Innholdsfortegnelse for Aug-04-14 i The New Yorker

NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE (“CRIME FICTION,” P. 34) is a staff writer and a Cronkite Fellow at the New America Foundation. JAMES SUROWIECKI (THE FINANCIAL PAGE, P. 23), the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” writes about economics, business, and finance for the magazine. MICHELLE GOLDBERG (“WHAT IS A WOMAN?,” P. 24) is a senior contributing writer at The Nation. Her third book, “The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Adventuress Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West,” is due out next year. JOHN LANCHESTER (“MONEY TALKS,” P. 30) has contributed to the magazine since 1995. His next book, “How to Speak Money,” will be published in October. ALEC WILKINSON (“FINDING THE WORDS,” P. 48) is a longtime New Yorker writer. “The Ice Balloon” is his most recent…

PERFORMING AT LE POISSON ROUGE LAST May, the fifty-eight-year-old guitarist Nels Cline stood off-center, at the edge of the stage. Tense but palpably joyous, he operated seventeen effects pedals that were perched on his road case and on a section of the floor with great precision, using his hands and his feet. He was there with his instrumental quartet, the Nels Cline Singers, performing material from a beguiling new record called “Macroscope.” Their set was an ever-shifting mélange of free-jazz improvisations, bossa-nova grooves, noise-rock blowouts, primal riffs, and country-tinged Americana, stitched together with such lyricism and craft that it suggested a new genre. Playing “Divining,” from an earlier record, Cline made intricate pedal adjustments mid-phrase with his right hand as the song moved seamlessly from an ambient beginning to breezy…

55 Irving Pl. “You guys are going to think I’m drunk,” Gil (Owen Wilson) says, in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” explaining that he’s been transported, via Peugeot, from the two-thousands to the nineteen-twenties. “So far I see nothing strange,” Man Ray responds. Gil: “You’re a Surrealist, but I’m a normal guy!” Allen’s film inspired this “cocktail parlor,” in which the rooms lead you back in time—from the sixties (zebra print, vintage Playboys) into the twenties (crystal-beaded curtains, Deco fixtures), through the nineteenth century (dark wood, tin ceiling; think contemporary Brooklyn) to eighteenthcentury France (chandelier, lewd wallpaper). Dear Irving is run by the team behind the Raines Law Room, that hub of investment-banker first dates. Drinks are elaborate: the Hero of Little Venice is a rummy root-beer float; the Vice…

Four years ago, three guys had an idea: that it might be nice to swim in the East River. “It came about pretty simply,” one of them, Dong-Ping Wong, recalled recently, on one of those humid, ambition-melting summer mornings. “Just sitting and sweating near the river, and realizing, after years of living here, that it’d be sort of amazing if you could jump in, and kind of ridiculous that you couldn’t.” The N.Y.P.D. frowns upon people jumping into the city’s waterways, out of practical concerns about the strength of the currents and the difficulty of exiting—no ladders, no ramps. Also, consider the quality of the water itself, which seldom conjures up images of the Caribbean. The guys decided that they should build a floating pool, one that would neutralize the…

In recent years, Warby Parker has become the eyeglass-maker of choice for hipsters. In a recent GQ taxonomy of the different varieties of nerd, all but one of the nerds were wearing a pair of Warby Parkers. The company’s approach—selling stylish specs at affordable prices—seems obvious, but, in an industry where brand-name glasses cost two or three hundred dollars a pair, it counts as revolutionary. The company has a similarly unconventional approach to its corporate identity. Soon after starting Warby, the founders made it a “B corporation.” B corporations are for-profit companies that pledge to achieve social goals as well as business ones. Their social and environmental performance must be regularly certified by a nonprofit called B Lab, much the way LEED buildings have to be certified by the U.S.…

