Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-09-14 i The New Yorker

DAVID GILBERT (“HERE’S THE STORY,” P. 46) is the author of the novel “& Sons,” which came out in paperback in May. RACHEL KUSHNER (“THE ADOLESCENTS,” P. 59) has written two novels, “The Flamethrowers” and “Telex from Cuba.” JOSHUA FERRIS (“GOOD LEGS,” P. 69) published his third novel, “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour,” last month. RAMONA AUSUBEL (“YOU CAN FIND LOVE NOW,” P. 70) is the author of “A Guide to Being Born” and “No One Is Here Except All of Us.” COLM TÓIBÍN (“STORIES,” P. 72) will publish a new novel, “Nora Webster,” in October. HARUKI MURAKAMI (“YESTERDAY,” P. 74) has a new novel, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” coming out in August. MIRANDA JULY (“TV,” P. 78) is a writer, artist, and…

SHAKESPEARE’S WOMEN, HAROLD BLOOM HAS observed, are always marrying down. Is Orlando truly worthy of Rosalind, with her panoptic wit? How does Viola wind up with that ninny Orsino? Perhaps that’s why playing a Shakespearean heroine requires not just poise but a hint of sourness. For the past few years, Lily Rabe has been Shakespeare in the Park’s go-to interpreter of these sharp but compromising women, having appeared as Portia in “The Merchant of Venice” and Rosalind in “As You Like It.” Beginning June 3, she plays Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing,” directed by Jack O’Brien. Beneath Rabe’s alabaster beauty is a shrewd intelligence marked by disillusionment, and a vulnerability that allows her characters to get swept offff their feet despite themselves. Still, there’s a pool of regret, even…

Central Park West at 67th St. (212-877-8684) IN 1976, AFTER TWO YEARS of renovations, Tavern on the Green reopened with a bang, and this magazine ran a Talk of the Town story describing the “two-and-ahalf-million-dollar, stop-at-nothing, one-thousand-seat-capacity update” of the 1934 sheepfold turned restaurant. On the menu: New Zealand wild boar with gingered apples and lingonberries ($9.50) and pizza ($2.50), prepared by fourteen French chefs. In the brand-new, glass-walled Crystal Room: seven-foot-tall Baccarat chandeliers from Indian palaces, a molded-plaster ceiling in “light mint green, birthday-candle pink, and telegraph-blank yellow,” and a “fantasy mural” with flowers, birds, and butterflies. On opening day, Mayor Abe Beame dipped into the world’s largest ice-cream sundae (7,250 pounds of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry Sealtest), drank a toast from a nine-litre bottle of champagne that had…

In Egypt, where physical markers often tell you something about a person’s beliefs, an outsider inevitably engages in the act of profiling through appearance. Race hardly matters, and even class is secondary; instead, you look for the hijab and the niqab, the beard and the prayer bruise on the forehead. And so, on May 26th, the first day of the Presidential election, it was possible to walk into a women’s polling station at the Commercial High School in Minya, a city in Upper Egypt, and make a quick assessment of the hundred and eighty women who had lined up to vote. More than a third had uncovered heads, which in a conservative town could mean only one thing: Christians were voting in high numbers. Not one woman wore a niqab,…

SPY VS. SPY Last month, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the United States was charging members of the Chinese military with economic espionage. Stealing trade secrets from American companies, he said, enabled China to “illegally sabotage” foreign competitors and propel its own companies to “success in the international marketplace.” The United States should know. That’s pretty much how we got our start as a manufacturing power, too. “The United States emerged as the world’s industrial leader by illicitly appropriating mechanical and scientific innovations from Europe,” the historian Doron Ben-Atar observes in his book “Trade Secrets.” Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American industrial spies roamed the British Isles, seeking not just new machines but skilled workers who could run and maintain those machines. One of these artisans…

In the beginning was B, who looked like an angel. He asked to carry my books up the hill. It was the first day of sixth grade at my new school, in a new city, San Francisco. It began to rain. A tough and intimidating eighth grader approached. (She and her friends looked like adults to me, and, as I soon discovered, they had adult problems, like pregnancy and drug addiction.) She took my umbrella and said something unrepeatable about B’s race. He was black, and she was stridently white. Many things were new to me that day. B and I never reconnected. All the girls in my grade liked D, who was a natural leader with a demonic personality. (I’ve given these people random initials.) D made fun of…

You are lonely, but you don’t have to be. You have so many great qualities! Just think of all the single ladies out there who are waiting to hear from you. Whether you are looking for lasting love or just a little fun, this is the only guide to online dating you’ll ever need. Within the hour, you’ll be on your way to eternal happiness! Let’s get started. When creating your username keep in mind that it should be concise and easy to remember. Make it personal. If you’re a dancer maybe try: hipdancer21. Find me at cyclops15. Cyclops 1-14 were taken. Now choose a tagline that will attract the woman you want. Secret: Do what no one else is doing. I’m eight feet tall and I have one…

