Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar-24-14 i The New Yorker

CALVIN TOMKINS (“EXPERIMENTAL PEOPLE,” P. 38) is a longtime New Yorker writer, covering art and cultural affairs. The Museum of Modern Art recently published a new edition of his book “Living Well Is the Best Revenge.” STEVE COLL (COMMENT, P. 31), the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Ghost Wars,” about the C.I.A. and Afghanistan. EMMA ALLEN (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 35) is a member of the magazine’s editorial staff. IAN FRAZIER (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 47) edited the collection “Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings,” which came out last August. KELEFA SANNEH (“SKIN IN THE GAME,” P. 48) is a staff writer. ANTHONY LANE (“HER AGAIN,” P. 56), the author of “Nobody’s Perfect,” is a…

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN WHEN THE OUTRAGEOUSLY DYSTOPIAN teen comedy “Heathers” came out, in 1989, it was a box-office failure, but its straight-faced camp and pitch-black plot—Veronica, the fourth wheel of a fierce highschool clique, falls in love with J.D., a mischievous, murderous rebel—have made it a widely adored cult classic. “Heathers” also kick-started the careers of Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. Twenty-five years later, its issues of bully-related suicide, school shootings, and bomb threats are even more relevant, and the highly un-P.C. escapade takes on an even darker hue. Get ready for the return of fluffy bangs, shoulder pads, and vicious croquet matches, because the stage adaptation, “Heathers: The Musical,” directed by Andy Fickman, is in previews at New World Stages. It will be so very. THE THEATRE…

“EL AMOR BRUJO” (“Love, the Magician,” from 1915), a flamenco music drama that will be shown in three performances at Peridance this weekend, was composed by the refined Spaniard Manuel de Falla, but it was meant to coruscate with Gypsy passion. Here is a snatch of the lyrics: Only Hell’s fire burns hotter than all my blood . . . Suffering condemns me! Love poisons me! Sorrow kills me! Ay! Ay! These days, nationalism is a suspect emotion. People have not forgotten the Second World War. But in the nineteenth century—and even up to the nineteen-thirties—love of homeland was one of the most powerful sources of European art, above all of the music. As Western Europe became increasingly consolidated, with different countries drawing close to each other under the banners…

413 E. 12th St. (646-602-1300) “What do you think Joey Ramone would think if he found out there was a cheese board named after him?” a wine lover asked on a recent Saturday night, puzzling over his menu at Terroir, the “elitist wine bar for everyone.” The wine list, a riot of fonts, manifestos, and fun facts that comes in a binder, evokes a cross between a Dr. Bronner’s label and a Sex Pistols album cover. The bar, which began as an offshoot of the restaurant Hearth in 2008, now has outposts all over town. Its emphasis on environment—terroir—extends beyond its wine selection to its beer list (many are local) and its neighborhood aesthetic. Oak bookshelves display records by Patti Smith, Blondie, and Television; in Park Slope, there’s a Sandy…

In the vestibule of Room 211 of the Hart Senate Office Building, just to the north of the Capitol, a cop guards an inner door that requires a numerical code to open it. The room, where the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence sits, is called a “skiff,” for “sensitive compartmented information facility.” Last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s chair, described secret documents that are now apparently stored in the office. She did so publicly, during a remarkable jeremiad on the Senate floor, which was part “Homeland” treatment, part grand-jury instruction. She recounted several years of maneuvering between the committee staff and the C.I.A., before announcing “grave concerns” that agency officers had broken the law and violated the Constitution during a struggle over the documents. Feinstein called…

Last Wednesday morning, Andrew Malone, the principal of Success Academy Harlem Central, stood in front of his school, on West 111th Street. He held a cup of coffee in his left hand; with his right he shook the hand of each arriving student. “Mr. Malone, what’s the capital of a capital?” Amir Kimbrough-Smith, a fifth grader, asked. Malone replied, “Are you thinking of a building that’s called a capitol?” “No, I mean, like, what’s the capital of Albany?” Amir said. “Amir, that is such an interesting question that I have no idea how to answer it,” Malone said, rustling Amir inside. The first Success Academy opened in 2006, and the network, which is supported by both public and private funds, is now the largest charter-school group in the city, with…

