Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-30-14 i The New Yorker

DEXTER FILKINS (COMMENT, P. 19), the author of “The Forever War,” has reported from Iraq since 2003. He joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2011. ELIZABETH KOLBERT (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 22) is the author of, most recently, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.” JOHN COLAPINTO (“SHY AND MIGHTY,” P. 24), a staff writer, will publish “An Upright Man,” his second novel, early next year. DAVID SEDARIS (“STEPPING OUT,” P. 30) has been contributing to the magazine since 1995. His book “Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls” is just out in paperback. JEFFREY TOOBIN (“THE ABSOLUTIST,” P. 34) is a staff writer and the author of six books, including “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court” and “The Run of His Life: The…

TO CELEBRATE ITS FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY, BAM Cinématek will reprise, from June 29 to July 10, the program with which it was launched: a retrospective of the films of Brooklyn’s own Spike Lee. The timing is apt, because Lee has, in a way, come full circle, too. He began his career as an independent filmmaker, and he recently said, “I’m still an independent filmmaker.” He was referring to the fact that he financed his new feature, “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,” via Kickstarter—a process that he likened to the fund-raising he did “with pen and paper” for his first dramatic feature, “She’s Gotta Have It,” which he shot in twelve days in the summer of 1985. “We were doing Kickstarter before there was Kickstarter,” he said. But, according to Lee, independence…

1000 Fifth Ave. (212-535-7710) In addition to its Stradivarius collection, its Caravaggios, and the Sphinx of Hatshepsut, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has the best sky in town. Its rooftop café, which becomes the Martini Bar on Friday and Saturday evenings, overlooks Central Park; the view is of leafy treetops, a mostly prewar skyline, and an unobstructed celestial display worthy of Bierstadt. “Giant cumulonimbus clouds,” a woman drinking a dirty Martini said on a recent evening, gazing up at what looked like a benevolent H-bomb. The sky, between rainstorms, was a dusky gray, its clouds backlit by sun. A merry, international group—a young boy and his dad, both with blond dreadlocks and crisp white shirts; Italian-speaking women in scarves; a tiny French bulldog in a service vest—hung out on the…

A garden in Kent—willows, buff roses, bumblebees on a salted wind. Next door, a pair of builders stood on a scaffold, hammers prattling. “Sandwich is getting rather smart,” the writer Jane Gardam said, setting a ramekin of potato chips on an iron table. “It’s disappointing.” Gardam, who was born in Yorkshire in 1928, has lived in Sandwich since 1987. Her home, Haven House, was once a pilgrims’ hostel. “I saw it in Country Life,” she recalled. “When we arrived, we were greeted by a manservant in a white jacket, who led us to a strange old lady sitting in a chair in front of a fire.” A character in one of Gardam’s short stories thinks that “English country life is more like Chekhov than ‘The Archers’ or Thomas Hardy or…

In late March, the xx, a band that ordinarily appears at ten-thousand-seat arenas, played a ten-night “residency” at the Park Avenue Armory, performing for just a few dozen people at a time. Open to the public for fifty-five dollars a ticket, the shows also drew the musicians Beyoncé, Jay Z, and Madonna, as well as the filmmakers Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach. After assembling in a windowless storage area deep within the Armory, a former military headquarters on the Upper East Side, ticket-holders were led through tunnels to a small, square room, built around a shallow pit where three unsmiling figures stood in near darkness: the guitarist and singer Romy Madley Croft, with dyed black hair in a geometric cut that fell over one eye; the bassist and singer Oliver…

When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs and to the crest of my ability, for never was I a snob about it moreover never lazy, day into night through the cold pine forest we were bred to and for which I came to feel love as fast as others as a blur that slowed around us at our suppers, then watched us twitch in our heavy sleep. When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs mile on mile convincingly, my tongue construed the forest no condition not to drape in, identical its pinkness from my open mouth as theirs, the nylon tapes between us reinforcing sentiment, a kind relief through constant focus but from what I failed to grasp,…

