Innholdsfortegnelse for March 28, 2016 i The New Yorker

George Packer ( “Exporting Jihad,” p. 38) is a staff writer. His most recent book is “The Unwinding,” for which he won a National Book Award. Jeffrey Toobin (Comment, p. 21), the author of “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court,” has a new book, “American Heiress: The Wild, Strange Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst,” coming out in August. Siddhartha Mukherjee (“Runs in the Family,” p. 26) won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” His new book, “The Gene: An Intimate History,” will be published in May. Susanna Wolff ( Shouts & Murmurs, p. 33) has contributed humor pieces to The New Yorker and to newyorker.com since 2012. David Sedaris (“The…

The more popular Donald Trump gets, the more solitary a figure he appears to be. For every Chris Christie who jumps on board the S.S. Trump, there’s a Muhammad Ali abandoning ship. The Times, searching for bona-fide Friends of Donald, recently turned up one who would admit to the title: Richard LeFrak, a fellow billionaire scion of a New York real-estate family. Richard’s father, Samuel, was pals with Donald’s father, Fred, and the two sons are golf buddies. LeFrak told the paper, “Being friends with Trump is like being friends with a hurricane.” The other day, a visitor to the LeFrak residence, a town house steps from Central Park, was greeted by Richard’s wife, Karen, along with two barking standard poodles. Karen is a big deal among poodle people: her…

When David Rockwell, the architect and designer, first moved to New York, in 1979, he lived on West Fourteenth Street, and so his neighborhood pharmacy was Bigelow, on Sixth Avenue between Eighth and Ninth Streets. Founded in 1838, Bigelow is the oldest operating apothecary in the United States. Its interior dates from 1902; there are floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted oak cabinets and illuminated display cases edged in brass. Overhead hang gas lamps, long ago converted to electricity but still suggestive of turn-of-the-century shopping expeditions for Eastern European face creams and pre-antibiotic remedies. “Coming here was part of walking around New York, not realizing that there would be less and less of old New York to see,” Rockwell said the other day, while revisiting the store. He drew on his experiences at Bigelow…

I’m not sure how it is in small families, but in large ones relationships tend to shift over time. You might be best friends with one brother or sister, then two years later it might be someone else. Then it’s likely to change again, and again after that. It doesn’t mean that you’ve fallen out with the person you used to be closest to but that you’ve merged into someone else’s lane, or had him or her merge into yours. Trios form, then morph into quartets before splitting into teams of two. The beauty of it is that it’s always changing. Twice in 2014, I went to Tokyo with my sister Amy. I’d been seven times already, so was able to lead her to all the best places, by which…

“Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business” (Random House) is Charles Duhigg’s follow-up to his best-selling “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business,” which was published in 2012. The new book, like its predecessor, has a format that’s familiar in contemporary nonfiction: exemplary tales interpolated with a little social and cognitive science. The purpose of the tales is to create entertaining human-interest narratives; the purpose of the science is to help the author pick out a replicable feature of those narratives for readers to emulate. What enabled the pilot to land the badly damaged plane? How did the academic dropout with anxiety disorder become a champion poker player? What made “West Side Story” and Disney’s “Frozen” into mega-hits?…

The Lost Time Accidents, by John Wray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this restless experimental novel, Waldemar Tolliver, unemployed and living in Spanish Harlem, finds that time has stopped. With nothing to do but write, he embarks on a rambling letter to an estranged lover, narrating both the story of their relationship and that of his ancestors, time-obsessed clockmakers from Central Europe. Waldemar is particularly interested in his namesake, a great-uncle who, convinced that he discovered relativity before Einstein, becomes rabidly anti-Semitic and ends up as a Mengele-like Nazi war criminal. The book’s hectic, slapstick invention impresses but also threatens to outstay its welcome, and Waldemar’s predicament seems more and more like a madcap parable about the act of writing. Ways to Disappear, by Idra Novey (Little, Brown). At…

A STEM-CELL SCANDAL I read Dana Goodyear’s article on the disturbing events surrounding the scientist Haruko Obokata’s discoveries in stem-cell research with both delight and a sinking heart (“The Stress Test,” February 29th). As a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, I, like many of my peers, can identify with Obokata. Despite suspicions of unethical conduct, including misleading publications, her underlying motivation was in line with the understandable desire to make it in academia. Goodyear writes that bylines in prominent publications are, unofficially, “a measure of hirability.” This could not be more true. The dictum “Publish or perish” goes beyond job prospects: a scientist’s funding is based largely on her name and publication record, and without the endorsement of top journals in the field it can be difficult to…

Late on a recent Friday, a burly duo was deep in conversation outside this Washington Heights hangout. One of them, wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with a fighting leprechaun, turned to a group trying to get in. “I.D.s, please.” The other, in an Under Armour turtleneck, asked the holder of an Illinois driver’s license whether she was Israeli. “Palestinian,” she replied. “Oh, shit,” the fighting leprechaun responded. “You should know that. Those guys hate each other.” After they’d matched faces to photos and scrutinized dates of birth, Under Armour burst out laughing. “Thing is, we’re not bouncers.” They were policemen, on an off-duty gambol. Inside, a lambent neon panel backed fourteen beers on tap, among them Dyckman Brew, a beer “inspired by the flavors, the people, and the culture of Uptown.”…

