Innholdsfortegnelse for May-26-14 i The New Yorker

ROBIN WRIGHT (“THE ADVERSARY,” P. 40), a joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has been covering Iran since 1973. She is the author of several books on the Middle East, including “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.” ALEXIS OKEOWO (COMMENT, P. 21) is a journalist based in Lagos, Nigeria. JAMES SUROWIECKI (THE FINANCIAL PAGE, P. 26), the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” writes about economics, business, and finance for the magazine. DAVID OWEN (“THE YIPS,” P. 28) has been contributing to the magazine since 1991. He is the author of several books, including “The Making of the Masters: Clifford Roberts, Augusta National, and Golf’s Most Prestigious Tournament.” ADAM GOPNIK (“WORD MAGIC,” P. 36), a…

IT WOULD BE FOOLISH, any year, to view the Tony nominations as a barometer for the state of the art, but this season’s crop seems particularly out of synch. Of the four nominees for Best Musical, only one has a wholly original score: “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak’s poison-laced pastiche of British operetta. Worthy new efforts, such as “The Bridges of Madison County,” were snubbed. On the play side, Will Eno’s existential comedy “The Realistic Joneses,” with its koanlike probing of mortality, was shut out completely, leaving room for Terrence McNally’s trite AIDS drama “Mothers and Sons.” This is a bad sign for Broadway, which is already risk-averse. Still, there is much to celebrate. James Lapine’s adaptation of “Act One,” Moss Hart’s…

IN 1991, a twenty-two-year-old Australian free-jazz drummer named Oren Ambarchi made his yearly pilgrimage to New York, looking for records and a chance to see live acts unlikely to make the trip to his home city of Melbourne. At the Knitting Factory, then on East Houston Street, he saw Keiji Haino, a forty-nine-year-old Japanese musician who had long black hair with bangs. In skinny wraparound shades popular with English mods in the sixties, Haino made high-pitched noises with his mouth while playing a Gibson SG electric guitar. The unified effect, over the course of ninety minutes, was more like the sound of a wounded velociraptor or a metal rigging collapsing than anything as pedestrian as chords. Ambarchi decided, right there, to pick up the guitar. Over the next twenty years,…

Last Thursday, Bali Barret, the “women’s universe” artistic director for Hermès, sat beneath stained-glass windows at the Gallim Dance company, at the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew, in Brooklyn. She had arrived from Paris the day before. Beside her was Gallim’s choreographer, Andrea Miller, whose work usually focusses on “social and political issues: pack mentality, crowd behavior.” (She recently won a Guggenheim.) Around them, dancers warmed up, surrounded by dozens of Hermès handbags and shoes; muscular men in suits at the doors resembled ushers. “This is a church, so we’re praying while dancing,” Barret said. The dancers were rehearsing for All About Women, a fashion show, party, and feat of Surréalisme, a year in the making, that Barret created for Hermès lovers from around the world. The event—to…

Six or seven years ago, I played a round of golf in a foursome that included Hank Haney, who at the time was Tiger Woods’s coach. Haney’s golf swing was exceedingly strange. On the first tee, after he lined up his shot, he drew his driver back high in the air while turning to look at the clubhead, took a baseball-like practice swing well above the ball—then, immediately, took the club all the way back again and swung. The last part looked pretty normal, but if I hadn’t known who Haney was I wouldn’t have guessed that his occupation was teaching golf. Haney is tall and trim. He was an allconference player at the University of Tulsa, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, but a few years after graduation he began having serious…

On September 4th of last year, shortly after Javad Zarif was named Iran’s foreign minister, a new Twitter account with the handle @JZarif posted its first tweet: Hope to be able to #interact & stay in touch. Several hours later, a second tweet appeared: Happy Rosh Hashanah. The tweets drew widespread attention, and some skepticism. Iran’s new President, Hassan Rouhani, had taken office a month earlier, but his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had challenged Israel’s right to exist, urged Jews to return to the countries they came from, and questioned the occurrence of the Holocaust. Moreover, most social media had long been cut off in the Islamic Republic. Among the skeptical responses was one from @sfpelosi: Thanks. The New Year would be even sweeter if you would end Iran’s Holocaust denial,…

