Innholdsfortegnelse for Feb-10-14 i The New Yorker

STEVE COLL (COMMENT, P. 19) is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia. ARIEL LEVY (“BREAKING THE WAVES,” P. 26) has been writing for The New Yorker since 2008. SUSAN ORLEAN (“MAN AND MACHINE,” P. 33), the author of “Rin Tin Tin,” is working on a book about the Los Angeles Public Library. TAD FRIEND (“THICKER THAN WATER,” P. 42) has been writing for the magazine since 1987. “Cheerful Money” is his most recent book. RACHEL AVIV (“A VALUABLE REPUTATION,” P. 52) is a staff writer. DAN WINTERS (PHOTOGRAPH, P. 52), an award-winning photographer, published “Road to Seeing” in January. ZADIE SMITH (FICTION, P. 64) is the author of four novels, including “NW” and “White Teeth.” MARK BIBBINS (POEM, P. 71) lives in New York City.…

NANCY KWAN WAS THE FIRST. The first movie star my brother and I fell in love with. We met her late at night in the black-and-white universe of our television set. We saw her, initially, in her breakout role, in the 1960 film “The World of Suzie Wong,” in which the mixed-race actress—her father was a Chinese architect, her mother white and English—played a call girl. Not unlike many of the women we grew up with, who toiled in the legit world, Kwan’s character supported her family with what she had, or what the world would allow her to have. What moved us about Kwan, in those pre-gender-and-race-studies days, was her insistence on projecting her ethnicity as part of her style; she wasn’t performing for the white male director, but…

The Fest for Beatles Fans In arguably the most important rock introduction of all time, on February 9, 1964, in New York, Ed Sullivan said, “The city never has witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool who call themselves the Beatles.” The Fest for Beatles Fans was formed in 1974, to mark the tenth anniversary of the British Invasion, and has been an annual celebration ever since. This year’s edition includes performances by the co-invaders Donovan, Peter Asher, Chad & Jeremy, and Billy J. Kramer; talks and book signings by historians of the era; and appearances by those who had roles in the pop pageant, among them Freda Kelly, the Beatles’ secretary and the subject of a wonderful 2013 documentary. Finally, fifty years to the minute after…

Fitness fads have been escalating in machismo: CrossFit, boot camps, kettlebells. Now, just in time for the Olympics—that sobering display of athletic masochism—comes a new trend, developed by a mother-and-daughter team who have experienced extreme athleticism and have returned to save people from it. Their program is called Chaise-Fitness, and it takes place largely on a padded chair. On a recent Saturday morning, Rachel Piskin taught at the ChaiseFitness studio downtown, while her mother, Lauren Piskin, prepared for the nine-thirty class at their new studio, in the basement of the 92nd Street Y. Lauren is fifty-three, petite, muscular, and cheerful, and she wore a pink tank top and a gold skull pendant with red eyes. “A client made me this,” she said. “She’s into skulls.” She hugged people as they…

The first time Diana Nyad tried to swim around Manhattan, in the fall of 1975, she was pulled out of the East River in the black of night after eight hours of non-stop swimming—“trembling uncontrollably, muttering an incoherent stream of monosyllables,” she wrote in her 1978 memoir, “Other Shores.” She had contracted a virus in the contaminated water, and it took her ten days to recover. Then she got back in the water and did it again. On her second try, she wrote, “the Hudson was rough, but the full force of the tide was with me and I almost frolicked in the waves.” Nyad made it around in seven hours and fifty-seven minutes, breaking the record by nearly an hour: “Manhattan Island was mine!” There were pictures of her…

The stripers weren’t biting. After watching clients cast in vain for two hours on Nantucket’s sheltered North Shore, Captain Jason Mleczko called his father, who ran the family’s charterboat company, and said that he was heading to the Opening to try fishing the rips. It was a raw, wet afternoon last May, with a hard wind gusting out of the northeast—too cold for fish to be stirring, really—but Mleczko’s clients, four twenty-six-year-old guys, remained enthusiastic. “It was nasty out,” one said, “but it beat having beers on land.” They’d come in for Figawi, the Memorial Day Weekend rite in which young professionals swamp the island’s bars and strip its shops of “I Am the Man from Nantucket” T-shirts. (The weekend is predicated on a Hyannis-to-Nantucket sailboat race named for an…

