Innholdsfortegnelse for May-19-14 i The New Yorker

DALE RUSSAKOFF (“SCHOOLED,” P. 58), a former reporter for the Washington Post, is writing a book entitled “The Prize,” about Newark’s school-reform undertaking, which is due out next year. AMY DAVIDSON (COMMENT, P. 31), the executive editor of newyorker.com, writes the Close Read blog. MICHAEL SPECTER (“PARTIAL RECALL,” p. 38) is a staff writer and the author of “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives.” AMY WALDMAN (“THE URBAN WILD,” P. 74) is the author of “The Submission,” her début novel, and is now working on her second. NATALIE SHAPERO (POEM, P. 66) teaches at Kenyon College. “No Object” is her first poetry collection. ALEC WILKINSON (“A VOICE FROM THE PAST,” P. 50), a longtime New Yorker contributor, has published several books,…

OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Early Shaker Spirituals The Wooster Group interprets an album of Shaker songs. Elizabeth LeCompte and Frances McDormand star in the show, which is directed by Kate Valk. Previews begin May 17. (Performing Garage, 33 Wooster St. 212-966-3651.) Fly by Night: A New Musical Playwrights Horizons presents the New York première of a musical by Kim Rosenstock, Will Connolly, and Michael Mitnick, set during the Northeast blackout of 1965, in which a sandwich-maker meets a pair of sisters. Carolyn Cantor directs. Previews begin May 16. (416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.) Just Jim Dale The veteran Broadway performer Jim Dale wrote and performs this solo show, about his experiences in the theatre. Richard Maltby, Jr., directs. Previews begin May 15. (Laura Pels, 111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300.) The Killer…

A singer-songwriter with many voices, at Music Hall of Williamsburg. WHEN I MET ANGEL OLSEN earlier this year to talk about her second album, “Burn Your Fire for No Witness,” she answered my questions the way she performs her songs—she’s perfectly happy to have you listen, but entirely unworried about your reaction. The opener, “Unfucktheworld,” is a stable but pained call to someone she will dance for, but ultimately doesn’t need: “I am the only one now.” If the album has a theme, that’s it. The second song on the record, “Forgiven/Forgotten,” is two minutes of straight indie rock played with a full band. (It sounds like a release from the fifth or sixth golden age of the seven-inch single, circa 1990.) Olsen told me the song was designed to…

The Cinderella story never gets old. Who doesn’t like a triumphant underdog? As it turns out, this spring was Cinderella season in New York: the Canadian pop star Carly Rae Jepsen—known for her 2011 hit “Call Me Maybe”— began a run in the Rodgers and Hammerstein version of the tale, on Broadway. And up at the Metropolitan Opera the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato assumed the title role in Rossini’s “La Cenerentola.” It was the first time she’d sung the part at the Met, having made her name with it in 2001, at La Scala. As research, the two stars decided to watch each other in action: Jepsen, who is twenty-eight, joined the opera fanatics mobbing Lincoln Center one afternoon to see DiDonato’s final dress rehearsal. Later that night, DiDonato, forty-five, made…

Can neuroscience help us rewrite our most traumatic memories? One morning every spring, for exactly two minutes, Israel comes to a stop. Pedestrians stand in place, drivers pull over to the side of the road, and nobody speaks, sings, eats, or drinks as the nation pays respect to the victims of the Nazi genocide. From the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, the only sounds one hears are sirens. “To ignore those sirens is a complete violation of the norms of our country,” Daniela Schiller told me recently. Schiller, who directs the laboratory of affective neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, has lived in New York for nine years, but she was brought up in Rishon LeZion, a few miles south of Tel Aviv. “My father doesn’t care about…

In early 2000, south of Oakland, California, a physicist stuck in traffic was listening to the radio. He heard Mickey Hart, a drummer for the Grateful Dead, say that the archives of the world’s aboriginal musics were deteriorating and needed attention. The bulk of the archives had been assembled between 1890 and 1940 by ethnographers using antique devices that recorded mainly on wax cylinders and aluminum disks. Many of the recordings had not been played for a number of years and had grown so fragile that the pressure of a stylus might destroy them. Anything you can embed sound in you can scratch, crease, crumple, bend, break, tear, warp, or melt. Oil and dust and dirt get in the path of a stylus and deepen, widen, or distort a groove,…