“I’m Camilo!” he shouted to me from the gate, opening his arms wide, as if we knew each other. “Your daddy’s godson.” It seemed terribly suspicious to me, like a caricature of danger, and I was nine then, already too big to fall for a trap like that. Those dark glasses, like a blind man’s, on a cloudy day. And that jean jacket, covered in sewnon patches with the names of rock bands. “My dad’s not here,” I told him, closing the door, and I didn’t even give my father the message; I forgot. But it turned out to be true: my father had been a close friend of Camilo’s father, Big Camilo—they’d played soccer together on the Renca team. We had photographs of the baptism, the baby crying and…

The final edition of Spring for Music, at Carnegie Hall. Spring for Music, the annual orchestra festival that began running at Carnegie Hall in 2011, was one of the best ideas to hit the New York music world in a decade or more. Here was a series dedicated not to the empty-headed pursuit of technical excellence but to the exploration of ideas. Orchestras were invited on the basis of the freshness of their repertory and the inventiveness of their programming. Twenty-three North American ensembles performed music by sixty-six different composers, half of them still living. The overplayed warhorse was Charles Ives, five of whose symphonies were heard. Mozart and Beethoven received only token representation; Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler appeared not at all. Some concerts were riveting, others rambling; none were…

“Godzilla.” Wrinkled and crinkled, huge in Japan, heroically reluctant to give up, and forever touring the world on a mission to make us scream, Godzilla is the Mick Jagger of giant amphibians. In the latest version of the legend, directed by Gareth Edwards, Godzilla even has a Ronnie and a Keith to mess around with: a pair of scaly, primeval throwbacks who rise from the depths and join him in merry mayhem. For food, they snack on nuclear power plants and other sources of radiation, chomping atomic warheads as if they were Twinkies. All that’s missing from this film is a Charlie Watts figure: some slender beast, nicely preserved, calmly beating time at the back of the action. We begin in 1999, in the Philippines, where mining operations have unearthed…

WHAT IS A DEGREE WORTH? Adam Gopnik makes many pertinent observations in his essay on the relationship between college athletics and higher education (Comment, May 12th). Unfortunately, measuring higher education itself in terms of “market values” has now become the norm, in both public universities, which have to answer to state legislatures, and élite private universities and liberal-arts colleges. Administrators are increasingly appointed because of their ability and willingness to bring the values of the market to bear on their day-to-day decision-making. This results in an emphasis on job placement and starting salaries for recent graduates, and often in the elimination of foreign-language and other humanities departments, because they add no demonstrable “value” to students. What is most distressing is that many administrators appear to accept the self-evidence of…

137 Sullivan St. (212-533-1137) THE OWNERS OF THE TRIBECA bar Smith & Mills, Matt Abramcyk and Akiva Elstein, were so enamored of their design concept—wartime bunker, in the vein of Bauhaus and Constructivism—they expanded on it. Navy, their adorably tricked-out new restaurant (wartime deprivation, si chic!), sits on a quiet SoHo block in the former home of Jean-Claude, a beloved French bistro. When asked what inspired all those signal flags, the clever galley latrine, and the crisp blue-and-white ship-motif tiles, one dapper gentleman working the lunch hour replied, “It was inspired by World War II and the thirties and forties, obviously, but really it’s because it’s a seafood restaurant.” Depending on what time it is, the vibe ranges from extremely pleasant, during the day (open French windows, Bien Cuit croissants,…

Yakubu Kabu, a Nigerian civil servant and the father of one of the more than three hundred girls abducted from a school in the village of Chibok, was struck by the fact that the first real news of his daughter came from the Boko Haram terrorists who had taken her, and not from the government. To many, it was emblematic of the general mishandling of the case. Last week, after a month of conflicting reports from President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, the governor of the northeastern state of Borno, where Chibok is situated, arranged for some of the parents to watch a video released by Boko Haram, to see if they could identify their daughters. It had been broadcast on national television, but both electricity and Internet access are in short…

