Innholdsfortegnelse for Feb-16-15 i The New Yorker

NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE (“LOST IN SYRIA,” P. 36) is a staff writer and the author of “To Live or to Perish Forever.” ELIZABETH KOLBERT (“THE LAST TRIAL,” P. 24) has published three books, including “The Sixth Extinction,” which came out in paperback in January. MARGARET TALBOT (COMMENT, P. 19), the author of the memoir “The Entertainer,” has been writing for the magazine since 1997. BEN MCGRATH (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 21) is a staff writer. JOSEPH MITCHELL (“A PLACE OF PASTS,” P. 32), who died in 1996, began writing for the magazine in 1933. Thomas Kunkel came across this unfinished chapter of a planned memoir while doing research for his book “Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,” which will be published in April. JEFFREY TOOBIN…

Bar Tab: Play Lounge The neon-lime façade of this Elmhurst bar offers three edicts: eat, drink, party. Yet none seemed quite possible for a pair of new arrivals, one night, when a bachelorette party, composed mainly of young women with auroraborealis-themed eyeshadow, thronged the strobe-lit dance floor, bowling alley, and a dozen leather banquettes. Dark, dank, and cavernous, Play Lounge is a sort of urban sorority house that not only peddles the idea of everlasting youth but energetically cultivates a blingy wonderland as imagined in an R. & B. music video. Ping-Pong and billiard tables are as much recreational equipment as they are props for the draping of languorous limbs in spandex minis (the dress code forbids “excessively baggy clothing”). Hookah beer towers (strawberry, mint, melon) are hailed like cabs…

For the better part of a year, the artists Eve Biddle and Joshua Frankel quietly mourned the desecration of their best-known collaboration, a mural proclaiming, “Queens Is the Future” over a flying subway train, painted on the wall of a handball court outside I.S. 145, a middle school in Jackson Heights. Then, last month, a photograph of the mural in its “adjusted” form, as Frankel put it, appeared in Time Out, in an issue devoted to “New York’s hottest borough.” No mention was made of the mural’s provenance, and the artists, who are married, were spurred to revisit the matter. “Those aren’t icons of Queens,” Frankel said recently, arriving at the handball court on a snowy morning and gesturing through a chain-link fence at painted images of the Statue of…

Oskar Gröning, who has become known as “the bookkeeper from Auschwitz,” was born on June 10, 1921, in Nienburg, a town about thirty miles south of Bremen. His father, a textile worker, was a fierce German nationalist and a member of Der Stahlhelm (the Steel Helmet), a paramilitary group that opposed the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar government. While Gröning was growing up, his family lived next to a metal shop owned by a Jew. Gröning used to play marbles with the shop owner’s daughter, Anne. When the Nazis were coming to power, picketers appeared in front of the shop with a banner that said, “Germans, do not buy from Jews!” Gröning continued to play marbles with Anne, only now in a courtyard rather than out on the street.…

In December, 2012, an itinerant American named Eric Harroun checked into a youth hostel in Istanbul. A thirty-year-old U.S. Army veteran with sandy-blond hair, Harroun had left the service in 2003, and since then he had travelled everywhere from Lebanon to Thailand. He was living out of a green duffelbag and a tan camouflage backpack, navigating the world one Lonely Planet guidebook at a time. At the hostel, Harroun, who made friends easily, met a liberal Syrian activist from Aleppo. “We were hanging out every night, drinking until morning, and talking about the revolution in Syria,” the activist said. The revolt against Bashar al-Assad was approaching its third year, and the activist lamented that Assad was bombarding his people with tanks, jets, and poison gas. Human-rights organizations had accused Syrian…

Dale had been doing a lot of reading on Hellenic myth, so when he said he had a surprise for us at his Pumpkin Jamboree we knew he wasn’t screwing around. The jamboree—a weekend he organizes on his property to bring the town together and raise a little money for the Fire Department—features a hayride, face painting, and a cakewalk that occupies the entire side yard, but his corn maze tends to be the highlight. A crew of hard-core maze runners formed a line before he had even finished setting up. I deposited my five dollars in the bucket, like everyone else. “Only it isn’t a maze this time,” Dale said, arranging a last bale of hay around the pumpkins from the patch. “It’s a labyrinth.” A general murmur rose.…

THE FIRST BAD MAN, by Miranda July (Scribner). This surreal novel blurs reality and imagination through the voice of Cheryl Glickman, the manager of a company that sells self-defense videos as a fitness aid. Cheryl works from home and lives alone, eating at her sink with a single utensil and dish—part of a “system” so refined that, she notes with pleasure, “after days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore, it’s as if I don’t exist.” The arrival of a guest disrupts her life, bringing violence and eroticism. July has perfected the art of the compellingly uncomfortable scene, and though the technique perhaps suits short fiction better than a novel, she succeeds in making Cheryl both achingly familiar and repulsively…

