Innholdsfortegnelse for Jul-07-14 i The New Yorker

ADAM GOPNIK (“STONES AND BONES,” P. 38) is a staff writer and the author of many books, including “Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York.” ELIZABETH KOLBERT (COMMENT, P. 31) recently published her third book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.” JACK HANDEY (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 45) has written several humor books, including “The Stench of Honolulu.” NATHAN HELLER (“CALIFORNIA SCREAMING,” P. 46) is a staff writer. HÉCTOR TOBAR (“SIXTY-NINE DAYS,” P. 54), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a novelist, will publish “Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free” in October. MOISES SAMAN (PHOTOGRAPHS, PP. 54, 60, 68) is a Magnum photographer based in Barcelona. He is currently working on a book…

THE IDEA THAT THE HOLOCAUST defeats attempts at artistic dramatization—that it constitutes, in Andreas Huyssen’s words, “unimaginable, unspeakable, and unrepresentable horror”—has a particular force in the world of music. While there are any number of symphonic and choral meditations on the Holocaust, operas on the subject are rather rare, not least because the larger-than-life gestures native to the genre can seem inapt. Furthermore, because of associations between Wagner and the Nazi regime, the very vocabulary of post-Wagnerian opera may appear to be implicated in the genocide. Mieczys³aw Weinberg’s 1968 opera “The Passenger,” which the Lincoln Center Festival is set to present at the Park Avenue Armory, is not a flawless work, but it comes closer than any other extant opera to overcoming the challenge of placing the Holocaust onstage. For…

Satao, a bull elephant who lived in the arid plains northwest of Mombasa, had tusks so long that when he walked they nearly scraped the ground. Mark Deeble, a filmmaker who spent weeks curled up in a box by a watering hole, waiting to catch a glimpse of Satao, described him as materializing out of the haze, as in “Lawrence of Arabia”—“a magnificent, dusty behemoth.” Satao was born sometime in the late nineteen-sixties, and by the time he reached forty he was one of the largest elephants in Africa. Just the weight of his ivory topped two hundred pounds; all told, he weighed probably more than seven tons. By the logic of the savanna, Satao’s size should have made him immune from predators, but by the logic of the market…

Bill Paxton keeps seeking a better vantage point. As he raced through the Museum of the City of New York—“C’mon!”—the actor grabbed his companion’s arm to point out curiosities, mimicked Alan Arkin’s put-upon growl and Richard Burton’s mellifluous boom, and discussed his ambivalence about psychotherapy. He’s prone to nightmares “where I’m clutching the spire of the Empire State Building and I don’t have the strength to hold on, and then I’m falling.” But: “If you cure the patient, do you kill the passion?” At the end of one therapy session in Beverly Hills, he said, he’d wept and said, “I just want to be Bob Cratchit!” By birth Texan and by choice Californian, Paxton is by nature Dickensian. He came to New York in 1976 to study acting at N.Y.U.…

THE FIFTEEN-DOLLAR MARGARITA Seems there was a local fella who owned a Mexican restaurant. Served good red chile. One day, he decided he was going to sell a fifteen-dollar margarita. People all said he was crazy. But he explained he was going to make the margaritas with real Cointreau and fine añejo tequila. And he did. Sure enough, the fifteen-dollar margaritas sold faster ’n hotcakes. THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO One year, the head honcho at the Santa Fe Opera decided to present “The Marriage of Figaro,” just two seasons after it had already been done. Some folks wanted him fired. But he decided to go ahead. Then things got worse. His tenor, who was supposed to play Basilio, left for a gig at the Met, in New York. His set…

The San José Mine is situated inside a round, rocky, and lifeless mountain in the Atacama Desert, in Chile. Once every dozen years or so, a storm system sweeps across the desert, dropping a torrent of rain. When that happens, the dust turns to mud as thick as freshly poured concrete. Charles Darwin briefly passed through this corner of the Atacama in 1835. In his journal, he described the desert as “a barrier far worse than the most turbulent ocean.” In the deeper desert, miners are the only conspicuous living presence; they ride in trucks and buses to the mountains, which contain gold, copper, and iron. The minerals draw workers to the Atacama from all over Chile. On the evening of August 3, 2010, Juan Carlos Aguilar began a bus…

