Innholdsfortegnelse for April 11, 2016 i The New Yorker

Gay Talese (“The Voyeur’s Motel,” p. 40) is the author of thirteen books, among them “The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge” and “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which includes photographs by the late Phil Stern. Steve Coll (Comment, p. 19), a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia. Calvin Tomkins (“Play It Again,” p. 26) covers art and culture for The New Yorker. “The Bride and the Bachelors” is one of his many books. Charles Bethea (The Talk of the Town, p. 20) is a freelance journalist based in Atlanta and a regular contributor to newyorker.com. Tomer Hanuka (Cover) won an International Manga Award for his graphic novel “The Divine,” a collaboration with the artist Asaf Hanuka and the writer Boaz…

IN AN ELECTION season in which the wisdom of pundits, pollsters, and elected officials has proved to be unreliable, anxious voters have been turning elsewhere to make sense of the Presidential campaigns. One unexpected source of insight: the dictionary. “During the Democratic debate on March 6th, ‘fracking’ and ‘incarceration’ trended in our word-search data,” Rebekah Otto, the director of content at dictionary.com, said recently, from the company’s office in Oakland. A few days later, during a Republican debate, Ted Cruz called Donald Trump’s language “quite incendiary,” and “incendiary” (“tending to arouse strife, sedition”) shot up in the rankings. Dictionary.com has a feature called Word of the Day; its lexicographers send vocabulary words to a subscriber list of nineteen million. Sometimes the linguists appear to be editorializing. Last Friday, after two…

FIVE YEARS AGO, Anne Washburn headed to the Texas Hill Country for a ten-day silent playwriting retreat at a refabbed ranch, where she cranked out the first draft of “Antlia Pneumatica,” currently up at Playwrights Horizons. The ranch’s owners, “big Beckett fans,” insisted that the writers stop for dinner, on their drive down, at a roadside joint called Rudy’s. “It seemed like a good intro,” Washburn recalled the other afternoon, at Morgan’s Barbecue, in Prospect Heights. “You take a bunch of mostly New York playwrights and you drop them into Texas, which many of them were sort of apprehensive about. But the first thing is barbecue, and they’re kind of, like, Ooh, because barbecue makes people feel safe.” Washburn, who is from Berkeley and now lives in Brooklyn, gestured around…

No one ever said, Right now, as I passedthe wild leeks in Leipzig on my bicycle.No one said, That milky Alpine stream.Of Hungary, mostly the wedding.No one said, The children on Kalymnos,part fish, part gods. Diving at nightfor the bottom. Your lost butterfly earring.In Tessin, the warm rocks before the waterfall.Stopping under every bridge on the footpathto Tübingen to sing another verse. Getting closer.Getting there. What that old woman meantwhen she shouted from her balcony.The Danube on the way home. Watchingthe dragon boats and the fog come in.Croatian men playing bocce.The swallows lifting from the cobblestone.Coriander fields. Spreading a cloth outside.Dolmades, gigantes with garlicand fresh tomatoes. Breaking loaves.Yelling. Getting up and leaving the tableangry. We never knew it was because of this beauty.No one said, Lou carrying baskets.Anna’s colored skirts.…

IF YOU CAN’T think of a good way to kick off your movie, how about this? Take a handsome young buck, put him at the wheel of an Oldsmobile coupe, and have him whip along a Texas highway to the sound of “My Sharona,” by the Knack. That is what Richard Linklater does in his latest film, “Everybody Wants Some!!,” and it’s hard to think of a brighter start. The buck in question is Jake (Blake Jenner), and by the end of the song we’ve already grasped the unfolding shape of his life. He glides past groups of girls his age and parks in front of a house on a pleasant street. He has a shy smile and a box of LPs in his arms. Sunlight pours down like a…

HOW TO LEARN felt a pang of sadness while reading Rebecca Mead’s piece on AltSchool, a new elementary school developed by Silicon Valley tech veterans which aims to “disrupt” students’ education through data collection and hyper-personalized learning (“Learn Different,” March 7th). As an elementary-school educator, I know that there is a real need for education reform, but by focussing on how technology can quantify a child’s potential we lose the essence of education. AltSchool’s learning practices—in which schoolwork is done on a tablet, and then tracked and minutely analyzed—anchors children to their machines. Avoiding technology has now become an effort for most people; schools should be teaching social skills, collaborative work, and responsibility. We should be helping children develop into dynamic individuals, not isolating them and making them dependent…

