Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2, 2016 i The New Yorker

Eyal Press (“Madness,” p. 38), the author of “Beautiful Souls,” is a visiting journalism fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation and a past recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Siddhartha Mukherjee (“Same but Different,” p. 24) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Gene: An Intimate History,” which will be published in May. Hallie Cantor ( Shouts & Murmurs, p. 31) writes for the upcoming NBC variety show “Maya & Marty.” Jason Adam Katzenstein, a New Yorker cartoonist, illustrated the graphic novel “Camp Midnight,” due out in May. Ian Frazier (“The Bag Bill,” p. 32) is the author of “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces,” which comes out in June. He is working on a book about the Bronx. Bob Staake (Cover) has created nineteen covers for…

WHEN GREGORY DORAN, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, first decided to direct Shakespeare’s cycle of Englishhistory plays, he met with Sir Ian Mc-Kellen and asked him if he’d consider playing Falstaff—the fat, uproarious counsellor to the young Prince Hal. McKellen demurred, telling Doran that it was not the part for him, Doran recalled recently. “But then he said, ‘Why are you looking for Falstaff when you live with him?’ ” Doran is the longtime partner of Antony Sher, one of Britain’s leading Shakespearean actors. They have been together for twenty-nine years, and in 2005 they were among the first gay couples to enter into a civil partnership when the legal right became available to them. They married last year. Sher, who has delivered memorable in-terpretations of Richard…

Int.—Bedroom, morning Pan across a bedroom: cute furniture, framed photo of Candice (Reese Witherspoon), in the arms of her f iancé, Kevin (Chris Pine), and a calendar with the days crossed out leading up to one day that’s circled in pink. (This is called visual storytelling, and it’s how you can tell this is a great movie.) Pan to the bed, where Candice rolls over, yawns, and realizes that she has SLEPT THROUGH HER ALARM. She sits bolt upright, with natural makeup and “bedhead” hair. CANDICE: Oh, no! I’m supposed to be on a plane to Hawaii for my wedding, but I overslept! This is a conflict! She calls Kevin, who has great eyelashes but no sense of adventure, and also some anger issues. Kevin is at the Hawaii airport…

Summer solstice (first scene). A girl with a knife cuts a pear in half. Think “Venus Rising from the Sea” goes city and smoke. At the bar, a man dreams a glass of champagne like an unbalanced thought. Think “Streetcar” goes “Gatsby,” the scene with the boat. She lights a cigarette as if it’s made of thin glass, he’s telling a story as if it’s a city uncut. Cut. A nightmare. The girl shouts in a black-and-white dream. Cut. There’s a gallery. Think MoMA but rough. She looks at a pear made of bronze, in a nest of cast iron and glass. The gallery turns into a field of white roses, a white city, is it still June? Think Fellini’s dancing scene in “8½.” One hand’s filling a glass with…

Black bile, yellow bile, blood, phlegm: we pledged—to divide ourselves up and played flip cup to determine who’d bust a move to begin. Best not to let the big muscle groups take over in classical training they must be tempered by the slow-twitch fibres to support the most natural leaps to conclusion. Dance teachers love to talk about the magic of muscle memory, the notion that, you do it often enough, the nerves do the remembering for you, but that was also Mr. B.’s gloss on the dissemination of sorostitutes. We gave the garden gnomes our neon shirts to better wave our legs in the air, petit-allegro-style giddy even though the sanguine gals don’t menstruate—it’s all good, for the man says it keeps us quick on our backs. Is it…

The End of Alchemy, by Mervyn King (Norton). The former governor of the Bank of England argues that, seven years after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, “nothing fundamental has changed.” Most academic and media narratives, he writes, focus on symptoms—swelling personal debt, the housing bubble, misdeeds of financiers—but the underlying malady is a system of banking geared to convert ostensibly riskless deposits into long-term risky investments, all the while assuring depositors that they can redeem their money at any time. King points out that, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, crises occurred almost once a decade. Preventing the next one requires “radical reforms,” including obliging major banks to maintain enough equity to sustain losses without taxpayer support. The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe, by Elaine Showalter…

MATTERS OF FACT Jill Lepore, in her piece on truth in the Internet age, writes that “the collection and weighing of facts require investigation, discernment, and judgment, while the collection and analysis of data are outsourced to machines” (“After the Fact,” March 21st). This view minimizes the role of a programmer, who, like a librarian, aims at preserving and presenting facts and data in a meaningful way. Lepore quotes Michael Lynch, the author of “The Internet of Us,” as saying that we no longer discover facts; we download them. But how different is the process of searching online from searching in the stacks? Are the words of the Federalist Papers any more significant when read in the Library of Congress than on a glowing screen in a Starbucks? Either way…

ROGER STONE, the political provocateur, visited the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel on primary day last week to reminisce about his long friendship with Donald Trump. It started in 1979, when Stone was a twenty-six-year-old aide in Ronald Reagan’s Presidential campaign. Michael Deaver, a more senior campaign official, instructed Stone to start fund-raising in New York. “Mike gave me a recipe box full of index cards, supposedly Reagan’s contacts in New York,” Stone said. “Half the people on the cards were dead. A lot of the others were show-business people, but there was one name I recognized— Roy Cohn.” So Stone presented himself at the brownstone office of Cohn, the notorious lawyer and fixer. “I go into Roy’s office,” Stone continued, “and he’s sitting there in his silk bathrobe,…

