Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar-17-14 i The New Yorker

ANDREW SOLOMON (“THE RECKONING,” P. 36) is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College. His book “Far from the Tree” won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 22) writes for the magazine and is an editor of The Talk of the Town. DANA GOODYEAR (“LONG STORY SHORT,” P. 24), a staff writer, is the author of “Anything That Moves,” which was published in November. CORA FRAZIER (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 31) is a writer and editor living in New York. ANDRÉ ACIMAN (“ARE YOU LISTENING?,” P. 32) is a professor of comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. “Harvard Square” is his third novel. TAD FRIEND (“HEAVY WEATHER,” P. 46) has been writing for The New Yorker…

22 E. 13th St. (212-231-2236) THE NAME OF THIS NEW restaurant near Union Square means “of the waves,” which refers both to the ideal, soupy state of a proper risotto and to the concept of combining the cuisines of two archipelagos, Venice and Japan. Those places have drastically different approaches to food, but both hold tradition in high regard, and find exquisite ways to elevate the bounteous seafood available to them. All’Onda has fashioned a lovely menu of seafood-driven crudi (or is it creative sashimi?) and homemade pastas, for a sophisticated foodie crowd. Who can resist arancini? The rice in the fried bite-size spheres at All’Onda is mixed not with the classic Fontina cheese but with jet-black squid ink. They are garnished with scoops of fresh uni, resulting in a…

In 1990, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn emerged from his isolation in Cavendish, Vermont, and issued a vatic manifesto entitled “How to Revitalize Russia.” Published at great length in Komsomolskaya Pravda, it was a document out of time, written in a prophetic nineteenth-century voice, with archaic diction and priestly cadences. Solzhenitsyn, a heroic dissident, was always at the nationalist end of the spectrum, but he was not calling for some sort of tsarist revival and imperial maintenance. Rather, he endorsed a hyper-local, Swiss-style democratic politics, a transition to private property, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “We do not have the energy to run an Empire!” he wrote. “Let us shrug it off. It is crushing us, it is draining us, and it is accelerating our demise.” Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, along…

Confused by the recent events in Ukraine? It was hard to find clarity the other night at Café Glechik, a Ukrainian restaurant on Sheepshead Bay Road, near Brighton Beach. You could find comfort, though: the borscht was hot, the vareniki pillowy, and the atmosphere tranquil. Near the front, two burly men with shaved heads were hunched over a plate of beef Stroganoff. “I am boxer,” the one with the thicker neck said. He pointed to his companion, who wore a yellow-and-electric-blue jumpsuit that said “UKRAINE” on the front. “This is my trainer.” The boxer was Vyacheslav (Czar) Glazkov, an Olympic bronze medallist from the eastern city of Lugansk. His trainer was Eduard Mienchakov, formerly with the Ukrainian national boxing team. Mienchakov wasn’t touching the Stroganoff, Glazkov explained, because he was…

The SAT college entrance exam is undergoing sweeping revisions . . . to make the exam better representative of what students study in high school and the skills they need to succeed in college and afterward. —The Daily News. 1. Reading comprehension. Consider the following passage by a nineteenth-century female writer: Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody; and Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her. He really believed that, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger. How would you title the above passage to generate the most “likes”?…

This is the way your life began to end with the words “I don’t feel so hot” but when I think of the red-eye to Florida the plane wallowing in turbulence my memory is not of you in a diaper gonged on morphine drifting up out of sleep but a manatee approaching the window in the underwater viewing chamber curious about us transfixed behind the cloudy glass your granddaughters gazing openmouthed having forgotten about you entirely or is this the way you now loom up in memory whiskered entranced in folklore thought to have once been human…

Annie Clark, who performs under the name St. Vincent, is a musician who arrived fully formed. Her début album, “Marry Me” (2007), showed her to be a nimble guitar player, an expert arranger of voices, and a collector of unidentifiable sounds. Her work lives at a distance from most rock or pop, owing to the contrast between her even, unshowy temperament and her taste for fertile clashes of language. (“You’re a supplement, you’re a salve. You’re a bandage, pull it off. I think I love you, I think I’m mad” is a lyric from the song “Actor Out of Work,” from 2009.) Her new album, “St. Vincent,” her fourth, is her simplest and most potent. It is odd but accessible, detailed though never ornamental, personal but stripped of narcissism. In…

Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” is a play with a fantastic theme, but, as directed by Linda Ames Key (at the Pearl), it’s not so fantastic to watch. First produced in Paris in 1944, “No Exit” was the philosopher’s third effort for the stage in nearly as many years. His first significant theatre piece, “The Flies,” had premièred the year before, when he was thirty-seven; a distinctly anti-Fascist work produced in Vichy-era France, “The Flies” generated a critical dialogue that helped fuel Sartre’s growing notoriety. “No Exit,” on the other hand, grew less out of politics than out of the demands of love. Or, more accurately, the demands of desire combined with the fantasy of love. In the early forties, when he was working on his seminal text “Being and Nothingness”…

