Innholdsfortegnelse for Feb-03-14 i The New Yorker

EYAL PRESS (“A BOTCHED OPERATION,” P. 40) is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge, at New York University, and the author of “Absolute Convictions” and, more recently, “Beautiful Souls.” AMY DAVIDSON (COMMENT, P. 19), a senior editor at the magazine, writes the Close Read blog on newyorker.com. PATRICIA MARX (“A TALE OF A TUB,” P. 26) is the co-author, with Sarah Payne Stuart, of the humor book “Home Colleging,” which comes out in May. WIS³AWA SZYMBORSKA (POEM, P. 28), who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, died in 2012. Her last poetry collection was “Monologue of a Dog.” TEDDY WAYNE (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 32) is the author of the novel “The Love Song of Jonny Valentine,” which comes out in paperback on February…

THE MASTER PERCUSSIONIST STEVEN SCHICK, who will present a two-night, one-man survey of his repertory this week at Miller Theatre, grew up on a farm near Clear Lake, Iowa. His earliest musical memory is of his mother playing Chopin on the piano late at night while the wind howled outside. “I remember the wind as much as the Chopin,” he said recently, on the phone from San Diego, where he lives. “And I remember the sound of the ice on the lake breaking up—this glass-wind-chime effect, as a huge wave of ice cubes broke on the shore. I remember wondering why that wasn’t music, too.” The art of percussion is an endless patrol on the border between music and noise. In classical music, it is among the newest of genres:…

RENNIE HARRIS HAS SAID that he never really liked most of the work that he choreographed. That is a minority view. Harris, age fifty, is the most respected—and, to my knowledge, the most brilliant—hip-hop choreographer in America. Hiphop dancing is very hard to transfer to the stage. As in other “street” forms, most of the dances are short, improvisational solos, and they don’t travel much. They’re meant to be done more or less in one spot. Also, because they have so short a time to make their point, they do not build gradually. They go from here to the moon in one shot. Yet Harris—and, in my experience, he alone—has created hip-hop productions that actually work as unified, evening-length shows. The first was “Rome & Jewels” (2000), a hip-hop adaptation…

You’ve probably seated your share of dinner parties: writing the names of the guests on place cards (wishing your handwriting was better) and trying to calculate who might thrive next to whom. So imagine the dinner is for some nine hundred of the most famous and sought-after people in the world—luminaries who, at any other party, would be the cynosure of all eyes but on this evening might not even merit favorable placement. That was the challenge facing Clive Davis, the music mogul, and his son, Doug Davis, an entertainment lawyer and sports agent, late last week, as they met in Bungalow 3A at the Beverly Hills Hotel to seat the Davises’ annual pre-Grammys gala, which is always held at the Beverly Hilton, the night before the awards. Each guest’s…

Troy Andrews, the horn player better known as Trombone Shorty, and Jonathan Batiste, the hot-shot pianist, first met when they were twelve and eleven, at jazz camp, in their home town of New Orleans. Andrews was already something of a star; he’d been a bandleader since he was six. Batiste had only just taken up the piano, having grown up playing percussion with his family, in the Batiste Brothers Band. Andrews had admirers, a circle of kids who tried to talk the way he did. Batiste kept to himself and didn’t talk at all. They reconnected in high school, at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and became friends. Andrews started a band called Orleans Avenue, with Batiste on keys. They skipped classes to teach each other musical tricks.…

Are there good scientific studies that show that drinking sugar-sweetened soda increases the risk for obesity? . . . Among the reviews with no conflicts of interest, 10 of 12, or 83.3 percent, reported that sugary drinks were directly associated with weight gain or obesity. The conclusions of studies supported by [the sugar-sweetened-soda] industry were a mirror image: five of six—the same 83.3 percent—reported that there was insufficient evidence to draw a conclusion. —The Times. QUESTION: Are sugar-sweetened sodas associated with weight gain, or are the tasty, happiness-producing beverages associated with attractiveness, wealth, popularity, and intelligence? HYPOTHESIS: Sugar-sweetened sodas are associated with attractiveness, wealth, popularity, and intelligence, owing to the wonderful, natural sugar that sweetens the beautifully packaged sodas. MATERIAlS: • Sugar-sweetened soda (Mmm! Just writing that is making me…