“But it’s tawdry,” the woman said. “Petty. I still can’t figure out what happened. . . .” She was tall, pale, and had dark hair and a heart-shaped face. She looked to be in her early thirties. “I made a series of mistakes,” she said, “due to being hasty, or influenced by who knows? And each led to the next, and they seem to have ruined this man’s life—my ex-boyfriend’s—or else changed it completely. And the initial mistake was that, when I moved from Manhattan to a bleak town upstate, I took a house sight unseen.” “That doesn’t sound so bad,” someone said. “Yes,” a man, a novelist, said, and nodded. “If you didn’t like it when you got there, you could have just switched houses.” “But I didn’t,”…

In Stephen Crane’s novel “Maggie” (1893), it’s impossible to pinpoint the moment when the title character is first set on the path to prostitution. Maybe it happens when her brother’s friend Pete tells her that her figure is “outa sight.” Maybe it happens a little later, when her job making shirt collars on an assembly line begins to seem dreary. Is it a mistake when she lets Pete take her to a music hall? What about when she lets him spirit her away from her rage-filled mother, who has collapsed on the kitchen floor after a bender? Women in the neighborhood gossip, and a practiced flirt steals Pete away—perhaps they are instrumental. Or maybe the end is determined from the beginning, when the girl has the misfortune to be born…

LITERARY WARNINGS Rebecca Mead, in her piece on trigger warnings, the shootings at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the #YesAllWomen campaign, offers a thoughtful and historically informed approach (Comment, June 9th & 16th). The purpose of trigger warnings is not, as some have argued, to make participants in a class discussion feel that they’re in a “safe space.” Trigger warnings serve to prevent panic attacks or flashbacks that impede one’s ability to engage in discussion. (I speak as a college professor with P.T.S.D.) They are intended to enable everyone to remain present and alert enough to be challenged and discomfited. Margaret Price Atlanta, Ga. I studied in the great-books program at St. John’s College, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I cannot imagine what might happen to the…

THE TREY MCINTYRE PROJECT, which will appear at Jacob’s Pillow this week, is a chamberballet company, which means, more or less, that you get the ballet steps without the panoply: the serried ranks, the tutus, the love-struck swans. Strange to say, classical ballet sometimes seems clearer, more like itself and like nothing else, when it’s performed in this way. I once went to see T.M.P. perform a piece set to songs—including “Puff, the Magic Dragon”—by Peter, Paul and Mary. Gird your loins! I said to myself. This is going to be a sentimental business. It wasn’t. I can still see the Puff dancer, performing pas de chat across the stage—this huge guy, in shorts, doing these dainty little hops. It was all there: the thrill of love, the coming sorrow.…

COMMENT: CHOICES AT THE TOP President Obama won the White House in part by promising to end the war in Iraq, and since then he placed his faith in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to help him do so. It was Maliki who would hold together the state that the Americans had helped build. Obama had correctly judged the war in Iraq to be a catastrophe, but placing his confidence in Maliki required no small exertion of faith. Maliki’s past, and his present, often raised doubts about his inclination to reach beyond his own community, the Shiites—the country’s long-suppressed majority—and mend relations with the country’s other main groups, the Sunnis and the Kurds. In early 2009, a group of American diplomats in Iraq warned the White House that it ran the…

A lot of people are grossed out by cockroaches. They think they’re dirty and disgusting, and if they see one scuttling across the floor they reach for a can of Raid, or maybe they roll up a magazine and whack it, so that its innards spill out through its abdomen. George Amato, the director of the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, at the American Museum of Natural History, sees roaches differently. “There’s this notion that a lot of people have that there are good living things and bad living things,” he said. “But they all just evolved on this planet, like everything else.” Well, not exactly like everything else. “If you cut cockroaches’ heads off, they still walk around for a long time, functioning O.K., except that they don’t have…

