Innholdsfortegnelse for Apr-28-14 i The New Yorker

MICHAEL KINSLEY (“HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?,” P. 24), the author of “Please Don’t Remain Calm: Provocations and Commentaries,” recently joined the staff of Vanity Fair as a contributing editor. MARGARET TALBOT (“PIXEL PERFECT,” P. 32) has been writing for The New Yorker since 1997. “The Entertainer” is her first book. PAUL RUDNICK (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 39) contributes regularly to the magazine. “Gorgeous,” his young-adult novel, was published last year. ADAM GOPNIK (“THE POET’S HAND,” P. 40), a staff writer, is the author of “The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food,” which won the 2012 I.A.C.P. Award for literary food writing. DEXTER FILKINS (“WHAT WE LEFT BEHIND,” P. 50), who covered the war in Iraq for the Times, joined The New Yorker as a…

ZANKEL HALL, THE COOLLY FUTURISTIC space beneath the main auditorium of Carnegie Hall, opened a decade ago, amid what turned out to be a golden age of adventurous programming at the Carnegie complex. John Adams oversaw a crazy-quilt festival; far-seeing composers like Frederic Rzewski and Meredith Monk shared space with Youssou N’Dour and Ustad Vilayat Khan; John Cage and Morton Feldman, musical leaders of the heroic mid-century generation that also produced Abstract Expressionism, were celebrated more than five decades after their first meeting, which took place in the Carnegie lobby, as both men fled a performance of Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances.” These days, Carnegie follows a more conservative line: Rachmaninoff takes precedence over Cage and Feldman. But Zankel remains a welcoming space for wayward artists, and this month it will host…

In 1987, Joseph Brodsky, the singular Russian poet of his generation, delivered a lecture in Vienna entitled “The Condition We Call ‘Exile.’” He began with a gesture of humility. Brodsky had been forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1972, but it was his good fortune to reside in the Russian language no less than he did in his apartment on Morton Street. Working for the dictionary, he called it. He got academic jobs, won prizes, made new friends. Cruel fate, soft berth. So when he began his talk in Vienna it was with an overture to the “uncountable” exiles: the Turks in Germany, the Mexicans in Southern California, and the Pakistanis in Saudi Arabia searching for menial work; the Vietnamese boat people, “bobbing on high seas or already settled…

At some point in the twenty-twenties, if all goes according to plan, four humans will blast off in a rocket, travel for seven months, and land on Mars. The mission, run by a private organization called Mars One, is meant to establish a permanent colony. If the four survive, four more will follow, then four more, until there’s a full-blown Jamestown with a view of Olympus Mons. Anyone can apply. The catch: Getting to Mars is hard enough, and nobody’s quite sure how to get back. There will be no return flights. Earlier this year, a dozen aspiring astronauts who had survived the first round of Mars One application cuts gathered at the Explorers Club, on the Upper East Side, to discuss why they had volunteered to leave Earth for…

By the time I met Emily O’Brien, a twenty-eight-year-old actress, I had looked at the computer-generated version of her so many times that seeing her in person was at once anticlimactic and strange. Non-Digital Emily was instantly recognizable to me, from her gently crooked smile to her habit of raising her eyebrows for emphasis. She was, I thought, prettier and softer-looking in person, but it was only after observing her in the flesh that I could see any weaknesses in her duplicate. Many people in the visual-effects world consider Digital Emily, which was created in 2008, to be the first computer-generated face that, even in closeup, is persuasive rather than creepy. A demonstration video of Digital Emily shows her chatting in a leather office chair, and many viewers on You-Tube…

On Christmas Day last year, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki appeared on Iraqi television to wish his country’s Christian minority—which has been fleeing by the thousand since the American invasion, in 2003—a happy holiday. Maliki, who is sixty-three, wore a dark-blue suit and a purple tie, and stood almost perfectly still at a lectern flanked by Iraqi flags. His long face conveyed, as it almost always does, a look of utter joylessness. Having spent much of his life hunted by assassins, Maliki gives the impression of a man who learned long ago to ruthlessly suppress his feelings. “He never smiles, he never says thank you, and I’ve never seen him say, ‘I’m sorry,’” a longtime associate of Maliki’s told me. For Maliki, the holiday greetings were a pretext. What he really…

