Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar-10-14 i The New Yorker

PETER HESSLER (“REVOLUTION ON TRIAL,” P. 26) lives in Cairo. His most recent book is “Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West.” JILL LEPORE (COMMENT, P. 21) is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard. “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin” is her latest book. JANE HIRSHFIELD (POEM, P. 30), the author of “Come, Thief: Poems,” has another collection, and a new book of essays, coming out next year. PAUL RUDNICK (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 33) contributes regularly to the magazine. His first young-adult novel, “Gorgeous,” was published last year. JOAN ACOCELLA (“HIT MAKER,” P. 34) has been the magazine’s dance critic since 1998. ROZ CHAST (SKETCHBOOK, P. 38), a New Yorker cartoonist since 1978, is the author of the graphic…

MARIA LASSNIG is “the perfect artist for the age of the selfie,” says Peter Eleey, who has curated a survey of the Austrian painter’s self-portraits. The idea is counterintuitive: the ninety-four-year-old artist never relies on photography, unlike many contemporary figurative painters. She uses her imagination and what she calls “body awareness,” a unique approach to Expressionism that she hit on in 1948. Simply described, she paints from the inside out, taking cues from her body’s sensations. If Lassnig doesn’t feel her ears as she’s working, they stay out of the picture. The same goes for her hair. She seems to be aware of seeing and breathing; her faces tend to have eyes, mouths, and noses. The results can suggest an Alice Neel portrait of an extraterrestrial. For all their startling…

IN THE EVENING, even a well-lit cathedral space will take on a touch of gloom, with the awareness of the day’s demise enforcing a certain intimacy among the congregants. The dozens who arrived on a night last April to hear a concert in Trinity Wall Street’s Stravinsky Festival were probably skeptical: were the Master’s late-period sacred works, seldom heard and composed according to a demanding and idiosyncratic twelve-tone technique, really that good? “Threni,” a setting of texts from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, had suffered a disastrous Paris première in 1958. But Julian Wachner, Trinity’s Director of Music and the Arts, brought out the tortured beauty of the piece, leading the unflappable musicians of the Trinity Choir and of Novus N.Y., the church’s in-house contemporary ensemble, with palpable enthusiasm. Doubts dispersed…

If the Presidential election were held today, Hillary Clinton would deliver her acceptance speech sometime before midnight tonight. Last week, a Times/CBS News poll found that a whopping eighty-two per cent of Democrats picked Clinton over both Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. Last month, a Quinnipiac poll reported that registered voters in Ohio chose Clinton over six possible Republican candidates: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich. “If the election were tomorrow,” John McCain said, “Hillary Clinton would most likely be the President.” But the election isn’t being held today or tomorrow or even next year, and Clinton isn’t even officially a candidate. Nor are any of the people she’s been squared off against, which is why mock elections are mostly meaningless. A CNN/USA Today/ Gallup…

It is seventy-two miles as the crow flies from Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania (six hundred and forty-two residences), to the Diamond Horseshoe night club, on Forty-sixth Street, beneath the Paramount Hotel (five hundred and ninety-seven rooms). The other day, the filmmaker So Yong Kim, who lives in Lackawaxen, rode the train in, by way of Bard College, where she teaches, to attend a party hosted by Miu Miu, Prada’s little-sister label. Kim was to be the guest of honor. Billy Rose, the showman and lyricist (“It’s Only a Paper Moon”), opened the Diamond Horseshoe in 1938. Shortly thereafter, the Times called the club “the most zestful, gorgeous and lovable pleasure palace in town.” Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Orson Welles were patrons; Gene Kelly contributed choreography for six-foot-plus chorus girls, who were…

My life was the size of my life. Its rooms were room-sized, its soul was the size of a soul. In its background, mitochondria hummed, above it sun, clouds, snow, the transit of stars and planets. It rode elevators, bullet trains, various airplanes, a donkey. It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose. It ate, it slept, it opened and closed its hands, its windows. Others, I know, had lives larger. Others, I know, had lives shorter. The depth of lives, too, is different. There were times my life and I made jokes together. There were times we made bread. Once, I grew moody and distant. I told my life I would like some time, I would like to try seeing others. In a week, my empty suitcase and…

