. The hit part has less to do with Rebecca Hall’s acting than with her presence: she’s beautiful, with dark features set in skin as white as a cloud. Looking up at her long form, as she turns this way and that—she has an interesting, off-center rhythm that slows the action down even as the script and the director want to speed it up—you may mistake the subtlety of her movements for depth, but clouds are surface attractions, and Hall’s performance is mostly just that. “Machinal,” which premièred in 1928—this staging, directed by Lyndsey Turner, is the play’s first Broadway revival—was written…

THE ROOT OF THE MATTER Michael Pollan reports on a debate over whether plants have intelligence; they don’t (“The Intelligent Plant,” December 23rd & 30th). The property being ascribed to plants as intelligence is shared by all organisms, even the single-celled amoeba. Life, like obscenity, is easy to recognize but hard to define. Still, we can identify general attributes. Growth is one, replication another. But these are in sufficient: a crystal that grows, splits in half, and grows more is not alive. Organisms constantly sense their environment and adjust their conditions to maintain some kind of optimality. This is called acclimation (or, over the long term, adaptation) and represents a fundamental attribute of the living state. Intelligence makes humans superb acclimators. It depends on nerves, cells with highly ramified…

14 E. 60th St. (212-390-8060) GEORGETTE FARKAS WAS THE HEAD of public relations for Daniel Boulud, the famous French chef, when she decided to open a French place of her own. Rotisserie Georgette has a simple conceit—roast chicken—but it’s a strikingly sophisticated space, with a clientele to match. The restaurant has many draws, but the second-best thing about it is its location. It’s on the Upper East Side, which means there is finally somewhere to go for something other than a salad after a hectic morning with the crowds at the Met. The best thing about the restaurant is the smell coming from the giant brass-trimmed ovens at the back of the dining room, where Pennsylvania chickens roast slowly in rotation. You can get one stuffed with wild mushrooms, draped…

Bushwick Book Club In January, 2009, the musician Susan Hwang founded this monthly event where local musicians perform original pieces inspired by a preselected text. The first book was Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions,” an appropriate choice for the anything-goes Bushwick venue Goodbye Blue Monday, whose name was an alternate title to Vonnegut’s novel. Every month features a different book, but Januarys are reserved for Vonnegut. For its fifth anniversary, on Jan. 22, the show draws from “Welcome to the Monkey House,” his short-story anthology. There will be performances by the joke-folker Phoebe Kreutz; the energetic pair Kenichi (Ken) Minami and Adam Aron Amram, who perform as Ken South Rock; and Hwang herself. (1087 Broadway, Brooklyn. 718-453-6343.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The Winter Antiques Show, the grande dame of New…

The Campbell Brothers—Chuck, Phil, and Darick—play a specialized strain of gospel music called Sacred Steel. Sacred Steel features lap and pedal steel guitars, and it is indigenous to the House of God Church, a schismatic Pentecostal church, whose headquarters are in Nashville. There is a House of God church in Brooklyn, at 9024 Ditmas Avenue, and one in Harlem, at 127 West 128th Street, where the Campbells played about a year ago. The Campbells, who have a new CD and performed at Lincoln Center, as part of the 2013 White Light Festival, live in Rochester, New York. The other morning, they got up at three-thirty and drove to the city to have breakfast at Katz’s Delicatessen, on East Houston Street. Chuck and Darick were on their way to North Carolina,…

Last summer, I signed up for a tenmile trail run at the Northstar California Resort, a ski hill near Lake Tahoe. It was a bright, cool morning, and the run took place on piney mountain trails. My companions, five young professionals, and I chatted as we jogged. Things were good. Trail running isn’t so bad! I thought, for the first time in my athletic career. Then, at a bend in the path, I heard whoops, and blood-curdling screams. It sounded like a village being attacked by marauding barbarians. In a clearing in the woods were two metal dumpsters, each eight feet wide and thirty feet long, filled with nine thousand gallons of melting ice, mixed with mud, to create a near-freezing slush. Ladders were propped up against the sides of…