The photographer Andres Serrano’s most famous work is “Piss Christ” (1987), a picture of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. Its exhibition launched a crusade by the late senator Jesse Helms to revoke N.E.A. funding for art he didn’t like. (“He is not an artist. He is a jerk,” Helms told the Senate.) The other morning, Serrano, now sixty-three, tested a new method of provocation: he was expected at the headquarters of Scholastic, Inc., in SoHo, to judge photos submitted by twelfth graders to the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards competition, and he was late. “Where’s Andres?” asked Casey Kelbaugh, another judge, a photographer who runs the nonprofit Slideluck (potlucks featuring art slide shows). “Maybe we can just start looking at the works?” the third judge, the gallerist Julie…

Vladimir Putin, in his campaign to restore Russian dominance over post-Soviet states, has an unconventional weapon in his arsenal: vast supplies of natural gas. In 2006 and 2009, Gazprom, the Russian gas company, cut off supplies to Ukraine (the second time, this created shortages in Europe, too). In 2010, it reduced supplies to Belarus, and last fall Russia threatened Moldovans with the same if they didn’t abandon plans to sign a free-trade accord with the European Union. “We hope that you will not freeze,” a Russian deputy foreign minister said ominously. During the current crisis in Crimea, Putin’s readiness to use natural resources for strategic ends has made it difficult for Europeans to take a hard line against him, since Europe gets roughly thirty per cent of its gas from…

Civics 1.0: Why We Have Texas Did you ever stop to think about all the advantages we receive as a result of Texas? Without Texas, our government would not be able to function. To give just one example, Texas made it possible for us to have a full complement of Presidents during the past fifty years. If not for Texas, we would have had to forgo the terms of Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush. It was our Texas that made the existence of those Presidents possible. Or consider the space program, one of our country’s proudest accomplishments. It achieved such outstanding success mainly because we, as a country, committed a sizable amount of Texas to it. Another important benefit that Texas provides is national defense. Thanks to a…

The logo for Under Armour, the sporting-goods company, consists of two overlapping parabolas, opening in opposite directions, which suggest the company’s initials. If you start looking for it, you may find that you see it all the time. In 1999, Jamie Foxx wore Under Armour in “Any Given Sunday”; in 2009, in the fourth season of “Friday Night Lights,” a compassionate Under Armour sales representative helped Coach Taylor secure new uniforms for his beleaguered East Dillon Lions. The company has the exclusive rights to equip athletes at thirteen colleges, among them Notre Dame, which became an Under Armour school in January, after signing a ten-year deal that is reportedly worth around ninety million dollars. Under Armour’s roster of paid endorsers includes the skier Lindsey Vonn, the quarterback Tom Brady, and…

The first person I met in Berlin was a boar-hunting friend of a friend, who agreed to talk to me only if I didn’t print his name. He was in his early forties, six and a half feet tall, muscular, lean, and fair, with shaggy reddish-brown hair, some stubble, and a great deal of self-confidence. He had on worn jeans, biker boots, a loose faded black T-shirt, and a scarf, and yet I’ll confess I found myself picturing him trim and tidy in Heidelberg duelling garb. Preconceptions can be hard to shake when you’re fresh in town. It was a Sunday night in the dregs of December, sleety and dark. We were at a bar in Mitte, the formerly bombed-out and abandoned East Berlin district that was reclaimed by squatters,…

