Innholdsfortegnelse for Feb-02-15 i The New Yorker

WHEN CLAUDE DEBUSSY PUBLISHED his maritime masterpiece, “La Mer,” in 1905, he placed on the score’s cover a stylized detail from “Under the Wave off Kanagawa,” Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print of apocalyptic waves towering over Mt. Fuji. Debussy’s veneration of Japanese art helped initiate an intricate, evolving conversation between Western-style classical composition and Japanese culture. The conversation began in earnest when Japanese composers came into their own after the Second World War; the results of the interaction can be heard in this year’s “Focus!” festival at Juilliard, titled “Nippon Gendai Ongaku: Japanese Music Since 1945.” Appropriately, the final program, an orchestral concert on Jan. 30, begins with Debussy and ends with his most faithful twentieth-century follower, Toru Takemitsu. “Music is either sound or silence,” Takemitsu once said, expanding on insights…

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar walked through the lobby of his hotel on Central Park South recently, doing his best impression of someone with a low profile. He swerved to avoid a chandelier (low clearance for a former N.B.A. center), then bumped into an old friend who’d been a coach with the Chicago Bulls. Handshakes, camera flashes. Finally, Abdul-Jabbar wriggled free. “I have somewhere to be,” he said, adjusting a white cashmere scarf over his blue pin-striped suit. He ducked through a doorway, took a few loping steps to the curb, and scrunched into the back of a black Suburban. He was late for cocktails at the Yale Club, where the Baker Street Irregulars, an eighty-one-year-old Sherlock Holmes society, was hosting its annual dinner. Abdul-Jabbar—a Sherlockian since he began reading Sir Arthur Conan…

“How come they never show an indigenous person using the Internet?” Tanya Tagaq remarked on a recent Sunday visit to the Museum of the American Indian, at Bowling Green. “We’re not only in the past. We’re here right now.” Tagaq, who is thirty-nine and has jet-black hair and a girlish face, had removed her sealskin boots and was sitting barefoot on the floor of the Diker Pavilion, a large oval space on the museum’s ground level. A couple of mothers were browsing the exhibition cases while, nearer Tagaq, their young children mimicked the traditional Indian dances that were being projected on the curving wall of the room. “They should put me in one of those cases,” Tagaq said. “I’d be like—” and she flipped the bird with both hands, grinning…

Late one night in September of 2013, Rick Schiller awoke in bed with his right leg throbbing. Schiller, who is in his fifties, lives in San Jose, California. He had been feeling ill all week, and, as he reached under the covers, he found his leg hot to the touch. He struggled to sit upright, then turned on a light and pulled back the sheet. “My leg was about twice the normal size, maybe even three times,” he told me. “And it was hard as a rock, and bright purple.” Schiller roused his fiancée, who helped him hobble to their car. He dropped into the passenger seat, but he couldn’t bend his leg to fit it through the door. “So I tell her, ‘Just grab it and shove it in,’…

I decided to learn to drive because I wanted to learn to drive. I wasn’t, I told anyone who would listen, searching for a metaphor of middle age, or declaring my emancipation from my pedestrian past, or making up for time wasted in the passenger seat. There’s a rich literature about learning to drive written by women, for whom it represents a larger emancipation from the feminine roles of enforced passivity, of sitting in place and accepting helplessness. That wasn’t my “issue.” I wanted to learn to drive because I wanted to make a vehicle move in an orderly direction forward and around corners and to necessary places. I didn’t know how to drive for reasons that seemed to me obvious and accidental and psychologically uncomplicated. My parents, who worked…

BABY TALK Margaret Talbot’s article contains much of the current thinking about the value of immersing babies and toddlers in language (“The Talking Cure,” January 12th). Encouraging parents and caregivers to talk more to their babies more often is certainly important, but we must also consider how to expand upon the limited vocabularies of many caregivers. One solution is to read picture books. In the psychology department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, we recently carried out a large replication of a classic study showing that print has a richer vocabulary than speech. We found that the variety of words in picture books was more extensive than that of parents talking to their children. Picture books were three times as likely as child-directed speech to use a word…

