Innholdsfortegnelse for Feb-17-14 i The New Yorker

JEFFREY TOOBIN (“HOLDER V. ROBERTS,” P. 42) has written six books, including “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court.” MARGARET TALBOT (COMMENT, P. 33), a staff writer, is the author of “The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century.” ELIF BATUMAN (“OTTOMANIA,” P. 50) is a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, at the New York Public Library. ROGER ANGELL (“THIS OLD MAN,” P. 60) first contributed to the magazine in March, 1944. AMIT MAJMUDAR (POEM, P. 64) has written two poetry collections, “0°, 0°” and “Heaven and Earth,” which received the 2011 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. GEORGE PACKER (“CHEAP WORDS,” P. 66) won the 2013 National Book Award for nonfiction for “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.” REBECCA…

THE SOUTH KOREAN DIRECTOR Hong Sang-soo’s latest film, “Our Sunhi,” opens the “Film Comment Selects” series at Film Society of Lincoln Center (Feb. 17-27). It arrives just four months after the New York Film Festival screening of his previous work, “Nobody’s Daughter Haewon.” Late in the last decade, Hong shifted his strategy toward ultralow-budget films. In the process, he increased the pace of production and also liberated his artistic voice, filming with freer, more audacious strokes. Yet American distributors have been slow to keep up with his output. Series such as this one, which highlight undistributed new films, take up some of the slack. Like many of Hong’s films, “Our Sunhi” centers on a milieu close to the director’s own—that of struggling filmmakers racing against time (Hong is fifty-three), whose…

TODAY, IN ARTISTIC CIRCLES, there are few conventions more deplored than Orientalism, the depiction of the East, especially the Middle East, as a realm of luxury, sensuality, and violence. In the nineteenth century, though, there was nothing that seemed more chic—indeed, more true and beautiful. Orientalism had been operating in European art for a long time, but in the nineteenth century a number of factors—Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Syria, the beginning of the archeological excavations in Egypt, the growing belief, among intellectuals, that European culture had exhausted itself and needed a hot infusion from somewhere else—came together to form the idea that the East had the answer. Again and again, in European art of the nineteenth century, we see the pasha’s court, with folks in baggy trousers and pointy…

Isabella Tobias is a twenty-two-year-old ice dancer who was born and raised in Manhattan. She learned to skate at the Ice Studio, a rink on Lexington Avenue, until she gave up skating, at the age of twelve, to focus on dance. (The Times called one of her performances with the New York City Ballet “delightful.”) She returned to the ice at fifteen, and found that being a female ice dancer in the U.S. was a lonely proposition. “What American boy wants to be an ice dancer?” she said last week, lamenting her search for a partner. “Finally, my coaches sat me down and said, ‘Look, we have this Lithuanian—he’s a good skater, he’s the right size, and he’s already here.’” Tobias’s parents are from Brooklyn and New Jersey, with ancestors…

Twelve months ago, Lululemon Athletica was one of the hottest brands in the world. Sales of its high-priced yoga gear were exploding; the company was expanding into new markets; experts were in awe of its “cultlike following.” As one observer put it, “They’re more than apparel. They’re a life style.” But then customers started complaining about pilling fabrics, bleeding dyes, and, most memorably, yoga pants so thin that they effectively became transparent when you bent over. Lululemon’s founder made things worse by suggesting that some women were too fat to wear the company’s clothes. And that was the end of Lululemon’s charmed existence: the founder stepped down from his management role, and, a few weeks ago, the company said that it had seen sales “decelerate meaningfully.” It’s a truism of…

Sign here, please. And here. And on page 3 as well. And I’ll need your signature here. And here. And right here at the bottom of page 7, too. Then I’ll need you to initial here. And here. No, not a full signature. Just your initials. We want to convey a sense of “breezing through” this section of the contract. Like “I read this, but I didn’t dwell on it.” Uh-huh. Now, on page 11, we just need one initial. Could be first or last name. Middle is fine, too. No confirmation names. “L.” Well chosen. All right, now, on the bottom of page 15, I just need a letter that’s not your initial. Could be any letter. Cyrillic alphabet is fine. Not encouraged, but accepted. Ooh, I see you’ve…

Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business. Sam Walton wanted merely to be the world’s biggest retailer. After Apple launched the iPod, Steve Jobs didn’t sign up pop stars for recording contracts. A.T. & T. doesn’t build transmission towers and rent them to…

or starve. Too much. Or not enough. Or. Nothing else? Nothing else. Too high too fast too organized too invisible. Will we survive I ask the bot. No. To download bot be swift—you are too backward, too despotic—to load greatly enlarge the cycle of labor—to load abhor labor—move to the periphery, of your body, your city, your planet—to load, degrade, immiserate, be your own deep sleep—to load use your lips—use them to mouthe your oath, chew it—do the dirty thing, sing it, blown-off limb or syllable, lick it back on with your mouth—talk—talk—who is not terrified is busy begging for water—the rise is fast—the drought comes fast—mediate—immediate—invent, inspire, infiltrate, instill—here’s the heart of the day, the flower of time—talk—talk— Disclaimer: Bot uses a growing database of all your conversations to…

In Tom Stoppard’s 1970 play “Jumpers,” the philosopher hero broods unhappily on the inexorable rise of the atheist: “The tide is running his way, and it is a tide which has turned only once in human history. . . . There is presumably a calendar date—a moment—when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, the noes had it.” Well, when was that date—when did the noes have it? In 1890? In 1918, after the Great War? In 1966, when Time shocked its readers with a cover that asked whether God was dead? For that matter, do the noes have it? In most of the world, the ayes seem to be doing just fine. Even in secularized Manhattan, the Christmas Eve midnight Mass is…

By the start of 1991, “Law & Order” was well into its first season, and its stride. Cop shows have a record of pulling good actors into their gravitational field. I once got a jolt of recognition, and of joy, when, hopping channels and pausing for a dose of “Kojak,” from 1974, I saw James Woods—green in years, but already hard-grained with incipient threat. A similar promise lurked in “The Violence of Summer,” an episode of “Law & Order” that aired on February 5, 1991. Ryan, a young man charged with rape, was led into court, followed by two co-defendants. One made no impression, but the other, though granted less time on camera, drew the eye. Casting a wicked smirk over his shoulder as he came in, he then sat…

THE GREATEST GOOD Jerome Groopman’s piece on team palliative care for children was heart-warming (“Lives Less Ordinary,” January 20th). However, it is also an example of the two-tiered financial and physician-supply problems in our health-care system. I was a Harvard Medical School graduate and worked for two years doing everything—psychiatry, internal medicine, geriatrics, pediatrics, dermatology, pulmonary medicine, obstetrics—for about eight thousand Zuni and Ramah Navajo people. When necessary, our group of four doctors called specialists for advice, with no remuneration involved. The patients in Groopman’s article got care from multiple physicians, all of whom were paid, which is different from what is available to underserved populations, who contract tuberculosis and other serious illnesses owing to things like inadequate vaccinations and recurrent ear infections. Groopman’s article reveals the discrepancy between…

210 Tenth Ave. (212-596-7523) SURE, THERE’S THE CHRYSLER and the Empire State, but this diner in Chelsea is more quintessentially New York than just about any other building. The Empire Diner’s art-moderne exterior has been featured in movies and on TV shows, and also on the cover of this magazine, which praised the “glitz-free, gemutlich” vibe of the place in 1998, when it was the official hangout of the city’s art world. It shut in 2010, after thirty-four years of late-night patty melts and piano jams, and then reopened, briefly, as the Highliner, which convinced no one. Now Amanda Freitag, formerly of Tribeca’s coziest restaurant, the Harrison, has reinvented the icon, but unlike the last time around, there’s not a hint of New Coke about it. The most important question:…

QUENTIN BAJAC, MOMA’S new chief curator of photography, is shaking things up. “I’m a bit tired of the predictable history from the daguerreotype to the digital print,” says the Paris-born Bajac, who comes to MOMA from stints at the Musée d’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou, where he was the head of the photography department from 2007 to 2013. Bajac is known for breaking down departmental boundaries and displaying photography alongside other mediums. His brilliant 2009 exhibition at the Pompidou, “La Subversion des Images: Surréalisme, Photographie, Film,” was as audacious as it was entertaining. He says, “I’m most interested in the connection between photography, painting, and film, setting up a dialogue and seeing that they have more in common.” At MOMA, which has had a photography department since 1940, Bajac sees…

Last November, at a friend’s birthday party, Dick Scanlan ran into a woman whose daughters go to Dalton, the Upper East Side private school. She told him that the middle school was putting on “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” the 2002 musical for which Scanlan co-wrote the book. Based on the Julie Andrews movie, from 1967, the story concerns a Jazz Age flapper who moves to the big city looking for love. The Dalton mother suggested that Scanlan talk to the students there about the process of creating the show, which won six Tonys. Scanlan, a rangy fifty-three-year-old with nerd glasses, visited Dalton in January, along with the show’s composer, Jeanine Tesori, and was promptly summoned to the principal’s office. The principal told him that certain material in “Millie” had raised concerns.…

