Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-23-14 i The New Yorker

JILL LEPORE (“THE DISRUPTION MACHINE,” P. 30) is a professor of history at Harvard. Her new book, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” will be published in October. DEXTER FILKINS (COMMENT, P. 25), a staff writer and the author of “The Forever War,” has reported from Iraq since 2003. GEORGE SAUNDERS (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 37) wrote these liner notes for the album “2776,” sales of which support the educational charity OneKid OneWorld. NICK PAUMGARTEN (“ID GIRLS,” P. 40) is a staff writer. ROBERT HAYDEN (POEM, P. 44), who died in 1980, wrote nine books of poetry. A new edition of his “Collected Poems” came out last year, to mark the hundredth anniversary of his birth. This is one of his previously unpublished poems. SARAH STILLMAN (“GET OUT OF…

700 Fifth Ave. (212-903-3097) Meet Madame Ning: ageless socialite, international tastemaker, and generous hostess at her penthouse, modelled as a kind of homage to her birthplace, triad-era Shanghai. Madame Ning proudly displays her patrician heritage—a painting of the Beijing Opera, Qing-dynasty bamboo seats, a side table lacquered vermillion red—but Venetian mirrors and Moroccan lanterns are reminders of her East-meets-West sensibility. She’s fictional, of course—a mythical grande dame, conjured as a creative concept for Peninsula hotels from Hong Kong to Manila. At the New York iteration, the management is betting that a rooftop twenty-three floors up on Fifth Avenue near the Park is draw enough, and that there’s no need to hit the chinoiserie too hard. Some staff wear mandarincollared silk, but many don’t, and the lacquer on the table seems,…

A songwriter transfers her complex studio creations to the stage. THE NEW TUNE-YARDS ALBUM, “Nikki Nack,” is a testament to the virtues of exhaustion. Merrill Garbus, the band’s front woman and chief songwriter, felt tapped out and stymied after her last album, “who kill,” came out, in 2011. To recharge, she embarked on a scattershot self-improvement program: she travelled to Haiti, took voice lessons, and even read a book about how to write a hit song. The gambit paid off. “Nikki Nack” is jubilantly kaleidoscopic—its lead single, “Water Fountain,” bounces from style to style, folding in African polyrhythms, children’s rhymes, and ironic asides. But returning to the studio was only half of the equation. A new album meant going on tour, and Garbus wasn’t sure if she was ready. “It’s…

For Don Johnson, the gravel-voiced, often-married charmer, appearing on “The View” the other day should have been a victory lap. But afterward, over lunch at Rosa Mexicano, Johnson said, “I’m overdosed on estrogen, bro.” He assumed a chirpy air: “‘What’s the key to your marriage—love or lust?’ Ray Charles could have seen that question coming. So of course I said, ‘You gotta have both, baby!’” It’s been thirty years since “Miami Vice,” when Johnson somehow made stubble, Wayfarers, and a feathered mullet a thing. The role of Detective Sonny Crockett, and many subsequent parts, didn’t require much acting beyond an I’m-fixin’-to-shoot-you face. But now, at sixty-four, Johnson is enjoying a late reappraisal; he was on “The View” to promote “Cold in July,” a thriller in which his merry vigilante commands…

In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new graduates—to do what little was left of the work of the employees they’d laid off. This was in Cambridge, near M.I.T. I’d type users’ manuals, save them onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, and send them to a line printer that yammered like a set of prank-shop chatter teeth, but, by the time the last perforated page coiled out of it, the equipment whose functions those manuals explained had been discontinued. We’d work a month here, a week there. There wasn’t much to do. Mainly, we sat at our desks and wrote wishy-washy poems on keyboards manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, left…

On a cold November afternoon, Harriet Cleveland, a forty-nine-year-old mother of three, waved me over from the steps of her pink cottage in Montgomery, Alabama. She was off to her part-time job as a custodian at a local day-care center, looking practical but confectionary: pink lipstick, a pastel yellow-and-pink tunic, and dangly pink earrings. We’d need to start walking soon, she explained. The job, which paid seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, was the only one she’d been able to find for some time, and was four and a half miles away. As we set off beneath loblolly pines, she recounted the events that had led me to her doorstep: her arrest and jailing for a string of traffic tickets that she was unable to pay. It was, in…

