Innholdsfortegnelse for April 18, 2016 i The New Yorker

Ben Taub (“The Assad Files,” p. 36) has previously written for The New Yorker about jihadism in Europe. Reporting for this piece was facilitated by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Jill Lepore (Comment, p. 17), a professor of history at Harvard, is the author of nine books, including “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin” and “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” which will be out in May. Elizabeth Kolbert (“Unnatural Selection,” p. 22) is a staff writer. Her book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Emma Rathbone (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29) will publish her second novel, “Losing It,” in July. Peter de Sève (Cover) is an illustrator and a character designer for animated films. His work…

Green Festival For the fifth year, the Jacob K. Javits center hosts this three-day environmental festival, featuring more than two hundred and fifty exhibitors and fifty speakers. Venders offer a wide selection of products and services, from green foods and clothes to sustainable-energy and design ideas; attendees will enjoy hands-on demonstrations and presentations on health and medicine. A highlight will be the director Keegan Kuhn’s screening and discussion of “Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret,” a “Blackfish”-esque feature-length documentary about the animal-agriculture industry and its effects on the planet, including deforestation, water pollution, greenhouse-gas emissions, and topsoil erosion. The latest cut of the documentary, showing on Saturday, was executive-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. (655 W. 34th St., 212-216-2000. April 15-17.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The two big houses are busy this week with…

As he shed his tweed jacket, Hugh Dancy looked around Sushi Azabu, a basement nook in Tribeca, and said, “It feels like a railway car—if you can imagine Humphrey Bogart eating sushi, it’d be here.” He laughed. “I actually can’t imagine him eating sushi, though. Maybe he’d use some for a black eye: ‘If there’s no steak available, give me the halibut.’ ” Dancy, the lithe and elfin forty-yearold English actor, is particularly keen on uni, the sea urchin’s gonads. Dabbing chopsticks into a pink curl of them, Dancy said, “My three-year-old son”— from his marriage to Claire Danes—“has a fascination with germs, because, he says, ‘they’re disgusting and beautiful.’ I suppose the same is true of me and uni.” He held up a morsel of the unctuous goo. “They…

BINGE-WATCHING IS a night out, even when you spend the whole day in. It’s a way of being. We begin to esteem this way of being at its true worth when we realize that the creators of the brain food that we’re wolfing down are at least as involved in it, at the level of imagination, as we are. From Homer until now, and onward to wherever the creaking fleet of “Battlestar Galactica” may go in the future, there never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism. And, when we click on Play All and settle back to watch every season of “The Wire” all over again, we should try to find a moment, in the midst of such complete absorption, to reflect that the…

SHADOW PUPPETS George Packer, in his review of Michael Hayden’s memoir, “Playing to the Edge,” describes the shortcomings of the former C.I.A. director (“Can You Keep a Secret?” March 7th). During the Vietnam War, Hayden was an intelligence officer, guiding pilots of B-52 bombers; I had a similar position when I worked with the Army, using electronic sensors to guide artillery. Although the capability to minimize collateral damage was praised at the time, the technology was highly inaccurate. The language that Hayden has used to support drone warfare echoes what we heard during Vietnam, but similar problems with precision persist. Automated warfare has allowed Hayden and others to stay above the din of combat: soldiers kill people in the Middle East from their desktops in Nevada. As with Vietnam,…

LAST WEEK, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Panama Papers, implicating thousands of people in a global scheme to conceal wealth and evade taxes, among them Presidents, kings, Prime Ministers, race-car drivers, drug traffickers, and Caroline, Lawrence, Ana, and Tim. The last four are interns in the commodities department of an unnamed investment bank. They are the leading characters of “Run,” a small but sparkling play that just finished a residence at the New Diorama Theatre, in London. “Developed in conversation with the freshest financial minds and inspired by the true story of Moritz Erhardt, a twenty-one-year-old intern who died at his London flat after reportedly working seventy-two hours straight,” according to a press release, “RUN is a blackly comic and tragic…

“An example for the Nation” is how President Lyndon Johnson imagined Washington’s Metro, in a letter that he wrote fifty years ago to an official involved in planning it. And so it was. When the Metro opened, ten years later, in 1976, it was acclaimed as a farsighted fusion of design and utility, a system generations ahead of those in other cities. Today, the Metro is in such a state that fixing it may require shutting whole lines for months at a time. It’s yet again an example for the nation, but now it’s an example of how underinvestment and political dysfunction have left America with infrastructure that’s failing and often downright dangerous. From the crumbling bridges of California to the overflowing sewage drains of Houston and the rusting railroad…

May 5, 2015: that was when Maggie Nelson’s ninth book, “The Argonauts,” came out. Published two months after the author turned forty-two, the slim, intense volume, which tells the philosophical, sometimes comic tale of Nelson’s ever-developing consciousness, combines—like a number of other masterpieces of American autobiography—memoir, literary analysis, humor, and reporting with vivid instances of both the familiar and the strange. Central to “The Argonauts” is the story of Nelson’s great love for Harry Dodge, a West Coast sculptor, writer, and video artist who is fluidly gendered. As Nelson embarks on her intellectual and emotional journey, Harry also goes on various excursions in order to become the person he is now, whom Nelson describes, quoting a character from Harry’s 2001 film, “By Hook or By Crook,” as neither male nor…

BOBBY TALLIS POSSESSED the drainpipe physique, knee-length mackintosh, and winsomely dissolute demeanor of a poet, or so he believed, as he pursued a lavishly wayward course across the mangy municipal parks, median strips, and depressed residential quadrangles of his quarter of the city on another blustery October afternoon. One hand broodingly ensconced within a pocket, Bobby smoked as he walked and made rapid, furtive motions with his lips, as if having an intense, collusive conversation with himself, which is exactly what he was doing: Bobby was a poet. He lived in a dilapidated apartment block on the south-side inner city, a block so populated with retirees and pensioners that visitors—of which Bobby had absolutely none—often mistook it for a state retirement home. Bobby was certain he was the only resident…