This tiny, beloved East Village sports bar—eleven barstools, three tables, a pair of seats from Shea Stadium—has the dark-wood intimacy of a church vestibule, and it welcomes all affiliations. The décor, a riot of memorabilia, is more discriminating: no pinstripes. Triangle pennants, fatheads, and growl towels hang from the ceiling. There’s a Phillie Phanatic coloring book, a Mets popcorn box, a UConn Huskies banner, a mini hockey stick. On the walls, eight flatscreen TVs blare (“Always game sound. We HATE music!!” the bar’s business card reads), and meticulously updated chalkboards display league standings. The other night, a man in an “I LIKE BEER” T-shirt showed up for the Colts-Broncos N.F.L. playoff game. Standings likes beer, too: there are ten craft beers on tap (recently, Yonkers Lager, Scrimshaw, and Bronx Session…

Seventeen years ago, in distant Canada, a sports-apparel seller named Chip Wilson had a vision. What if you made yoga clothes so stylish that you’d want to wear them all day? The result, Lululemon, ushered in a new era: the decline of jeans, the rise of spandex, and the practice—some might argue the scourge—of women going about their day dressed for an Ashtanga class. Wilson and his wife, Shannon, a designer he’d hired, became billionaires, though the past few years have presented setbacks. He resigned from Lululemon’s board last year, after a disastrous episode involving unintentionally see-through yoga pants. (Attempting to explain the glitch to a television reporter, he blamed a “rubbing through the thighs.”) But, in general, things are good. “It’s funny,” Shannon Wilson said the other day. “I…

I don’t see what difference it can make now to reveal that I passed highschool math only because I cheated. I could add and subtract and multiply and divide, but I entered the wilderness when words became equations and x’s and y’s. On test days, I sat next to Bob Isner or Bruce Gelfand or Ted Chapman or Donny Chamberlain—smart boys whose handwriting I could read—and divided my attention between his desk and the teacher’s eyes. Having skipped me, the talent for math concentrated extravagantly in one of my nieces, Amie Wilkinson, a professor at the University of Chicago. From Amie I first heard about Yitang Zhang, a solitary, part-time calculus teacher at the University of New Hampshire who received several prizes, including a MacArthur award in September, for solving…

Stephen Torres was meeting with a client at his law office, in downtown Albuquerque, on April 12, 2011, when he received a call from a neighbor, who told him that police officers were aiming rifles at his house. He left work and drove to his home, in a middle-class suburb with a view of the mountains. There were more than forty police vehicles on his street. Officers wearing camouflage fatigues and bulletproof vests had circled his home, a sand-colored two-story house with a pitched tile roof. Two officers were driving a remote-controlled robot, used for discharging bombs, back and forth on the corner. Stephen’s wife, Renetta, the director of human resources for the county, arrived a few minutes later, just after three o’clock. A colleague had heard her address repeated…

She was a little girl with red-gold sausage curls, curls darker than redgold. She did have this lovely hair. She also had thick creamy skin and grayblue eyes that wondered. Very young, she read all the stories in which the fairies and the kindest mothers and fathers and the strangers in the woods who were benevolent to lost children said, if not in so many words, “It is good to be good.” But, even without the painted finger of the fables pointing in that direction, Alice would have been inclined to be good. Babies arrive with dispositions, and this was hers. Her mother was Scottish born and bred—irrational, raucous, bony, quicktempered, and noisy. She had no feelings. She was bright, like anything burning: a match, a firecracker, a tree. Alice…

FROG, by Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (Viking). This satire by a recent Nobel laureate takes aim at Chinese reproductive hypocrisies from the Cultural Revolution to the present, such as the one-child policy and the preference for male offspring. In a village where children are customarily named for body parts, wombs are the unspoken and collective obsession. The narrator grows up in the shadow of his fearsome aunt, a notorious abortionist. Mo relishes the cartoonishly macabre: a drowning woman carrying an illegal pregnancy is pursued by motorboat; a bullfrog farm serves as a front for a surrogate agency exploiting disfigured women. But the characters seem flat, and the novel devolves into a collection of lightly sketched caricatures. HOW TO BE BOTH, by Ali Smith (Pantheon).…