We were by the hedge that separates our properties when I asked our neighbors about their souls. I said it with a smile, the way one asks such a thing. They were somewhat like us, I thought, more than middle-aged, less dull than most. Yet they seemed to have no interest in disputation, our favorite game, or any of the great national pastimes like gossip and stories of misfortunes about people they disliked. In spite of these differences, kindred was a word we often felt and used. The man was shy, though came to life when he spotted an uncommon bird, and the woman lively, sometimes even funny about barometer readings and sudden dips in pressure, the general state of things. We liked their affection for each other and for…

“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves.” So starts “Naked Lunch,” the touchstone novel by William S. Burroughs. That hardboiled riff, spoken by a junkie on the run, introduces a mélange of “episodes, misfortunes, and adventures,” which, the author said, have “no real plot, no beginning, no end.” It is worth recalling on the occasion of “Call Me Burroughs” (Twelve), a biography by Barry Miles, an English author of books on popular culture, including several on the Beats. “I can feel the heat” sounded a new, jolting note in American letters, like Allen Ginsberg’s “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” or, for that matter, like T. S. Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month.” (Ginsberg was a close friend;…

Cashiers at a supermarket endure another day of monotony. A war reporter is visited by the spectre of the slain American soldier whose corpse he photographed. A Pakistani woman fights for justice after being ritualistically raped. An effete young man whose proclivities put him at odds with his family commits suicide. No one will accuse the composers participating in the Prototype Festival—which, in mid-January, presented half a dozen new operatic pieces around New York—of ignoring contemporary reality. Happily, Prototype offered musical vitality alongside social pertinence. The recent demise of New York City Opera has been widely, and fittingly, lamented, yet in an eleven-day period Prototype managed to uncover more new work of substance than City Opera was able to do in the past decade or more. The festival came into…

A TOTAL BUST As Mattathias Schwartz shows, in his article about the human cost of the drug war in Honduras, you don’t have to be a promoter of drug use to see that the war on drugs is wasteful (“A Mission Gone Wrong,” January 6th). Studies over the past twenty years have shown that even as spending on interdiction continues to grow—I was astonished to read in your article that it’s now fifteen billion dollars annually—the quantity of street drugs is increasing. Rather than concede that the task of interdiction cannot be achieved at a price that we are willing to pay, or increase spending on alternatives (like better education about the ill effects of drug abuse and treatment for those whom education does not reach), we make incremental…

IN HIS .... BOOK, “Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States,” Andrew Coe makes a troubling proclamation: “Like their ancestors fifty and a hundred years ago, most Americans still expect Chinese food to be cheap, filling, familiar, and bland.” Certainly, a wide gulf continues to exist between American Chinese food (slick lo mein with carrot and cabbage, beef and broccoli in “brown sauce”) and authentic Chinese food (complexly flavored dishes with hard-to-parse names like “spicy cold jelly” and “home made style blotch soup”). The former is everywhere, the latter available mostly in out-of-the-way, drably decorated dining rooms in or near cities with large immigrant populations. But expectations are changing, not only because authentic restaurants are increasingly targeting the mainstream (Han Dynasty, a new Szechuan place…

Super Bowl XLVIII The nation’s eyes will be focussed on New York (or, technically, East Rutherford, New Jersey) come Feb. 2, and there are about as many related highprofile parties taking place in the city as there are passengers on a rushhour subway. Unfortunately, many of those events are impossible to get into, but a few are more accessible. Times Square is being turned into “Super Bowl Boulevard” from Jan. 29 to Feb. 1, featuring football clinics, player appearances, a display of the Vince Lombardi trophy, and a toboggan run, in honor of the first cold-weather, open-air Super Bowl. (nfl.com/superbowl/48.) The Barclays Center’s “Kickoff in Brooklyn” event includes a WFAN concert with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and other groups on Feb. 1. (barclayscenter.com.) The 50 Yard Lounge, a…

Last week, Jim Cassella, the five-term mayor of East Rutherford, New Jersey, welcomed a visitor fresh off the 164 bus from Port Authority. “I just finished shovelling my walk, like Mayor de Blasio,” Cassella said. That task had distracted him, briefly, from his anger. East Rutherford sits on four square miles in Bergen County, a third of which is devoted to the Meadowlands, where the Giants and the Jets play, and where, on Sunday, the Super Bowl will, for the first time, be played outdoors and above the fortieth parallel. Cassella’s borough is the smallest municipality ever to host the event, and he was beginning to feel underappreciated. “It’s so obvious that they’re being disrespectful to New Jersey,” he said, noting that the N.F.L. was installing a hundred-and-eighty-foot toboggan run…