He says in the newsreel, like a hundred little dodges to make his Sherlock Holmes think straight, meaning crooked, meaning sense and surprise do mix. A museum thing. Surgeons’ Hall, Edinburgh— bones in bottles, flesh ravaged by disease or musket balls or plain bad DNA, oh chloroform, save us, carbolic soap and Lister Lister Lister, now Conan Doyle, homeboy of this old and gorgeous city. It’s just that, holy jealous! His detective gets mail. One young woman would drop her darling village boy to marry him. Holmes, that is. The doctor should be saying, yes, my stilted prose, yes, rare luck of the draw, a great character came to me. Dogged effort pays off. Everything’s a mystery until a narrative kicks in. You know what? It’s still a mystery. Such…

Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac,” a film in two “volumes” (each to be shown separately), is a pornographic work of art—an obsessive, violent, and at times remarkably eccentric sex epic that is often brilliant and never simpleminded or dull. The earlier work of the fifty-seven-year-old Danish director—“Breaking the Waves,” “The Idiots,” “Antichrist”—was soaked in show-off despair. For almost twenty years, he has triumphed on the international art-film circuit as a sensationalist and a boor, making lurid “metaphysical” movies and offering, on one occasion—at Cannes—a hapless pro-Nazi rant. His previous film, “Melancholia” (2011), chronicled the end of the world (a rogue planet wipes us out), something that he appeared to welcome, at least as a visually radiant experience. But now he has sprung back from the apocalypse to create the fictional history…

The idea that there is literature, and then there is something that professors do with literature called “theory,” is a little strange. To think about literature is to think theoretically. If you believe that literature is different from other kinds of writing (like philosophy and self-help books), if you have ideas about what’s relevant and what isn’t for understanding it (which class had ownership of the means of production, whether it gives you goose bumps, what color the author painted his toenails), and if you have standards for judging whether it’s great or not so great (a pleasing style or a displeasing politics), then you have a theory of literature. You can’t make much sense of it without one. It’s the job of people in literature departments to think about…

“Tradition ist Schlamperei,” Gustav Mahler liked to say—“Tradition is sloppiness.” When Mahler took charge of the Vienna Court Opera, in 1897, he resolved to banish bad habits that had encrusted that institution. The city of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert has long cherished the belief that music is native to its air, that a certain sound and sensibility can flourish only in its climate. In Mahler’s day, the Vienna Philharmonic, the élite ensemble associated with the Court (later the State) Opera, already prided itself on its painterly approach to sonority, on its shimmering strings and golden horns. Mahler, the scourge from the provinces, shook things up. His Beethoven Ninth was described as a “triumph of lucidity,” and caused unease for that very reason: critics found it too precisely delineated, too nervously…

You might not expect much drama from “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Germany 1937,” a succinct historical show at the Neue Galerie. The subject—the propagandistic “Degenerate Art” exhibition, which presented modernist works for popular vilification—is familiar, and it ranks as scarcely a footnote in the annals of Third Reich infamy. But the nuanced treatment of the event, by the German curator Olaf Peters, shocks anew, even at a distance of seventy-seven years. Peters has done a lot with a little: only about twenty works that appeared in the show, along with others by the same artists. Apposite photographs and films accompany the works. One room features empty frames that once held large paintings—probably destroyed—by the likes of Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Oskar…

THE LANZA TRAGEDY I read Andrew Solomon’s article detailing the psychological background of the Sandy Hook killer, Adam Lanza, with interest and with feelings of sympathy for his parents, both of whom struggled valiantly to do their best for their deeply troubled son (“The Reckoning,” March 17th). However, I wish more attention had been paid to the question of gun ownership. Did Nancy Lanza make firearms available to her son because she herself was a gun enthusiast? Were gun shows and target shooting one of the few ways that she could engage Adam’s interest? Much is made of the fact that no one, neither Adam’s parents nor any of the several mental-health professionals who examined him, recognized any violent tendencies. But isn’t a preoccupation with weapons itself evidence of…