The greenroom at the Ed Sullivan Theatre, where “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” is taped, is a bland way station distinguished chiefly by trays of uneaten snacks, but on a recent Thursday it felt like Richard Scarry’s Busytown. Eleven celebrities bustled about, emissaries from DonorsChoose.org, an organization that public-school teachers can use to solicit donations for classroom needs. These luminaries, along with forty-seven others, had secretly flash-funded every DonorsChoose project in their home cities or states—a fourteen-million-dollar undertaking that encompassed more than eleven thousand projects. As they waited to go on the show to announce the initiative, Best School Day, they seemed thrilled not only by their mission but by their own diversity. Charles Best, the founder of DonorsChoose, introduced the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons to John King, Jr.,…

You will have heard of my friend the once celebrated novelist Jocelyn Tarbet, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade. Time can be ruthless with reputation. The association in your mind is probably with a half-forgotten scandal and disgrace. You’d never heard of me, the once obscure novelist Parker Sparrow, until my name was publicly connected with his. To a knowing few, our names remain rigidly attached, like the two ends of a seesaw. His rise coincided with, though did not cause, my decline. Then his descent was my earthly triumph. I don’t deny there was wrongdoing. I stole a life, and I don’t intend to give it back. You may treat these few pages as a confession. To make it fully, I must go back forty years,…

Bill Clinton—the necktie-eschewing, more loosely hinged 2016 edition— went to New Hampshire last month to attack Bernie Sanders on behalf of his wife’s Presidential campaign. At one stop, he derided Sanders as “the champion of all things small and enemy of all things big.” This was partly sarcasm (Sanders was posing, Clinton suggested) but partly critique: the implication was that Sanders was simply turning his back on the high-tech, globalized world of the twenty-first century. One of the surprises of the current campaign has been how strongly the 2008 financial crisis still resonates. Presidential candidates don’t often refer to specific pieces of financial regulation, but Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have disagreed repeatedly on the debate stage about the Clinton-era repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which strictly limited banks’…

You may know the ancient Chinese game Go, but the traditional “Plant Contest” (above), which Cao Fei staged in 2000, is probably less familiar. The picture is one of the earliest works in the Beijing-based artist’s show at MOMA PS1, opening on April 3. Cao, who was born in 1978, delves into the fantasies and entertainments of her generation, videotaping cosplayers in her native Guangzhou and building a virtual city in the online world Second Life, where her avatar, China Tracy, has served as a philosopher-guide. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera The role of Elisabetta (Queen Elizabeth I) in “Roberto Devereux”—the third and final monarchess in Donizetti’s so-called Tudor Queens trilogy— is famously fearsome. In the opera’s first-ever appearance on the Met stage, in a production by David McVicar,…

Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival Held annually in New York City for more than a century, the Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival has long been a nationwide symbol for the blend of religion, pageantry, and whimsy that has come to define Easter Sunday. In the mid-nineteenth century, patrons of St. Patrick’s Cathedral began displaying floral arrangements at Easter services, and high-society women in attendance brightened their Sunday apparel in accordance. Soon, the march from the Cathedral down Fifth Avenue became a showcase of bonnets, ribbons, and floral-print dresses. On Sunday, participants will gather at Forty-ninth Street and march up to Fifty-seventh, with head displays featuring elaborate models of the skyline, live animals, and countless other decorations. No matter how one ornaments her or his headwear, the spirit is still…

Ken Greene taught school in California for five years. In 2000, he came east to work on a master’s degree, and he took a part-time job running the children’s programs at the public library in Gardiner, New York, a small town eighty miles up the Hudson from the Bronx. His field is special education, but he had been reading everything he could find on biodiversity. “We’ve lost a huge percentage of the vegetable varieties that existed in the nineteen-thirties,” he said recently. With help from the three- and four-year-olds who attended his story hours, he turned the library’s tiny front yard into a garden, mostly for heirloom vegetables, and in the fall the children helped him collect seeds from the plants they had grown. “I loved the fact that the…

As the animal returns on a beaten pathto the den, we go back over the factscertain we ignored clear signs.I left for Italy that summer, thoughshe had quit her job and moved back home.I knew it signalled a bad turn but chosethe Tuscan love affair in the seventeenth-centuryolive mill. We say we survive our siblings’suicides, meaning we stood with our parentsat the unthinkable graves. In one theory,the troubled family sacrifices one member,as plants surrender leaves in times of drought.…

Dispossessed despair, depression, despondentdejection, the doom is the off-white of white. But wait,white can’t know what white feels. Where’s the life in that?Where’s the right in that? Where’s the white in that?At the bone of bone white breathes the fear of seeing,the frustration of being unequal to white. White-male portraitson white walls were intended to mean ownership of all,the privilege of all, even as white walls white in.And this is understandable, yes,understandable because the culture claims whiteowns everything—the wealthof no one anyone knows. Still the equation holds—jobs and health and schools and better thanbefore and different from now and enoughand always and eventually mine.This is what it means to wear a color and believethe embrace of its touch. What white long expectedwas to work its way into an upwardly mobile…

Early in “Life Class,” the first of Pat Barker’s three novels about a group of painters who meet while studying at the Slade School of Art, a young student named Paul Tarrant takes a girl to a music hall. Paul (based loosely on the British painter Paul Nash) prefers acrobats and jugglers to “one-act plays,” which “always struck him as being rather pointless—you’d no sooner worked out who the characters were than the curtain came down.” It’s a sentiment that Barker appears to share; she is best known for her “Regeneration” trilogy, set during the First World War, which follows the lives of several historical figures, among them the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and the doctor William Rivers, who worked with soldiers suffering from shell shock. “Life Class”…