Innholdsfortegnelse for May-12-14 i The New Yorker

LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE (“THE END OF FOOD,” P. 28) is a writer for the magazine and an editor of The Talk of the Town. ADAM GOPNIK (COMMENT, P. 23) has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986 and is the author of, most recently, “The Table Comes First.” SEAN O’BRIEN (POEM, P. 35) is a professor of creative writing at Newcastle University, in the U.K. “The Beautiful Librarians,” his eighth poetry collection, will be published next year. LISA BIRNBACH (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 36) has published twenty-two books, including “The Official Preppy Handbook” and “True Prep.” LEE SIEGEL (“PURE EVIL,” P. 38) is the author of four books, including “Are You Serious?: How to Be True and Get Real in the Age of Silly.” KEITH GESSEN (“WAITING FOR WAR,”…

“NO PROBLEM: COLOGNE/NEW YORK, 1984-1989,” a big, museumquality show now at the David Zwirner gallery, bemuses as the marketing of a heyday in art marketing—never mind (but do note) that the art is first-rate. The subject is a starry transatlantic scene that was ginned up by gallerists in Cologne—the leading European city for adventurous art in the several years before the Berlin Wall fell—in ad-hoc collaboration with certain New York dealers. Of the hundred or so works by twenty-two artists from the period, eleven Americans sparkle: Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Robert Gober, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, George Condo, Raymond Pettibon, and Christopher Wool. Tops among the eight Germans are Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, and Rosemarie Trockel. Such lesser-known but appealing Germans as Walter Dahn…

208 Court St., Brooklyn Around Cobble Hill, little remains of the old neighborhood. There’s Sam’s Pizza (no tank tops, no slices) and the Community Bookstore (irregular hours, hoarder’s heaven). Until a few years ago, there was also the Jim & Andy produce market, owned by Vincent (Jim) Cincotta, who peddled out of a horse-drawn cart from the nineteen-thirties until 1970, when he bought the shop. He died in 2009, and, while the original Jim & Andy sign remains, the bar that moved in is of the new Brooklyn order. (No word on the fate of the horse.) Sharpelbowed nonnas shopping for Sunday supper have been replaced by freelancers toting vinyl to play on the bar’s turntable (currently trending: classic soul), which they are invited to do in off-peak hours. By…

Karol Ruiz, a third-year, part-time student at the Seton Hall University School of Law, considered removing the tiny stud adorning her left nostril before participating in the finals of the school’s moot-court competition, but ultimately she decided against it. Ruiz, who is the daughter of a welder and a domestic worker from Colombia, and has a fifteen-year-old son, acquired U.S. citizenship only three years ago. She had avidly read the autobiography of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three judges for the evening’s competition. “I had heard that when she first went on the bench she wore red nail polish,” Ruiz said. “I practiced hard to make sure I would be judged by the content of my arguments, not by the ring in my nose.” Ruiz was one of four…

In December of 2012, three young men were living in a claustrophobic apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, working on a technology startup. They had received a hundred and seventy thousand dollars from the incubator Y Combinator, but their project—a plan to make inexpensive cellphone towers—had failed. Down to their last seventy thousand dollars, they resolved to keep trying out new software ideas until they ran out of money. But how to make the funds last? Rent was a sunk cost. Since they were working frantically, they already had no social life. As they examined their budget, one big problem remained: food. They had been living mostly on ramen, corn dogs, and Costco frozen quesadillas—supplemented by Vitamin C tablets, to stave off scurvy—but the grocery bills were still adding up.…

When the Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø was in his early teens, he had a panic attack. The sun had set in Molde, the small city on Norway’s west coast where he grew up, and the apartment in which he lived with his parents and two brothers was silent. Thoughts of death descended on him, visions of being trapped in a coffin under the earth. He ran to his father, Per, woke him from a nap, and asked him what happens when you die. “Do you really want to know?” his father asked. The boy insisted. “It all goes black,” he said. In the crowded field of Scandinavian crime fiction, Nesbø’s books stand out for their blackness. He has written ten novels about the investigations of Inspector Harry Hole, a…