In January, 1975, the musician Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt released a set of flash cards they called “Oblique Strategies.” Friends since meeting at art school, in the late sixties, they had long shared guidelines that could pry apart an intellectual logjam, providing options when they couldn’t figure out how to move forward. The first edition consisted of a hundred and fifteen cards. They were black on one side with an aphorism or an instruction printed on the reverse. Eno’s first rule was “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” Others included “Use non-musicians” and “Tape your mouth.” In “Brian Eno: Visual Music,” a monograph of his musical projects and visual art, Eno, who still uses the rules, says, “ ‘Oblique Strategies’ evolved from me being in a…

Last year, when the women’s-prison series “Orange Is the New Black” débuted, on Netflix, it felt like a blast of raw oxygen. Part of this was baldly algorithmic: here, at last, were all those missing brown faces, black faces, wrinkled faces, butch lesbians, a transgender character played by a transgender actor—an ensemble of electrifying strangers, all of them so good that it seemed as if some hidden valve had been tapped, releasing fresh stories and new talent. As bouncy as vaudeville, “Orange” veered away from the antihero solemnity of many cable shows, but it shared those series’ air of authority and, especially, their willingness to be rude. The apparent protagonist of Season 1 was the Waspy Piper Chapman, based on Piper Kerman, whose memoir of serving time for drug trafficking…

CORPORATE DISRUPTION Jill Lepore’s characterization of Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation is, quite reasonably, based on a synthesis of his writing and the work that has built upon it (“The Disruption Machine,” June 23rd). I fear, however, that in forming her argument she has both included and left out too much. (I was Christensen’s co-author on the book “The Innovator’s Solution.”) Lepore repeats a common claim that advocates of disruption theory employ circular arguments: anything that succeeds is disruptive, and failure arises from insufficient disruption. This idea does not come from Christensen’s writing, and in scholarly works he has disagreed with this formulation. Lepore also links disruption theory to the axiom that failure is endemic to the innovation process. That may be believed by some who have continued…

Pier 66, at W. 26th St. (212-989-6363) “Life on board, I would sum it up to say it ranged from sheer loneliness and boredom, to all the excitement you could stand,” wrote Captain David Melvin, in a letter about crewing, in the sixties, for the Lightship No. 115 Frying Pan. The lighthouse boat was built in 1929, for $274,434; in her current manifestation as a bobbing bar, that’s about eight thousand and seventy-two buckets of Corona. Having once guarded the treacherous Frying Pan Shoals, off Cape Fear, the vessel sank into the Chesapeake Bay in 1985. She’s since risen again, permanently docked in Chelsea, to service Manhattan’s Wayfarer-wearers. From May through September, with some leeway, those of sturdy leg and steady income throng her dank, rusted cabins and her deck,…

Last year, Dave Bry, a writer in New York, published a book called “Public Apology,” a memoir in the form of a series of apologies to various friends, family members, strangers, and celebrities. The cover was an image of a small airplane towing a banner that read “Public Apology.” Last month, a friend of Bry, looking through The New York Review of Books, spotted an ad for a new book titled “Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology.” The cover featured a plane towing a banner that read “Sorry About That.” The covers weren’t identical—on one, you see only the tail of the plane—but they were so similar that it was hard to imagine, especially in light of the subject matter, that one hadn’t inspired the other. The friend…

The past few years have been very good to Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group, the giant private-equity firm. His industry, which relies on borrowed money, has benefitted from low interest rates, and the stock-market boom has given his firm great opportunities to cash out investments. Schwarzman is now worth more than ten billion dollars. You wouldn’t think he’d have much to complain about. But, to hear him tell it, he’s beset by a meddlesome, tax-happy government and a whiny, envious populace. He recently grumbled that the U.S. middle class has taken to “blaming wealthy people” for its problems. Previously, he has said that it might be good to raise income taxes on the poor so they had “skin in the game,” and that proposals to…