One looked like a woman but was too tall, or maybe it was just that the other one was so small, like a little boy. I saw them around Portland all the time that summer. Were they young or old? Couldn’t tell. Were they from the present, or another era; i.e., time-travellers? Wasn’t sure. They were in black and white, neckties and knickers. A little dirty. Always leaning on each other. Their house was the one with the big wooden sign on the porch—a blue finger pointing thataway. I began to hang around. Not comfortably or with any panache—I just couldn’t seem to stay away from the finger, and those strange people, especially the little one, TV. She, if she was a she, was every boy from every childhood book:…

In the nineteen-nineties, when you bought a book at Barnes & Noble the cashier slipped it into a plastic bag bearing a black-and-white illustration of an author’s face—Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Edith Wharton. Recently, I was poking around a bookstore in Manhattan and noticed a canvas tote for sale. In a simple red heart, the word “books” was spelled out in white letters. This tale of two bags is the story of decades of change in the publishing industry. “Books,” O.K.—but which ones? The number of Americans who read books has been declining for thirty years, and those who do read have become proud of, even a bit overidentified with, the enterprise. Alongside the tote bags you can find T-shirts, magnets, and buttons emblazoned with covers of classic novels; the…

For centuries, the myth of Sleeping Beauty has tossed and turned. In Charles Perrault’s version of 1697, the happy ending was not an ending at all; it led to an aftermath flavored with serial cannibalism, writhing vipers, and slit throats. Italo Calvino, collecting Italian folktales, dug up an old Calabrian variant in which the prince does not wake the heroine but rapes and impregnates her in her sleep. For some reason, none of this made it into the Disney film of 1959. As for the fairy villain, Perrault did not name her; nor did the Brothers Grimm, in “Little Briar-Rose,” their retelling of 1812. Disney, however, which never lost money by spelling things out, called her Maleficent: something of a giveaway, you might think, although the other characters seemed taken…

MISTA T KEN IDENTITY Lizzie Widdicombe, in her piece about the Manhattan Institute’s Hamilton Awards, quotes a number of Republican politicians intent on promoting an image of Alexander Hamilton as representing an urban, Wall Street-friendly brand of conservatism (The Talk of the Town, May 26th). In researching my biography of Hamilton, I discovered that, in many battles with Jeffersonian foes, Hamilton proved himself to be a liberal champion. He advocated federal power against the doctrine of states’ rights and favored an expansive reading of the Constitution. He promoted abolitionism and lent his prestige to a school for Native Americans. He was the foremost agent of economic modernity against the slavocracy of the South. When he founded Paterson, New Jersey, he espoused open immigration against the forces of nativism. Even…

“HONEY, I TWISTED THROUGH MORE damn traffic today,” reads the new white-on-pink mural by Ed Ruscha, above the High Line at Twenty-second Street. On a recent afternoon, the text doubled as a caption for a live-action cartoon, as a man on a scooter wove his way through a gaggle of tourists. Nearby, teenagers held up handwritten signs advertising free hugs and yelled, “It’s emotional Tuesday!” Performance art? No, students from the neighborhood’s Fashion Industries high school, blowing off steam. It can be hard to distinguish what’s art and what’s not on the High Line. “Archeo,” a new exhibition of eight outdoor sculptures by seven young artists, organized by the park’s nimble curator, Cecilia Alemani, plays to the idea of the High Line as a latter-day Readymade. Marcel Duchamp turned his…

THE CENTENARY of Alec Guinness’s birth fell, without fanfare, on April 2nd. He would not have lamented the lack of trumpets. His life had begun with a blank, the space for his father’s name left unfilled on his birth certificate, and, to judge by the titles of his memoir and journals (“Blessings in Disguise,” “My Name Escapes Me”), he never lost his taste for a vanishing act. Alone among the great performers, he resolved a paradox: how to be a star without being the center of attention—or, at least, while giving no sign that you crave such a prominent spot. When Laurence Olivier played King Lear onstage, in 1946, it was Guinness, pattering around him as the Fool, with a mime-white face, and with his lines shorn to a bald…

When Robert De Niro was young, his father would ask to paint him, but he wouldn’t pose. “I wish I had,” De Niro said recently, “but I didn’t have the patience. You gotta sit still.” Much later, the actor felt he was too acquiescent when his father neglected the prostate cancer that killed him, in 1993. Bookended by regrets, De Niro, now seventy, sat in Robert De Niro, Sr.,’s studio in SoHo. Save for installing shades beneath the skylights, he’d preserved the loft as it was: red dial phone on a pillar; shirts in dry-cleaning bags; birdcage lacking only the parrot, Demetreus. De Niro slipped his glasses on to peer at the canvases against the far brick wall—women reclining, dab and con-fident, fit companions to the images from Ingres, Poussin,…