Like Asian cuisines, our Founding Fathers rotate in and out of fashion every few years. Sometimes we’re in a George Washington year, sometimes everyone’s talking about James Madison. Lately, Alexander Hamilton is having a moment. He comes up in Timothy Geithner’s new memoir (President Obama gives Geithner a ten-dollar-bill engraving plate, with the inscription “Hamilton would be proud!”). And Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “In the Heights,” is workshopping a new hip-hop musical, inspired by the life of the first Secretary of the Treasury, called “Hamilton.” A few years ago, as Tea Party hysteria raged, theatregoers lined up to see “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” the musical inspired by the populist seventh President. Hamilton is a less exuberant figure—he’s the money guy, who designed the federal government and envisioned an America…

Here is what we know so far: —The victim, Mr. Hollis, was found by a servant in the library at the stroke of midnight, with his limbs splayed, his clothes torn to shreds, and his hair matted with dried blood. —Sometime later, after cleaning himself up, he was murdered. —The body was noticed by Mrs. Devereaux, who was all the more shocked and confounded since the discovery came near the end of a round of hide-and-seek and just before a round of Corpse Hunt. —The guests have convened in the study, and have agreed that no one will leave until the authorities arrive, and that Mr. Burlinson is owed an apology now that they realize where the stench was coming from. —The head servant, Huntley, insists that no one could…

In June of 2011, Isaac Aguigui and his wife, Deirdre, learned that they were going to have a boy. Aguigui, then twenty years old and a private in the Army, spoke excitedly with friends about becoming a parent. Deirdre, twenty-three and a sergeant, sent her father a text announcing, “It’s a boy,” repeating the final word eight times to punctuate her glee. They picked out a name, Kalvin James, and when Deirdre adopted an orange tabby they named it Hobbes, evoking the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.” The two had met in 2009, as cadet candidates at the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School for West Point, at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Deirdre tutored Aguigui in math; he was gregarious and handsome, with black hair and angular features. “She was elated…

How did we get so busy? In the winter of 1928, John Maynard Keynes composed a short essay that took the long view. It was titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” and in it Keynes imagined what the world would look like a century hence. By 2028, he predicted, the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. “Our grandchildren,” Keynes reckoned, would work about three hours a day, and even this reduced schedule would represent more labor than was actually necessary. Keynes delivered an early version of “Economic Possibilities” as a lecture at a boys’ school in Hampshire. He was still at work revising and refining the essay when, in the fall of 1929,…

Ryan Murphy takes on Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart.” Early in Larry Kramer’s 1985 play, “The Normal Heart,” Ned Weeks—the Kramer stand-in—meets Dr. Emma Brookner, who is trying to get the word out about a disease that is killing her gay male patients. As she examines Weeks, a journalist, she says that she’s heard he has a big mouth. “Is big mouth a symptom?” he asks the doctor. “No, a cure,” she snaps. “The Normal Heart” is not a nuanced play, and reading it in 2014, nearly thirty years after its première, you can feel as if fingers were jabbing at you from the page. But it’s witty and it’s alive. In the polemical tradition of Odets and Chayefsky, Kramer named names, gay and straight, major and minor: Mayor Ed…

IN “THE QUEEN MOTHER of Reality,” the Polish artist Pawel Althamer pays tribute to Delois Blakely, who is known as the “queen mother” of Harlem. A former Roman Catholic nun, Blakely has been an advocate for women and children for decades. She was named an honorary mayor of Harlem by Rudy Giuliani and later became a hero to the Occupy movement. To do justice to this larger-than-life figure, Althamer and a team of collaborators built a fifty-foot-long statue from urban flotsam and jetsam—hats, scaffolding, headlights. The monument reclines like a Buddha and includes a walk-in belly outfitted with airplane seats and a photograph of Blakely for a face. The sculpture, which débuted at “Performa” last November, is now installed at Socrates Sculpture Park, in Long Island City, through Aug.…

A first-time festival from the Philharmonic offers new music from around the world. THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC will soon launch its inaugural “NY Phil Biennial” (May 28-June 7), a glorious, elevenday festival of new music from around the world. Alan Gilbert’s keen interest in contemporary sounds has been a historic aspect of his term as music director: you have to go back to the days of Pierre Boulez and Leonard Bernstein to find a similar level of enthusiasm. For whatever reason, Gilbert’s administration has always placed an intense emphasis on music by foreign composers. The programs in the orchestra’s new-music chamber series, “Contact!,” have shown a decided devotion to the current gods of high European modernism, such as Boulez and Magnus Lindberg, who was the orchestra’s composer-in-residence from 2009 to…