In the spiritual geography of San Francisco, Davies Symphony Hall—a glass-and-concrete half rotunda much resembling R2-D2’s neckline—sits between hills steep with layered mansions and the urban basin where the city’s gritty elements now rest. John Adams’s “Harmonielehre” premièred here; so did a recent album by Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks. When the hall opened, in the eighties, it was said to be “dead” and “at war with itself,” but acoustic tinkering perked it up, and today it’s a reminder of the way the urban landscape is perpetually smoothing its sharp edges. Pleasant London plane trees trace the building. A warm, cultivated light glows from inside. On the evening of the Crunchies Awards, one Monday in February, the fog was so low and diaphanous that it appeared only in spotlights…

Her sisters flinched because she was the youngest, but she looked so old. Jeanne was just seventy-four, and no one had ever thought . . . They didn’t speak of it. They would not allow themselves, but Helen was eighty, Sylvia seventy-eight. They’d married first, been mothers first. They were older. They should have been frailer. How could Jeanne be first to go? Their baby sister lay propped up on pillows. Jeanne, who had celebrated her first birthday in eyelet lace, a slice of cake on the tray of her high chair, and her sisters on either side. Their living doll, with her blond curls and round blue eyes. They’d pulled her in their wagon over grass bumpy with apples from the apple tree. It was dreadful to approach her…

FRIENDSHIP, by Emily Gould (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this post-coming-of-age novel for the urban millennial, two young women try to settle some of life’s big questions—vocation, relationships. Both moved to New York with literary aspirations—though one is snarkier than the other—but neither has achieved what she wanted. As the women exit their twenties, one bottoms out and the other becomes pregnant. An encounter with a childless middle-aged couple causes alliances to shift and make room for unusual parenting arrangements. Gould’s protagonists are well drawn and entertaining, but (despite the book’s title) she does not always succeed in making their friendship feel real. They are loyal, but don’t seem especially interested in each other. FALLOUT, by Sadie Jones (HarperCollins). London’s theatre scene, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, was surely…

The Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum—the last show in the Madison Avenue building, before the museum relocates downtown—calls to account the most original, controversial, and expensive American artist of the past three and a half decades. At the age of fifty-nine, Koons has behind him a parade of scandalously sensational works that include a stainless-steel cast of an inflatable bunny; a porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee; pictures and sculptures of the artist in flagrante with his short-term first wife, the Hungarian-Italian porn star Ilona Staller; a four-story-high West Highland terrier covered with growing flowers; and an orange-tinted stainless-steel balloon dog that sold at auction, last year, for more than fifty-eight million dollars, the record for a living artist. We might justly term the present…

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEHAD NGA THE CIVIC-MINDED THEATRE PIONEER Joseph Papp was on to something when, in 1956, he began offering Shakespeare plays for free in the East River Park Amphitheatre. Now the Public’s Delacorte, his legacy, isn’t the only place to go for free Shakespeare in bucolic Manhattan. The Classical Theatre of Harlem had a hit last summer with its rousing production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheatre, in Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park; on July 4, the company returns to the recently refurbished outdoor stage for a three-week run of “Romeo N Juliet.” The director, Justin Emeka, adapted the familiar tragedy to be set in contemporary Harlem. The play features Sheldon Best as Romeo and Natalie Paul as Juliet, doing Shakespeare as it was meant…

Au Za’atar, 188 Avenue A (212-254-5660); Balade, 208 First Ave. (212-529-6868); Toum, various locations (toumnyc.com) LEBANESE RESTAURANTS DON’T GET a lot of love in New York. Their roster usually includes a decent hummus or tabouli and some better than average grilled meat, dishes that seem to have roots elsewhere. But the truth is that Lebanon has a deep bench of culinary influences that goes back thousands of years, to a time when that fertile strip of land to the east of the Mediterranean began its streak of besiegement by foreigners, including, but not limited to, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and, perhaps most auspiciously, in a culinary sense, French. Au Za’atar, a new Lebanese restaurant in the East Village, attempts to tap into this rich history, billing itself as an…