Dolphin Bay, at the Texas State Aquarium, in Corpus Christi, is a twelve-foot-deep, pale-blue pool with a concrete bottom. It is home to Kai and Shadow, two Atlantic bottlenose dolphins the color of storm clouds. Twice a day, they perform in a show that is meant to inspire visitors to “help protect our planet,” the m.c. tells the audience. For the promise of dead fish, the dolphins ferry rubber ducks, leap and twirl, and wave and bow to the beats of Katy Perry. At the beginning of the show and again toward the end, Kai and Shadow rise on cue to flap their pectoral fins for their corporate sponsor, Whataburger. On a Sunday in March, Jeanne Gang sat in the bleachers and looked out onto the bay that flows next…

There is a difference between knowingness and knowledge, but what is it? Knowingness comes after knowledge; it is only the echo of its source, and it is proud to be the echo. One of the liberties of our connected age is that we can be almost infinitely knowing, consoling our lack of true knowledge with an easy cynicism of acquisition. It is cheaply glorious to be able to discover almost any fact about the world on the machine I am using to write this review: I experience that liberty as the reward it is, and also as a punishment; as both a gift of the digital world and a judgment on my scant acquaintance with the actual world. Speak for yourself, you may say. Who is this “we,” so easily…

“The Immigrant” and “Belle.” At the start of James Gray’s sombre half-masterpiece, “The Immigrant,” Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard) sails past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island. It’s January, 1921, and Ewa and her sister, Magda (Angela Sarafyan), arriving from Poland, are both in trouble: Magda is found to have tuberculosis, and is sent to the infirmary, while immigration inspectors mysteriously accuse Ewa of having displayed “low morals” on the voyage, and threaten to deport her. Suddenly, a gent in a dark coat and a bowler, named Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), presents himself, bribes the guards, and takes Ewa to a building on the Lower East Side, which is the center of a small empire that he runs. Across the hall from his apartment, Bruno boards a few women who…

SOMETHING FOR THE PAIN Rachel Aviv, in her otherwise outstanding treatment of the problem of opioid painkillers, does not address the woeful inadequacy of our government’s response to the chronic-pain epidemic (“Prescription for Disaster,” May 5th). More Americans live with chronic pain than with cancer, heart disease, and diabetes combined, yet in recent years funding for basic research into chronic pain has hovered around one per cent of the total budget of the National Institutes of Health. Pain research remains an orphan in the federal bureaucracy, scattered ineffectively among various agencies. The truth now emerging from research labs is that chronic pain is not just a symptom of something else but a disease in its own right. It deserves its own institute within the N.I.H.— a bipartisan issue that…

BAR TAB GALLOW GREEN 542 W. 27th St. (212-564-1662) In New York, as in life, absurdity and pleasure often go hand in hand. The elevator ride to the roof of the McKittrick Hotel, home of the immersive theatre show “Sleep No More,” involves eerie overheard music and portentous chitchat—eye-rollinducing haunted-mansion fare. But Gallow Green, the bar on the rooftop, is more of a secret garden: an open-air space with wooden tables, creeping vines, bursting flowers, and a view of the High Line and the Hudson River. The train tracks underfoot and the tattered fabric fluttering in the breeze, you must grudgingly admit, only add to the charm. On a recent chilly spring evening, bundled-up waiters handed out blankets. “More hot potatoes?” one asked kindly, after customers finished a second helping.…

“You want me out of your life,” Monica Lewinsky wrote in a draft of a letter to President Bill Clinton in December, 1997. At that point, their sexual encounters in his Oval Office study, which had begun two years earlier during a government shutdown and were facilitated by a pizza delivery, were still secret. “I will never forget what you said that night we fought on the phone—if you had known what I was really like you would never have gotten involved with me. I’m sure you’re not the first person to have felt that way about me. I am sorry that this has been such a bad experience.” But, she wrote, she had some Christmas presents for him. In what remains, sixteen years later, a remarkable story of sub-tabloid…