Call him Ishmael. Call me Insane. Some time ago, I had a hankering: wouldn’t it be lovely to take a break from the hurly-burly of landlubber life and the oppressive, never-ending connecting with everybody and everything? What could be more restorative than to voyage across the Atlantic aboard a merchant vessel, and, as Melville said, see the watery part of the world? How great would it be to have the time to read “Moby-Dick” instead of just talking about it? Oh, really? Now that I am about to board the Rickmers Seoul freighter (Chinese-built, German-managed, Marshall Islands-registered), being a passenger on a cargo ship seems a lot like being an inmate in a prison, except that on a ship you can’t tunnel yourself out. Please try to imagine the privations…

In 1994, Harry Huang and his wife, Zhang Li, were running Lily Burger, a tiny backpacker restaurant on the banks of the Jin River, in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. The city wasn’t yet the sprawling metropolis of seven million that it is today, and many people still lived in the picturesque wooden houses of the old town. A thousand miles southwest of Beijing, Chengdu was a refuge from China’s big coastal cities, and a gateway to Tibet. One day, an Australian couple came to the restaurant. The man, thin and ascetic, with piercing eyes, started talking about an idealistic education system that had been introduced in Central Europe in the early twentieth century. Emphasizing the need to help children develop as individuals, it was based on ideas of…

In the spring of 2000, Reed Hastings, the C.E.O. of Netflix, hired a private plane and flew from San Jose to Dallas for a summit meeting with Blockbuster, the video-rental giant that had seventy-seven hundred stores worldwide handling mostly VCR tapes. Three years earlier, Hastings, then a thirty-six-year-old Silicon Valley engineer, had co-founded Netflix around a pair of emerging technologies: DVDs, and a Web site from which to order them. Now, for twenty dollars a month, the site’s subscribers could rent an unlimited number of DVDs, one at a time, for as long as they wished; the disks arrived in the mail, in distinctive red envelopes. Eventually, Hastings was convinced, movies would be rented even more cheaply and conveniently by streaming them over the Internet, and popular films would always…

A poet who comes to consciousness on a small island—like Derek Walcott, who was born on St. Lucia in 1930—is doomed, or privileged, to spend a lifetime writing about the sea. The subject matter for Walcott is as consistent and inescapable, potentially as monotonous, as the five beats in a pentameter line. But, like so many great poets before him, he shows that constraints do not have to starve the imagination; they can also nourish it. What is the sea to Walcott? In the more than six decades covered by “The Poetry of Derek Walcott” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)—a rich and beautiful new selection of his life’s work, edited by Glyn Maxwell—it can be anything, like matter itself. For the teen-age poet, making his début in the pamphlet 25 Poems,…

At the beginning of the ambitious German television miniseries “Generation War,” five young friends (three men and two women) dance and drink in a Berlin bar. The time is June, 1941. Two of the men are heading to the Eastern Front, but the Führer has promised that the war will be over by Christmas, and the mood is charged, even celebratory. “The whole world lay before us. We just had to take it,” one of the men says, narrating. Four years (and four and a half hours) later, after Germany’s defeat, the survivors reassemble in the same bar. The bookends pull the series together, but the banality of the device is almost comical. “Generation War” (originally titled “Our Mothers, Our Fathers”) was a sensational success in Germany and Austria when…

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN THE FUTURE OF the music business is in question, and institutions like City Opera have collapsed, but the Ecstatic Music Festival, started by Kaufman Music Center in 2011, is thriving, by encouraging contemporary classical artists to work with musicians from rock, hip-hop, and other worlds. The indie-pop band Hospitality joins the teen new-music ensemble Pannonia Quartet (all pictured above) on Jan. 31, to begin the festival; later shows include the acoustic trio Dawn of Midi with the electrified chamber ensemble Bright Wave and the sound artist William Basinski with the percussionists Man Forever. This year, according to the festival’s curator, Judd Greenstein, is the first time that every concert features musicians who have not collaborated before. “So I know less about what’s going to happen…

