Innholdsfortegnelse for April 4, 2016 i The New Yorker

Dexter Filkins (“The End of Ice,” p. 58), a staff writer, has been reporting about the Himalayas since 1998. Simon Norfolk (Photographs, pp. 58, 63) won a 2015 Sony World Photo Award for his photographs of the Lewis Glacier, on Mt. Kenya, which are now on view at the Kunst Haus Wien, in Vienna. Lauren Collins (“Come to the Fair,” p. 32) is a staff writer living in Paris. Michael Schulman (The Talk of the Town, p. 29), the theatre editor of the Goings On About Town section, will publish his first book, “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep,” in April. Carolyn Kormann (“The Tasting-Menu Initiative,” p. 48) is a member of the magazine’s editorial staff. Jaime Hernandez (Cover), the author of “The Love Bunglers,” is the creator, with Gilbert…

More than one Donald Trump recently made the rounds in Florida. Inside a campaign van, which started in Tallahassee and crisscrossed the state, an eighty-pound bronzegilded bust of the leading Republican candidate for President shuttled between rallies, where members of the electorate had a chance to pose with it. A few days ago, offers to buy the sculpture began coming in from New York and Los Angeles. “There was a time when being a sculptor was a real profession,” Keith Allen Johnson, the bust’s creator, said the other day, from his studio, in Flowery Branch, Georgia. “There were sculptors who were able to create these larger-than-life, heroic portraits. The seated Lincoln sculpture at his Memorial, in Washington, D.C.—is there anything so powerful and stately? That’s what I want when people…

FEW FALLS in business history have been as sudden and as steep as that of Michael Pearson, the C.E.O. of the drugmaker Valeant. Not long ago, he was heading a company whose stock price had risen more than four thousand per cent during his tenure. A former McKinsey consultant, he had developed a strategy based on acquisitions, cost-cutting, and price hikes. The influential hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, one of Valeant’s largest shareholders, compared Pearson to Warren Buffett, citing his genius at capital allocation. No one’s calling Pearson a genius anymore. In the past six months, Valeant’s stock price has fallen almost ninety per cent, thanks to a toxic combination of sketchy accounting, political blowback, and slowing growth. Two weeks ago, the company announced terrible fourth-quarter earnings, and said that it…

Last year, the British critic Philip Clark had a provocative response to the perennial question of how to save classical music from its so-called image problem—the perception that it is stuffy, élitist, and irrelevant. He declared, “There is absolutely nothing wrong with classical music. It cannot pretend to be anything other than it is. And perhaps it’s the wider cultural environment . . . that has a problem.” I don’t accept Clark’s entire argument. Certain of classical music’s difficulties are self-created: ossified concert norms, braindead programming, a pervasive fear of the new. Yet his principal point holds. Endless chatter about the need to reinvent the art is symptomatic of a deep-seated hostility toward fundamental features of the concert experience: the extended duration of works, the complexity of their construction, the…

HOW TO LIVE As an anthropologist at Amherst College, I was interested to read Nick Paumgarten’s Profile of Peter Adeney, a.k.a. Mr. Money Mustache, a lifestyle guru who espouses a frugal and Spartan way of life (“The Scold,” February 29th). Mustachianism is similar to one of my areas of study: the neomonastic movement in the United States. The majority of the followers of this movement are Christians in their twenties and thirties, who live communally, share rules of life, and practice collective prayer. Almost all of them find fault with the “typical” American life, particularly the drive to consume, and most of them adhere to the “theology of enough,” inspired by the Christian activist Shane Claiborne. The impact of consumerism on the environment is part of what drives both…

For a new bar, Subway Inn is pretty old. The original haunt opened in 1937 on 60th near Lexington, and, after seventy-seven years of serving happy-hour drinkers with sleeves either rolled up or tattooed, as well as New York icons like Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Jay McInerney, the landlord refused to renew its lease, in 2014. Like any true New Yorker, the bar put up a fight, but despite the best efforts of the owner Marcello Salinas and his family the original location succumbed to the city’s seemingly inexorable mutation into a solid block of luxury condos. Happily, since March of last year, the same old neon sign has beamed resiliently onto Second Avenue outside the beery Lazarus’s new home. A few nights ago, two patrons admired the new…

The actor Ben Whishaw pulled up in a black car the other day and popped into an East Village store called Enchantments, which specializes in essential oils, talismans, books of spells, and other witchy accoutrements. A black cat leaped onto the cash register. “That’s Medea,” the shop’s owner, Stacy Rapp, said. “The Greek Medea, not the Tyler Perry Madea.” Whishaw, who is thirty-five, bashful, and from Bedfordshire, caressed the cat—he used to own several, but gave them to his grandmother when his film career exploded, eight years ago. He is best known for playing Q in the two latest Bond films: not the crusty old gadget-maker made famous by Desmond Llewelyn but a coy young tech geek with a windswept mop of hair. He is frequently cast as a writer…