On Kawara, the subject of a vast and elegant retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, was born in Japan and lived very, very quietly in Manhattan for fifty years until his death, last June, at the age of eighty-one—or, rather, the age of twenty-nine thousand seven hundred and seventy-one days, by the form of reckoning that he preferred. Starting in 1966, he created nearly three thousand acrylic paintings, which feature only the dates on which they were made: the month, day, and year meticulously inscribed in white on layered grounds of red, blue, or dark gray. The “Date Paintings” are all rendered in the same sans-serif style, without the aid of stencils, and are horizontally oriented. They come in eight sizes: the smallest measure eight by ten inches, the largest sixty-one…

THE BUSH CLASSROOM I read Alec MacGillis’s piece on the education reforms of Jeb Bush with a careful eye (“Testing Time,” January 26th). In my twenty-five years of experience in education, I have found that Florida’s success story surpasses that of all other states. When Bush became governor, in 1999, more than sixty per cent of minority and low-income fourth graders couldn’t read at a basic level, which doomed them to failure in future grades. Barely half of Florida’s high-school seniors were graduating. After Bush’s programs were enacted, Florida’s gains in math and reading, according to the federally funded Nation’s Report Card, were larger than they were anywhere else in the country—save Washington, D.C., which also used rigorous accountability systems and choice to improve education. The graduation rate has…

Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose This reading series, which started in New York City and is held at laundromats around the country, celebrates its tenth anniversary with “Every Fold Matters,” a collaborative, site-specific performance exploring the strange intimacy of the everyday ritual. The piece, created by the playwright and director Lizzie Olesker and the filmmaker Lynne Sachs, highlights the perspective of laundry workers. It’s playing for three nights at a Brooklyn laundromat, performed by the singer and actress Jasmine Holloway, the actress and dancer Veraalba Santa, and the actors Ching Valdes-Aran and Tony Torn. Produced by the series’ founder, Emily Rubin. (New Lucky Laundromat, 323 Lafayette Ave., at Grand Ave., Clinton Hill. dirtylaundryreadings.com. Feb. 12-14.) Welcome to Boog City 8.5 Festival The heyday of newspapers has come and gone,…

Igor Krutoi, the Russian composer, TV producer, and cultural-mogul billionaire, who paid nearly fifty million dollars for a condo in the Plaza Hotel in 2011 and who holds the Order of Merit for the Fatherland of the 3rd Class, which Vladimir Putin bestowed on him last summer, gave a one-time-only gala concert at the Barclays Center on a recent Saturday night, and sixteen thousand Russian-speaking people showed up. They filled the immense lobby with the cold January air still in their clothes, and flowed slowly through the security checkpoints, talking quietly. The men wore dark coats and hats, and the women came in furs of every description. The pocketbooks they set down for guards to inspect were of shiny leather, studded, strapped, embossed, metallic-looking, with black-and-white checkerboard patterns, zebra stripes,…

A remarkable feat of agility was performed on Sunday night, and it had nothing to do with football. It was the sharks. . . . The dancing sharks at Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show . . . danced in unison. But soon, one of the sharks, specifically Left Shark, said enough of that, and began to do his own thing frenetically on national television. —Washington Post. First rehearsal went great. Katy says to just call her “Katy”—very downto-earth move. Happy to see Eric! Grateful he got me this gig, as not a lot of work out there for us sharks. Second rehearsal O.K. Eric picking up dance moves faster than me, which is no biggie, since I’m still getting over quad injury. Still, resolving to work harder. Went for…

The conceit upon which “Kingsman: The Secret Service” rests is a simple one. The service in question is international, filthy rich, and independent of any government, although it is based in London and staffed by British agents. They are modelled on the Round Table, with sobriquets to match: Arthur (Michael Caine), Galahad (Colin Firth), Lancelot ( Jack Davenport), and so on. They fight evil, crime, and other caddish deeds, and the front for their headquarters is a tailor’s called Kingsman, in Savile Row. The name is cunningly wrought, combining hints of sovereignty, and of Firth’s most lauded role, in “The King’s Speech,” with the actual firm of Huntsman, in the same street. Some scenes were filmed at the Huntsman shop. You can drop by anytime and order a bespoke suit,…