FOR MAJOR DIRECTORS, there are no more typical productions. Darren Aronofsky follows a low-budget erotic thriller with a grand-scale Biblical epic; Wes Anderson makes a historical anti-Nazi fantasy as well as an animated adaptation of a children’s classic. Every new movie is, by definition, eccentric, whereas in the studio era directors often found a niche and stuck (or were stuck) with it. Anthology Film Archives’ series “Auteurs Gone Wild” (March 20-30) offers some of the exotic masterworks that arose when golden-age directors strayed from their usual fare to create some of their most distinguished works. Fritz Lang, a refugee from Nazi Germany, is best known for the crime story “M” and the dystopian fantasy “Metropolis.” “You and Me,” a musical vision of working-class New York, from 1938, is his third…

“EL AMOR BRUJO” (“Love, the Magician,” from 1915), a flamenco music drama that will be shown in three performances at Peridance this weekend, was composed by the refined Spaniard Manuel de Falla, but it was meant to coruscate with Gypsy passion. Here is a snatch of the lyrics: Only Hell’s fire burns hotter than all my blood . . . Suffering condemns me! Love poisons me! Sorrow kills me! Ay! Ay! These days, nationalism is a suspect emotion. People have not forgotten the Second World War. But in the nineteenth century—and even up to the nineteen-thirties—love of homeland was one of the most powerful sources of European art, above all of the music. As Western Europe became increasingly consolidated, with different countries drawing close to each other under the banners…

138 Orchard St. (212-466-4633) THE DINERS OF THIS CITY have lost the bread-service battle, in that it is now a service, and comes at a cost. On the upside, the complimentary but soul-crushing wicker basket of day-old baguette and frozen butter is now difficult to find anywhere but the most cynical tourist spots. The humblest of offerings has become a way for chefs to signal their ingenuity, and at Contra, a new restaurant on the Lower East Side, three dollars is a fair price for a warm, dense loaf of French bread, baked with sunflower seeds and served with butter shot through with chocolate, whipped into peaks, and sprinkled with onion salt. The food at Contra can be intricate, even challenging, but the concept is not: a prix-fixe of five…

In the vestibule of Room 211 of the Hart Senate Office Building, just to the north of the Capitol, a cop guards an inner door that requires a numerical code to open it. The room, where the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence sits, is called a “skiff,” for “sensitive compartmented information facility.” Last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s chair, described secret documents that are now apparently stored in the office. She did so publicly, during a remarkable jeremiad on the Senate floor, which was part “Homeland” treatment, part grand-jury instruction. She recounted several years of maneuvering between the committee staff and the C.I.A., before announcing “grave concerns” that agency officers had broken the law and violated the Constitution during a struggle over the documents. Feinstein called…

In 1983, Jeff Daniels arrived in Houston to shoot his first major film role, in “Terms of Endearment.” He was a twenty-eight-year-old Off Broadway actor with twelve hundred dollars in the bank. Suddenly, he was in a movie with Jack Nicholson, Debra Winger, and Shirley MacLaine: “a big damn deal,” he recalled recently. At the airport, he saw three limos. In went Nicholson, Winger, and Mac Laine. Everyone else climbed into a van. He’d heard that the cast was putting up at the Ritz. Twenty minutes later, the van dropped him off at the Allen Parkway Inn. “Hellhole does not begin to describe this dump,” he said. “This is where Texas businessmen bring their secretaries for lunch.” For most actors, this would one day be an anecdote for the “Tonight…

The photographer Andres Serrano’s most famous work is “Piss Christ” (1987), a picture of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. Its exhibition launched a crusade by the late senator Jesse Helms to revoke N.E.A. funding for art he didn’t like. (“He is not an artist. He is a jerk,” Helms told the Senate.) The other morning, Serrano, now sixty-three, tested a new method of provocation: he was expected at the headquarters of Scholastic, Inc., in SoHo, to judge photos submitted by twelfth graders to the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards competition, and he was late. “Where’s Andres?” asked Casey Kelbaugh, another judge, a photographer who runs the nonprofit Slideluck (potlucks featuring art slide shows). “Maybe we can just start looking at the works?” the third judge, the gallerist Julie…