JAN/FEB 2015 WEDNESDAY 28TH THURSDAY 29TH FRIDAY 30TH SATURDAY 3 1 ST SUNDAY 1 ST MONDAY 2ND TUESDAY 3RD WHEN SHE WAS JUST SIXTEEN years old, in Detroit in the early sixties, Bettye LaVette recorded a single, “My Man—He’s a Lovin’ Man,” that caught the ear of Jerry Wexler, at Atlantic Records, and became a minor R. & B. hit. She then bounced around the business for decades before connecting with the producer Joe Henry for the album “I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise,” in 2005, which cracked open a new chapter in her career. Remaking rock and pop songs by everyone from Fiona Apple (“Sleep to Dream”) to the Who (“Love, Reign o’er Me”) with her restrained phrasing and aching voice, she’s now recognized as one of…

“Video Games Live” Perhaps the easiest way to get kids to the symphony, this event is a full-blown spectacle of video-game music performed by an orchestra and accompanied by lights, lasers, synchronized video screens, choirs, and costumed performers. The first “Video Games Live” was presented in 2005 at the Hollywood Bowl with the L.A. Philharmonic, and the series has been touring non-stop worldwide ever since. The shows stay fresh with an ever-changing lineup of pieces from new games and arcade classics, many of which are being performed live for the first time. Conducted by the video-game composer Emmanuel Fratianni, the performance at the Beacon Theatre features the world première of “Donkey Kong Country,” and includes a segment celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the “Legend of Zelda.” (Broadway at 74th…

We used to parse liner notes for cultural significance. Now we look to menus: a Brooklyn restaurant’s Kim and Kanye-themed prix fixes for Valentine’s Day (Karrot terrine with dill kreme fraîche and a Midori shot, “Imma Let You Finish” for dessert), a New Jersey casino’s awkward “Martin Luther King, Jr., Special” (fried chicken, collard greens). Dan Jurafsky’s new book, “The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu,” is full of such tidbits. Toasts are called “toasts,” he writes, because, until the seventeenth century, wine and ale were often flavored with grilled bread. People talk about expensive meals using sex metaphors; for noodle joints and cupcake counters, they resort to drug lingo. The more Yelp reviewers mention dessert, the more stars they will give. The longer the words a restaurant…

Maybe a whale, as Hamlet mused, or a camel or weasel, more likely a hill, or many hills (with clouds, as with us, true singletons are rare). Mostly we compare them to silent things, sensing that thunder is something else that gets into them—a stone, a god— and, as for what they want to say, aeromancy, which presumed to interpret, never caught on. After all, clouds weren’t reliable predictors even of rain, and if they had a message for us, we guessed, it would hardly be practical: clouds are not about about, showing instead boundless detail without specificity. Whales, sure (which might in turn be blue clouds), but we don’t say How very like a screwdriver, or my house, or my uncle, or certainly how unlike my uncle. For though…

It is no surprise that the work of Philip Roth, so easy to swallow on the page, should prove indigestible on film. How do you find a style to match the momentum of his voices—that ceaseless flock of narrators, interpolators, first persons, third persons, and minor figures who roll up, discharge a monologue, and retire from the scene? More to the point, how do you film an exclamation mark? Of the fistful of Roth adaptations that have reached the screen, all have failed, some more gracefully than others. The latest challenger is Barry Levinson, with “The Humbling,” based on Roth’s short novel of 2009. With a whole back catalogue to choose from, it is an odd book to plump for, with an oddity for a hero. Simon Axler (Al Pacino)…

Sometime in the spring of the year 59, the emperor Nero decided to murder his mother. As you can imagine, the two were not on good terms. In a gesture designed to appear conciliatory, Nero invited his mother, Agrippina, to join him at a festival in Baiae, a resort town near present-day Naples. During the festivities, he treated her with great affection. Then, when it was time for her to leave, he presented her with a gift—a beautifully appointed boat to ferry her up the coast. The gift was supposed to be a death trap. But just about everything that should have gone wrong didn’t. The deck of the ship fell in, yet, rather than killing Agrippina, it crushed one of her attendants. The hull, too, had been crafted to…