Innholdsfortegnelse for March 21, 2016 i The New Yorker

Ryan Lizza (“The Great Divide,” p. 38) is a Washington correspondent for the magazine and a political commentator for CNN. Amy Davidson (Comment, p. 31), a staff writer, contributes regularly to Comment and also has a column on newyorker.com. Lizzie Widdicombe (“Barbie Boy,” p. 46) is a New Yorker writer and an editor of The Talk of the Town. James Surowiecki (The Financial Page, p. 36), the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” writes about economics, business, and finance for the magazine. Ian Frazier (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 45), a longtime contributor, will publish “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces” in June. Maira Kalman (Cover) is a writer and an illustrator and the author of the illustrated memoir “Beloved Dog.” Judith Thurman (“The Empire’s New Clothes,” p. 54) has been…

DIRECTORS WHO HAVE an interest in style are not prevalent in the American theatre. Mostly, directors are there to serve the play and keep the bodies moving in space as clearly, effectively, and entertainingly as possible. Downtown legends who have bucked that particular trend—juggernauts like Elizabeth LeCompte, who heads the Wooster Group, and the late Iranian-born director Reza Abdoh—are rare, and their influence is so pervasive that you can’t really separate their legacies from the work of younger artists who aspire to a similar level of invention. There are, however, directors such as David Cromer, who works with standard material and brings to it an eye or a vision that has both a downtown edge and an emotional realness that lifts the script up, thereby creating something unpredictable, new, and…

“Streets of Ships: The Port and Its People” The South Street Seaport Museum will host its first exhibition since Hurricane Sandy, in celebration of the hefty restoration of its flagship. The show will display artifacts and art works from the museum’s permanent collection, contextualizing New York’s nineteenth-century transition from one of many competing American cities to an epicenter of global trade, thanks to “the Street of Ships,” as South Street came to be called. Commerce boomed and the city’s population swelled as ships brought in goods from Europe and Asia. Wavertree, an archetype of the sailing ships that docked at the port, has undergone a fifteen-month, thirteen-million-dollar restoration, and it is the centerpiece of this show. “When she returns this summer,” Captain Jonathan Boulware, the executive director of the…

IN THE SUMMER of 1909, an entomologist named Anton Krausse strolled the narrow streets of Sardinia netting bumblebees. He plunked his haul in a jar of ethanol and shipped the bees back to the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, where they’ve been sitting on a dusty shelf for the past hundred and six years. On a recent Friday morning, Melody Doering grabbed Krausse’s jar from among a jumble of yellowing vials and bottles. The bees inside were dishevelled from their century-long submersion. “The longer you keep things in alcohol, the crispier they get,” she said. Doering, who is sixty-four, has a graying pixie cut and wears electric-blue eyeglasses. She works two days a week preparing specimens for storage in the museum’s research collection. By head count, the…

A concise retrospective—a sampler, really—of important works by David Hammons, at the Mnuchin Gallery, on East Seventy-eighth Street, is a big deal, as Hammons shows generally are. Now seventy-two, the African-American artist has, by choice, exhibited rarely during the five decades of his now-yousee-him, mostly-you-don’t career. When glimpsed in person, he’s a watchful dandy sporting a colorful knit cap, but sightings are few and far between. Hammons so successfully shuns and fascinates the art world that he is almost an art world unto himself. The qualifier “elusive” clings to him. “Unique” applies, too. He is both a satirical oracle of racial fissures in society and a subtle aesthete, in forms of post-minimalist sculpture and installation. Comedy and spleen seesaw in Hammons’s art. “In the Hood” (1993) is in fact the…

All the Single Ladies, by Rebecca Traister (Simon & Schuster). This lucid and well-researched book examines the rise of autonomous unwed women and their impact on society. In describing the achievements and the difficulties that have resulted as marriage has ceased to be the defining focus of women’s lives, Traister interviews trailblazers such as Gloria Steinem and also more recent activists, among them the reproductive- rights advocate Frances Kissling. She vividly illustrates the collective power of single women in guiding legal, economic, and social progress and in “asserting themselves as citizens—full citizens—in ways that American men have for generations.” A chapter on female friendships satisfyingly conveys the complexity of a significant, and often dismissed, relationship. Republic of Spin, by David Greenberg (Norton). Saul Bellow once wrote of seeing a…

AIRHEADS Jeanne Marie Laskas’s article about airships— lighter-than-air vessels that are able to transport large loads to remote locations at relatively little expense—covers many of the longstanding barriers to these machines’ commercial use (“Helium Dreams,’’ February 29th). But an important difficulty remains, one not mentioned in the article: a limited supply of affordable helium. Twenty years ago, in a short-sighted act, the U.S. government sold off much of the Federal Helium Reserve, in Texas, a move that depressed helium prices and diminished the possibilities for a competitive helium market. Although this inert gas is the second most abundant element in the universe, it’s rare on Earth, where it has crucial uses in science and medicine, including as a coolant in MRI machines. It takes thousands of litres of helium…