The Minister of the Interior stood in the middle of the room, assessing three suits laid over a chair. One was a pale morning-sky blue; the next tan, of light material, intended for these terrible summers; the last a heavy worsted English three-piece, gray, for state visits. They were slung across one another every which way, three corpses in a pile. The rest of the marbled room—his wife had liked to call it the “salon”— was in boxes, labelled, optimistically, with a forwarding address. Within the hour, efficient young Ari would drive the Minister to the airport, and from there—all being well—he would leave to join his wife and children in Paris. The car would not be a minute out of the driveway, he knew, before the household staff fell…

Like his earlier work, Jesse Ball’s strange, brief, beguiling fourth novel, “Silence Once Begun” (Pantheon), flirts with the hermetic. Laid out as a series of Q. & A. interviews (and a small collection of photographs), the book sometimes resembles a film script; the pages bloom with whiteness. Silence is both the book’s quarry and its stalker: silence “once begun,” the hanging title suggests, is voraciously expansive. Ball tells the story, or stories, of Oda Sotatsu, a twenty-nine-year-old Japanese man of no great distinction or education. In 1977, he is working in an import-export business owned by his uncle. He lives alone, has no girlfriend, no pets. The novel’s atmosphere at first calls to mind Kurosawa’s great film “Ikiru,” with its portrait of Kanji Watanabe, who has done the same dull…

A playwright’s voice isn’t everything. Certainly not when it comes to our superficial enjoyment of a show. Watching a straight drama or comedy, we listen less for literary invention—the moments when language exists for its own sake, its own pleasure—than for themes and plot points that not only move the story along but also give us the sense, once the curtain falls, that the play has been a gratifying experience. But, periodically, playwrights come along who disrupt our spectatorial passivity by making our vibrant, boring, familiar, catchy, and idiosyncratic speech patterns strange and new. They do this by composing dialogue that works toward something far grander and harder to achieve than the usual he-said-she-said stuff: speech that is literature, representative of this world even as it creates another, in a…

MAKERS’ MARK Evgeny Morozov, in his article on makers and hackers, characterizes Stewart Brand, the publisher of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” as a consumerist (“Making It,” January 13th). It is true that the “Catalog” and Brand’s subsequent publications sold products, but they also contained wide-ranging articles. The “Catalog”’s sale items were primarily tools, not products to be consumed. And while it was not overtly political, the “Catalog” did express the widespread desire of people to mold their environments to suit their purposes. Steve Jobs referred to the “Catalog” as “sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along.” Morozov seems to say that we must choose between believing that technology determines politics or vice versa. But technology enables a variety of uses, and it is…

43-03 Broadway, Astoria (347-642-5804) Queens is the most diverse urban area in the world—almost half its residents are foreign-born—and Elixir Lounge, an L.G.B.T. bar on Astoria’s eastern edge, mirrors the borough’s inclusive makeup. Marilyn Sulay and Lidia Jimenez, the trans women owners, rehash the dark boudoir décor of Manhattan and Brooklyn speakeasies, and then heap on the frills: high-backed tufted banquettes, laser lights, and TVs playing music videos that are out of synch, by decades, with the d.j.’s Beyoncé and dancified Lana Del Rey. The mélange makes you feel like you walked into the coolest gay bar in Cleveland. On a recent Friday, Paul, a shirtless Polish bartender with six-pack abs and a sprawling shoulder tattoo featuring a blue koi and lotus flowers, served Coronas to gay couples in tight…

Last month, Colorado opened its first retail marijuana shops. At the Colorado Springs airport, there are now bins to help departing travellers remember to drop their pot before flying off to less liberated states. The law legalizing marijuana in Colorado was the result of a long grass-roots campaign that culminated, in 2012, in a winning ballot vote, and was one of the most surprising left-libertarian successes in recent years. But pot legalization (Washington State has approved a similar law) is a difficult political harbinger to categorize. Colorado has a free-range-inspired history, and the new law might be understood as the latest reimagining of frontier freedom. It has not been a mellowing project, however. The campaign was fought amid a series of bruising battles over social and economic issues—gun control, fracking,…