JENNIE ROMER MOVED from California to New York about four years ago to save the city from plastic bags. A practicing attorney, she is the country’s leading expert in plastic-bag law. Romer is thirty-eight years old, stands six feet tall, wears dark skirts with dark tights, and has copper-red hair, a pale complexion, and light-blue eyes. The bangs across her forehead sit as straight and level as the scales of blindfolded Justice. She served her apprenticeship in San Francisco, which in 2007 became the first city in America to place a ban on plastic grocery and retail-store bags. San Jose, where a similar law led to an eightynine-per-cent reduction of plastic-bag litter in the city’s storm drains, relied on her counsel. When Oakland moved to pass an anti-bag ordinance, it…

IN “BABY FACE” (1933), one of the most pungent movies ever made in Hollywood, Barbara Stanwyck plays Lily, a young woman raised in a speakeasy next to a Pennsylvania steel mill. Her father pimps her out to workers and local pols, but she fights off the men who want her—though not, we are given to understand, all of them. The point is that she chooses. The performance is classic early Stanwyck: the slouching walk, the acetylene voice, the eyes that lock onto a man in contempt and then soften at will into mock- desire. Lily is a near-slattern looking to find her pride. In town, a German cobbler, who reads Nietzsche in his spare time, scolds her for lacking the “will to power.” He tells her, “You have power over…

The daughter of a ballet dancer and a champion soccer coach, Michelle Dorrance is a tap dancer of gawky grace with especially quick, smart feet. But she has won particular attention for her choreographic creativity in extending tap tradition in new directions. In “ETM: Double Down” (at the Joyce, April 26-May 1), the virtuosic footwork of Dorrance and her affable company, Dorrance Dance, triggers digitally produced sounds, bringing the rhythms of metal-tipped shoes into the age of electronic dance music. PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY AMANDA JASNOWSKI PASCUAL CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera The late Patrice Chereau’s new production of “Elektra” (realized at the Met by Vincent Huguet, a young colleague) is possibly the most humane rendering of the opera ever brought to the stage. This is the tragedy of a royal household,…

A FEW WEEKS AGO, Susan Sarandon, the actor and Bernie Sanders supporter, told Chris Hayes, on MSNBC, that she did not know how she would vote if given a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. She added, “Some people feel Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately, if he gets in.” Things would “explode.” Last Tuesday, when New York’s Presidential primary coincided with the New York première of “The Meddler,” in which Sarandon stars, she left her Chelsea apartment at dusk, wearing brightred lipstick, a tuxedo, and a boot cast protecting a foot that she had fractured while hiking in Colombia. “I did not say I was voting for Trump,” she said in the elevator, recalling the national eyeroll that her remarks prompted. “And I did not say I…

SHORTLY AFTER Harriet Krzykowski began working at the Dade Correctional Institution, in Florida, an inmate whispered to her, “You know they starve us, right?” It was the fall of 2010, and Krzykowski, a psychiatric technician, had been hired by Dade, which is forty miles south of Miami, to help prisoners with clinical behavioral problems follow their treatment plans. The inmate was housed in Dade’s mental-health ward, the Transitional Care Unit, a cluster of buildings connected by breezeways and equipped with one-way mirrors and surveillance cameras. “I thought, Oh, this guy must be paranoid or schizophrenic,” she said recently. Moreover, she’d been warned during her training that prisoners routinely made false accusations against guards. Then she heard an inmate in another wing of the T.C.U. complain that meal trays often arrived…

WHEN SHE WAS younger she could be alone for weeks and never realize that it was time to miss another person, time to call another person on the phone. Now she found herself missing anybody she could think of. Nobody had warned her that watching her husband hold her baby with such care, their faces wordlessly opened to each other in admiration, would make her feel so alone. Day after day she climbed the staircase up to the bed and lay on her side, her gut and womb positioned directly above the space where the two of them usually took their alone time together. They might be in love with each other, but her body was the causal link. Mentally she was older than ever, as tired in the morning…

PAUL MARIANI’S EXCELLENT new book, “The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens” (Simon & Schuster), is a thrilling story of a mind, which emerges from a dispiriting story of a man. It’s hard to think of a more vivid illustration of T. S. Eliot’s principle of the separation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” For most of his life, Stevens was an elaborately defended introvert in a three-piece suit, working as a Hartford insurance executive. He came slowly to a mastery of language, form, and style that revealed a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism. Mariani persuasively numbers Stevens among the twentieth-century poets who are both most powerful and most refined in their eloquence, along with Rilke, Yeats, and…

THE STRANGEST THING about “Drone Bomb Me,” the first track on Anohni’s début solo album, “Hopelessness,” isn’t the fact that it’s written from the perspective of a young Afghan girl, looking up at the sky, waiting for death. “Blow me from the side of the mountain / Blow my head off,” Anohni sings, in a quivering falsetto, searching out the drone’s camera eye. The strangest thing is that the song is a seduction: with its triumphant fanfare of synths and cavernous drops, it’s a slow jam. There’s a relationship here, albeit a perverse and destructive one. As the girl awaits her executioner, she scrambles our sense of who’s zooming in on whom. “Let me be the one,” she sings, part dare and part demand. “The one that you choose from…