Video art was invented in the mid-nineteen-sixties by a slightly mad, Korean-born genius named Nam June Paik, and in spite of the oceanic flood of video artists that his discovery unleashed, for the longest time I was convinced that no one had come close to improving on Paik’s mastery of the form. I’m no longer convinced. About a year ago, I started looking at the work that Ryan Trecartin and his loosely associated group of fellow artists and performers have produced during the past decade. Not even Paik, I decided, made videos that are as consistently non-boring as these, or as full of breaking news about the future. Four new works that Trecartin showed at the Venice Biennale last summer had their New York première on December 11th, at the…

Civics 1.0: Why We Have Texas Did you ever stop to think about all the advantages we receive as a result of Texas? Without Texas, our government would not be able to function. To give just one example, Texas made it possible for us to have a full complement of Presidents during the past fifty years. If not for Texas, we would have had to forgo the terms of Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush. It was our Texas that made the existence of those Presidents possible. Or consider the space program, one of our country’s proudest accomplishments. It achieved such outstanding success mainly because we, as a country, committed a sizable amount of Texas to it. Another important benefit that Texas provides is national defense. Thanks to a…

These are exciting times for Scarlett Johansson. In the past year, she has played the girlfriend of a porn addict, in “Don Jon”; she has played an operating system, using nothing but the honey of her voice, in “Her”; and she has seen her friend Scott Stringer become New York City Comptroller. It’s been one thrill after another. And now, on April 4th, she has two films coming out: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” in which she resumes her role from “The Avengers” as Black Widow, a do-gooder who dresses like a dominatrix; and “Under the Skin,” in which she undresses to do bad, and which is like nothing that Johansson buffs, or pretty much anyone else, have seen before. In February, clad in Dior, bejewelled in Cartier, and accompanied…

The first person I met in Berlin was a boar-hunting friend of a friend, who agreed to talk to me only if I didn’t print his name. He was in his early forties, six and a half feet tall, muscular, lean, and fair, with shaggy reddish-brown hair, some stubble, and a great deal of self-confidence. He had on worn jeans, biker boots, a loose faded black T-shirt, and a scarf, and yet I’ll confess I found myself picturing him trim and tidy in Heidelberg duelling garb. Preconceptions can be hard to shake when you’re fresh in town. It was a Sunday night in the dregs of December, sleety and dark. We were at a bar in Mitte, the formerly bombed-out and abandoned East Berlin district that was reclaimed by squatters,…

The train paused at a red light on its way into the station, waiting for a platform to clear. The passengers had put on their coats and put away their laptops and lifted their bags down from the luggage rack; some were already standing, queuing between the seats. Liverpool was the last station, the end of the two-and-a-half-hour journey from London; they were ready to move on but could not move anywhere yet. Quiet and stillness settled unexpectedly on the carriage. Because the forward motion of their lives was suspended while they waited, the passengers were suddenly more intimately present to one another—although no one spoke or made eye contact. Greta felt the change in atmosphere and looked up from her book and out the window, keeping her finger on…

Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac,” a film in two “volumes” (each to be shown separately), is a pornographic work of art—an obsessive, violent, and at times remarkably eccentric sex epic that is often brilliant and never simpleminded or dull. The earlier work of the fifty-seven-year-old Danish director—“Breaking the Waves,” “The Idiots,” “Antichrist”—was soaked in show-off despair. For almost twenty years, he has triumphed on the international art-film circuit as a sensationalist and a boor, making lurid “metaphysical” movies and offering, on one occasion—at Cannes—a hapless pro-Nazi rant. His previous film, “Melancholia” (2011), chronicled the end of the world (a rogue planet wipes us out), something that he appeared to welcome, at least as a visually radiant experience. But now he has sprung back from the apocalypse to create the fictional history…