“No one hurt Duncan!” Catherine Hoke, a tall woman in a blazer, said the other day, to a group of athletic men. Hoke is the founder and C.E.O. of Defy Ventures, a nonprofit that teaches ex-convicts to start their own companies. She was referring to Duncan Niederauer, a C.E.O. of the New York Stock Exchange and a Defy faculty member. For Defy’s most recent fund-raiser, Niederauer and Hoke had organized something more exciting than the traditional gala: a basketball tournament, at Madison Square Garden, between members of the business community and ex-convicts in the program; two former Knicks players, John Starks and Larry Johnson, had agreed to coach. It was the morning of the tournament, and Hoke’s students had gathered at a McDonald’s on Seventh Avenue, to talk strategy. But…

Were you driving through western Pennsylvania in the mid-nineteen-nineties, with the radio on? Was the music interrupted by two adolescent male voices jabbering trucker lingo? Or, several years ago, did you come across an online tourism video for the city of Milwaukee? Did it seem a little strange, in that the city shown was very obviously Manhattan, and that the video suggested that the entire Milwaukee area had been contaminated by an industrial accident? Or, sometime during the past few years, did you notice an account on Twitter called Horse_ebooks that spewed peculiar, mantralike messages such as “You’re not alone in your passion for tomatoes!” and “Demand Furniture”? Around the same time, did you happen upon a You-Tube channel called Pronunciation Book, which consisted of videos of words in black…

is a phrase coined by Cal Watkins of the Harvard Linguistics Department in November 1971 to disparage certain concerns of the female students of Harvard Divinity School. In a world where God is “He” and everyone else “mankind,” what chance do we have for a bit of attention? seemed to be their question. Cal Watkins— how patient a man— did not say you carry-tale mumblenews mar-plot find-fault spoilsports! but rather that pronouns themselves were not to blame. It’s the Indo- European system of markedness. A binary system. Which regards masculine as the unmarked gender. As if all the creatures in the world were either zippers or olives, except way back in the Indus Valley in 5000 B.C. we decided to call them zippers and non-zippers. By 1971 the non-zippers were…

Warhol was right: he said athletes are fat in the right places and they’re young in the right places. Apparently the next Godzilla movie has Godzilla just stomping around eating everyone’s money and it’s the scariest thing ever— we can rub bug powder on the national anthem and run that over the closing credits as long as the singer manages to sing I’m in love with everyone but you, almost convincingly. A production team undoing one another’s pants is How We Get Naked Now but tomorrow morning all the cut-off parts of us are coming back so get ready. Europe: you swear it exists because you once had sex in it, and ideas. Prepositions: that’s where we all get sucked under. Prepositions: the San Andreas fault of meaning. Prepositions: what…

WARSAW 1944,by Alexandra Richie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In August, 1944, when the Warsaw uprising began, the city had almost a million inhabitants; within a few months, almost a hundred and seventy thousand were dead, and more than half a million had been sent to a Nazi transit camp. Others were hiding in sewers, or starving in the basements of houses soon to be burned. This history grapples movingly with the question of whether the order to rise up should have been given at all. The Poles had counted on the German Army being in disarray (it was actually being reinforced) and on Russian aid (Stalin was not their friend). After the capitulation, Hitler had Warsaw levelled; Richie makes the city’s existence today feel like a miracle. FLYOVER LIVES,by…

No character that you see onscreen this year will match the impact that is made by Benjamin Murmelstein. “The Last of the Unjust,” a new documentary, runs three hours and forty minutes, much of which is spent in his company, and very good company it is. We first see his head from behind, with its solid rolls of flesh. He turns to reveal a face of undimmed liveliness—seventy years old, and thickly spectacled, yet verging on the combative, and never too far from a smile. His voice tumbles over itself, so much does he have to impart, and any question sent in his direction is fired straight back, with barely a pause for thought. It is hard to imagine that doubts perplex his sleep. At a glance, you would guess…

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN ALEXANDER BORODIN’S “PRINCE IGOR” is a permanent fixture in the Russian operatic repertory, but it hasn’t been heard at the Metropolitan Opera since 1917. Now the epic work, which Borodin did not live to complete, returns in a new guise: the director Dmitri Tcherniakov and the conductor Gianandrea Noseda have created a unique edition that uses all the music Borodin is known to have written (including recently discovered passages) while retaining much of the material that the composer’s devoted colleagues Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov added to make the opera’s first viable version. Many of the scenes have been reordered, but the beloved “Polovtsian Dances” will still be there, and the Met has a magnetic young basso, Ildar Abdrazakov (above), to sing the heroic title role. OPENINGS…