ISAAC MIZRAHI, the fashion designer, is the subject of a retrospective opening this week at the Jewish Museum. “The thing I don’t want this exhibit to be about is how old I am,” Mizrahi, who is fifty-four, said the other day, in the museum’s auditorium, where the raw materials of the exhibition—thousands of swatches, scores of sketches— were being sorted by assistants and curators. Nonetheless, confronting thirty years’ worth of one’s own work is likely to prompt elegiac reflection upon that which is past or grumpy complaint over that which has been lost. “I look at tweed, and I go, Whatever happened to tweed?” Mizrahi said. He was surveying pages spread across the floor, to which scraps of fabric from his archive had been painstakingly Velcroed, ready to be mounted…

In 1980, the third-party Presidential candidate John Anderson succinctly summed up Ronald Reagan’s promise to simultaneously cut taxes, increase defense spending, keep government services intact, and balance the budget: “Reagan’s budget is constructed with mirrors.” Sure enough, Reagan presided over eight years of deficits that tripled the national debt. Yet the Republican faith that you can tax-cut your way to deficit reduction has never dimmed. This year’s Republican race is dominated by candidates whose budgetary plans make Reagan’s look downright reasonable. Not surprisingly, the most extreme plan is Donald Trump’s. He would slash taxes across the board, reducing revenues by nine and a half trillion dollars over the next decade, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Yet he has also promised to balance the budget, protect Social…

I have built my ship of death and when a wind kicks up I’ll cut it loose to do its thing across an unnamed lake of you, a firefly sent pulsing through the non-stop estivation of the verses of our South, who in its larval phase would feast on bitter worms and snails, who emerges from its mud chamber our planet’s most efficient luminescence, who turns chemical energy into radiant energy shedding very little heat, so will I sail the compass of you pleased with my cold light. I have built my ship of death aglow in sturdy chemicals and powered up at night like American Express, I’m all customer service only minus the customer, no service to speak of other than death, you will know my logo by its…

Robert Glasper’s 2012 album, “Black Radio,” put forth a thesis that’s playing out across radio stations today. The pianist and composer collaborated with popular rappers and singers, insisting that contemporary branches of jazz, R. & B., and hip-hop share a potent root—Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy mantel shines in evidence of this. At the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts on March 19, the Robert Glasper Trio will play originals and selects from its new album, “Covered,” featuring songs by Joni Mitchell, John Legend, and Radiohead. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera The movie director Anthony Minghella’s strikingly two-dimensional production of “Madama Butterfly,” from 2006, has become a firm repertory staple, and is thus not always cast from strength. This week, however, the current revival gets an injection of star power from…

I THINK THAT most of us still believe that art originates in solitary inspiration, a sort of bolt to the brain, the way Jesus was beamed into the Virgin Mary in those paintings of the Annunciation. There is some empirical support here. If you talk to artists, they will often describe a feeling of openness, receptivity, that accompanied their getting a really good idea. But this is probably true of people in all fields, not just art. Also, chances are that they had had that idea for a long time, and that the feeling they are describing is actually one of release: the idea is freed from impediments, things that were dragging it down. In other words, what these people are experiencing is not the beginning of their piece but…

Sharlene’s, tucked between a wings joint and a Dominican restaurant, has been a bar for as long as anyone can remember—first as O’Reilly’s and then, starting in 1986, as Mooney’s, before Sharlene’s took over, seven years ago. Inside, a jukebox plays compilations like “Pure Disco” or “Holiday Songs that Don’t Suck,” which features six tracks from Gods of Fire’s “Hanukkah Gone Metal”; “Addams Family” and “Star Trek” pinball machines flash in the corner. The vinyl stools and linoleum-topped tables fill up with grizzled drinkers, staid couples in their sixties, and flannelled young professionals, all scruff and asymmetrical haircuts. A reassuringly dependable list of beers is augmented by some left-field concoctions, like the Grown-Up’s Chocolate Egg Cream: a sweet, tangy mix of vodka and Swiss Miss nostalgia. One evening, a bartender…

RICHARD LINKLATER bid baseball farewell at Sam Houston State. He was a promising talent, but sophomore year he suddenly grew weak and dizzy. “One minute you’re a starting left fielder, batting third and hitting home runs, and the next …” The fifty-fiveyear-old director returned to spooning up a bowl of oatmeal at Locanda Verde, in Tribeca, last week after a poor night’s sleep; unshaved, his bowl haircut askew, he had pulled it together just enough to clothe himself in gray from head to toe. He went on, “I remember walking to the plate and having an inkling that this is my last at bat. I hit a single to left and barely made it to first.” Given a diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmia, Linklater dropped out of baseball, then out of…