Mark Tercek, the head of the Nature Conservancy, recently took a tour of the largest chemical-manufacturing facility in North America: the Dow plant in Freeport, Texas. The Nature Conservancy, which is responsible for protecting a hundred and nineteen million acres in thirty-five countries, is the biggest environmental nongovernmental organization in the world. Tercek, accompanied by two colleagues, had come to Freeport because the facility—a welter of ethylene crackers and smokestacks built next to a river that flows into the Gulf of Mexico—is at the center of a pilot collaboration that he hopes will reshape conservation. The key idea is to create tools that can assign monetary value to natural resources. Tercek, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, thinks that environmental organizations rely on fuzzy science and fail to harness the…

CASEBOOK, by Mona Simpson (Knopf). On the cusp of adolescence, the narrator of this novel, Miles Adler-Hart, sees himself as a sleuth, but his attempts at surveillance are hapless. When he tries to rig a walkie-talkie under his parents’ bed, he overhears a marriage breaking down. Much of the rest of the novel charts his concerns about his mother’s new boyfriend, whose visits make him feel “as if wolves were biting at our walls.” A mystery involving a double life sends Miles to an actual private detective, but adult relationships are the true mystery here. Simpson manipulates the tropes of suspense fiction astutely, and the touches of noir are delicate. Miles’s snooping is considerate and his voice frank, more often than not in pursuit of “the lit, apparent side”…

LIFE OF THE MIND Michael Kinsley’s personal essay on living with Parkinson’s disease is a striking affirmation of the integrative faculties of mind that endure despite the assaults of disease and time (“Have You Lost Your Mind?” April 28th). Kinsley notes that there is now evidence that levodopa—a dopamine replacement “miracle drug” that revolutionized treatment of Parkinson’s in the nineteen-sixties—“can make the non-motor symptoms worse.” Indeed, some studies have shown that, in brain regions that are less affected by Parkinson’s, dopamine therapy apparently produces an “overdose” response, which can interfere with tasks for which there are narrow “cues”— what might be called simple tasks. But in dopamine-depleted regions the drug seems to enable better performance on tasks that are complicated by distracting or irrelevant information—what we might think of…

THE MONTHLONG RETROSPECTIVE of all the extant films by the Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956) at Museum of the Moving Image is a long-overdue tribute to his supreme artistry. Though Mizoguchi worked in Japan’s mainstream movie industry, his work bears no trace of commercial compromise or populist sentiment; it reaches the purest realms of tragedy—and this accounts for his relative neglect. He was an intensely, even angrily, political filmmaker, who explored Japanese history and classical literature in order to dramatize the country’s social and emotional crises at their source. For Mizoguchi, Japan’s most destructive and deeply rooted crisis was the subjugation of women. Mizoguchi’s two-and-a-half-hour drama “The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums,” from 1939, is one of the cinema’s great outpourings of imaginative energy. The movie is set in the…

The bizarre American genius for making major events out of meta-events—the pre-Oscar broadcast; the before-the-debate spin on the after-the-debate spinning—includes our sports, where in some ways it first began. The N.F.L. draft, arriving this week, has become a spectacle of its own, with “draftniks,” day-long previews, and winners and losers announced before the draftees are. The stories of those who might get picked—this year, for the first time, they include an openly gay player, the University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam—often overshadow the stories of how the players already picked are playing. The N.F.L. draft is also the moment on the calendar when the intersection of college sports and capitalism comes into clearest focus, and this year brings into view a couple of timely, overlapping crises: one of health…

“I’d better get back to work after this—I’m running a lab!” Eric Kandel said as he crossed Twenty-seventh Street, on the way to an art gallery. Kandel, who is eighty-four, won a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his studies of the molecular mechanisms of memory. “Now I’m working on how memory is perpetuated,” he said, describing his research at Columbia medical school, where he is a professor. “I’m studying how you remember your first love experience for the rest of your life.” What did Kandel, who has prominent ears, large round glasses, and a halo of white hair, remember of his first love experience? “A great deal!” he said. “It was fantastic! ” He went on, “It happened when I was eight years old, with our housekeeper, Mitzi, in Vienna.”…

