Innholdsfortegnelse for Apr-14-14 i The New Yorker

ELIZABETH KOLBERT (COMMENT, P. 21), a staff writer, is the author of “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” which was published in February. JEFFREY TOOBIN (“THIS IS MY JAIL,” P. 26) has been writing for the magazine since 1992. His most recent book is “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court.” CAMPBELL MCGRATH (POEM, P. 30) teaches at Florida International University, in Miami. “In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys” is his tenth book of poems. DANIEL MENDELSOHN (“DEEP FRIEZE,” P. 34), an author and a critic, teaches at Bard College. “Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture,” his second collection, came out in paperback in March. RYAN LIZZA (“CROSSING CHRISTIE,” P. 40) is a staff writer and has been a Washington…

“ART OF THE REAL,” running April 11-26 at Film Society of Lincoln Center, brings together works that reveal a major trend in contemporary filmmaking around the world: blurring the boundaries of reporting and fiction, placing unforeseen and uncontrollable events in explicitly staged frameworks, or repurposing filmed fictions as historical documents. These films put into action ideas that have been part of moviemaking since its earliest days, and which came to the fore around 1960, when modernist directors called attention to the artifices of fiction and a new breed of documentary filmmakers sought their subjects’ self-aware participation. A highlight of the series is the closingnight film, Robert Greene’s extraordinarily accomplished, vertiginous “Actress.” Greene (who here does most of his own camerawork) films the daily life of a woman in suburban Beacon,…

COMMENT ROUGH FORECASTS The chemist F. Sherwood Rowland is one of the few people in history about whom it can accurately be said: he helped save the world. In 1972, Rowland, a chemist at the University of California-Irvine, attended a talk on the compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons. At the time, these were being used as refrigerants, cleaning agents, and propellants in aerosol cans, and they had recently been detected in the air over the Atlantic. CFCs are unusually stable, but it occurred to Rowland that, if they were getting blown around the world, at very high altitudes they would eventually break down. He and one of his research assistants began to look into the matter, and they concluded that in the stratosphere CFCs would indeed dissociate. The newly liberated chlorine…

If you’re a British person of a certain age, you know Michael Pennington as a distinguished classical actor, belonging to the same generation as Sir Ian McKellen but lacking his blockbuster credentials. If you’re a New Yorker, you can see Pennington at the Theatre for a New Audience, playing King Lear for the first time, in a production directed by Arin Arbus. Pennington and McKellen first met in 1976, in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “Romeo and Juliet”— Sir Ian was Romeo, Pennington was Mercutio—and the other day McKellen stopped by Pennington’s theatre, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, for a chat. “I’m sure we’d agree that Shakespeare is very, very helpful to his actors,” McKellen said. “You are not fighting Shakespeare. It’s wonderful, so reassuring. You come to Brecht, or…

Let’s start in a forward fold at the top of our mats today. And let’s just shake things out a little, get used to this new heightened sensitivity, and open yourself up to it. Allow each tiny criticism or rejection you experience today to fully penetrate your chakras. You don’t need to pay attention to anyone else in the room, or in your life. Today’s practice, and, honestly, everything else for the next few weeks, is all about you and your sacrum. Find a rhythm in your breath, in and out, that will fuel the extreme vacillations in your mood during your practice. On the inhale, fill yourself with hope and possibility: You can hook up with literally anyone you want now. You can stop wearing eyeliner to bed. You…

Flat as the table it’s placed on. Nothing moves beneath it and it seeks no outlet. Above—my human breath creates no stirring air and leaves its total surface undisturbed. Its plains, valleys are always green, uplands, mountains are yellow and brown, while seas, oceans remain a kindly blue beside the tattered shores. Everything here is small, near, accessible. I can press volcanoes with my fingertip, stroke the poles without thick mittens, I can with a single glance encompass every desert with the river lying just beside it. A few trees stand for ancient forests, you couldn’t lose your way among them. In the east and west, above and below the equator— quiet like pins dropping, and in every black pinprick people keep on living. Mass graves and sudden ruins are…