Eric Holder’s office is a civil-rights shrine. At the Department of Justice building, in Washington, he conducts meetings in a vast conference room, where he sits beneath a portrait of Robert F. Kennedy, one of his predecessors as Attorney General, who used the sprawling space as his office. According to Justice Department lore, Kennedy placed his desk in this room because J. Edgar Hoover presided in a similarly sized chamber on the other side of the fifth floor. Holder put his desk in a modest room in the corner of the building, where the place of honor belongs to a portrait of Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who was Attorney General during the Johnson Administration. Katzenbach played a leading role in the integration of the University of Alabama, where one of the…

Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the K.G.B. No, it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the curveball, who retired from the game in 1877. To put this another way, if I pointed that hand at you like a pistol and fired at your nose, the bullet would nail you in the left knee. Arthritis. Now, still facing you, if I cover my left, or better, eye with one hand, what I see is a blurry encircling version of the ceiling and floor and walls or windows to our right and left but no sign of your face or head: nothing in the middle. But…

It was a mild October day in Hollywood, but a trace of artificial snow remained on the ground as Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, at the American Museum of Natural History, walked around a back lot at Paramount Studios. Late the previous evening, the street corner outside a fake storefront had stood in for the bus depot on a snowy night in Ithaca, New York, and a young actor had portrayed the Tyson of nearly forty years ago: a senior at the Bronx High School of Science who had been summoned to Cornell University by Carl Sagan, at the time the best-known astrophysicist in the world. Tyson had filmed a short introduction to the scene. Toeing snow with the tip of a cowboy boot, he told…

In the summer of 1925, Carl Van Vechten, a New York hipster and literary gadabout, sent a letter to Gertrude Stein, whose friendship he was cultivating. Stein had finally found a publisher for “The Making of Americans,” but Van Vechten was preoccupied with a project of his own. He called it “my Negro novel,” though he hadn’t started it yet. “I have passed practically my whole winter in company with Negroes and have succeeded in getting into most of the important sets,” he wrote. “This will not be a novel about Negroes in the South or white contacts or lynchings. It will be about NEGROES, as they live now in the new city of Harlem (which is part of New York).” A few weeks later, Stein replied, using a word…

Beck has often used indirection to his advantage. In his roughly twenty-five-year career, he has made so many costume changes that nobody was surprised when, for instance, he released a lavishly produced book called “Song Reader,” which offered twenty new songs only in sheet-music form. His first commercial success was “Loser,” in 1993, a song that seemed like a loving translation of a rap tune from English into Dada. Since then, I’ve watched him play greatest-hits sets with his longtime travelling band, and work with gospel choirs. All these endeavors have wandered in and out of sense—and brilliance—as if there were so many songs trying to get out of Beck that sometimes the execution lost to the writing. His new album, “Morning Phase,” is a triumph, possibly because he’s never…

OPENING CHILD’S POSE Reviewed in Now Playing. In Romanian. Opening Feb. 19. (Film Forum.) ENDLESS LOVE A remake of the 1981 drama, based on the novel by Scott Spencer, about two teen-agers whose parents try to break up their romance. Directed by Shana Feste; starring Alex Pettyfer and Gabriella Wilde. Opening Feb. 14. (In wide release.) JIMMY P.: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening Feb. 14. (In limited release.) OMAR A drama, directed by Hany Abu-Assad, about a Palestinian activist who, after his arrest, is forced to become an informant for Israel. In Arabic. Opening Feb. 21. (In limited release.) ROBOCOP A remake of the 1987 action film, starring Joel Kinnaman as a Detroit police officer who is transformed into a part-cyborg.…

134 Eldridge St. (No phone.) Attaboy, a reduced-frills speakeasy, occupies the old Milk & Honey space and is run by two of its former bartenders, Sam Ross and Michael McIlroy. You knock, and a pleasant host lets you in. Inside, there’s feel-good music (New Order, T. Rex), wooden barstools and booths, dim exposed-filament bulbs, modest canoodling, and shelves of clothbound books. Attaboy has no menu; you suggest a mood or a flavor and the bartenders improvise, which they do proudly (“This is a Monte Carlo Benedictine. I rinsed the glass with absinthe. Cheers!”) or gruffly. When a man in a hung-over mood vacillated about whiskey, McIlroy glared at him and said, “We still havin’ a conversation here, mate?,” then made a basic Old-Fashioned. His earlier request for something refreshing had…