I wait for you inside a glass beside The long dim window of the Café de l’Imprimerie. I see you, beautiful and wry And not yet here, and yet not here, While this late-summer evening never ends And never ends but is infinitesimally Dimming on the street beside Les Halles, where I Can see you, beautiful and wry as you draw near, And I am reassured you are not coming. Yes. All night I wait for you at the Café de l’Imprimerie. Your absence makes you beautiful and wry And this late-summer evening never ends, Nor does the beautiful intolerable Music, where the truth is cut With sentiment and surely fatal. Come now. Do not come. Come now. Do not, And lead me to a room where you undress, A…

Can the country hold together? I am sitting in a café in a Euro-Soviet city, drinking from a little pot of tea, looking at my computer, and wondering whether the leader sitting in a Euro-Soviet city to the north of here will decide to invade the country where I currently am. I check the Web sites, Ukrainian and Russian. There are all sorts of reports. Russian tanks are massing at the northern and eastern borders; American and European leaders are pondering further sanctions; the interim government has announced that it has a plan. “The border is a two-hour tank ride from here,” a friend of mine will tell me later in the day. “Do you realize what that means? It means you go to sleep at night and you wake…

At nine o’clock one morning in June, Captain Popov rang the doorbell. No one answered for a long time, but finally he heard the sound of scurrying. “Who’s there? Who is it?” a plaintive female voice said. The door opened a crack, the chain left on. Sivtsev and Emelyanenko shifted their weight, itching to start, finish, and get out of there as fast as they could. They were incompetent boys. Popov pushed his I.D. through the crack in the door. He heard more scurrying, and then it finally opened. The witness, one of their own, from the municipal housing office, stomped in first. “Does Boris Ivanovich Muratov live here?” Popov asked. Muratov flashed into the room immediately—a large, bearded man of around forty in a blue robe that might have…

In Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from the first century B.C., we meet Narcissus, a young man so handsome that all the nymphs are in love with him. He doesn’t understand why; he wishes they would leave him alone. One day, in the woods, he comes upon a pool of water and leans over to take a drink. In the reflection, he sees his face for the first time, and falls in love. He swoons, he kisses his image, but he cannot have the thing he desires. In despair, he stops eating, stops sleeping. Finally, he lays his head down on the greensward and dies. It is this ancient story that supplied us with the word “narcissism,” to mean excessive self-love. Thousands of years later, with the advent of modern…

KARA WALKER HAS never been one to sugarcoat things, until now. Her scabrously lyrical silhouettes—antebellum scenes that skewer received ideas about race and gender—have earned Walker both accolades (a MacArthur fellowship, a Whitney retrospective) and notoriety (the African-American artist Betye Saar once protested the work as “a form of betrayal”). The centerpiece of “A Subtlety,” her new sculptural installation in the old Domino Sugar Factory, in Williamsburg, is a mammy-as-sphinx, rising more than thirty-five feet. It owes its gleaming white surface to sugar coating, but, along with the sweet, Walker serves up a bitter political truth: the subtitle of “A Subtlety” is “The Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the…

THERE ARE TWO PLACES you might go while waiting for a table at Bunker, a restaurant in an industrial part of Ridgewood which takes no reservations and has no bar (though a liquor license is on the way). A ten-minute walk in one direction will bring you to Drunken Fish Sushi & Lounge, which, despite its name, is dry as a bone; a ten-minute walk in another direction will bring you to a strip club called Pumps, where the booze is abundant but the tax is steep, and must be leveraged in dollar bills. It’s not altogether surprising that the house recommends the latter: Bunker is the passion project of four skating buddies who grew up in Elmhurst, and the place has a slapdash, dude-bro vibe, with men in the…