Many years ago, after I retired from the bank, James brought a small terrier to our apartment in Paris. I told him I did not want it. I knew he was trying to keep me occupied, and it is a ridiculous thing, to have a dog. Maybe one day you rise from bed and say, “I would like to pick up five thousand pieces of shit.” Well, then, I have just the thing for you. And for a man to have a small dog—it makes you a fool. “Please,” James said. “Let’s just see how it goes.” I considered the dog, a blond female no bigger than a cat. She had long hair like whiskers over her eyes, so she seemed always to be raising her eyebrows. She sat down,…

THE BLAZING WORLD, by Siri Hustvedt (Simon & Schuster). In Hustvedt’s sixth novel, Harriet Burden, an artist who has spent many years in the shadow of a wealthy art-dealer husband, secures wild acclaim for three of her installations by enlisting three male artists to take credit for them. Once overlooked by the art world and underappreciated by her family, she becomes a figure of fascination. The riddle of Harriet is enhanced by the book’s form, a collection of texts purportedly gathered after her death, including excerpts from her journals. Hustvedt creates a parallel between the biases of gender and age that Harriet faces and duelling identities that she battles within herself. “Were we just one person or were we all many?” she wonders. ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE,…

“Third Person” and “22 Jump Street.” In Paul Haggis’s new movie, “Third Person,” Anna (Olivia Wilde), a go-getting New York journalist, is having an affair with Michael (Liam Neeson), a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist in a funk. In a darkened room in a posh Paris hotel, he tries, with diminishing confidence, to finish writing a book. He flies Anna over, and they taunt each other, make love, play complicated erotic games. They’ve been carrying on this way for two years—fighting keeps the affair alive. Neeson, now sixty-two, is recognizably stalwart—tough-tender and imposing—and it’s a pleasure to see him acting with a woman after so many fantasy characters and man-alone genre movies. The revelation is Wilde. A slender beauty with high cheekbones, she makes Anna a full-fledged neurotic, candid and demanding and…

A GREENER SOYLENT Lizzie Widdicombe rightly points to agriculture as a leading cause of climate-warming emissions, and Rob Rhinehart, the creator of the food substitute Soylent, calls nonindustrialized farms “very inefficient factories” (“The End of Food,” May 12th). But, until Rhinehart engineers Soylent from algae, his product will depend on chemical-and fossil-fuel-reliant grains grown in monocropped fields and refined in energy-intensive processing plants—an inefficient nutrient-delivery system, from an emissions perspective, if ever there was one. Meanwhile, studies show diversified small-scale agriculture to be one of the best ways to both mitigate and adapt to a warming climate. Healthy soils built through crop rotation and organic fertilizers sequester carbon and fare dramatically better in both droughts and floods. Food production is part of the problem of global warming, but it…

458-460 Myrtle Ave., Brooklyn (718-643-6500) FOLLOWING IN THE TRADITION of Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. is the Runner, another restaurant inspired by art.Time has not been kind to “Forrest Gump,” the movie that spawned the seafood chain; WaltWhitman, who lived in Clinton Hill for a stint and wrote the short poem from which this excellent new neighborhood joint gets its name, is doing better. The chef, Andrew Burman, formerly of the cult sandwich shop Court Street Grocers, takes the connection beyond a volume of Whitman’s poems in the bathroom—practically obligatory for a certain kind of Brooklyn restaurant anyhow—with a menu that looks back to the writer’s era in New York. It’s an elaborate, slightly twee conceit, but now there’s another place to eat roasted oysters, and many of the other throwback…

The day after Islamic militants swept into Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and several other enclaves along the Tigris River, the conquering army, called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, posted a photograph on Twitter. It showed one of its fighters—a Chechen volunteer, the group said—opening the door of an American-made Humvee that it had seized from the Iraqi Army. The Humvee and the militant, the group said, had just arrived at an ISIS base in Syria, where, presumably, they were ready to be dispatched in the war there. The border between Iraq and Syria may have effectively disappeared, but the dynamics driving the civil wars in those nations are not identical. In Syria, an oppressed majority is rising up; in Iraq, an oppressed minority. (The opposition fighters in both…