It ends with his right hand gripping her left, the curve of her knuckles the pulling yoke. The plane is on its final approach. Greater Cincinnati lies ahead. Outside, it’s dark, snowing lightly. Every window seems to have concluded its broadcast day, though in houses down below people idle in front of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “The Lucy Show.” Whatever might happen above is not their concern. The landing gear is set. In two miles, the runway. Flaps 50. Altimeters cross-checked on zero seven. Inside the cabin, he squeezes her hand harder. The flight manifest lists them as Theodore Harris Martin (9B) and Emma Callahan Brady (6A), both from Los Angeles, specifically Studio City. The date is November 20th and the year is 1967 and the time is 8:57…

In late 2006, the writer John Green came up with the idea of communicating with his brother, Hank, for a year solely through videos posted to You-Tube. The project wasn’t quite as extreme as it sounds. John, who was then twenty-nine, and Hank, who was three years younger, saw each other about once a year, at their parents’ house, and they typically went several years between phone calls. They communicated mainly through instant messaging. Hank was living in Missoula, where he’d started a Web site about green technology. John was living on the Upper West Side while his wife, Sarah Urist Green, completed a graduate degree in art history at Columbia. He had published two young-adult novels, “Looking for Alaska,” in 2005, and “An Abundance of Katherines,” in 2006, and…

One day in June, 1978, when I was twenty-three and living in Barcelona, a friend mentioned that a charter flight that weekend was offering very cheap one-way seats to Dublin. In that second, it came into my head that I might go—pack up my apartment, leave for good. Three days later, I was back home in Ireland. In the years that followed, I often wondered what might have happened had I stayed in Barcelona that summer and spent the days on one of the nearby beaches with a guy I was seeing then and the nights at his apartment in the city, had I stayed into the winter and then into the following year. It’s possible that I might never have gone home. After I left, I wrote to the…

When I was fifteen, I cut off the last joint of my left ring finger during a woodshop class. I was laughing at a joke while cutting a board on a table saw. The bite of the blade sent a great shock through me, and I didn’t dare look down, but the bleached faces of the other boys told me just how bad it was. They didn’t reassemble bodies in those days. Later, I heard that one of the guys in the class had picked up the joint, complete with dirty fingernail, and scared some girls with it. No surprise, no hard feelings; it was the kind of thing I would’ve done, and not only because I was a jackass. The girls around me were coming into glorious bloom, and…

ALL THE BIRDS, SINGING, by Evie Wyld (Pantheon). Violence takes many forms in this suspenseful and melancholy novel. Sheep die mysteriously on a farm on a lonely British island; in Australia, a school bully’s nails leave scars. The protagonist, Jake Whyte, lives alone, tending to the animals on her farm and spurning all human companionship. A stranger arrives at her door, and the mystery of his appearance leads Jake to examine a traumatic past and to confront whoever or whatever is attacking her sheep. In alternating chapters, the story moves forward and backward in time—a narrative architecture that might seem gimmicky were it not for Wyld’s masterful control. There are also surprising moments of lightness—the protagonist’s dark humor, the author’s unsentimental reverence for the natural world. THE ANATOMY LESSON,…

NO MATTER HOW popular Governors Island becomes, it always feels like a getaway. To arrive by ferry—from lower Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge Park—is to retrace the watery journey of the Spanish, Italian, and Dutch settlers who sailed New York Harbor centuries ago. This summer, the ferries run seven days a week, which means more chances to swing in one of the island’s fifty red hammocks, bike on its car-free streets, or play on the mini-golf course created by local artists. There are plans to make Governors Island accessible year-round, but for now it remains a seasonal pleasure, ending on Labor Day. PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL ARNOLD MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES International Center of Photography “Urbes Mutantes: Latin American Photography 1944-2013” Although “Mutant Cities,” as the show’s title translates, is too quirky…

29-19 24th Ave., Astoria (718-274-4925) “It’s not very good,” a waitress said, one balmy Sunday, of the Bohemian’s house brew, Rhapsody, an unfiltered wheat Pilsner. “Guess I’m just one of those honest people!” The Bohemian is also just that kind of place: a man offered a stranger bites of his goopy potato salad; another fellow, in a lime-green tank top, yelled “Come join us!” to the stranger, as she fled the potato-pusher. The self-professed oldest beer garden in New York City—tree-shaded picnic tables, populous smoking section—and the adjoining cedar barrooms are owned by the Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria, which opened as a social club in 1910. Some of the superior beers now on tap are the citrusy Franziskaner Weissbier and the White Aphro, which has strong lavender notes,…