EMA flirts with chaos. Erika M. Anderson, who records as EMA, grew up in South Dakota. Her great-great-grandparents, dairy farmers who emigrated from Scandinavia to the Midwest, probably would not recognize the world today, with its Oculus Rift virtual-reality headsets and its online identities. But they would recognize the spirit of Anderson’s music, a half-electronic, half-organic project that has the feel of someone trying to figure out the world, using all the tools at hand. “The Future’s Void,” her new album, sprawls and pulses, as much like unpredictable weather as like music. (On its cover, Anderson is actually wearing an Oculus Rift headset.) Improvisation is everywhere. When the drums sound big and echoey, they’re probably V-Drums, electronic pads that trigger samples of drum sounds. When Anderson’s vocals are most fevered,…

Three years ago, I retired the chili party that I used to give in Italy at the end of August. This was a shame, because I liked my party, and thought that the chili made a nice reprieve from the ubiquitous barbecues of summer. Two of the twenty-four regulars at my party were vegetarians—one reluctantly, under a doctor’s orders. A doable number, it seemed to me: for years, I put out a bowl of pasta al pesto just for them. Then, from one chili party to the next, everything changed. Seven formerly enthusiastic carnivores called to say they had stopped eating meat entirely, and would like to join my vegetarians for the pesto. Worse, on the night of that final party, four of the remaining carnivores carried their plates to…

Does Jim Jarmusch ever come out during the day? Is he purely a nocturnal mammal? There are moments in his movies—in fact, there are entire Jarmusch movies—where the penchant for darkness becomes a golden rule. “Mystery Train” (1989), hitching together three unconnected tales, took us to a Memphis flophouse after hours. “Night on Earth” (1991) was another compendium, starting in Los Angeles at dusk, following five taxi-drivers and their passengers in five cities, and closing as the sun rose in Helsinki. Since then, it’s true, there have been visits to the waking world, and “The Limits of Control” (2009) even squinted its way through the noon-bright glare of Spain; but that was not a natural habitat for Jarmusch. In his films, life is at its most redolent as it approaches…

THE USES OF DELUSION Malcolm Gladwell, in his article on the assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, is correct that the F.B.I. did not understand the group (“Sacred and Profane,” March 31st). But his distinction between Jim Jones’s People’s Temple and the allegedly more stable group led by David Koresh is misleading. Each example cited as evidence of the Davidians’ greater stability also applies to the People’s Temple. Members of Jones’s group engaged with the outside world, and most did not worship Jones as a deity. More than a few were highly educated. Both groups easily met Robert Jay Lifton’s criteria for a coercive cult. Both had charismatic leaders who created an environment of—to use Lifton’s term—“ideological totalism.” Both employed techniques of thought reform. The fact that…

LAST SEPTEMBER, MARGARET CHARDIET, who has performed under the name Pharmakon since 2007, walked onto a low, black wooden platform in a small art gallery called Dilettante, in downtown Los Angeles. Bathed in red light, wearing a dark shirt and fish-net stockings, Chardiet hunched over a Korg synthesizer and a variety of effects pedals. She held one piercing note on the keyboard, and then looped it into a drone. After she turned the pitch into a tremolo pulse, adding a clomping beat and a repeating low note like a foghorn blast, the sound was less drone and more particulate cloud. Some particles stung, some massaged. Once the pattern was in place, Chardiet picked up a piece of metal and began screaming into it. (“The metal is just a piece I…

The most dangerous bus route in the city, the B46, crosses a large section of Brooklyn from north to south. It starts near the Marcy Avenue El stop for the J, M, and Z subway trains, in Williamsburg, and ends at the Kings Plaza mall, in Flatlands, about eight miles distant. Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and East Flatbush are along its way. The B46 bus goes down Broadway under the El tracks, turns onto Malcolm X Boulevard, makes a quick jog right at Fulton Street, and then follows Utica Avenue for miles; a short stretch of Flatbush Avenue brings it to the Sears entrance of the mall, where it turns around. In the past year, forty-one incidents involving assaults on drivers or harassment of them have occurred on the B46—far more than…