One recent sunny morning on West Forty-fourth Street, upstairs from Sardi’s, a group of drama teachers gathered to sit at the feet of Stephen Sondheim. The teachers had been bravely putting on Sondheim musicals for years, in the face of administrative protests about immoral messages and lascivious or bloodthirsty content. It was true that even they, in private moments, had wondered whether it was wise to encourage teen-agers to enter into the minds of characters such as Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, who chop people up and bake them into pies and find this activity so exciting that they have sex with each other. But, on the whole, the teachers were smut-and-gore idealists. Now, in this master class, organized by the Academy for Teachers, they would for one day be…

The history of epic musical attempts to meaningfully engage with the vast sweep of American history is, to say the least, problematic. Meat Loaf’s “Ben Franklin Makes Love in a Foggy Grove of Trees,” though energetic enough on vinyl, failed to translate to live performance. The rather too subtle stage actions (Ben thoughtfully taking off his “spectacles” as Priscilla Hedges, partly unclad, sings up at him, “When you invent the kite / Will you still recall this moment? / Or will I become part of / A vague montage of New England sluts?”) fizzled in the large venues then favored by Meat Loaf. The Tim Rice–Andrew Lloyd Webber production of “Johnny Tremain” was likewise moribund, its “heavy” lyrics (“My hand / This hand / Once so lovely / Has now…

One day in late December, I was sitting at a small table on the fifth floor of the Argosy Bookshop, on East Fifty-ninth Street, with the three beautiful sisters—Judith Lowry, Naomi Hample, and Adina Cohen—who own and run the business, which they inherited from their father, Louis Cohen, in 1991. Now in their seventies, the sisters have been at the Argosy—which sells autographs, maps, prints, and paintings, as well as old and rare books—since their early twenties. As each one graduated from college, she came to the bookshop, and found the work so congenial and was so good at it that when Cohen died the transition was seamless. The sisters have distinct personalities. Judith has a firstborn’s quiet augustness; she is tall and elegant and could be taken for a…

The Minnesota noir of “Fargo.” Maybe the week of the U.C. Santa Barbara shootings was not the ideal time to catch up on a tragicomedy about emasculation avenged. Maybe I’m burned out on bloodbaths. But “Fargo,” FX’s adaptation of the great film by the Coen brothers, created and written by Noah Hawley, left me feeling a thousand miles away, despite its strong cast and shrewd beauty. It also raised a question that’s become a cable-drama default: How good does a violent drama need to be to make the pain of watching worth it? “Breaking Bad,” thumbs up; the brilliantly nightmarish “Hannibal,” too. Other shows—“The Walking Dead,” say—have seemed like a bad bet. As the critic James Poniewozik tweeted recently, “TV’s not a chili-pepper-eating contest.” “Fargo” is nowhere near as graphic…

The New York Philharmonic puts on its first Biennial. The mission of the New York Philharmonic Biennial, whose inaugural edition overran several of the city’s concert halls in the last days of May and the first week of June, is a brave and bracing one: to celebrate the new without apology, banishing the image of the symphony orchestra as a shrine of the past. As the title makes obvious, the Philharmonic is emulating the glitzy rites of the contemporary-art world, which has no fear of confronting its public with novelties and extremes. In the spirit of the Venice Biennale or the Whitney Biennial, the festival strove for dizzying diversity, presenting some fifty modern works—most of them previously unheard or less than a decade old. Local groups such as Gotham Chamber…

THE COMPOSER AND SINGER Kate Soper celebrates the power of feminine identity through limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and a mastery of modernist style. The Metropolitan Museum recently commissioned Soper, who won a Guggenheim fellowship in 2012, to write a piece that commemorates the Met’s acquisition of the Temple of Dendur, which was given to the United States by the Egyptian government in 1965, to safeguard it from the flooding caused by the construction of the Aswan High Dam. On June 20, Soper performs “I Was Here I Was I” with the conductor Alan Pierson and his superb new-music group, Alarm Will Sound, in the magnificent setting of the temple itself. ART MUSEUMS SHORT LIST METROPOLITAN MUSEUM “Charles James: Beyond Fashion.” Through Aug. 10. MUSEUM OF MODERN ART “Lygia…

World-class films by young directors at BAMcinemaFest. BAMCINEMAFEST, AN ANNUAL SERIES presented by BAM Cinématek, is the city’s leading showcase for American independent films. But with competition for New York premières rising from other venues, such as the small but ambitious La Di Da Film Festival, the “New Directors/New Films” series, and the Tribeca Film Festival, this year’s lineup doesn’t have quite the consistency of artistic quality that has marked its recent editions. Nonetheless, its best offerings are, by any standard, remarkable—world-class films by young directors whose work deserves wide recognition. The most original independent filmmaker to surface in the past few years is Josephine Decker, whose second feature, “Thou Wast Mild and Lovely,” unleashes torrents of emotion from an exemplary melodramatic story. It stars the director Joe Swanberg—whose own…