John Updike’s cultural project. John Updike moved with his wife, Mary, and their two children from New York City to Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1957. He had just turned twenty-five. He’d spent most of the previous two years working as a staff writer at The New Yorker, but he didn’t enjoy city living—“The place proved to be other than the Fred Astaire movies had led me to expect,” as he put it—and he remained in Ipswich until 1974, when he and Mary separated. The Updikes liked to attend summer concerts at Castle Hill, a nineteenth-century mansion outside town, overlooking Crane Beach. A friend had bought a local newspaper, the Ipswich Chronicle, and Updike offered, as a favor to him and for the fun of it, to write reviews of the concerts.…

The characters of Charles Ludlam and John Steinbeck. Diane Arbus knew from freaks. But the photographer was never derogatory toward her subjects—all those circus performers, overdone drag queens, and angry young men she framed with such affectionate ardor. As Arbus famously noted during a lecture she gave toward the end of her life—she died in 1971, at the age of forty-eight—“Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” Arbus’s presentation of the facts of difference was not literary—she was not telling a story but observing the source. Still, her photographs have a definite tone—a nonjudgmental, trusting calm. While Arbus never, to my knowledge, photographed the late Charles Ludlam, whose 1984 play, “The…

Tatiana Maslany’s magnificent sister act, on “Orphan Black.” “Orphan Black,” a sci-fi thriller about clones, set in Toronto, is a good show, but it’s not flawless. After a strong first half to its début season, during which the episodes were universally funny and sharp and suspenseful, the show lost its footing slightly as it approached the finale. Its conspiracy plot felt shaggy; the pace flagged. Season 2, which began Saturday on BBC America, continues along this line: individual scenes are terrific, but a few plotlines strain credulity. If it weren’t for Tatiana Maslany, the show’s star, “Orphan Black” would be just a likable-enough thriller, with Toronto local color—enough to recommend it to a Canadaphilic sci-fi buff like me, but maybe not to you. Maslany explodes that calculation entirely. The actress…

INSIDE JOBS Jeffrey Toobin’s piece on the inmates and staff at the Baltimore City Detention Center illustrates the devastation of human lives and communities which decades of drug prohibition have wrought (“This Is My Jail,” April 14th). Most American drugprohibition enforcement is in minority communities, even though drug use among minorities is virtually no higher than it is in the white population. With a large percentage of the young men from minority neighborhoods locked up, and few opportunities for young women to make a living wage as anything other than their jailers, sex, romance, smuggling, and gangs within detention facilities should come as no surprise. Even after huge expenditures, the erosion of civil rights across the country, and the disruption of communities and families, drugs are still available both…

NEVER GIVE AN ARTIST an assignment. When James Baldwin (1924-1987) published the essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” in this magazine in 1962, it wasn’t the piece he’d promised its then editor, William Shawn. As originally conceived, it was meant to be a report from a troubled land, or homeland: Africa. When Baldwin finally handed his piece in, his report described trouble closer to home: the burgeoning Black Nationalist movement in America. The essay became the centerpiece of his 1963 book, “The Fire Next Time”; soon afterward, Baldwin was on the cover of Time magazine. Baldwin had been writing about the civil-rights movement since the nineteen-fifties, in magazines like Harper’s and Partisan Review, but “The Fire Next Time” was something different: a report from segregated territory—Elijah Muhammad’s Nation…

I TOLD YOU SO Since John Paul Stevens is still playing tennis (singles) at the age of ninetyfour, it may not be surprising that he just finished his second book since resigning from the Supreme Court, four years ago. Stevens now splits his time between Washington, D.C., and Florida, and the other day he returned to the chambers assigned to a retired Justice looking the same as ever. He was wearing one of his trademark bow ties and speaking with lawyerly precision. “I’m not sure you should say I’m still a tennis player,” he said. “I mean, I haven’t played in a month.” Stevens’s new book was prompted by the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012. “I read a newspaper story that said the federal database of criminal…

Few people have done better in the recent stock boom than biotech investors. Biotech was the bestperforming market sector last year, and in the past two years its stocks rose a hundred and twenty per cent. But suddenly, in late March, the stocks tanked, some falling more than twenty per cent in a few weeks. The selloff can be explained to some extent as a market correction and part of a wider flight from risk. But the real story concerns a revolutionary new hepatitisC drug developed by the biotech giant Gilead. Hepatitis C affects 3.2 million Americans; untreated, it leads to scarring of the liver and to liver cancer. Until now, the best treatments cured only about half of patients and often had debilitating side effects. But in December the…