Have they run out of provinces yet?If they haven’t, we’ve reason to fret.Long ago, there was just Cantonese.(Long ago, we were easy to please.)But then food from Szechuan came our way,Making Cantonese strictly passé.Szechuanese was the song that we sung,Though the ma po could burn through your tongue.Then when Shanghainese got in the loopWe slurped dumplings whose insides were soup.Then Hunan, the birth province of Mao,Came along with its own style of chow.So we thought we were finished, and thenA new province arrived: Fukien.Then respect was a fraction of meagreFor those eaters who’d not eaten Uighur.And then Xi’an from Shaanxi gained fame,Plus some others—too many to name.Now, as each brand-new province appears,It brings tension, increasing our fears:Could a place we extolled as a findBe revealed as one province behind?So we…

SANDER LOVES HIS mother. He walks a few steps after her, wearing a new black suit that has room for him to grow into, carrying a big black valise of pamphlets. When his mother goes to the front door, rings the bell, waits for an answer, Sander stands behind her, looking over her shoulder, with an expression on his face that he means to be pleasant. It’s the second day of his summer vacation, but it still feels like spring. Lilacs bloom in every yard; irises wag their pink and purple tongues at him. His mother is plain. She wears a gray sweater, despite the sun, and a black skirt that reaches nearly to her ankles. No lipstick, short, practical hair. Her name is Anna. She makes up for her…

Global sounds have long traversed borders more smoothly than their bearers. Anoushka Shankar’s father, Ravi, carried the velveteen sitar west in 1956; by the sixties, with a little help from George Harrison, the classical Indian instrument had become a pop staple. On April 2-4 at City Winery, Shankar plays from her new album, “Land of Gold,” blending traditional sitar with pop tropes, her personal response to the trauma of displaced refugees worldwide. Relieved of classical boundaries, she says, “the instrument’s just allowed to run free.” ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Metropolitan Museum “Crime Stories: Photography and Foul Play” The Met goes C.S.I. in this show of pictures in its collection, from nineteenth-century mug shots of suspected anarchists rounded up by the French police to Richard Avedon’s 1960 portrait of Dick…

Macy’s Flower Show Less well known than its Thanksgiving Day Parade counterpart, the Macy’s Flower Show is nonetheless a welcome sign of spring’s arrival. The two-week exhibition at Herald Square features ornate, aromatic displays of flora from around the country, in line with this year’s “America the Beautiful” theme. The store’s ground level is transformed into an indoor garden with various live plants, flowers, and trees, and special seminars and events are held. On April 1, Dimitri and Sara Gatanas, of New York’s Urban Garden Center, offer tips on gardening in tiny apartments and hand out starter pots for attendees to nurture at home. (Macy’s Herald Square, 151 W. 34th St., 9th Fl. 212-695-4400. April 1 at 1.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES week, Christie’s offers two smaller auctions, one of…

Earlier this month, attending Nancy Reagan’s funeral, Hillary Clinton delivered a peculiarly revisionist encomium, praising the former First Lady for starting “a national conversation” about AIDS and being a “very effective, low-key” advocate on behalf of Americans with H.I.V. Clinton quickly retracted her statement, after high-key advocates pointed out that Mrs. Reagan and her husband had, in fact, been derelict on the issue. A photograph circulated on social media as a reminder of AIDS in the time of the Reagans: an image of David Wojnarowicz, the artist and activist, participating in an ACT UP demonstration, wearing a jacket bearing a pink triangle and the words “If I die of Aids—forget burial—just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.” Wojnarowicz died in 1992, four years after the photograph was…

LATE ON A winter night, Aretha Franklin sat in the dressing room of Caesars Windsor Hotel and Casino, in Ontario. She did not wear the expression of someone who has just brought boundless joy to a few thousand souls. “What was with the sound?” she said, in a tone somewhere between perplexity and irritation. Feedback had pierced a verse of “My Funny Valentine,” and before she sat down at the piano to play “Inseparable,” a tribute to the late Natalie Cole, she narrowed her gaze and called on a “Mr. Lowery” to fix the levels once and for all. Miss Franklin, as nearly everyone in her circle tends to call her, was distinctly, if politely, displeased. “For a time up there, I just couldn’t hear myself right,” she said. On…

The Firebrand and the First Lady, by Patricia Bell-Scott (Knopf). In 1938, in an impassioned letter to Eleanor Roosevelt about the status of black Americans, the activist Pauli Murray wrote, “We are as much political refugees from the South as any of the Jews in Germany.” Roosevelt wrote back, “The South is changing, but don’t push too fast.” That dynamic—ferocity versus pragmatism—persisted, but the correspondence, as this sensitively drawn account shows, grew into a friendship. Murray, who was gay and had enormous drive, was neither immune to Roosevelt’s charm nor cowed by it. Thrilled at having tea with the First Lady, she nonetheless soon followed up with a letter rebuking her for crossing a picket line. The Secret Life of the American Musical, by Jack Viertel (Sarah Crichton Books).…