200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn (718-935-9842) “THE SHOP’S CLOSED,” the security guard in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum said, blocking the way of three diners who had a six-forty-five reservation at Saul. The new-American restaurant moved recently to the back of the museum, past the gift shop, from its home of fourteen years, on Smith Street, in Boerum Hill. The original Saul was one of the first spots in Brooklyn to receive a Michelin star and to lure Manhattanites in serious numbers across the river for dinner. The guard wasn’t the only one who seemed confused; the hostess was unsure about the feasibility of a pre-dinner drink at the half-empty bar, which was unfortunate, because by that time everyone in the group felt that they needed one. It’s strange to…

Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld is a highly successful twenty-one-year-old. Still, she is fallible; and though she was expected, last Wednesday morning, at quarter past nine, she did not arrive at the Starbucks in Harvard Square until nine-nineteen. “I’m so sorry!” she said, removing her hat. “I don’t even have an excuse. I’m just slow.” She placed an order, with some difficulty (“This menu requires a body of knowledge that I do not possess”), and sat down. “I’m never late, normally. Well, that’s not fully true. Contrary to what you might think, my mom is not an entirely punctual person, so I might have gotten some bad training in that regard.” The parental training that Chua-Rubenfeld got became the subject of a national debate when, in 2011, her mother, Amy Chua, published the…

Whatever happens on the ice and snow of Sochi in the next couple of weeks, one thing is certain: this Winter Olympics is the greatest financial boondoggle in the history of the Games. Back in 2007, Vladimir Putin said that Russia would spend twelve billion dollars on the Games. The actual amount is more than fifty billion. (By comparison, Vancouver’s Games, in 2010, cost seven billion dollars.) Exhaustive investigations by the opposition figures Boris Nemtsov, Leonid Martynyuk, and Alexei Navalny reveal dubious cost overruns and outright embezzlement. And all this lavish spending (largely paid for by Russian taxpayers) has been, as Nemtsov and Martynyuk write, “controlled largely by businesspeople and companies close to Putin.” Sochi is emblematic of Russia’s economy: conflicts of interest and cronyism are endemic. But the link…

RESULTS OF NASA’S INQUIRY INTO FLIGHT PV-801: Multiple lapses by Ground Control, compounded by astronaut error, led to the stranding in space of U.S.A.F. Major Thomas D. Ogletree (MAJOR TOM). Established procedures were not followed; flawed decision-making was rampant and systemic. Below are excerpts from the official CAPCOM transcript, with comments by the investigators. 1. GROUND CONTROL: Ground Control to Major Tom. Take your protein pills and put your helmet on. The panel found the command to swallow nutritional supplements just moments before liftoff to be reckless and foolhardy. In addition, the panel determined that T minus ten seconds was far too late in the launch sequence for Major Tom to “put [his] helmet on.” Consequently, his CO2 purge valve went unchecked, and he did not have time to rub…

In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.” Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half…

When Robert Frost, in his 1930 address “Education by Poetry,” spoke about the importance of being “at home in the metaphor,” he seemed to suggest how infrequently he had felt at home anywhere else. The New England landscape abounds with Frost sites: the Frost Farm, in Derry, New Hampshire, and the Frost Place, in Franconia, New Hampshire; the Robert Frost Stone House, in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, and the Homer Noble Farm, in Ripton, Vermont; a house on verdant Brewster Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one on leafy Sunset Avenue in Amherst, Massachusetts. Add to these two houses in England, where Frost lived from 1912 to 1915 and first found acclaim, along with a cottage in Key West, where he often spent winters, and a white pillared house that once stood…

In a recent episode of “The Fosters,” a new drama on ABC Family, Callie Jacob, a sixteen-year-old girl who has been bumped through several different foster homes, runs away. She hitches a ride, then tries to apply for a job as a waitress at a diner—an impossible task without I.D. She naps on a public bus until she’s kicked off; she lingers near some streetwalkers, who warn her that the local shelter is unsafe. Finally, she walks into a bodega and starts grabbing snacks: a sandwich, then a soda. “If you take one bite of that candy bar, I’m gonna call the cops,” the owner tells her. Eyes locked with his, Callie bites down. She knows she’s taking a fast track back into the system. In another television context—some slick…