CLASSICAL-MUSIC INSTITUTIONS RELY far too much on anniversary-driven programming: they may as well put up a neon sign saying, “We have no ideas.” Sometimes, though, there are benefits. The centenary of the Argentinean modernist Alberto Ginastera, which falls on April 11, is prompting reconsideration of a composer who, in recent years, seemed ready to fade into the ranks of history’s also-rans. In the decades after the Second World War, Ginastera cut a wide swath through the musical world of the Americas; between 1966 and 1973, New York City Opera staged all three of his operas (“Don Rodrigo,” “Bomarzo,” and “Beatrix Cenci”). Cannily navigating stylistic currents, he moved from folkloric nationalism to serialism and on to indeterminacy and other avant-garde techniques. A man of technocratic mien, he busied himself with foundations…

Descending a dank set of stairs directly below the inconspicuous sign—a downward arrow tinted sprightly green and white—patrons of this Village watering hole might be momentarily surprised to find a neighborhood nook that, in keeping with its name, is unequivocally on the up and up. The floral wallpaper and framed ads from mid-century glossies may suggest your grand-aunt’s living room—or as one newcomer put it, “a dive that got a shave and put on a clean pair of slacks”—but the real touch of propriety arrives in the form of an admonition printed on the menu to male patrons “not to introduce themselves to ladies.” That could prove difficult in this neck of the woods: N.Y.U. territory, teeming with keen, inquisitive co-eds. But, as a pretty waitress with a nose stud…

ON A RECENT Monday afternoon, Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara were in town, taping an episode of the “Tonight Show” at NBC. Before talking about “Schitt’s Creek,” the Canadian sitcom on which they co-star, now in its second season, they played Pictionary with Jimmy Fallon and Shailene Woodley. Fallon drew a cat and a tongue. Levy said, “Cat, tongue. Cat, tongue.” His thick black eyebrows flew up. “Hold your tongue!” he said. A buzzer sounded, and Fallon hurled a pillow from the couch. “Another ten minutes and I would’ve had it,” Levy said. The night before, in Toronto, “Schitt’s Creek,” which Levy and his son, Daniel, co-created, had won nine Canadian Screen Awards. The show is about the Rose family—a wealthy couple (Levy and O’Hara) and their feckless adult children…

He asks and I tell him our bodies falling from an open windowfirst, unfasten the pallu the fall should be swift and vacantlike the backward collapse of a moving hawk on a windscreenwait for the bare stomach to procure the fatigue of renewed airhalf breath half smokenext, spin on one foot the movement should be sexless bad atloveas you fallfall let the system of the city swell in the base ofyour throatdrop the petticoat walk out of its retreating puddlethis should be mildly theatrical depending on the sun’s humormeasure the distortion of reflection between collarbones baskin the twisted heatif the blouse is hooked at the back thrust your elbows outwardin imitation of a duck stepping into water unclasp blouseif the blouse is hooked at the front bring your hands to…

At the Existentialist Café, by Sarah Bakewell (Other Press). This lively history of the existentialist movement makes a strong, if sometimes disorienting, case for the inextricability of philosophy and biography, embedding dense concepts—such as “being,” “nothingness,” and “bad faith”—in the colorful lives and milieus of those who debated them. Though the book is in many ways a group study, dotted with cameo appearances by Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others, it focusses on Heidegger and Sartre. Heidegger appears as oracular, hermetic, and Nazi-tainted; Sartre as intellectually promiscuous and Soviet-sympathizing. Their divergent characters and checkered reputations lend credence to Bakewell’s view that “ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so.” Putin Country, by Anne Garrels (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Most reporting on Russia is done inside…

At the dawn of modernism, in the late nineteenth century, the activity of avant-garde artists often resembled rival expeditions into uncharted polar regions. The goal was to discover novel spheres of expression: the unspoken word, the unpainted image, the unheard sound. Arguably, the Amundsen of fin-de-siècle art— the first to plant a flag at an outer extreme of artistic possibility—was the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Upon his death, in 1898, he left behind a body of work so inscrutable that it still causes literature students to fall to their knees in despair. Such was the import of a note that I recently found in a library copy of Mallarmé’s selected letters: “Please pray that God would give me the patience and perseverance to get through this next week.” Mallarmé’s revolution…