Annabelle Selldorf is a New York architect largely known for refined art-gallery interiors, and for a terra-cottaclad apartment building on Eleventh Avenue whose residents, including Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, can, if their sense of shame allows, take their cars, by elevator, to parking spaces right outside their front doors. On a recent Saturday, Selldorf was in a seventy-five-foot-high shed in Sunset Park, in South Brooklyn, finding beauty in a mound of the city’s glass, plastic, and metal recyclables. She noted that the pile of refuse—“Not really live garbage, but you can smell garbage”— was topped by a jauntily upright toddler’s toy car, made of yellow and pink plastic. Behind, the building’s pale-gray steel walls were backlit by sunshine. Selldorf, accompanied by a small dog named Jussi, and wearing a…

I saw it being built, flat as a Frisbee in the bowl of those foothills, trees disappearing month after month, replaced by smooth roads, empty schools, pork-chop lots, and cul-de-sacs spotted with unfinished houses, the noise walls curving the roadway into one long cement smile. We used to drive up there in our parents’ cars––past the starter castles––to the daisy-wheel junctions with their stoplights sheathed in muslin like some beheaded prisoner, the air so high and tight and piney you could hear construction hammering from miles away. It was a ghost town but for that sound. We’d sit in the unfinished high-school stadium, at the lip of what would become the bleachers, the halfbuilt Cineplex in the distance like a prison, and listen to nothing turning to something, waiting for…

Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education. I. THE PACT Late one night in December, 2009, a black Chevy Tahoe in a caravan of cops and residents moved slowly through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Newark. In the back sat the Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, and the Republican governor-elect of New Jersey, Chris Christie. They had become friendly almost a decade earlier, during Christie’s years as United States Attorney in Newark, and Booker had invited him to join one of his periodic patrols of the city’s busiest drug corridors. The ostensible purpose of the tour was to show Christie one of Booker’s methods of combatting crime. But Booker had another agenda that night. Christie, during his campaign,…

ILLUSTRATION BY MELINDA BECK “Hey, sweetheart, nice patoot,” says the sad-eyed taxi-driver sitting at the all-night-diner counter, a doughnut wallowing in his unshaven jowls. The waitress glares at him. She is fed up with being ogled, or else stared at in disgust, whenever she bends over to pick up a dishrag. “If a goat wandered in, they’d ogle the goat and say the same stupid things,” she complains to the old bag lady near the cash register, to whom she has offered a free bowl of hot soup. “I’m sick of it. I wish nobody could ever look at me.” The bag lady turns out to be a fairy godmother in disguise, and, in thanks for the soup, she raises her spoon like a wand and grants the waitress her…

FROG MUSIC, by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown). This murder mystery, based on a true story, is set in San Francisco in the summer of 1876, as smallpox and a heat wave plague the city. Jenny Bonnet, a puckish cross-dresser and frog-catcher, is shot dead through a window while getting ready for bed. Her closest friend, a French burlesque dancer named Blanche Beunon, believes that she was the intended target. Following Blanche as she struggles to avenge Jenny’s murder, Donoghue shows how the two women came to be each other’s intimate, and Jenny in her boy’s clothing emerges in appealing contrast to the actual men in Blanche’s life. Blanche’s thoughts sometimes come across as stilted, but the setting she inhabits is alive, brimming with sin and with music. NO BOOK…

ROBERT FAIRCHILD PERFORMED his first leading role with New York City Ballet when he was still an apprentice. Now, at twenty-six, he’s danced more than fifty principal roles there. (This week, he’s scheduled to perform the piercing “Robert Schumann’s ‘Davidsbündlertänze.’”) Visiting choreographers, in particular, seem to fight over him, probably because he looks as though he could put a ballet over all by himself. He has the basics—line, concentration, skill (astonishing), endurance—but in addition he is touchingly grave in his manner, which makes him a natural for comedy as well as for the high-toned numbers. Oh, and he’s handsome. He was the first Romeo in Peter Martins’s “Romeo + Juliet.” You can see why. MOVIES | ART ABOVE & BEYOND THE THEATRE CLASSICAL MUSIC | DANCE FOOD & DRINK…