ANDREW’S BRAIN, by E. L. Doctorow (Random House). This novel follows the meandering thoughts of Andrew, a cognitive scientist and psychotherapy patient, as he recounts the story of his love affair with a former student. The book moves back and forth in time and space, as Andrew ruminates on abstract concepts, such as “cloud thinking, a chemical ubermensch,” or basks in the pleasant memory of seeing a young woman practice gymnastics. The disaster of Andrew’s life involves 9/11, and in its aftermath he turns for help to his ex-wife, with ruinous consequences. It’s a fitting mistake for a character who remains out of step, even with himself, throughout the novel. MARRY ME, by Dan Rhodes (Europa). The seventy-nine vignettes in this slim, addictive volume range in length from two…

“Tradition ist Schlamperei,” Gustav Mahler liked to say—“Tradition is sloppiness.” When Mahler took charge of the Vienna Court Opera, in 1897, he resolved to banish bad habits that had encrusted that institution. The city of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert has long cherished the belief that music is native to its air, that a certain sound and sensibility can flourish only in its climate. In Mahler’s day, the Vienna Philharmonic, the élite ensemble associated with the Court (later the State) Opera, already prided itself on its painterly approach to sonority, on its shimmering strings and golden horns. Mahler, the scourge from the provinces, shook things up. His Beethoven Ninth was described as a “triumph of lucidity,” and caused unease for that very reason: critics found it too precisely delineated, too nervously…

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN WHEN THE OUTRAGEOUSLY DYSTOPIAN teen comedy “Heathers” came out, in 1989, it was a box-office failure, but its straight-faced camp and pitch-black plot—Veronica, the fourth wheel of a fierce highschool clique, falls in love with J.D., a mischievous, murderous rebel—have made it a widely adored cult classic. “Heathers” also kick-started the careers of Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. Twenty-five years later, its issues of bully-related suicide, school shootings, and bomb threats are even more relevant, and the highly un-P.C. escapade takes on an even darker hue. Get ready for the return of fluffy bangs, shoulder pads, and vicious croquet matches, because the stage adaptation, “Heathers: The Musical,” directed by Andy Fickman, is in previews at New World Stages. It will be so very. THE THEATRE…

FOR MAJOR DIRECTORS, there are no more typical productions. Darren Aronofsky follows a low-budget erotic thriller with a grand-scale Biblical epic; Wes Anderson makes a historical anti-Nazi fantasy as well as an animated adaptation of a children’s classic. Every new movie is, by definition, eccentric, whereas in the studio era directors often found a niche and stuck (or were stuck) with it. Anthology Film Archives’ series “Auteurs Gone Wild” (March 20-30) offers some of the exotic masterworks that arose when golden-age directors strayed from their usual fare to create some of their most distinguished works. Fritz Lang, a refugee from Nazi Germany, is best known for the crime story “M” and the dystopian fantasy “Metropolis.” “You and Me,” a musical vision of working-class New York, from 1938, is his third…

138 Orchard St. (212-466-4633) THE DINERS OF THIS CITY have lost the bread-service battle, in that it is now a service, and comes at a cost. On the upside, the complimentary but soul-crushing wicker basket of day-old baguette and frozen butter is now difficult to find anywhere but the most cynical tourist spots. The humblest of offerings has become a way for chefs to signal their ingenuity, and at Contra, a new restaurant on the Lower East Side, three dollars is a fair price for a warm, dense loaf of French bread, baked with sunflower seeds and served with butter shot through with chocolate, whipped into peaks, and sprinkled with onion salt. The food at Contra can be intricate, even challenging, but the concept is not: a prix-fixe of five…