ON FEBRUARY 8th, the day before the New Hampshire primary, Bill Clinton stepped onstage to introduce his wife at a rally in Manchester. “I have to be careful what I say,” he told the crowd, acknowledging his tendency, over the years, to eclipse her with a loose remark that sends the news cycle churning. The former President seems diminished since Hillary Clinton’s last race, in 2008—he is thinner, more soft-spoken, less energetic. And yet Clintonism—the ideology, the tactics, and the record of his eight years in the White House—still looms large in the Democratic primaries. The subtext, and often the center, of Bernie Sanders’s campaign to upset Hillary Clinton is that too many of the signature achievements of her husband’s Presidency were a series of betrayals—the deregulation of Wall Street,…

Something funny happens to puritanical republics. After a while, they begin yearning for the glamorous, immoral ways of the aristocracy they overthrew. This yearning seems especially keen in China, where state television serves up feudal soap operas with the regularity of daily meals. Last November, seven hundred million people streamed the first installments of a typical saga, “The Legend of Mi Yue.” The story follows the fortunes of an orphaned princess who is exiled to the harem of an aging emperor, where she gives birth to his son but has to outwit malevolent rivals—warlords, concubines, her own sister—to become the Middle Kingdom’s first female ruler. Women fans, especially rural ones, who don’t get much chance to dress up, relish the fabulous costumes. Nolan Miller, who dressed the catfighting consorts of…

CAPTAIN JAMES DUKE, at fifty, was complicated, dark-haired, and somewhat handsome. He took a hardheaded and hardhanded stance to disguise an inner recognition of worthlessness. Quixotic, he swung from morbid self-pity to rigid authority over his crews and himself. The future flickered before him as a likely series of disappointments. On the annual occasion of an allday drunk (his ill-starred birthday), he dragged out the piteous litany of his life: he had been pitched onto a British ship as a midshipman in his tenth year “as an unwanted pup-dog is tied to a sapling in the woods and left to be torn apart by wild beasts.” Even his appointment had come about only because his paternal grandfather, old Nicolaus Duke, of the venerable Boston lumber company Duke & Sons, wrote…

TEd Cruz’s campaign autobiography is called “A Time for Truth.” “This guy’s a liar,” Donald Trump said at a recent G.O.P. debate, pointing at Cruz. Trump thinks a lot of people are liars, especially politicians (Jeb Bush: “Lying on campaign trail!”) and reporters (“Too bad dopey @megynkelly lies!”). Not for nothing has he been called the Human Lie Detector. And not for nothing has he been called a big, fat Pinocchio with his pants on fire by the fact-checking teams at the Times, the Washington Post, and Politifact, whose careful reports apparently have little influence on the electorate, because, as a writer for Politico admitted, “Nobody but political fanatics pays much mind to them.” “You lied,” Marco Rubio said to Trump during the truthfor-tat February debate. Cruz tried to break…

“For five seconds or perhaps longer, the world was perfectly still and immensely quiet. Then the screaming began.” The novelist Mischa Berlinski wrote those words in February, 2010, a month after the earthquake that devastated Haiti. He had been living there since 2007; his wife was working for the United Nations; he had embarked on his second novel. His eyewitness account, which appeared in The New York Review of Books, rings with his considerable talents— above all, a sternly passionate prose that notices intensely but orders coolly, and a pleasing honesty about the difference between well-intended authorial witness and genuine political aid. He powerfully conveys the prolific immediacies of the disaster: how loud the earthquake was; how, although frightened, he knew that his wife and small son were not going…

I have so many complicated responses to David Harrower’s 2005 play, “Blackbird” (at the Belasco), that trying to separate what I feel about the subject tangentially and what Harrower achieves in his meaningful ninety-minute drama is hard to do. In fact, I don’t think my account of the play can be entirely objective, not least because of Michelle Williams’s performance, which resonates in ways you, too, might find difficult to handle, especially if you’ve ever known and cared for anyone like Una, the complex and charged twenty-seven-year-old woman the actress plays with ardor and ambition. Lights up: the interior of a modern office building, gray in color and atmosphere. A fiftyish man named Ray (played by Jeff Daniels, with a distractingly clenched jaw) is leading someone by force down a…

Midway through the seventh season of ABC’s family sitcom “The Middle,” Frankie Heck (Patricia Heaton), who works as a dental hygienist, gets a new boss: Dr. Sommer Samuelson (Cheryl Hines, from “Curb Your Enthusiasm”), a prosperity guru with perfect teeth. “Her story is capital-‘A’ amazing,” gushes Dr. Goodwin (Jack McBrayer), Frankie’s former employer, whose practice Samuelson bought. “Her parents made pottery. And now she owns the thirteenth-largest dental chain in the country!” Reluctantly, Frankie attends a corporate convention in Des Moines—“all expenses paid,” a novel concept. But once Samuelson cranks up the dance music—“Tonight is tonight! Tomorrow is tomorrow! Believing is believing!”— Frankie drops all resistance. “Are you tired of working yourself to death, and still not reaching your goals?” Samuelson yells, gyrating in a silver dress. “Are you tired…