Last June 15th, Daniel Ortega, the President of Nicaragua, held a ceremony in Managua to announce his newest and most audacious plan to help the country’s poor: a transoceanic canal, stretching from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific, a few hundred miles north of the Panama Canal. “This is a project,” he promised, “that will bring well-being, prosperity, and happiness to the Nicaraguan people.” The last time Ortega attracted the world’s attention, it was as Ronald Reagan’s great adversary in the Contra war of the eighties: a fighter “against the domination of the capitalists of our country, in collusion with the U.S. government—i.e., imperialism.” In those days, Salman Rushdie described him as looking like “a bookworm who has done a body-building course.” Now his face has thickened and roughened, and…

Money is the more binding of the corsets that the female characters have to deal with in Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play, “A Doll’s House” (currently in revival at BAM’s Harvey Theatre). Perhaps “binding” is not the word, since it’s a lack of cash—and the power that goes along with having money—that determines so much in this very great play, a drama rife with emotional debts, secrets, recriminations, and sexual poverty. Taking intimacy as its basic theme—What determines love? Is it ever free of social convention, and, if so, what does “free” love look like?—Ibsen’s fifteenth script and third masterpiece (“Peer Gynt” and “Pillars of Society” had come out in 1867 and 1877, respectively, when Ibsen was middle-aged) is not difficult to follow, but it is difficult to take. The piece…

In Wes Anderson’s new movie, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” the past becomes visible in stages, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope that gets repeatedly extended. A middle-aged writer (Tom Wilkinson), appearing to us in 1985, recalls his youth spent idling in the Grand Budapest Hotel, a once luxurious resort in an obscure corner of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Looming over the fictional country of Zubrowka, the hotel—pink, and as fully tiered as a wedding cake—has been battered by war and, perhaps, by Communism. The movie jumps back to 1968, when the hotel was already forlorn. The writer, as a young man (Jude Law), dines with the hotel’s owner, Mr. Moustafa (F. Mur ray Abraham), who remembers the Budapest’s plump glory days between the wars, when he…

TOXIC REGULATION Rachel Aviv’s reporting on Syngenta’s campaign to discredit a scientist who warned of the dangers of the herbicide atrazine shows only a tiny facet of a regulatory problem that should concern every American (“A Valuable Reputation,” February 10th). Americans assume that chemicals are tested before being released into the marketplace, but, even when testing is required, companies exploit scientific uncertainty to delay and prevent regulation. Of the more than sixteen thousand pesticides registered under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, as many as sixty-five per cent were first approved for market by conditional registration, which means they may lack essential test data on human-health and environmental impacts. Americans may be shocked to learn that the regulation of toxic substances is even weaker. The E.P.A. has required…

300 W. 22nd St. (212-243-8888) IT SEEMS STRANGE TO SAY that the best thing at a place that specializes in juice cleanses is the porchetta, but Foragers Market and Table encapsulates the contradictory nature of the New York diet, serving quality food that feels “healthy,” and is often local and organic, but with none of that dull avocado-based asceticism. The Table, a sit-down restaurant, is an offshoot of the Market, a gourmet grocer, which opened first in Dumbo and in 2012 expanded to Chelsea. In addition to the three-day juice cleanse and the panoply of expensive condiments (sixteen-dollar peanut butter, fourteen-dollar Sriracha), Foragers sells vegetables, herbs, and eggs from a dedicated farm in Canaan, New York. A list of other regional suppliers is on the back of the menu, but…

NEW FRENCH MOVIES will occupy three of New York’s leading repertory houses—BAM Cinématek, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and IFC Center—March 6-16, in the annual “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema” series. It’s co-produced by Unifrance Films, France’s quasi-governmental agency for the international promotion of the country’s films, which is why the series showcases not only the cream of French cinema but also overtly commercial work. Though this balance was off in the past, this year’s edition offers a well-chosen set of movies by a rising generation of French directors whose work notably fuses documentary-based authenticity with blatant theatrical artifice. Serge Bozon—whose previous feature, “La France,” is a musical set on First World War battlefields—returns with “Tip Top,” a contemporary police procedural that’s also a screwball sex comedy. It stars Isabelle Huppert…