The best-selling book “Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back” tells the tale of four-year-old Colton Burpo, who, after losing consciousness during surgery, travels to Heaven. When he awakes he reports everything he’s seen to his dad, Todd, a Nebraska pastor, who then co-authors a book about this real-life miracle. Like a lot of people, I thought at first that this was just a money-grubbing hoax, until the same thing happened to me, Kent Kimmelman, an entertainment lawyer. It all started when I was doing hot yoga and the woman next to me fainted while trying to hold the downward-dog pose. She fell over on me and broke my wrist, and though the doctor who was setting it offered to use…

To make the servant in the corner unobjectionable Furniture, we must first make her a bundle of tree parts Axed and worked to confidence. Oak-jawed, birch-backed, Cedar-skinned, a pillowy bosom for the boss infants, A fine patterned cushion the boss can fall upon. Furniture does not pine for a future wherein the boss Plantation house will be ransacked by cavalries or Calvary. A kitchen table can, in the throes of a yellow-fever outbreak, Become a cooling board holding the boss wife’s body. It can on ordinary days also be an ironing board holding Boss garments in need of ironing. Tonight it is simply a place For a white cup of coffee, a tin of white cream. Boss calls For sugar and the furniture bears it sweetly. Let us fill the…

Sage is just the thing for snakebite, bee sting, and keeping all the bad at bay. The bush stands guard through ice and snow and when warm winds begin to blow it draws mauve flowers out of dark clay. They steeped it in a tea with rosemary, garlic, horehound, baby’s breath, and called it Four Thieves Vinegar, convinced its perfume could deter the swelling horrors of Black Death. But it will do, good herb, to salve and curb a common cold or nerves, and I these days, with everybody’s eyes on the grim news banked on the horizon, like how its leaf spears face the sky.…

A Sigmar Polke retrospective. “Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010,” a wondrous retrospective of the late German artist’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, is the most dramatic museum show of the century to date. It may also be the most important, if its lessons for contemporary art, both aesthetic and ethical, are properly absorbed. I fancy that young artists will feel put to a test. Even longtime Polke fans may be amazed by the cumulative power of the two hundred and sixty-five works on view, in painting, sculpture, graphic art, photography, and film. The modes range from the cartoonishly figurative to the augustly abstract, and the mediums from paint and pencil to toxic chemicals and meteorite dust. There is no Polke style, but only a distinctive force of talent and…

“Transcendence” and “Blue Ruin.” Almost fifty years ago, Norman Mailer insisted that realistic fiction “had never caught up with the rate of change in American life, indeed it had fallen further and further behind.” Even then, the answer to Mailer’s complaint was obvious. Many writers and movie directors have turned to science fiction—loving it for its brazenly free invention and its market popularity, but also, perhaps, as a way of catching up. By setting events in the future, they can identify social trends and technologies that bedazzle or frighten us, push them to their limits, and use the created fiction as a way of redirecting attention back to the present. Last summer’s “Elysium” posited an impending social system in which the élite gather in a blissful space station while the…

RAHUL ACHARYA BELONGS to a new generation of male Odissi dancers in India. Odissi is a classical form from the eastern state of Odisha, based on ritual temple dances performed by women as early as the first century B.C. Later, in the Mughal period, the dancers served a secular purpose: entertaining the royal court. In a parallel tradition, troupes of prepubescent boys known as gotipuas performed a more acrobatic version of this graceful, swaying dance at festivals. Modern Odissi draws from both practices, male and female. Acharya, with his strong, clean lines, fluid torso, and expressive hands, appears at the Skirball Center as part of the “Dancing the Gods” festival. CLASSICAL MUSIC ART | MOVIES THE THEATRE | DANCE FOOD & DRINK | NIGHT LIFE ABOVE & BEYOND PHOTOGRAPH…

WHEN THIS RESTAURANT WAS ELAINE’S, the food was beside the point. Think of the scene in “Manhattan” that took place there, in which Mariel Hemingway tells Woody Allen she needs to leave their double date early because she has an exam the next day. It’s so dark you can barely see their faces—that’s because Elaine Kaufman, the longtime proprietor and legendary smoker, reportedly got the lights from a funeral parlor. And even though it’s dinnertime, no one’s eating. “The key thing to remember is that the food at Elaine’s sucked,” said an Upper East Side resident who frequented the legendary literary hangout, which lasted forty-eight years, until a few months after Kaufman’s death, in 2010. What’s new? Not the famous canopy, which still juts out to Second Avenue, although it’s…