I was at an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, listening as a woman named Lesley talked about her housekeeper, an immigrant to Australia who earlier that day had cleaned the bathroom countertops with a bottle of very expensive acne medication: “She’s afraid of the vacuum cleaner and can’t read or write a word of English, but other than that she’s marvellous.” Lesley works for a company that goes into developing countries and trains doctors to remove cataracts. “It’s incredibly rewarding,” she said as our antipasto plate arrived. “These are people who’ve been blind for years, and suddenly, miraculously, they can see again.” She brought up a man who’d been operated on in a remote area of China. “They took off the bandages, and for the first time in two decades he…

Charles Barsotti, who died last week at the age of eighty, started publishing cartoons in The New Yorker at the height of the war in Vietnam. He was such an ardent opponent of that war that he ran for Congress in Kansas on the issue. And while he lost that race, he spent a lifetime obsessed with the theme of power. He didn’t think of himself as Important or, God forbid, Serious. Drawing with a simple, shapely line, Barsotti employed a set of recurring characters that seemed inoffensive, apolitical, even sweet—adorable hounds, therapized kings. Somehow, though, his humor approached essential things: the tyranny of autocrats, the injustice of corrupt judges, the complacency of the wealthy and the corrupt. In other drawings, of course, he took a zero-gravity approach, with a…

Of course I was the one who drowned the old world. I’d wanted it emptied-slash-filled by an element essential to life but, whoa, fatal in large quantity. I’d wanted less, concentrated. But here was the math of it: 2 + idea = the 10K things. Hence the box built to float over what I’d killed, and everyone got in. If “everyone” = a representative sample of the total zoo, which rides with us now full time. Nights, the animals sleep and we can grab a drink up on deck under the tarp. It’ll rain awhile yet. The 2’s turn in their beds and the black bird and the white wait for their chance to bring a little branched something—evidence of else— back before never anymore coming home.…

CAPITAL, by Rana Dasgupta (Penguin Press). In the interviews with rich young Indians that make up much of this unsparing portrait of moneyed Delhi, no telling detail seems to escape Dasgupta’s notice. His novelistic talents are matched by his skill at eliciting astonishing candor from his subjects. The best passages are incisive summaries of the human and environmental costs of the élite’s wealth and privilege and his persuasive predictions of crises yet to come. Dasgupta constantly seeks to upend conventional wisdom about Delhi, the murky circulation of its money, and the roots of its periodic outbursts of violence, making this one of the most worthwhile in a strong field of recent books about India’s free-market revolution and its unintended consequences. WHISTLER, by Daniel E. Sutherland (Yale). In the eighteen-seventies,…

WHEN BOSTON BALLET ARRIVES at Lincoln Center this week, it brings “The Afternoon of a Faun,” created by the fabled Ballets Russes star Vaslav Nijinsky in 1912. The piece shows a little faun on a summer afternoon, encountering a pack of nymphs and trying to detain one. When she flees, he takes her scarf, faute de mieux, to his bed. More than a hundred years old, this dance is still astonishing, with its sweet, milky haze set against its slicing steps, its demure classicism against its blunt sexuality. After “Faun,” Nijinsky choreographed three more pieces, but meanwhile he was going insane. In 1919, he was hospitalized, and he never worked again. Of his ballets, only “Faun” survives. NOW PLAYING: A Coffee in Berlin This downbeat, romantic, black-and-white vision of…

ON A RECENT SUNDAY AFTERNOON, two men sat back to back at Russ & Daughters Café. One, in his eighties, reclined in a wheelchair, wearing a nylon tracksuit; the other, in his thirties, sported chambray and skinny jeans, cuffed to expose bare ankles. The Lower East Side has changed tremendously in the hundred years since Joel Russ opened a tiny shop to supply a mostly Jewish neighborhood with “appetizing,” defined by his great-grandchildren and successors as “the foods one eats with bagels.” But, inflation aside (at $1,895, five hundred grams of Osetra Gueldenstaedtii caviar costs about as much as a month’s rent for a studio apartment on East Houston Street), Russ & Daughters has remained almost exactly the same, and has sold enough smoked fish and cream cheese to open…