PICKLE SHACK 256 Fourth Ave., Brooklyn (347-763-2127) A VEGETABLE-RESISTANT MAN and a pickle-averse woman went to lunch at the Pickle Shack, a vegetarian sandwich shop. They made this unlikely choice because they’d heard that the small Park Slope storefront, distinguished from Fourth Avenue’s general dreariness by a pickle barrel on its awning, houses one of the city’s largest selections of Dogfish Head craft beer on tap. Sitting in the back garden, he wound up, unexpectedly, with an unfiltered Kolsch; she got Dogfish’s Midas Touch, described unofficially as the Chardonnay of beers. Their first thought on the restaurant’s concept was that it had to be a caricature: the provenance of all the ingredients, made in-house or sourced locally, was listed on the menu, which fluttered gently in the breeze off the…

Bill Talen likes to put on performances in spaces that have been designed for other purposes, such as scientific research or investment banking. This, he reasons, is a good way to catch audiences off guard. It’s also a good way to get arrested. The other day, Talen, who goes by the name Reverend Billy and is the selfappointed leader of the Church of Stop Shopping, drove from Brooklyn to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was accompanied by the director of the Stop Shopping Choir, Savitri Durkee, who is also his wife, and about a dozen choir members. The group’s destination was Harvard’s school of engineering, where a team of researchers is working to create “autonomous flying microbots,” or robobees. “So this is the plan,” Durkee told the others, who were carrying baskets…

We live in the age of the startup. It’s never been easier to build a product and start a company. And, thanks to the boom in angel investing and crowdfunding, it’s never been easier for startups to raise money. The analytics firm CB Insights logged more than seventeen hundred seed-investment deals in the U.S. tech industry in 2012, more than three times the number from three years earlier. But there’s a catch: starting a company may be easier, but making it a success isn’t. Competition is fierce, profits are scarce, and venture capitalists aren’t generous when it comes to later stages of funding. As Gideon Lewis-Kraus shows in “No Exit,” a new Kindle Single about startup culture, the life of a new company is often brutish and short. Though we…

We regret to inform you that your beach body, slated for arrival in early June of this year, will be delayed, perhaps indefinitely. A number of factors, all under your direct control, have contributed to this unfortunate setback. First and foremost, you are still eating a lot of food. While you have done an excellent job of including more vegetables in your diet, you have also included more of everything else, like cake. In the past month alone, you have eaten cake on eight occasions. None of which were birthday-related. You have been complaining about your metabolism slowing down. Metabolic rate is difficult to determine, but what is certainly not slowing down is your intake of frozen French-bread pizzas. In fact, it is more than likely that one of those…

It wasn’t for love of having children that I had a child. Rather, I simply didn’t know how a person could cross, fully shoeless, a bed of coals and not burn, and I needed someone to pass this to. I needed my obtuseness to survive me. But I never accounted for our thwarting era. Every day, the paper runs a remembrance of a child, the notice struggling to sing the few years lived: He never sketched the Earth without its hatch of latitudes. She did not like to try new foods.…

Late-night television is the most static genre on TV. This hasn’t kept the media from touting it as the most exciting one—and maybe it is, if you’re most interested in TV as an economic horse race. Each year, we get fresh forensic analysis of the minute differences between Letterman, Leno, O’Brien, Fallon, Kimmel, Daly, and now Seth Meyers and, on HBO, John Oliver. Someone’s always the hot young buck. Someone’s the egghead. Yet every show looks identical, as if the format had made the same face one too many times, and got stuck. Still, if the genre can be saved, or at least revived, this might be the year. In February, Jay Leno stepped down from the “Tonight Show,” on NBC; Jimmy Fallon took his place. In April, David Letterman…

The Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson rues New York City’s antismoking policies, which crimp a performance piece that is part of “Me, My Mother, My Father, and I,” a show of his work now at the New Museum. The piece includes a video projection of a scene from one of the first feature films to be made in Iceland, “Morðsaga” (“Murder Story”), from 1977, in which a well-to-do woman fantasizes about seducing a plumber. She rips off his shirt and says, “Take me, take me here by the dishwasher!” They embrace and drop to the kitchen floor. The actors are Kjartansson’s mother and father. According to family lore, he was conceived the night after that scene was shot. The projection of it loops on a wall in a bare, white, echoey…