Idan Ravin, a personal trainer who calls himself the Hoops Whisperer, has so many clients in the N.B.A.—LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Dwight Howard—that the league’s playoffs have become a time of confused allegiance. “I always say, ‘If Steph scores a hundred and Chris scores a hundred, I’m happy,’ ” Ravin said last week, when asked whom he was rooting for in the matchup between Stephen Curry’s Golden State Warriors and Chris Paul’s Los Angeles Clippers. Both players are clients, and Ravin had been texting with them throughout the series, during which both had been dealing with fallout from the release of a tape in which the Clippers’ owner, Donald Sterling, expressed his distaste for African-Americans—twelve of whom are members of his team. “People like to imagine they live in this…

It was eleven on a recent Sunday morning, a few minutes before the Michael Nesmith photo op and signing, and Nez, as he’s known to friends, was in a suite at the Meadowlands Hilton, steeling himself. In the forty years since the demise of the Monkees—the made-for-TV band that, in spite of its ersatz origins, managed to record a handful of pop classics and shaped the future of the music video—Nez has avoided fan gatherings. “Never. Never. Never,” he said, in a slight Texas drawl. “Anytime anyone has suggested it, I’ve always said no, because I smelled trade show.” Even as a Monkee, he didn’t seem keen on being a Monkee; his sly put-downs of the enterprise were what made the show at least sort of cool. The other three…

Welcome to Selfridge University, the only “big small school,” as we like to say, in Putnam County. My name is Wanda. I’m from Wisteria, Oregon, and I’m a brain-science and aesthetics double major, modern-dance minor. Besides being a tour guide, I play the cornet in the school band (yeah!), and I’m the captain of the girls’ intramural lacrosse team, and I run the blood bank here at Selfie U. I love being a tour guide and I love walking backward. Can everybody hear me? Since we’re such a big group, why don’t you each just, like, say your first names, and I promise I won’t remember them. Lily. Michael. Sophie. Maggie. Ryan. Olivia. Miyong. Brad. Jane. Naeem. Sophie. Will. Michael. Leijo. Pandereen. Dylan. Charlotte. Megan. Jeremy. Morgan. Beverly. Jared. Leah.…

Now I begin with these two hands held before me as blessing & weapon, blackbirds in fierce flight & instruments of touch & consolation. This sign means stop, & this one of course means come forth, friend. I draw a circle in the red iron clay around my feet, where no evil spirit dares to find me. One’s hands held at this angle over a boy’s head are a roof over a sanctuary. I am a greenhorn in my fortress in the woods with my right eye pressed to a knothole. I can see a buzz in the persimmon tree, its ripe letting go—a tiny white cross in each seed. The girl’s fiery jump rope strikes the ground. I see the back door of that house close to the slow…

In the middle of the last century, C. Wright Mills bought a contraption called a Shopsmith, an all-in-one, five-foot-long workbench that included a lathe, a disk sander, a table saw, two drill presses, and a jigsaw. He was waiting for Oxford University Press to send him galleys of his new book, “White Collar,” a study of office workers. He paid for his Shopsmith with royalties he earned translating from German into English the essays of Max Weber, including one on bureaucracy. Then he bought an old farmhouse on five acres of land in Pomona, New York. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, he’d ride his motorcycle from the farm, where he hoped to grow vegetables, to Columbia University, where he taught sociology. (He’d built the motorcycle himself, in a factory in…

If you were to pause “Ida” after ten minutes and define its theme, you would guess that it’s about a young Catholic nun called Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska). Clad in a plain habit, she dwells in a Polish convent, chants in Latin, and helps carry a statue of Jesus through the snow. The Mother Superior addresses her as Anna. And yet you would be wrong. As soon becomes clear, she’s not a nun but a novice, preparing to take her vows. She’s not named Anna. And she’s not even Catholic. It’s a fitting start to a tale of constant wrongness—of taking wrong turns, making wrong assumptions, and inflicting wrongs terrible and small. Anna’s only relative is an aunt, Wanda Gruz (Agata Kulesza), whom she doesn’t know but whom she is sent…