110 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn (718-625-8908) The proprietors of this bar—including Toby Cecchini, of the former, iconic Passerby—have the right idea. From 1949 to 2007, the space was home to an unpretentious diner that catered to the dockworkers at the end of Atlantic Avenue. It was vacant for six years, and the new owners wisely chose to retain the original signage (a gorgeous neon beacon), handsome Art Deco bar and red-and-cream booths, original terrazzo floors, and acoustical-tile ceiling. They’re courting the Cobble Hill–Brooklyn Heights hipster-stroller crowd, on the same turf as the quintessentially antiquey Brooklyn boîte Henry Public, across the street. But Long Island Bar has a casual authenticity that starts with the neon and continues inside. The concise cocktail menu includes a nice gimlet, made with gin and a tart…

By the time the contenders for Super Bowl XLVIII were set, two weekends ago, a hero and a villain had been chosen, too. The Denver Broncos’ quarterback, the aging, lovable Peyton Manning, had outplayed the Patriots to win the A.F.C. title. Meanwhile, in the N.F.C. championship game, Richard Sherman, a cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks, became the designated bad guy. With thirty-one seconds left to play, Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, had the ball on Seattle’s eighteen-yard line—the 49ers were losing by six points and needed a touchdown. He spotted Michael Crabtree, a wide receiver, and sent him the pass. Sherman twisted up in the air until he seemed almost in synch with the ball’s spiralling, then tipped the ball into the hands of another defender for an…

The Jonah Hill audiences fell in love with in “Knocked Up” and “Superbad” was an overgrown baby—a pudgy, party-loving scamp who’d hide behind cardboard cutouts of himself in movie theatres, then jump out to scare people. The Jonah Hill enthroned in a corner seat at the Dead Rabbit, a pub near Wall Street, the other night was a different man: trim, short-haired, dignified in a dark suit and tie. As the bar filled with traders, Hill shook hands with a waitress and listened gravely as she listed the complicated ingredients in the house punch. He ordered a Pilsner, disappointing both the waitress and the manager, who’d dropped by to suggest one of the bar’s nogs, flips, or possets. “I have not engaged in the high palate of interesting drinks,” Hill…

There are catalogues of catalogues. There are poems about poems. There are plays about actors played by actors. Letters due to letters. Words used to clarify words. Brains occupied with studying brains. There are griefs as infectious as laughter. Papers emerging from waste papers. Seen glances. Conditions conditioned by the conditional. Large rivers with major contributions from small ones. Forests grown over and above by forests. Machines designed to make machines. Dreams that wake us suddenly from dreams. Health needed for regaining health. Stairs leading as much up as down. Glasses for finding glasses. Inspiration born of expiration. And even if only from time to time hatred of hatred. All in all, ignorance of ignorance and hands employed to wash hands. (Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh.)…

In May of 1990, several hundred physicians gathered in a conference hall at an Atlanta hotel, as uniformed guards stood at the door. Colleagues traded tips about installing bulletproof glass in their offices and spoke about fielding hate mail and death threats. It was the annual gathering of the National Abortion Federation, or N.A.F., a professional association with a beleaguered membership. At the time, fewer than a fifth of the counties in the United States had abortion providers. Since the mid-eighties, clinics across the country had been blockaded, vandalized, and firebombed. Most of the physicians at the conference were well into middle age. The right to safe, legal abortion, which had been established by Roe v. Wade, in 1973, would be rendered meaningless if a new generation of providers didn’t…

In less than a year, he’d lost his mother, his father, and, as he’d once and sometimes still felt Julia to be, the love of his life; and, during this year, or, he should say, during its suicidal aftermath, he’d twice admitted himself to the psychiatric ward at the University Hospital in Charlottesville, where, each stay, one in the fall and one the following summer, three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, he’d climbed onto an operating table and wept at the ceiling while doctors set the pulse, stuck electrodes to his forehead, put the oxygen meter on his finger, and then pushed a needle into his arm and instructed him, as the machines beeped and the anesthetic dripped down the pipette toward his vein, to count backward from a…

RADIANCE OF TOMORROW, by Ishmael Beah (Sarah Crichton Books). This first novel by a celebrated memoirist and former child soldier from Sierra Leone is an unsparing study of displacement and rehabilitation. When residents of a war-ravaged African town return to their land after a seven-year absence, they find houses burned to the ground and human bones strewn in pathways. Beah’s protagonist is a young father who tries to make a living as a teacher in a place rife with corruption and despair. Just as his community begins “shedding its image of war,” a mining company threatens to disrupt the newfound peace. “Beauty causes the wretchedness of this place,” the novel tells us, but though its message is powerful, it feels overly didactic. THE VISIONIST, by Rachel Urquhart (Little, Brown).…