She seems a mere girl really, small-breasted and slim, her body luminescent next to Adam, who scratches his head in mild perplexity. So many baubles hang from the tree it didn’t hurt to pick one. The snake is a quicksilver curve on a branch she is almost young enough to swing from. The garden bores her anyway: no weedy chaos among the flowers and vegetables; the animals so tame you can hardly tell the lamb from the lion, the doe from the stag whose antlers outline Adam’s modesty. She is like that teen-age girl who wandered from the mall last week not to be seen again, the world before her glittering and perilous.…

At first, it was great. Sure. It always is. She cuddled a frog, wishing for more, and—presto! A handsome prince who doted on her. It meant the end of her marriage, of course, but her ex was something of a toad himself, who had a nasty habit of talking with his mouth full and a tongue good for nothing but licking stamps. The prince was adorable—all the girls at the bridge club, squirming with envy, said so—though you could still see the effects his previous residence had had on him. He had heavy-lidded eyes and a wide mouth like a hand puppet’s, his complexion was a bit off, and his loose-fitting skin was thin and clammy. His semen had a muddy taste, like the pond he came from, and…

“More and more we can see that the question is not whether we are ‘individuals,’” Chang-rae Lee writes in “On Such a Full Sea” (Riverhead), his new, dystopian novel. “The question, then, is whether being an ‘individual’ makes a difference anymore.” It seems doubtful, in Lee’s sombre future. Afflicted by swine-and bird-flu epidemics and a profound change in the climate, America, now known simply as the Association, has split into three separate social groups. At the top sit the Charters, a small professional class that has corralled the country’s remaining resources and withdrawn into gated villages. Catering their dinner parties and keeping their cars perpetually waxed are the “service people,” who live in the land beyond, known as the counties. “You better have it while you have it” is the…

Ariel Rechtshaid, a wiry thirty-four-year-old producer who has been nominated for a Grammy as Producer of the Year, has no signature sound and doesn’t work in any particular genre more than others. Rechtshaid, who is from Los Angeles, has a perversely simple method—he lets artists sound the way they want, and then he puts his thumb on the scale and makes them sound a bit more exciting. His work on Vampire Weekend’s “Modern Vampires of the City,” Sky Ferreira’s “Ghost” E.P., and HAIM’s “Days Are Gone” earned him his nomination, though this is an insufficient accounting of his career. It is not hard to imagine why artists get along with Rechtshaid. He speaks evenly and openly, is rarely argumentative, and favors pants that would be pajamas in New York but…

MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Museum of Modern Art Isa Genzken The German sculptor’s sporadic output, abrupt stylistic changes, and personal vagaries have kept her at the margins of art-world notice, until now. This retrospective finds coherence in works that range from minimalist sculpture, charged with cryptic emotions, from the nineteen-seventies, to recent hilarious assemblages, featuring plastic toys and gussied-up mannequins, which secrete a steely aesthetic discipline. Unifying it all is a brash spirit that is strangely both celebratory and bedevilled. Genzken takes on the ideals of modern art and architecture along with the joys and the anxieties of life in contemporary cities. Her work employs vernacular materials, pop-cultural allusions, and seemingly slapdash procedures to mock—while also exploiting—the passive-aggressive obduracy of classic minimalism. Getting to the point of taking Genzken seriously…

355 Bowery (646-590-4244) You enter this night spot by walking through an inviting, larger-than-life photograph from the seventies that’s superimposed on its outside wall. It shows five stylish women in front of a Chinatown steak house run by the family of Christina Chin, a fashion-magazine creative director, who opened the bar last year with her friends Danielle Levitt, a photographer, and Caroleyn Ng. Its motto is “Friends always come first.” “Two of the owners grew up together,” a bartender named Patrick said on a recent evening. He wore a skinny tie and had the hair style of a young Crispin Glover. The bar’s interior is retro L.E.S.: red-and-black, geometric, boozy, meaty, with lamps that resemble chess players in “Through the Looking Glass.” As the playlist veered pleasantly through eras—Devo, the…