FEBRUARY 2015 WEDNESDAY 11TH THURSDAY 12TH FRIDAY 13TH SATURDAY 14TH SUNDAY 15TH MONDAY 16TH TUESDAY 17TH MOVIES ARE MADE by tricking the eye, and perhaps no director deployed more cheap tricks with more workingman’s glee than John Carpenter. Through Feb. 22, BAM Cinématek is showing a complete retrospective of his movies. Carpenter made his career with popcorn-spilling horror, but then took his instincts for exploitation in unusual directions. Highlights include “They Live,” certainly the only prescient critique of consumerism to star the wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper, and “Escape from New York,” the cult movie from 1981 that imagined a Manhattan of 1997 as a maximum-security prison. There was a sequel, of course, “Escape from L.A.,” memorable for the scene of Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) surfing on Wilshire Boulevard. Carpenter’s…

Late last month, above a pho restaurant on Grand Street, a group gathered around a life-size cutout of Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of “The Hunger Games,” outfitted with wings, body armor, and the face of Elizabeth Warren, the senior senator from Massachusetts. This was the inaugural meeting of Artists for Warren, a progressive answer to Prayer Warriors for Sarah Palin and Yoopers for Rand Paul. The group aims to persuade Warren to run for President. “I see her like this in my dreams,” Laura Dawn, who runs a collective called Art Not War, said of Kat-Liz, as the group had dubbed the cutout. Warren has become an icon to certain progressives, and the party’s host committee included Julie Pacino, Al’s daughter, and Mark Ruffalo, who was in London filming a…

Last spring, a song by a rapper named Bobby Shmurda (given name: Ackquille Pollard) was posted to You-Tube. The lyrics were full of violent braggadocio (“I’ma run up, put that gun on ’ em”), and alluded several times to GS9, his Brooklyn rap collective (“Grimey shooters dressed in G-Star”). The song became a hit. Although Shmurda was nineteen and had a discography of one mix tape—he calls them “shmixtapes”—Epic Records signed him to a major contract. A few months later, a defense attorney named Howard Greenberg (given name: Howard Greenberg) got a call. Shmurda needed counsel. Prosecutors alleged that GS9 was a gang, the G Stone Crips, and that Bobby Shmurda was its “driving force.” In an indictment, handed down in December, Shmurda was charged with gun possession and conspiracy…

Joseph Mitchell was born in 1908 into a prosperous family of North Carolina cotton and tobacco growers. At the age of twenty-one, he came to New York City to pursue a career as a writer, and he started contributing to this magazine four years later. In the late sixties and the early seventies, he began writing a memoir. What follows was intended to be the third chapter but was never finished. In the fall of 1968, without at first realizing what was happening to me, I began living in the past. These days, when I reflect on this and add up the years that have gone by, I can hardly believe it: I have been living in the past for over twenty years—living mostly in the past, I should say,…

On Day 1 the photographer walks into camp and immediately starts shooting. She shoots us at breakfast eating our C-rations, in our hammocks reading Stars & Stripes. She shoots us in her sleep. When we first cross paths at the creek, she says, “Hello, Tiger! Nice combat boots. Is that thing real?” pointing to my Special Forces jungle shirt. “I’m afraid so,” I say nonchalantly, trying to mask my satisfaction. Day 2: no more messing around. The photographer has agreed to join the action. “So what’s the scenario?” A lone guerrilla left over in a booby-trapped village jumps out of a hidey-hole and ambushes the platoon on a search-and-destroy. “Good thing I brought my black pajamas and sandals!” What a trooper. She also plays the captured prisoner, the native informant,…

Some say that the American Dream is not what it once was: wages are low, retirement is not a parachute glide but a plunge, and those chosen to fix such problems labor at undoing one another’s laws. For these doubters, there are the Swedes. On any given day, a Swedish man—call him Viggo—might be reclining on a sofa underneath a Danish lamp shaped like an artichoke. He is an artist, and he has a pension. He is wearing boldly colored pants. His young wife, Ebba, is a neurosurgeon, though she has never paid a krona in tuition, and her schedule runs between the operating table and the laboratory. Things are busy. She and Viggo have small kids (the government gives them a combined four hundred and eighty days of maternity…

As the sonnet was the quintessential form of the Elizabethan poet, packing distilled and dazzling language into its sleek fourteen lines and challenging every virtuoso of the day, so the quintessential form of the contemporary crime writer is the interrogation: two individuals in a room, one of them the suspect and the other the detective. Here we have the essence of drama. We know that the stakes are high: a violent act is at issue. The setting is stark; the language is almost purely dialogue, with the unpredictable swerves of actual life and none of its rambling asides, graced by a swiftness of storytelling in a genre in which exposition, often improbable and sometimes belabored, must be provided somewhere before the final line of the final chapter. (Recall bravura interrogation…