History is replete with composer-pianists and composer-violinists, but composer-harpists are rare. One is Hannah Lash, a professor at Yale, whose music is featured in a concert at Miller Theatre on April 7. Lash’s best work employs a kind of strategic patience: a simultaneous embrace of Romantic yearning and postminimalist stasis that can yield unexpected pleasures. Lash, on harp, will be joined by the pianist Lisa Moore, along with the gentlemen of the JACK Quartet and the voice-and-winds ensemble Loadbang. THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS American Psycho Benjamin Walker plays the murderous financier Patrick Bateman, in Duncan Sheik and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s musical adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel. Rupert Goold directs. (Schoenfeld, 236 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.) Exit Strategy Primary Stages presents a play by Ike Holter,…

Antiquarian Book Fair The Park Avenue Armory will house more than two hundred American and international dealers for the fifty-sixth annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair, a four-day meet-up for lovers of rare books, maps, manuscripts, and ephemera. The various exhibitors feature a vast collection of notable titles, covering subjects such as art, medicine, literature, and photography, spread across the fifty-five-thousandsquare-foot hall. Veteran collectors await this fair as one of the city’s best—it attracts the most prized hardcovers of many European dealers, the former Grolier Club president Eugene Flamm hints, “because it’s twice as far for them to go out to California.” (Park Ave. at 66th St. 212-616-3930. April 7-10.) Brooklyn Folk Festival Held in the borough for seven years, this festival honors string-band music in a celebration of…

Daryl Homer says that he lives in Harlem because “it’s halfway between Mom and practice.” Mom lives in Hudson Heights, near the Bronx, where Homer grew up; practice is at the Manhattan Fencing Center, on West Thirty-ninth Street, where, on a recent Friday night, he stretched while listening to the new Kanye West album on headphones. “ ‘Ultralight Beams’!” he said, a little too loudly. “This is excellence music. This is pump-up music.” Homer, who is twenty-five, will need pumping up in August, when he fences in the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. (He also competed in 2012, when he was a college sophomore; he finished sixth.) Peter Westbrook, a retired six-time Olympian, is considered the Michael Jordan of American fencing. Keeth Smart, a silver medallist, is probably second in the…

HE WATCHES THE second car back out of the driveway and then he makes a slow lap around the block, careful not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk. From other houses come the sounds of dogs barking, and from other yards the noise of lawnmowers and leaf blowers. Construction is happening somewhere down the street. After completing the lap he looks up at the clock on top of the Catholic church the next block over: nine-forty. He walks up the driveway purposefully and pushes through the white wooden gate, a high gate that, he noticed yesterday, doesn’t have a lock. Ecola? Orkin? Idling at the intersection, she can’t remember for a moment the name of the company she is on her way home to meet. In the past…

IN SEPTEMBER, THE publishing company Alfred A. Knopf celebrated its hundredth anniversary—a remarkable milestone in an industry that continues to experience upheavals, from the rise and fall of chain bookstores to the online invasion of Amazon, which wants to dictate the price of e-books and deliver the old-fashioned kind— physical books—to our homes by drone. Many of the firms that were around when Knopf got started no longer exist, or else have been swallowed up by one of the publishing conglomerates that now joust over the book business like the competing clans in “Game of Thrones.” Knopf itself has been bought and sold several times, and now belongs, along with hundreds of other publishing imprints, to a mega-company created by the merger of Penguin and Random House. Yet somehow Knopf…

Spoiler: in two of the best dramas on television, something terrible is going to happen. Worse, it can’t be stopped. In “The Americans,” set in the nineteen-eighties, that event is the end of the Soviet Union, which will ruin the lives of the Russian spies who are the show’s unlikely protagonists. In “Outlander,” it’s the Jacobite rebellion, an eighteenth-century Scottish uprising that will end in a bloodbath, two soul mates in its path. You likely already know about FX’s “The Americans,” a brilliant espionage thriller that’s really a dark poem about marriage and morality, which has won many deserved raves. “Outlander,” on Starz, gets less press, probably because it’s based on a series of historical romance novels and has a supernatural element. But beneath its guilty-pleasure surfaces (or maybe kilt-y…