Backstage at New York City Ballet on a recent afternoon, a Shetland pony waited to audition for the role of a donkey. The pony—short and broad, with pinto coloring that included a suggestion of eyeliner—was harnessed to a small open cart partly filled with plastic apples. For more than thirty years, a donkey named Giorgio appeared in every New York City production of George Balanchine’s “Union Jack.” The ballet, on British themes, calls for two girls to be carried onto the stage in a cart, pulled by a donkey and led by a boy. The girls leap off and join a dance to the tune of “There Is a Tavern in the Town.” The donkey waits; the girls climb back into the cart and ride off, and, a moment later,…

Barry Clifford, the only person known to have recovered pirate treasure dating from the so-called golden age of piracy, around the turn of the eighteenth century, recently exhibited a small selection on the second floor of the Explorers Club, on East Seventieth Street. “That’s a syringe,” he said, indicating a bratwurst-size pewter cylinder, which someone had guessed might be a bosun’s whistle. “It was filled with tincture of mercury and was used to treat syphilis. Those are shoe buckles. Pieces of eight. A blunderbuss, still loaded. Cannonball. Broken porcelain. Pirates threw Ming vases overboard. My wife saw pieces in the water and said, ‘Look at all the pretty blue-and-white clamshells!’ ” Clifford found his first pirate ship, the Whydah, off Cape Cod, in 1984. It went down in a storm…

STUDENT EVALUATION From Miss Kelli Schoopheimer Massapequa Elementary School Hygiene As Alec’s teacher, I can report that Alec pays careful attention to his personal cleanliness and grooming, especially regarding his hair, which he has repeatedly asked me to touch. For October’s show-and-tell, Alec brought in what he referred to as his “steely blue eyes.” He stood in front of the entire class in silence for three minutes, and then asked, in his already surprisingly deep and raspy voice, “Am I turning you on?” All the other children, including the boys, raised their hands. After another long pause, Alec smiled and said, “I thought so.” Playing Habits Alec is a generous and caring playmate, although during one game of tag, at recess, he claimed that Jimmy Peterson had not, in fact,…

We do it with knives in hand, blue tongues licking the bottoms of pots, steam fogging the windows from hearts of artichokes being strained. Hearts are made to be carved out, cooked soft, slathered with butter, fork-stabbed and lifted to another’s open mouth. We say we are starved, as though we were doing this alone, lonely as an onion in its skin, say we are starving when what we mean is that we want to postpone the inevitable, which is inedible, however we dice it, and so we make—as it consumes us— this love we call a meal.…

Plucking a few events out of the vastness of the world and declaring them to be the news of the day is a mysterious and complicated project. Sometimes what’s news is inarguable—the outbreak of war, a head-of-state transition, natural calamity—but very often it falls into the category of the resonant incident. It isn’t a turn in the course of history, but it strikes editors as illustrative of something important. Take crime. If crimes don’t involve anyone powerful or well known, they generally aren’t considered news. But a few such crimes do become news, big news, and hold the public’s imagination in a tight, enduring grip. An excellent example is the murder of Kitty Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, by Winston Moseley, a twenty-nine-year-old computer punch-card operator, just after three in…

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN IN THE RUN-UP to the World Cup in Brazil, this summer, the Joyce Theatre presents its inaugural festival of Brazilian dance, both traditional and contemporary. Capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial-arts form in which bare-chested dancers flip end over end, is represented this time by the veteran troupe DanceBrazil. The country’s vibrant tango and samba scenes infuse the work of Focus Cia de Dança. Pictured here is Companhia Urbana de Dança, which finds poetry in the dancers’ upbringing in the favelas of Rio. PHOTOGRAPH BY MOISES SAMAN MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Guggenheim Museum “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe” A spectacular survey of what has long been the most neglected canonical movement in modern art—because it is also the most embarrassing. An avant-garde so clownish, in its grandiose…

710 Myrtle Ave., Brooklyn (347-789-9901) On a barren stretch in Bed-Stuy there is a cement building, industrial and ambiguous enough to suggest a meat-processing facility or an auto chop shop. But it houses the cavernous bar Beast of Bourbon, where, on a recent night, the Jersey-based blues musician Ken (Stringbean) Sorenson, a former riverboat captain, performed James Cotton’s “Boogie Thing” next to a poster of Iggy Pop, whom he resembles. Patrons ate BBQ-by-the-pound off brown-paper-lined trays or huddled around the horseshoe-shaped bar, trying to decipher the Oxford English Dictionary-size print on the drink menus. There are more than forty beers on tap and two hundred-plus whiskeys, ryes, and bourbons—from Catdaddy corn whiskey, which tastes like bubblegum cough syrup, to James E. Pepper 1776 fifteen-year-old bourbon, reminiscent of oak and toasted…