The Sunday before last, Paul Van Haver, the Belgian dance-music star who, as Stromae, plays to multitudes in Europe but is largely unknown here, was in a taxi, passing through Times Square on his way to watch a World Cup soccer match between Belgium and Russia. At a red light, one of Van Haver’s countrymen, whose fright wig was dyed black, yellow, and red, the colors of the Belgian flag, crossed in front of the cab, and Van Haver—a tall, slender, unassuming twenty-nine-year-old, of half-Rwandan descent, dressed in a pastel-blue cardigan and what he called “grandfather moccasins”— recalled that, two days earlier, midway through his first New York concert, he had jokingly described Belgium as “a really small country just next to France—like, a ridiculous country.” From the stage, he…

To get into the 9/11 Memorial Museum, you have to pass through a world-class security arrangement—a conveyor belt for shoes, belt buckles, cell phones; a three-second hands-above-your-head body scan—overseen by a notably grim private-security corps. “Stand there!” uniformed guards shout at those in line moseying ahead. “Don’t advance.” A terrorist planning to commit an atrocity at a museum devoted to the horrors of terrorist atrocities might seem unduly biddable to his enemy’s purpose, but then perhaps the security apparatus is itself a museum installation. At the other end, as you exit, toward West Street, another uniformed man is obliged to spend his day telling kids not to stand on the benches in the memorial park. “You, there! Down.” It doesn’t occur to the kids that standing on the granite plinths…

My father is modest. He didn’t save hundreds from drowning. Just a few dozen. Gathered from the swell, the riptide, rough, rough waves he carried them ashore. Half-lit, he tells it again. The storm against sky, the lifeguard without fear alone in the water, the crowd gathered to witness. Here’s what to notice: the danger of weather, failures of the other people to help, we never know what happened to the boy. This is my humble brag, my bravado, my foolish affection to write the same poem year after year. In some versions I am the lifeguard. In others I’m drowning. Then I’m sky. Then wave.…

God bless the midnight bus depot, the busted guitar case. God bless diazepam, its dilatory grace. God keep Carl Perkins warm and Jesus Christ erase my name from all the files in the county’s database. The dog that bit my leg the night I left the state, Lord won’t you let his vaccines be up to date. West Point to the south of me, Memphis to the north. In between is planted with pinwheels for the Fourth. Smokestack Lightning, Jesus Christ— whatever your name is— bless my fingers on these strings, I’ll make us both famous. How about that, the new moon, same as it ever was. You must’ve been high as a kite when you created us. So hurry, hurry, step right up, there’s something you should see. The…

Convention can be the enemy of art, but it doesn’t have to be. There are a number of great artists who examine conventional social structures without becoming squares themselves, but it’s a complicated strategy, to be anarchic about the power of the tribe. For a number of years, the comedian Dave Chappelle—who, in late June, made his first major New York appearance since 2004, performing for ten nights at Radio City Music Hall—was the most prominent, racially astute social critic we had. On his legendary Comedy Central program, “Chappelle’s Show,” which he co-wrote, produced, and starred in from 2003 to 2005, he presented skits about the black family of man that distilled, without reducing, such issues as the links between power and race and how both can affect masculinity. Chappelle’s…

In one of the most mysterious passages in Revelation, Christ opens the seals of a book held by God, and unleashes, each on a steed of a different color, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, generally interpreted as symbols of war, pestilence, famine, and death. It is an awesome moment. In the somewhat less sacred precincts of the movie business, catastrophe has been a beloved subject for filmmakers from the beginning. In D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (1916), the Master staged the fall of the Babylonian Empire and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the Huguenots. Yet both these events were, so to speak, local; and so were the mishaps in such nineteen-seventies disaster movies as “Airport” and “The Poseidon Adventure.” “Titanic” was a huge success in 1997, but, at this…