Max Frankel, the former executive editor of the Times, once said of his old boss’s son, the future publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., “He’ll never make the same mistake three times.” Depending on who’s counting, that may or may not spell good news for Dean Baquet, the paper’s new executive editor, whom Sulzberger appointed last week, making Baquet the first African-American to hold the position. Baquet takes over from Jill Abramson, the first woman ever to hold the position—and the second chief editor whom Sulzberger can now be said to regret installing. In firing Abramson, on Wednesday, less than three years into her tenure, Sulzberger alluded to “an issue with management in the newsroom.” Sulzberger also appointed Howell Raines, in 2001, only to force him to resign less than two years…

The most expensive housing market in North America is not where you’d think. It’s not New York City or Orange County, California, but Vancouver, British Columbia. Now, Vancouver is a beautiful city—a thriving deep-water port, a popular site for TV and movie shoots. By all accounts, it is a wonderful place to live. But nothing about its economy explains why—in a city where the median income is only around seventy grand—single-family houses now sell for close to a million dollars apiece and ordinary condos go for five or six hundred thousand dollars. “If you look at per-capita incomes, we look like Reno or Nashville,” Andy Yan, an urban planner at the Vancouver-based firm Bing Thom Architects, told me. “But our housing prices easily compete with San Francisco’s.” When price-to-income or…

Once, in a restaurant in Italy with my family, I occasioned enormous merriment, as a nineteenth-century humorist would have put it, by confusing two Italian words. I thought I had, very suavely, ordered for dessert fragoline—those lovely little wild strawberries. Instead, I seem to have asked for fagiolini—green beans. The waiter ceremoniously brought me a plate of green beans with my coffee, along with the flan and the gelato for the kids. The significant insight the mistake provided—arriving mere microseconds after the laughter of those kids, who for some reason still bring up the occasion, often—was about the arbitrary nature of language: the single “r” rolled right makes one a master of the trattoria, an “r” unrolled the family fool. Although speaking feels as natural as breathing, the truth is…

I ran over a shadow, and the car went bump. In the back, the kid was worrying his sweet tooth with the tip of his tongue. What he wanted was to catch me in a generous mood. He saw all the signs: “Vote Yes,” “Speed Table,” “No Exit,” and he mumbled with disgruntled syncopation, as in sazzifrazzin laws and laws, the dark graphics standing between us and the wildness we shed to get through. What he wanted was to stay in the shadow of the fish crow, hooking left where they let down the guardrail, to crash through the sagebrush and angry old trees that wait to be thrown into relief. Oh, there are Great rules I want him to keep, so I broke the little red fish into halves…

NO PLACE TO HIDE, by Glenn Greenwald (Metropolitan). Early in this effective memoir of Edward Snowden’s revelations about National Security Agency spying, Greenwald recalls meeting Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel conference room next to “a huge, green, plastic alligator.” Greenwald found his youth “disorienting,” having assumed that someone willing to risk his future must be near retirement. He veers between frustration with the deliberations at the Guardian, his journalistic home at the time, and acknowledgment of the “remarkable speed and boldness” with which it published, despite pressure from two governments. He never sets aside his doubts about the Washington Post, which also had a cache of papers, or about the journalists elsewhere who, he believes, were too close to government sources and tried to discredit him. GANDHI BEFORE…

The two sides of Arto Lindsay. New York is the city that lives on the power of those who aren’t from New York, which makes Arto Lindsay a perfect New Yorker. Lindsay, who turns sixty-one this week, grew up near Recife, part of the northeastern nub of Brazil, next to the Atlantic Ocean. His parents were Southerners who went to Brazil as missionaries. In the time between leaving Brazil, moving to New York, and returning to live in Rio, Lindsay has done enough important work to justify calling his new two-disk compilation “Encyclopedia of Arto”—it could easily be five disks. The collected halves represent, more or less, the two main categories of his music: a sensuous mode of songwriting heavily indebted to Brazilian sounds and a strangled, atonal blend of…