ON THE MORNING of February 27, 1937, which began cold and gray, a few hundred Americans waited to storm a hill southeast of Madrid, near the Jarama River. They were volunteer soldiers, drawn to Spain by a noble cause. Germany belonged to Hitler, and Italy to Mussolini, but there was still a chance that the Spanish Republic— governed by an unstable coalition of liberals, socialists, and anarchists— could fight off a cabal of right-wing generals who called themselves Nationalists. The previous year, the Nationalists had tried to take over the country, touching off a civil war. Leftist volunteers from around the world flocked to the Republican side, seeing the war as a struggle between tyranny and freedom that transcended national boundaries. The fight felt almost holy—“ like the feeling you…

THE POET, TRANSLATOR, and publisher Rosmarie Waldrop, who turned eighty last year, has condensed her nearly twenty books of verse into a volume of selected poems, “Gap Gardening” (New Directions). The title is classic Waldrop, a phrase that asserts its meaning by undoing itself. The “gaps” between words (“gap” and “gardening,” for example) are, for Waldrop, the fruitful regions, the zones of transformation and possibility. Depending on how we take the phrase, the “gap” is either the ground that poets “garden” in or the crop that they eventually reap. The action of a poem (its “gardening”) is to transform the gaps, possibly into more gaps. The phrase makes us think hard about the way language works, and about how words catalyze reality, rather than transcribe it. In nature, nothing can…

“In the cherry blossom’s shade there’s no such thing as a stranger,” the great Japanese poet Issa wrote. If so, there’s no better place to meet new friends this spring than the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. For the next month, more than two hundred flowering trees are in fleeting bloom, representing around thirty species (bonsai count, too). Enjoy the view, but think twice before bringing a picnic. As another haiku master, Basho, observed: “From all these trees—in salads, soups, everywhere—cherry blossoms fall.” 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.) Cirque du Soleil—Paramour The Canadian circus company mounts…

If you’re lucky enough to snag a seat at one of the two long, narrow tables at this intimate, hard-tolocate jazz club (better to let your ears, rather than your iPhone, be your guide), you’ll be close enough to the band to flirt a little with the saxophonist during sets. Until fairly recently, Tomi was a membership club that served only Japanese patrons— that history is still apparent in the bar’s impressive menu of Japanese spirits and izakaya classics, like the mentaiko spaghetti (funky with fermented cod roe) and an enormous okonomiyaki (exactly what you want after a few rounds of Yamazaki 12 year). As intriguing as the frozen Green Tea cocktail (vodka, matcha, half and half) and the Ume Hime (brown-sugar plum wine, calpico) might sound, you’re better off…

THE OTHER DAY, Andrew Horn sat on a red exercise ball in his startup’s Williamsburg office, a tricked-out former garage, and explained why he was trying to sell people on the idea of creating eulogies for the living. “I spoke at the Burning Man TEDx two years ago, and the talk was called ‘We Got the Eulogy Wrong,’ ” he said. In a video of the address, he can be seen wearing gold shorts and a Sgt. Pepper jacket, saying, “If we look at the word ‘eulogy,’ it comes from the ancient Greek word eulogia, and eulogia simply means ‘praise.’ ” The desire to be present at one’s own funeral is nothing new. In an era of near-constant mutual affirmation—pause here to check the number of likes on your most…

The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to the border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks or water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians like himself. Now, on a summer afternoon, he loaded the truck with more than a hundred thousand captured Syrian government documents, which had been buried in pits and hidden in caves and abandoned homes. He set out at sunset. To the fighters manning the checkpoints, it was as if he were invisible. Three reconnaissance…

In my other life the B-17 my father is piloting Is shot down over Normandy And my mother raises her sons alone On her widow’s pension and on what she earns As a nurse at the local hospital, a sum That pays for a third-floor walkup In a neighborhood that’s seen better days. I play stickball after school in the lot Behind the laundry. I come home bruised From fistfights and snowball fights With boys who live in the tenement on the corner. Not once do I play with the boy I am In this life, whose father, too old for the draft, Starts a paint company in a rented basement Which almost goes under after a year And then is saved, as the war continues, By a steady flow…

Paradise Now, by Chris Jennings (Random House). In this history of America’s nineteenth-century utopian communities, Jennings examines how they upended conventions of property, family, and gender roles. The villages of the celibate Shakers became models for social organization, while a colony of free-love devotees in Oneida, New York, drew scores of visitors. Other plans were too audacious, or slightly mad: a group of French Communists were driven from the wilds of Texas by ineptitude and dysentery. Although Jennings is skeptical and, at times, gently mocking of these radical projects, he sees in them a boldness missing from our current age—what he calls “a sense of actively transforming the world, of living on the cusp of an incandescent future.” The End of Karma, by Somini Sengupta (Norton). When Narendra Modi…

IN DECEMBER, 2005, the Detroit producer and rapper James Yancey played a series of shows in Europe. Yancey, who went by the names Jay Dee and, in later years, J Dilla, had been battling a rare blood disease, and was repeatedly forced to postpone the tour. He had lost an unsettling amount of weight, and fans on message boards described him as looking emaciated and weak, requiring assistance to move about, and rapping while seated in a wheelchair. Some commenters questioned the wisdom of his playing the shows at all. A German d.j. called Deckstarr read these threads as he prepared to open for Yancey in Düsseldorf. He had been waiting years for the chance to see Yancey live and wanted to express his gratitude, so he had a T-shirt…