Charles Ives’s Studio As a nation, we seem reluctant to preserve the homes of great composers. (Copland House, near Peekskill, is a notable exception.) But composers’ studios, the quirkily individual spaces where they wrote their works and left indelible traces of their personalities, are having better luck. The contents of Leonard Bernstein’s Fairfield studio were recently relocated to the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, and now another Connecticut shrine, the studio of America’s first great composer, Charles Ives, is being reconstructed in a room at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, on Audubon Terrace. In their proper places are Ives’s hat, his piano, a set of double doors covered with press clippings, and an especially iconic object, the cornet played by his beloved father. (Broadway between 155th…

Sharon and Lawrence Tarantino bought their first and only house in 1988, in Millstone, just north of Princeton, New Jersey. It came with a leaky roof but a famous name attached to the blueprints—Frank Lloyd Wright—and the Tarantinos, who own an architectural studio, were smitten. They lined the living room with buckets until the roof got fixed, and imagined living there forever. “It’s hard for me to talk about this,” Lawrence said last month. He was giving a tour of the house, which he was now in the process of dismantling. If all went as planned, the house would soon be loaded onto three tractor-trailers and driven through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and on to St. Louis, where it would head south, through the Ozarks, toward its new home: Bentonville,…

The last two Presidents of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak and Mohamed Morsi, have both been tried on criminal charges, one after the other, in a converted lecture hall at the Cairo Police Academy. The academy is in the far eastern suburbs of the capital, near the summit of a long hill that rises from the Nile Valley into the desert. Beyond this area, the landscape is desolate—nothing but sand and rubble for seventy miles until the Suez Canal. The isolation is the reason that the trials have been held here. Ever since the Tahrir Square movement began, on January 25, 2011, Egypt has suffered from waves of instability, and the authorities fear that a trial involving a former President might become the target of protests or terrorist attacks. The Police Academy…

In the upstairs lobby of the Winter Garden Theatre, a few Fridays ago, two men were beating each other up. Or not exactly. They were rehearsing the fight that comes at the end of “Rocky,” a musical that is scheduled to open on March 13th. The show was inspired by Sylvester Stallone’s 1976 movie, “Rocky,” which tells of Rocky Balboa, a going-nowhere semi-pro boxer who lives next to an El in North Philadelphia and makes his living as a collector for a loan shark. By a fluke, Rocky is challenged to an exhibition fight with the world heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed, also known as the Master of Disaster. Written by and starring Stallone, “Rocky” was nominated for ten Oscars and won three, including Best Picture. The scene at the end…

The new mother, groggy from a nap, sat at the table as though she did not grasp why she had been summoned. Perhaps she never would, Auntie Mei thought. On the placemat sat a bowl of soybean-and-pig’s-foot soup that Auntie Mei had cooked, as she had for many new mothers before this one. Many, however, was not exact. In her interviews with potential employers, Auntie Mei always gave the precise number of families she had worked for: a hundred and twenty-six when she interviewed with her current employer, a hundred and thirty-one babies altogether. The families’ contact information, the dates she had worked for them, their babies’ names and birthdays—these she had recorded in a palm-size notebook, which had twice fallen apart and been taped back together. Years ago,…

THE POPE AND MUSSOLINI, by David I. Kertzer (Random House). In 1929, the Vatican asked Mussolini to insure that his candidates in a coming plebiscite were “free from any tie with Freemasonry, with Judaism, and, in short, with any of the anticlerical parties.” Mussolini made the changes, got a Vatican endorsement, and solidified his hold on power. Much more attention has been given to the Vatican’s compromises and complicity with Hitler, but Kertzer tells a fascinating and tragic story of its self-interested support for Mussolini when he was vulnerable early on, and Pius XI’s belated dismay at racial laws that engulfed even Jews who had been baptized as Catholics. When Pius XI died, in 1939, a speech critical of the laws was on his desk; his successor, Pius XII,…