BALLOT INITIATIVE Jeffrey Toobin, in his article on the Voting Rights Act, omits a significant feature of the legal landscape (“Holder v. Roberts,” February 17th & 24th). Contrary to the understanding of most Americans, there is no affirmative constitutional right to vote. Racial animus is a powerful motivation behind voter-suppression legislation, but so is a desire to suppress the votes of the poor and the working class generally. Moreover, the interests that need protection are broader than those covered by the Voting Rights Act. The way to make real progress, and to avoid being constantly on the defensive against efforts to restrict voting access, would be to pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a universal right to vote. Then the onus would properly and permanently be on those who would…

80 St. Marks Place (212-388-0388) In 1964, Lorcan Otway’s father, a Quaker playwright, bought the building that now houses William Barnacle Tavern, and turned the jazz club there into Theatre 80. The site had once been a speakeasy favored by New York City Council members, and its walls were pockmarked by bullets and packed with dynamite for a quick escape. As a child, Otway watched the previous tenant retrieve two million dollars in gold certificates from a basement safe, beginning his long obsession with the building’s history. After taking over the theatre, in 2010, Otway added a bar to the space, named it after a legendary local sailor, and picked absinthe as its featured drink. Banned in the U.S. for almost a century, owing to temperance-movement humbug, absinthe, Otway explains,…

The New York City Council convenes on the second floor of City Hall, in an august chamber with a frescoed ceiling. On a recent Saturday, the chamber was open, but empty. “Over here!” a voice called from an adjacent room. Seated around a table were nine current and former City Hall reporters. Average age: nearly eligible for a reduced-fare Metro-Card. Average outfit: rumpled shirt, jeans, maybe a sweater vest. They were the writers of the Inner Circle Show, a political-satire revue that has been staged nearly every year since 1923, and is notable for luring the mayors of the City of New York onstage, sometimes in drag. Shelly Strickler, the show’s director, said, “You got any good Cuomo jokes?” “No joke is too bad for us,” Bob Liff, formerly with…

For more than a year now, tens of millions of Americans have found time each day to devote themselves to an essential task: swiping at their phones and tablets to arrange colorful candy icons in rows. They are playing Candy Crush Saga, a wildly addictive mobile game that has been downloaded more than half a billion times. You can play the game for free, but enough people have been willing to pay for extra lives and various performance-boosting tools to make it staggeringly profitable. Last year, Candy Crush’s maker, an Irish company called King Digital Entertainment, had almost two billion dollars in sales, five hundred and sixty-seven million dollars of which was pure profit. Last month, King filed for an initial public offering, which is expected to value the company…

I always knew my mother couldn’t hear, but I can’t remember when it dawned on me that she’d always be deaf. If I was told, I didn’t believe it. It was no different when I learned about sex. Someone may have sat me down for the facts of life, and although I wasn’t really shocked and probably already knew, I couldn’t bring myself to trust any of it. In between knowing something and refusing to know it lies a murky chasm that even the most enlightened among us are perfectly happy to inhabit. If anyone gave me the official report on my mother, it would have been my grandmother, who did not like her daughter-in-law and who found my mother’s deaf friends as repellent as ungainly fowls squawking in her…

Russell Crowe, crewcut and burly in a woollen shift, arrived on set, marched to the video monitors, and planted himself behind the director. A musk of cigarettes and resentment filled the air. It was 2:30 A.M. at Brooklyn’s Marcy Armory, during an ice storm in November, 2012. The room temperature was fifty-eight, and Crowe, who plays the title character in Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical epic “Noah,” was scheduled to get really wet. He’d already shot a version of the scene outdoors, in slightly warmer conditions: Noah, soaked from the deluge, peers at a battleground where a barbaric army surges toward him, seeking shelter in his ark. But Crowe’s eye line, the place his stare fell, had been too low, so now he had to do it all over again. Aronofsky gazed…

The spring of 1942 was a perilous time for Americans, caught, as they were, in a new war. The preceding December, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. American troops in the Philippines were close to surrender. The Wehrmacht had advanced across Europe and into the Soviet Union and North Africa. Many people wondered whether the United States had a “crusading faith” to fight for. In April, Frank Capra, the ebullient director of “It Happened One Night” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” stepped into the Museum of Modern Art to see, for the first time, Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” a celebration of the Nazis’ 1934 Party congress, in Nuremberg. Again and again, Riefenstahl makes heraldic use of torchlight parades, banners, and trumpets raised to the sky like artillery.…

The current Whitney Biennial will be remembered as the last at the noble Marcel Breuer building, on Madison Avenue, before the museum moves to its snazzy new quarters, designed by Renzo Piano, in the meatpacking district. But most of the art in the show will likely be remembered only in a general way, as expressing a frazzled, peculiarly melancholy Zeitgeist. Like the previous Biennial, this one isn’t limited to American artists and to new works, but no other has so extended its range beyond the grave. Several of the artists are deceased, having died young, or relatively so. They include two distinguished but lesser-known Pictures Generation artists, Sarah Charlesworth and Gretchen Bender, who died in 2013 and 2004, respectively; Tony Greene, a promising maker of pictures that impose painted, sensual…