COMMENT LITERATURE AND LIFE Unless you spend much time sitting in a college classroom or browsing through certain precincts of the Internet, it’s possible that you had not heard of trigger warnings until a few weeks ago, when they made an appearance in the Times. The newspaper explained that the term refers to preëmptive alerts, issued by a professor or an institution at the request of students, indicating that material presented in class might be sufficiently graphic to spark symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder. The term seems to have originated in online feminist forums, where trigger warnings have for some years been used to flag discussions of rape or other sexual violence. The Times piece, which was skeptically titled “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm,” suggested that trigger warnings…

Among the trends on Broadway this season: musicals about sixties girl rockers (Janis Joplin, Carole King); bravura performances by men in drag (Neil Patrick Harris, Mark Rylance); and raw eggs. In “Rocky,” the title character downs a glass of them. In “Cabaret,” Michelle Williams, as Sally Bowles, mixes them with Worcestershire sauce—a prairie oyster—and drinks them for breakfast. And then there’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” Martin McDonagh’s black comedy about life in the Aran Islands in 1934. The play, starring Daniel Radcliffe, has been nominated for six Tony awards, but it also holds the record for Most Eggs Sacrificed in the Name of Art: thirty-six per show. Not long ago, the cast gathered in a rehearsal room on Forty-second Street to work out the logistics. Radcliffe, who plays a disfigured…

At dawn when rowboats drum on the dock and every door in the breathing house bumps softly as if someone were leaving quietly, I wonder if something in us is made of wood, maybe not quite the heart, knocking softly, or maybe not made of it, but made for its call. Of all the elements, it is happiest in our houses. It will sit with us, eat with us, lie down and hold our books (themselves a rustling woods), bearing our floors and roofs without weariness, for unlike us it does not resent its faithfulness or question why, for what, how long? Its branchings have slowed the invisible feelings of light into vortices smooth for our hands, so that every fine-grained handle and page and beam is a wood-word, a…

My old flame and I met in the hallway of a dorm in Iowa City. I didn’t think much of her, but I was sure she had never seen anyone quite so handsome. That was the year the weather never cleared of hand-rolled smoke and a mild hangover. I was arrogant with the ignorance of all that I didn’t know. She was dating the Philosopher, a theoretical proponent of free love who disapproved of her seeing other men. The onetime incident behind the pool table in her basement meant almost nothing to us. Then my old flame graduated early and was gone. There were rumors of a new boyfriend and a life in Ireland. I didn’t miss her. By then, I was in this terrible on-off thing with Sisyphus, who…

As far as I know, the only person ever to put Japanese lyrics to the Beatles song “Yesterday” (and to do so in the distinctive Kansai dialect, no less) was a guy named Kitaru. He used to belt out his own version when he was taking a bath. Yesterday Is two days before tomorrow, The day after two days ago. This is how it began, as I recall, but I haven’t heard it for a long time and I’m not positive that’s how it went. From start to finish, though, Kitaru’s lyrics were almost meaningless, nonsense that had nothing to do with the original words. That familiar lovely, melancholy melody paired with the breezy Kansai dialect—which you might call the opposite of pathos—made for a strange combination, a bold denial…

I. GERMINATION The land looked flattened, as if by a rolling pin. All aspects, all directions. On either side of Highway 62, the sand cast up visions of evaporated civilizations, dissolved castles that lay buried under the desert. Any human eye, goggled by a car’s windshield, can graft such fantasies onto the great Mojave. And the girl and the boy in the Dodge Charger were exceptionally farsighted. Mirages rose from the boulders, a flume of dream attached to real rock. And hadn’t their trip unfolded like a fairy tale? the couple later quizzed each other, recalling that strange day, their first in California, hiking among the enormous apricot boulders of Joshua Tree National Park. The girl had got her period a week early and was feeling woozy; the boy kept…

Every few months, I spelunk into the world of online indie television. It’s nearly always a disappointment: most series, even those which have managed to Kickstart up some hype, are half-baked and amateurish—more audition tapes than real productions. When I heard about “High Maintenance,” a Web series about a pot dealer in New York City, my expectations were calibrated low. Then I watched it. And I thought, Finally, finally, finally. Each episode of “High Maintenance” is between six and fifteen minutes long, and the episodes are released in sets of three, every few months. Then the show streams for free on the indie video-sharing site Vimeo. Although all the current installments were mostly funded by the show’s creators, the actor Ben Sinclair and his wife, the casting director Katja Blichfeld,…