A powwow is a powwow, in New York City or anyplace. At Floyd Bennett Field, in southeast Brooklyn, the open ground stretches far enough in all directions that you can forget you are anywhere in particular. The sound of Native American drumming and singing takes the huge space back to what it used to be; native drums sound insistent and powerful up close, wild and glorious from far away. White clouds lined up in an orderly pattern across the plain blue sky on a recent Saturday afternoon as the twentieth annual Gateway to Nations Pow Wow went on below them. Dancers in many styles, from traditional to fancy to jingle dress, entered the grassy circle between the main tent and a large, shade-providing tree. Then they jumped and stepped and…

Recently, a sign was posted outside the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, a block north of the Guggenheim, on Fifth Avenue. “The glory of God is a human being fully alive. Live fully,” it read. Inside, to the right of the nave, there is a small chapel, where, the other day, the French artist Sophie Calle was completing an installation, titled “Rachel, Monique,” about the death of her mother, in 2006. (Her mother, a film publicist, changed her name from Rachel Schindler to Monique Sindler during the Second World War.) There to help was a friend, the actress Kim Cattrall, with whom Calle had collaborated on a piece for the show. Calle, who is sixty, wore three layers of polka-dot shirts (black-and-white beneath blue-and-white and red-and-white) and a pin…

Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer play best friends on TV, on a sitcom called “Broad City.” They are its creators, head writers, and stars. Their characters, named Abbi and Ilana, are twenty-something stoners in New York—broke, horny, heedless, daffy, mostly benign, occasionally brilliant—who work crappy jobs, bump around town, get into mischief, and, with genial vulgarity and dirtbag charm, accidentally complicate their lives. Their manager initially pitched the show to the networks as “‘Laverne and Shirley’ meets ‘Louie,’” and it’s likely that somewhere along the line someone described it as a women’s “Workaholics,” or a chicks’ Cheech and Chong. Like anything, it owes debts to much that has come before, but it also offers something that, oddly, seems to be new, and that, to its legions of fans, is deemed…

THE PIE DISTRICT This is what we need to do at a certain point (wait for it, effendi): examine cheesy knockoffs of dubious provenance. Are we ready to help yet? Four negatives make a positive. I even joined city hall. Waves of attentiveness and straight A’s followed, but I was so crestfallen, the ship’s little dog seemed to think so. It hung around impetuously. They’re the ones to get somebody to do things, pick up after him. We’ll see who finishes soon in shock. There was nothing not to like about the new self-monitoring system. Yet strangely, the pie district voted against it. I, however, custodian of sang-froid, made a 180-degree swivel. The bandoneon keeps its goofy elixir locked in its dark depths. Thank you, by the way. I saw…

Zachary Lazar’s “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” Like many societies, the novel is a hybrid construction pretending to be an organic miracle. From its beginnings, fiction has had borderless relations with nonfictional sources, has found ways to incorporate and exploit journalism, biography, historical texts, correspondence, advertisements, and images. But, since fiction is an invention masquerading as a truth, the riot of intertextuality is often craftily smoothed into a simulacrum of orderly governance: these different materials, the novelist seems to say, possess an equivalent fictionality, and just naturally belong together like this—trust me. Some of the pleasure of reading novels, perhaps especially modernist and postmodernist ones, has to do with our simultaneous apprehension of invention and its concealment, raw construction and high finish. We enjoy watching the novelist play the game…

Chrissie Hynde’s rock-and-roll sneer. In another world, the movements of a musician like Chrissie Hynde would be closely tracked and regularly celebrated. A native of Akron, who has lived in England for more than forty years, she just released the excellent “Stockholm,” the first full-length album to be credited to her alone. Though her bestknown work is credited to the Pretenders, an act that was formed in 1978, in London, her new album was written and recorded with the Swedish musician Björn Yttling—a member of Peter Bjorn and John, and a producer for Lykke Li. The connection was suggested by Hynde’s publishing company, “a kind of old-fashioned way of doing it,” she told me. A younger listener would be forgiven for not knowing Hynde, or how she does business. The…