413 E. 12th St. (646-602-1300) “What do you think Joey Ramone would think if he found out there was a cheese board named after him?” a wine lover asked on a recent Saturday night, puzzling over his menu at Terroir, the “elitist wine bar for everyone.” The wine list, a riot of fonts, manifestos, and fun facts that comes in a binder, evokes a cross between a Dr. Bronner’s label and a Sex Pistols album cover. The bar, which began as an offshoot of the restaurant Hearth in 2008, now has outposts all over town. Its emphasis on environment—terroir—extends beyond its wine selection to its beer list (many are local) and its neighborhood aesthetic. Oak bookshelves display records by Patti Smith, Blondie, and Television; in Park Slope, there’s a Sandy…

Last Wednesday morning, Andrew Malone, the principal of Success Academy Harlem Central, stood in front of his school, on West 111th Street. He held a cup of coffee in his left hand; with his right he shook the hand of each arriving student. “Mr. Malone, what’s the capital of a capital?” Amir Kimbrough-Smith, a fifth grader, asked. Malone replied, “Are you thinking of a building that’s called a capitol?” “No, I mean, like, what’s the capital of Albany?” Amir said. “Amir, that is such an interesting question that I have no idea how to answer it,” Malone said, rustling Amir inside. The first Success Academy opened in 2006, and the network, which is supported by both public and private funds, is now the largest charter-school group in the city, with…

In 1983, Jeff Daniels arrived in Houston to shoot his first major film role, in “Terms of Endearment.” He was a twenty-eight-year-old Off Broadway actor with twelve hundred dollars in the bank. Suddenly, he was in a movie with Jack Nicholson, Debra Winger, and Shirley MacLaine: “a big damn deal,” he recalled recently. At the airport, he saw three limos. In went Nicholson, Winger, and Mac Laine. Everyone else climbed into a van. He’d heard that the cast was putting up at the Ritz. Twenty minutes later, the van dropped him off at the Allen Parkway Inn. “Hellhole does not begin to describe this dump,” he said. “This is where Texas businessmen bring their secretaries for lunch.” For most actors, this would one day be an anecdote for the “Tonight…

Vladimir Putin, in his campaign to restore Russian dominance over post-Soviet states, has an unconventional weapon in his arsenal: vast supplies of natural gas. In 2006 and 2009, Gazprom, the Russian gas company, cut off supplies to Ukraine (the second time, this created shortages in Europe, too). In 2010, it reduced supplies to Belarus, and last fall Russia threatened Moldovans with the same if they didn’t abandon plans to sign a free-trade accord with the European Union. “We hope that you will not freeze,” a Russian deputy foreign minister said ominously. During the current crisis in Crimea, Putin’s readiness to use natural resources for strategic ends has made it difficult for Europeans to take a hard line against him, since Europe gets roughly thirty per cent of its gas from…

Video art was invented in the mid-nineteen-sixties by a slightly mad, Korean-born genius named Nam June Paik, and in spite of the oceanic flood of video artists that his discovery unleashed, for the longest time I was convinced that no one had come close to improving on Paik’s mastery of the form. I’m no longer convinced. About a year ago, I started looking at the work that Ryan Trecartin and his loosely associated group of fellow artists and performers have produced during the past decade. Not even Paik, I decided, made videos that are as consistently non-boring as these, or as full of breaking news about the future. Four new works that Trecartin showed at the Venice Biennale last summer had their New York première on December 11th, at the…

The logo for Under Armour, the sporting-goods company, consists of two overlapping parabolas, opening in opposite directions, which suggest the company’s initials. If you start looking for it, you may find that you see it all the time. In 1999, Jamie Foxx wore Under Armour in “Any Given Sunday”; in 2009, in the fourth season of “Friday Night Lights,” a compassionate Under Armour sales representative helped Coach Taylor secure new uniforms for his beleaguered East Dillon Lions. The company has the exclusive rights to equip athletes at thirteen colleges, among them Notre Dame, which became an Under Armour school in January, after signing a ten-year deal that is reportedly worth around ninety million dollars. Under Armour’s roster of paid endorsers includes the skier Lindsey Vonn, the quarterback Tom Brady, and…