Mike Potter, the wig and makeup designer for “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”—the Broadway musical starring Neil Patrick Harris, the 2001 movie, the 1998 Off-Broadway original, and the character’s 1994 début, at the downtown drag party SqueezeBox—is thin, with bleached skater bangs and a small neck tattoo. The show has legions of fans—everyone from goth kids to “‘Golden Girls’ types,” Potter said—who are called Hedheads. Eating a salad in a dressing room at the Belasco Theatre before a show recently, he said, “It’s really funny, over the years, how many people are like, ‘You’ve saved my life.’ I’m like, ‘O.K.’ I did a wig, you know?” Potter met John Cameron Mitchell, the show’s co-creator (with Stephen Trask) and original star, in 1994. “I was working at Kim’s Video. He came…

HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND? “Write about what you know,” the creative-writing teachers advise, hoping to avoid twenty-five stories about robots in love on Mars. And what could you know better than the inside of your own head? Almost anything. And almost anyone else is better positioned than you are to write about the foreign land between your ears. You are the person least qualified to be writing about changes in your own brain, since you need your brain to comprehend those changes. It’s like trying to fix a hammer by using the hammer you’re trying to fix. Without getting into robots on Mars, I remember vaguely, from the nineteen-sixties, a comic-book tale about some residents of our three-dimensional world who go through a hole in space, or something like…

Although the Upper West Side, like every neighborhood in Manhattan, has lost a little of its distinctiveness over the past twenty soul-crushing, real-estate-lifting years, some specific, residual flavor of the place clings to its odd corners and company. Only a few decades ago, it was a gray place of strange, sober quest—the Village-dwelling Jane Jacobs called it “a surly kind of slum”— where documentary filmmakers filled vast basement spaces with editing chambers, and self-taught philosophers pursued solitary studies in the local cafeterias. Now its streets are mostly condo and co-op corridors, where the prices go up and the well-heeled, pushing their kids in broad-shouldered strollers, go by. For the past six years, though, in an eighth-floor apartment on Eighty-sixth Street, around the corner from Barney Greengrass, something of the old…

Wearily, moving his feet because he had nothing else to do, Christopher went on down the road, hating the trees that moved slowly against his progress, hating the dust beneath his feet, hating the sky, hating this road, all roads, everywhere. He had been walking since morning, and all day the day before that, and the day before that, and days before that, back into the numberless line of walking days that dissolved, seemingly years ago, into the place he had left, once, before he started walking. This morning he had been walking past fields, and now he was walking past trees that mounted heavily to the road, and leaned across, bending their great old bodies toward him; Christopher had come into the forest at a crossroads, turning onto the…

THE SPLENDID THINGS WE PLANNED, by Blake Bailey (Norton). In this captivating memoir about his troubled family in Oklahoma, the author recounts his parents’ failings and his own. But the dark heart of the book is his brother Scott—mentally unstable, drug-addicted, and often dangerous—whose story is harrowing. After one of many blowups, Bailey’s father kicks Scott out of the house: “Out my brother went with a tragic stumble, muttering how he’d never expected to be treated this way by his own family.” Bailey maintains a lacerating tone, and examines with the coolness of a detective the staggering things that we can do to the people we love. READING DANTE, by Prue Shaw (Liveright). This entertaining and learned tour through “The Divine Comedy” by a noted Dante scholar blends history…

Liza Lim’s song cycle “Mother Tongue,” which the soprano Tony Arnold and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble performed at Miller Theatre earlier this month, begins in a kind of sonic jungle. A saxophonist clicks his keys; flutists growl into their mouthpieces; string players make shivery sounds by bowing at the bridge; a trumpeter manipulates a wah-wah mute; percussionists make noise with tom-toms, a rainstick, a steel drum, and a Thai gong, among other things. When the voice enters, it could be mistaken for an unusually breathy instrument, as a “t” is accentuated by a percussive snap of the tongue. The first line of the text, by the Australian poet Patricia Sykes, is in Finnish: “Tämä kieli jota vaalin,” or “This tongue I am cradling.” We seem to be listening…