Last week’s report about the declining abortion rate in the United States was potentially good news for everyone, especially, one would think, for right-to-life groups. Most of them, though, weren’t cheering. A statement from Americans United for Life called the report “an abortion industry propaganda piece short on data and long on strained conclusions.” One problem was that the groups didn’t like the messenger. The report, which showed that between 2008 and 2011 the rate of abortions had fallen to its lowest level since 1973, came from the Guttmacher Institute. Guttmacher produces scrupulous research on reproductive health; it also supports abortion rights. But the bigger problem was the message itself, because the report made a persuasive case that the right-to-life movement cannot take credit for the decline in abortions. Since…

Matt Reynolds, a filmmaker, grew up east of Buffalo, New York, in what he calls the Wing Belt. Several years ago, he recruited six iron-tongued gluttons and a camera crew and led them on a quest to identify the best Buffalo wing in the region. They visited seventy-two establishments in sixteen days, during which time the group ate one non-wing meal. (It was steak.) “The Great Chicken Wing Hunt,” Reynolds’s documentary about the trip, came out last month, in time for the Super Bowl, the wing world’s Christmas. On game day, according to the National Chicken Council, Americans ate seventy thousand tons of wings. Some history: Teressa Bellissimo invented the dish at the Anchor Bar, her family’s restaurant in Buffalo, in 1964. Before then, many butchers treated wings like gizzards—fit…

On the way to the Sultan’s harem, I saw two beautiful slave girls walking across a parking lot clutching their tiaras and squinting unhappily into the sun. It was a hot August day in Istanbul, with an intermittent gusting wind. An attendant ushered me into a warren of royal chambers. I crossed the marble flagstones of a capacious Turkish bath, and proceeded down the passageway known as the Golden Road, through which a lucky concubine, having received the purple handkerchief indicative of the Sultan’s favor, approaches the privy chamber. On a gilt desk lay an imperial seal and two sticks of wax. An adjacent bedroom, lavishly appointed, had been occupied by the Sultan’s mother, until her death, toward the end of Season 2. “Magnificent Century,” a soap opera set in…

The arms I sing. Forget the man, there is no other epic. Sing the arms of kids, the ones with pustules all along their veins like runway track lights burning for a plane that blew up hours ago with no survivors. The ones with runes no parent can decipher, one message, knifed and scarred and knifed again in a mystic tongue forgotten who knows when. The arms imprinted with a shadow grip as if the dad who grabbed and crushed had dipped his hand in black paint first. The arms with tight arcs of perforation: human bites that get infected faster than a dog’s. The toddler’s arms with both hands scalded raw all glisteny and hog-pink, swollen taut, the tantrum over, the lesson taught, two signal fires that call across…

I was almost twelve years old, going into the fifth year of barneskole. At times it was as though the girls really hated me, considered me some sort of scum; at others it was the opposite—not only did they want to talk to me but at the class parties we had begun to arrange, at one another’s houses and at school, they also wanted to dance with me. My attitude toward them was also ambivalent, at least as far as the girls in my class were concerned. On the one hand, I knew them so well I was completely indifferent toward them; on the other hand, they had started changing—the bulges under their sweaters were growing, their hips were widening, and they were behaving differently. They had risen above us:…

WHY I READ, by Wendy Lesser (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This elegant manifesto distills more than five decades of thinking about books, from Lesser’s perspective as a critic, novelist, memoirist, biographer, and editor. Discussion encompasses everything from science fiction to Scandinavian mystery writers, but it is robust nineteenth-century fiction—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, James—that clearly arouses Lesser’s greatest passion. In chapters that aspire toward the qualities she admires in her subject matter (“compression,” “indirection,” “organic shape”), she shows the inextricability of plot and character, the importance of narrative authority, and the talent great authors seem to have for embodying contradictory positions in their writing—their prose is both utterly of the moment and something that will endure as an “independent entity, completely outside of time.” DANUBIA, by Simon Winder (Farrar, Straus &…

A half century ago, Burt Lancaster, playing an unusually broad-shouldered French railroad worker, saved art treasures stored at the Jeu de Paume from Paul Scofield, as a Wehrmacht colonel with precise speech, a foul temper, and a fondness for Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. “The Train,” directed by John Frankenheimer, was set in the summer of 1944; the colonel was trying to take the works to Germany before the Allies liberated France. Frankenheimer, working in handsome black-and-white, did extraordinary things with rail ties, heavy bolts, and puffing steam locomotives, and the two actors competed in physical determination. Lancaster, a former acrobat, scampered over walls and rolled down hills and finally shot Scofield, who stood stock still, by the side of the tracks. As an action film, “The Train” remains first-rate. As…