These are exciting times for Scarlett Johansson. In the past year, she has played the girlfriend of a porn addict, in “Don Jon”; she has played an operating system, using nothing but the honey of her voice, in “Her”; and she has seen her friend Scott Stringer become New York City Comptroller. It’s been one thrill after another. And now, on April 4th, she has two films coming out: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” in which she resumes her role from “The Avengers” as Black Widow, a do-gooder who dresses like a dominatrix; and “Under the Skin,” in which she undresses to do bad, and which is like nothing that Johansson buffs, or pretty much anyone else, have seen before. In February, clad in Dior, bejewelled in Cartier, and accompanied…

He says in the newsreel, like a hundred little dodges to make his Sherlock Holmes think straight, meaning crooked, meaning sense and surprise do mix. A museum thing. Surgeons’ Hall, Edinburgh— bones in bottles, flesh ravaged by disease or musket balls or plain bad DNA, oh chloroform, save us, carbolic soap and Lister Lister Lister, now Conan Doyle, homeboy of this old and gorgeous city. It’s just that, holy jealous! His detective gets mail. One young woman would drop her darling village boy to marry him. Holmes, that is. The doctor should be saying, yes, my stilted prose, yes, rare luck of the draw, a great character came to me. Dogged effort pays off. Everything’s a mystery until a narrative kicks in. You know what? It’s still a mystery. Such…

The train paused at a red light on its way into the station, waiting for a platform to clear. The passengers had put on their coats and put away their laptops and lifted their bags down from the luggage rack; some were already standing, queuing between the seats. Liverpool was the last station, the end of the two-and-a-half-hour journey from London; they were ready to move on but could not move anywhere yet. Quiet and stillness settled unexpectedly on the carriage. Because the forward motion of their lives was suspended while they waited, the passengers were suddenly more intimately present to one another—although no one spoke or made eye contact. Greta felt the change in atmosphere and looked up from her book and out the window, keeping her finger on…

The idea that there is literature, and then there is something that professors do with literature called “theory,” is a little strange. To think about literature is to think theoretically. If you believe that literature is different from other kinds of writing (like philosophy and self-help books), if you have ideas about what’s relevant and what isn’t for understanding it (which class had ownership of the means of production, whether it gives you goose bumps, what color the author painted his toenails), and if you have standards for judging whether it’s great or not so great (a pleasing style or a displeasing politics), then you have a theory of literature. You can’t make much sense of it without one. It’s the job of people in literature departments to think about…

ANDREW’S BRAIN, by E. L. Doctorow (Random House). This novel follows the meandering thoughts of Andrew, a cognitive scientist and psychotherapy patient, as he recounts the story of his love affair with a former student. The book moves back and forth in time and space, as Andrew ruminates on abstract concepts, such as “cloud thinking, a chemical ubermensch,” or basks in the pleasant memory of seeing a young woman practice gymnastics. The disaster of Andrew’s life involves 9/11, and in its aftermath he turns for help to his ex-wife, with ruinous consequences. It’s a fitting mistake for a character who remains out of step, even with himself, throughout the novel. MARRY ME, by Dan Rhodes (Europa). The seventy-nine vignettes in this slim, addictive volume range in length from two…

You might not expect much drama from “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Germany 1937,” a succinct historical show at the Neue Galerie. The subject—the propagandistic “Degenerate Art” exhibition, which presented modernist works for popular vilification—is familiar, and it ranks as scarcely a footnote in the annals of Third Reich infamy. But the nuanced treatment of the event, by the German curator Olaf Peters, shocks anew, even at a distance of seventy-seven years. Peters has done a lot with a little: only about twenty works that appeared in the show, along with others by the same artists. Apposite photographs and films accompany the works. One room features empty frames that once held large paintings—probably destroyed—by the likes of Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Oskar…