Sitting in traffic destroys the soul. In the Hobbesian logic of a jam, each car becomes every other car’s enemy, and life’s purposefulness turns on itself. Time dilates. The NPR headlines roll by, then roll by again. Inching your way toward the tauntingly designated E-Z Pass lane, you grow to despise the man in the gray Audi, but it’s the woman in the blue Subaru who cuts you off. Progress slows until you reach a standstill. You begin to fantasize that you’re the victim of a malevolent force, that your lane has been singled out for some sort of cruel test or act of vengeance. This is a sign that you’ve lost touch with reality—unless, of course, you live in New Jersey. Last week, as the scandal inevitably known as…

Jen Bervin, a visual artist and a poet, first read Emily Dickinson as most people who read Emily Dickinson do, in a poetry collection aimed at highschool students. It was not until Bervin was getting her master’s degree in poetry, at the University of Denver, that she first saw a page in Dickinson’s own hand. “Seeing what the poems looked like changed everything,” Bervin explained one recent afternoon, in her studio, in Gowanus. “What I was responding to was the visual composition.” Dickinson’s editors had often given her poems line breaks that differed from those on the manuscripts. In addition, her pages were covered with tiny crosses and other markings that had not been preserved in any printed edition. “It seemed to me that what she was doing was much…

1. True or false: The map of New Jersey resembles a policeman, and if you look closely you can see his cap and his profile. Answer: False. The map of New Jersey resembles a corrupt policeman, and if you look closely you can see the brand-new hot tub in his back yard, his place in the Bahamas, and his wife’s new implants. 2. What should Teresa Giudice, the Real Housewife of New Jersey who’s been indicted for financial fraud, blame her troubles on? (a) Her unnaturally low hairline. (b) Whoever told her that Tuscan-style kitchens are ever a good idea. (c) The fact that, according to her blog, she once visited a Florida steak house where “they give you a personalized ‘love bone’ with your name carved in it. So…

On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Barack Obama sat in the office cabin of Air Force One wearing a look of heavy-lidded annoyance. The Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic achievement and, for all its limitations, the most ambitious social legislation since the Great Society, half a century ago, was in jeopardy. His approval rating was down to forty per cent—lower than George W. Bush’s in December of 2005, when Bush admitted that the decision to invade Iraq had been based on intelligence that “turned out to be wrong.” Also, Obama said thickly, “I’ve got a fat lip.” That morning, while playing basketball at F.B.I. headquarters, Obama went up for a rebound and came down empty-handed; he got, instead, the sort of humbling reserved for middle-aged men who stubbornly refuse…

People don’t ordinarily self-medicate by writing a book, but “My Age of Anxiety” (Knopf) is an attempt at recovery by a man whom modern psychiatry has failed. The man is Scott Stossel, a successful journalist (he is currently the editor of The Atlantic), now in his forties, who has suffered all his life from an acute anxiety disorder. When he was a child, he had terrible separation anxiety; as he grew up, he acquired phobias about public speaking, flying, fainting, heights, closed spaces, germs, vomiting, and cheese. Many people have an aversion to those things (cheese excepted), and, given the option, go out of their way to avoid them. But, faced with the prospect of a plane trip or a speaking engagement or sometimes even a squash match or a…

The third season of “Sherlock” opens with an homage to its online fans, but tensions between the classic detective story and its audience go way back. In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed Sherlock Holmes, chucking him off Reichenbach Falls. Protesters wore black armbands in the streets. Even the author’s mother was opposed, writing to him, “You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!” A few years later, Conan Doyle gave in and rolled back the rock, but Sherlockians call the period in between the Great Hiatus. According to Anne Jamison’s terrific “Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World,” when the author retreated his fans stepped in, writing their own Sherlock mysteries: the origin of modern fan fiction. The men behind “Sherlock,” which airs in the U.S. on PBS, are major…

The best way to see “Like Father, Like Son” is in a gang of four. Take a geneticist, a behaviorist, and a childcare expert, go to a whiskey bar afterward, and make a night of it. There is much to thrash out, although the film itself, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, surveys its traumas with a tranquil eye. The hero is Ryota (Masaharu Fukuyama), who is hard to rattle and harder still to like. He is married to Midori (Machiko Ono), and they have a son, Keita (Keita Ninomiya), who is six. “He takes after my wife in his calm nature and kindness to others,” Ryota says, and while the boy could be more diligent, especially at the piano, he is loved by his parents and furnished with whatever he needs.…