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN PAUL TAYLOR OFTEN populates his dances with creatures who seem half human and half something else rather appalling. The greatest of these pieces is “Cloven Kingdom,” from 1976, which is part of the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s season at the David H. Koch Theatre this month. The women wear mirror-clad geometric shapes on their heads, but are dressed in lovely, swishing dresses. The dancers alternate between lyrical movements and actions you might perform if you were losing your mind, or inhabited a Hieronymus Bosch painting. They make dog paws, they climb between one another’s legs. Taylor gave the piece an epigraph from Spinoza: “Man is a social animal.” God only knows why. Thrillingly, man doesn’t look very social here. PHOTOGRAPH BY RUVEN AFANADOR THE THEATRE…

IN ALL ARTS, there are quarrels between the old order and the new—the Academy versus the Refusés—but dance is a special case. It is the only major art form that has no text: no canvas, no book on the shelf, no score to speak of. Therefore dancers are especially anxious to preserve their art. In popular dance, the situation is even more urgent. Many artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were entranced by ballet dancers and made paintings and prints of them in action. But the virtuosos of the street and the tavern—flamenco dancers, tap dancers—were less often portrayed. In some cases, we barely know what they did. Because non-academic dance is so scantily recorded, it breeds debates about authenticity. In the realm of flamenco, the arguments are especially…

Last month, during the Beatles-fiftieth-anniversary hoopla, a hot young European foursome with distinctive hairdos—Asbjørn Nørgaard, Frederik Øland, Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen—landed in New York for a high-profile gig. They are the Danish String Quartet, from Copenhagen, and they’re at the beginning of a three-year residency with CMS Two, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s emerging-stars program. A few nights before a concert at Alice Tully Hall (which yielded raucous cheering, four curtain calls, and a woman exclaiming, “This has never happened before!”), they laced up their sneakers and hit the town. The evening began at Bar Centrale, where they slid into a booth and ordered margaritas. Their instruments were in Chelsea, locked in a room with a man named Max, awaiting a late-night set in the…

Somewhere in the files of General Mills is a letter from the very-short-story writer Lydia Davis. In it, Davis, who is widely considered one of the most original minds in American fiction today, expresses dismay at the packaging of the frozen peas sold by the company’s subsidiary Cascadian Farm. The letter, like many things that Davis writes, had started out sincere and then turned weird. Details grew overly specific; a narrative, however spare, emerged. “The peas are a dull yellow green, more the color of pea soup than fresh peas and nothing like the actual color of your peas, which are a nice bright dark green,” she wrote. “We have compared your depiction of peas to that of the other frozen peas packages and yours is by far the least…

In Peter Lanza’s new house, on a secluded private road in Fairfield County, Connecticut, is an attic room overflowing with shipping crates of what he calls “the stuff.” Since the day in December, 2012, when his son Adam killed his own mother, himself, and twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, strangers from across the world have sent thousands upon thousands of letters and other keepsakes: prayer shawls, Bibles, Teddy bears, homemade toys; stories with titles such as “My First Christmas in Heaven”; crosses, including one made by prison inmates. People sent candy, too, and when I visited Peter, last fall, he showed me a bag of year-old caramels. He had not wanted to throw away anything that people sent. But he said, “I was wary about eating anything,” and…

Katie wanted to relive Katie at nine, before her mother left, and I could appreciate that, but we had only one console at the time, and I really didn’t want to go there. It was coming up on the holidays, absolutely grim outside, nine-thirty at night—on a school night—and she had to be up at six to catch the bus in the dark. She’d already missed too much school, staying home on any pretext and reliving all day, while I was at work, so there really were no limits, and who was being a bad father here? A single father unable to discipline his fifteen-year-old daughter, let alone inculcate a work ethic in her? Me. I was. And I felt bad about it. I wanted to put my foot down…

ALL JOY AND NO FUN, by Jennifer Senior (Ecco). This far-ranging essay on modern parenting follows a variety of parents—stay-at-home, working, single—from parent support groups and Cub Scout sign-ups to the privacy of their messy, middle-class households. Always generous in tone, Senior is a keen observer of the impact children have on their parents’ marriages, mental health, work, and social lives, and she makes deft use of social-science research to tease out cultural shifts that have occurred. The distinction she draws between joy and fun is slippery (a lot of what she documents sounds like fun) and the book’s most useful contribution may be the connection it makes between joy and a darker set of emotions: loss, vulnerability, and, surprisingly, grief. THE EMPIRE OF NECESSITY, by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan).…

Two men come together in a hotel room near Toronto. The day outside is flat, and the room is dim; nobody turns on the light. The men have never met before, although they have spoken on the phone. Now, at last, they find themselves face to face. And here’s the curious thing: it’s the same face. Denis Villeneuve’s “Enemy” stars Jake Gyllenhaal, twice. His first and mousier role is that of Adam Bell, who teaches history to patently bored students. As befits someone who specializes in the study of dictatorships, he seems to be bowed beneath the yoke of an invisible tyrant. He works, eats, lives alone, walks with a mixture of shuffle and trudge, and has glumly regular sex with his girlfriend, Mary (Mélanie Laurent). A colleague suggests a…