For many Americans, the World Cup is a little like a family Thanksgiving: a feast of reënacted arguments that lie dormant the rest of the year. Nothing seems to annoy international fans of the futebol more than Americans’ objections to the players’ widespread practice of diving, flopping, and/or rolling around on the grass in feigned agony, as though sledgehammered in the shin rather than hardly nicked. When you call attention to the phenomenon—what FIFA, the sport’s governing body, euphemistically calls “simulation”—you may be accused of trafficking in American exceptionalism or an outdated idea of masculinity. Early in the World Cup, which runs for the next three weeks, the Times had a page-one story about how the United States players and coaches were concerned that they weren’t adept or eager enough…

One night this spring, Amanda Burden went to see the new Broadway musical “If/Then.” She had recently returned from a “psychic healing” retreat in Arizona, having spent twelve years as Mayor Bloomberg’s director of city planning. One of Bloomberg’s aides had recommended “If/Then,” which stars Idina Menzel (you have heard her sing “Let It Go”) as an urban planner named Elizabeth. After a chance moment in a park, her life takes two divergent paths: In one, she calls herself Liz, marries an Army reservist, and has two kids. In the other, she’s Beth, a career woman who becomes New York City’s chief planner. Burden trembled in her seat. “Oh, my God,” she recalled thinking. “I think that’s me!” As it turns out, it was. “We wanted a profession that a…

Ted Cruz, the Republican junior senator from Texas, has heard the line about how the Party needs to become more moderate to win Presidential elections. “It is amazing that the wisdom of the chattering class to the Republicans is always, always, always ‘Surrender your principles and agree with the Democrats,’ ” he told me. “That’s been true for my entire lifetime. The chattering classes have consistently said, ‘You crazy Republicans have to give up on what you believe and become more like Democrats.’ And, I would note, every time Republicans do that we lose.” Cruz then offered a short history of recent Presidential politics. Richard Nixon ran as a conservative, twice a winner; Gerald Ford, moderate, loser; Ronald Reagan, also twice a winner. “President George Herbert Walker Bush ran as…

To get to the place where Richard Linklater was shooting his new film, you had to travel a short distance that seemed far: past the Barton Creek Greenbelt, a preserve on the edge of downtown Austin; past an R.V. park and a country club; past the turnoff to the Salt Lick Bar-B-Que, one of the last open-pit joints in Texas. You’re in Oak Hill now, where the Hill Country starts. The trees crop up more densely on the sides of Route 290. In the spring, along the highway, there are wildflowers, but in August the grass bakes and leaves droop drowsily from the surrounding branches. At the Texaco, you’d turn, and down Mowinkle Drive you’d spy a group of trailers near a small house. These marked the final preparations for…

I don’t know which casting directors first took notice of the great American actress Cherry Jones, but they must have had an interest in what I call spiritual casting. More often than not, casting directors work from the outside in: taking their cue from a director’s previous projects, they call on actors who, first, conform to that director’s established vision and, second, may add a little something to it. Spiritual casting involves looking beyond an actor’s superficial suitability for a role and recognizing, with a kind of critical love, the artists, like Jones, whose interiority not only transcends the limitations of their physical features but transfixes us until we believe in the very real unreality of the stage. Ever since she played the emotionally doomed Catherine Sloper, in the 1995…

There was a moment in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1990) when Karen (Lorraine Bracco) went to find Henry (Ray Liotta) after he stood her up for dinner. She confronted him, and asked, “Who the hell do you think you are, Frankie Valli or some kind of big shot?” I remember thinking what an unlikely name it was for Karen to pluck from the air. What was it, exactly, that gave a guy the right to disrespect a girl—was it the fame, or the falsetto? Now we have “Jersey Boys,” directed by Clint Eastwood, which gives us a fresh chance to measure just how big a shot little Frankie was. For the first third of the movie, it is Scorsese territory that Eastwood muscles in on. We are in New Jersey, in…