On a recent afternoon, in a practice room at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, in midtown, Ramin Djawadi sat on a high stool, holding a baton, surrounded by thirty-one string musicians from the New York Philharmonic. Djawadi composes the music for the HBO dragons-and-intrigue drama “Game of Thrones.” The following night, in a coup de théâtre at the show’s fourthseason première, he would conduct the musicians as they played the “Game of Thrones” theme before a screening at Lincoln Center. Outside, on billboards and buses all over town, ads for the show said “ALL MEN MUST DIE.” Djawadi, who is Iranian-German, conducts orchestras infrequently. He’d encouraged the musicians to offer suggestions. At times, the event’s concertmaster, Sheryl Staples, a violinist in a teal turtleneck sweater, seemed to be conducting…

What will archeologists twentyfive centuries from now make of the ruins of One World Trade Center, currently nearing completion in downtown Manhattan? Some scholars in the year 4514, familiar with ancient accounts describing the diminutive structure as a “skyscraper,” will no doubt speculate about the significance of its height—although they will be forced to admit that 1,368, the number of “feet” from base to roof, was a figure with no known significance in the culture of the ancient builders. Others, drawing on fragmentary scriptural texts (“wikis”) that refer to a now missing aerial spire, will propose an ingenious theory that the original height of the building was 1,776 of those antique units of measure: a symbolic reference to a date known to have had considerable ideological importance for the builders.…

The horseshoe crab is half a billion years old, but its existence may be threatened. A few years ago, I went on a boat trip to Fire Island with some researchers who were doing a population survey of horseshoe crabs. Soon after I boarded the boat, on a hot spring morning at a slip in Patchogue, I overheard this conversation: “Diane, did you have your conga-drum lesson?” “No, I missed it today. Horseshoe crabs are the only thing that can take me from my congas.” “Did you bring your drums with you, at least?” “No, they’re very heat-sensitive. I’d bring them if you could air-condition part of your boat.” The conga drummer turned out to be a volunteer named Diane SanRomán. On that morning, she wore knee-high rubber boots, a…

FREE MAN OF COLOR Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” may or may not be a great play, but it’s a profoundly fair one. When it was first produced, in 1959, Amiri Baraka’s radical Black Arts movement had yet to be born, but historically significant companies, such as the Negro Theatre Unit at the Lafayette Theatre, in Harlem—where the young Orson Welles first staged his legendary all-black “Macbeth”—had already produced work that was political and message-driven. Indeed, any number of black playwrights, from William Wells Brown to Alice Childress, had expressed similar ideas: about the corrupting power of the white world and the sick sham at the heart of any black American’s dream of racial integration. Hansberry was an integrationist—she married the Jewish songwriter Robert Nemiroff, whom she met…

BOY, SNOW, BIRD, by Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead). Oyeyemi, in her fifth novel, recasts the story of Snow White as a tale of racial conflict that drives a family apart. In 1953, a young woman named Boy runs away from her abusive father and marries a widower with a beautiful child, Snow. When Boy gives birth to a child, Bird, who has dark skin, she discovers that her husband has been passing as white, and sends Snow away to be brought up by black relatives. The conceit of adapting a fairy tale to reflect on racial history promises much, but Oyeyemi’s attraction to the fantastical yields prose that becomes chattery and undisciplined. MARTA OULIE, by Sigrid Undset, translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally (Minnesota). This novella, about a woman…

THE SINGER BUIKA was born forty-one years ago in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, to political exiles from Equatorial Guinea. Growing up among Gypsies, she learned Spanish and flamenco in equal measure. Barred from singing in church, because her voice was too rough, she started performing in night clubs, worked as a Tina Turner impersonator in Las Vegas, and eventually achieved success on the world stage with her 2006 album, “Mi Niña Lola.” She wraps her husky, impassioned voice around everything from jazz standards to the repertoire of the Mexican singer Chavela Vargas. For a show on April 9, at Town Hall, she appears with a new band, performing songs from her latest release, her fifth in the U.S., “La Noche Más Larga” (“The Longest Night”). OPENING DRAFT DAY A…

DANCE Amanda Loulaki Loulaki’s new solo, “Forested,” is structured around autobiographical fragments. She speaks, but don’t expect a linear story. Instead, a body moves through a cleared space, with sparse choreography, plentiful silence, and imaginative lighting by Joe Levasseur. (The Chocolate Factory, 5-49 49th Ave., Long Island City. 866-811-4111. April 9-12 at 8.) Youth America Grand Prix The organizers of this competition offer two appealing programs. The first, “Stars of Today Meet the Stars of Tomorrow,” features Y.A.G.P. winners showing off their skills. The bill also includes Olga Smirnova, an exquisite young soloist at the Bolshoi, performing a pas de deux from John Cranko’s much loved “Onegin,” with the handsome Stuttgart Ballet principal Evan McKie. And the promising New York City Ballet choreographer Justin Peck presents a new piece, “Distractions.”…

When you are invited to a superdesk party, you go, because it’s hard to imagine ever hearing of another. In the Venn diagram linking “superdesk” and “party,” the shaded area is a tiny sliver, and, in spite of various observable trends, it probably won’t get much fatter in the years to come. Superdesk is the name that the executives at the Barbarian Group, an Internet-oriented advertising agency, have given to the giant workstation they’ve just had installed at their new headquarters, in Chelsea. It is a single desk for all of the firm’s hundred and twentyfive employees, with room for fifty more. It is more than a thousand feet long and has no beginning or end, swerving around the giant loft space like a mega slot-car track—“4,400 square feet of…

On January 5, 2013, Tavon White, an inmate at the Baltimore City Detention Center, had a cell-phone conversation that was intercepted on an F.B.I. wiretap. “This is my jail, you understand that,” White told an unidentified friend. “I’m dead serious. I make every final call in this jail. . . . Everything come to me. Before a motherfucker hit a nigga in the mouth, guess what they do—they gotta run it through me. I tell them whether it’s a go ahead and they can do it or whether they hold back. Before a motherfucker stab somebody, they gotta run it through me.” White was a leader of a gang called the Black Guerrilla Family. The gang had such control over inmates in the facility that, as White put it in…

On April 1st, Chris Christie, the beleaguered Republican governor of New Jersey, attended a celebrity roast, in Newark, to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of Brendan Byrne, the state’s governor from 1974 to 1982. “He’s an inspiration,” Christie told the audience, referring to Byrne, who won reëlection against long odds, because he has “shown that political comebacks can actually happen.” Christie sat on a long dais with five former governors and five local comedians, listening to the guitarist John Pizzarelli sing an ode to the state: “I may leave for a week or two, but I’m always coming back.” Christie was seated next to former Governor Thomas Kean, a longtime supporter, but he did not say hello or shake his hand, and he glared at the comedians as they delivered their…

There’d nearly been a fight. People were drinking wine like it was beer and a man Sam didn’t know had thumped the table and shouted that “House of Cards” was better than “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men,” put together. —All the seasons! The man had knocked over a glass. A woman had thrown a fistload of peanuts at him, although most of them had bounced off the table. She seemed to be defending “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad.” Sam wasn’t sure. He hadn’t seen either. His wife, Emer, had been in the middle of it, too, standing up for “The Killing,” the Danish version. Sam hadn’t seen “The Killing,” and he hadn’t a clue how Emer had managed it. They’d walked home, staggering a bit. —When did you watch “The…

HUNGER ARTIST The history of California is a history of will grafted onto the landscape. First came missionaries, building churches out of clay and meting out God’s kingdom to the native peoples. Then came gold and silver, the pursuit of which levelled hills, remade cliffs, and built cities along the Pacific Coast. Water was diverted. Sprawling fields soon followed. By the time Cesar Chavez organized a grape workers’ strike, in 1965, the agriculture business was the largest in the state. People say Chavez fought for justice, which is broadly true. And yet that strike, like many of his efforts, rose more from scrappy pragmatism than from any abstract ideal. “No one in any battle has ever won anything by being on the defensive,” he liked to tell his picketers. High…

Each week, I receive a dozen or more piano recordings in the mail—the digital calling cards of performers looking to join the tiny club of virtuosos who can sell out Carnegie Hall and otherwise maintain international fame. Some of the disks are lavish presentations from major labels, swaddled in effusive press releases and gauzy eight-by-ten photos. Others are self-produced offerings in cardboard cases, with a note attached. There is not enough time in the day for me to absorb them all—never mind the new-music disks, the Baroque-opera sets, the Mahler cycles, and the rest. Sometimes I apply what might be called the multitasking test: put a CD in the player, set about other work, and await some strong gesture or upwelling of emotion that forces full attention to be paid.…