BASEBALL A dangerous sport characterized by long periods of daydreaming, punctuated by intense bursts of unmanageable violence, panic, and people screaming at you. “RISE AND SHINE, CAMPERS” They’re gonna force you to play baseball today. BASEBALL BAT A wooden or metal bar that can easily fly out of someone’s hands. SOFTBALL A hard ball. HARDBALL A killer. SPEEDBALL All balls. CATCHER’S MASK AND PADS Protective gear that only the catcher is allowed to wear. BATTER’S HELMET A thing about which someone will say, “Where’s the batter’s helmet? Oh, Jesus, Eskenazi, put it back. You’re not gonna get hit. Don’t make me chase you.” “ON DECK” A type of tummy ache. “GOOD EYE!” Something that you will yell at the wrong times. Like when you have just let a pitch go…

1. For Emma’s three samplesof landrace maize,the blue, the red,the long-toothed yellow, my unclereservedjust east of the barn a plot as yetunpoisoned by the pesticidewhich the cranes, who are alsoendangered, unerringlyfoundso whenthe first green shoots had sproutedthey were oneby onebefore their time extractedfrom the earth and seed by seedconsumed.When everything elsehad gone to hell—rich men jumping from windows andthe wholeof Oklahoma turnedto dust—this farm,this godsentquarter section and a half, was likea fence againstconfusion. Nowwe say to the children, This fencelessworld . . . 2. She hated the plow.She hated the cattle.She hatedthat her sweet acres when the girlhad been taken away should stillcontrive to beconformable, eventhe barley, even the grape, as thoughher heart had not been tornwith hooks.Well if theycould be reckless so could she.And that was whenthe blighted times…

After India and China, Indonesia was the biggest new nation-state to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. Consisting of thousands of islands large and small, it sprawls roughly the same distance as that from Washington, D.C., to Alaska, and contains the largest Muslim population on earth. Yet, on our mental map of the world, the country is little more than a faraway setting for earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. The political traumas of post-colonial Egypt, from Suez to el-Sisi, are far better known than the killing, starting in 1965, of more than half a million Indonesians suspected of being Communists or the thirty-year insurgency in Aceh Province. Foreign-affairs columnists, who prematurely hailed many revolutions at the end of the Cold War (Rose, Orange, Green, Saffron), failed to color-code the dramatic overthrow,…

“The Production Line of Happiness,” a retrospective of work by the photographic artist Christopher Williams, at the Museum of Modern Art, brings a tonic chill to an art summer enfevered by the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney. The two shows describe opposite extremes in sophisticated art since the nineteen-seventies: ascetic, academy-based, and soft-core political in Williams’s case; hedonistic, market-oriented, and smiley-faced populist in that of Koons. Williams can seem to work strictly for circles of educated initiates, while Koons endeavors to please practically everybody. But, if you remove the measures of money and fame, by which Williams is a relative pauper and a cipher (this is his first American museum retrospective), commonalities emerge. The two artists share roots in a moment, in the seventies, of self-conscious reflection on the…

PUT TO THE TEST In Rachel Aviv’s comprehensive article on the Atlanta school-testing scandal, a teacher, Damany Lewis, claims that he owes Secretary of Education Arne Duncan an apology (“Wrong Answer,” July 21st). But it is Duncan (who was never an educator) who owes Lewis, other staff members caught up in the scandal, and also teachers, administrators, students, and parents across the country an apology, for trapping them in a system based not on evidence but on the unproved theories of corporate education reform. This movement claims to rely on data, but seems to ignore some shocking outcomes. Are we really to believe that Atlanta’s students are better off without teachers like Lewis in the classroom? Is it really a better idea, to cite one of the reformers’ planks,…

ONE OF THE WAYS in which New York City Opera earned its nickname as the People’s Opera was through its lavish attention to homegrown composers. The postwar glory years of American high culture demanded big operas in big productions, and City Opera was at the forefront. Inevitably, most of them were chaff. But among the very best was Jack Beeson’s “Lizzie Borden,” which premièred in 1965 and, like its notorious antiheroine, has refused to go away. Now City Opera is history, and the “fringe opera” movement, which tends by necessity to offer works limited in instrumentation and production values, reigns. How appropriate, then, that “Lizzie” has been remade in a fringe version by Boston Lyric Opera, which presents its acclaimed 2013 production at Tanglewood on Thursday. Beeson, collaborating with the…

THE TRAUMAS OF THE FIRST WORLD War preoccupied Hollywood directors even while the war was still being fought, as seen in the Museum of Modern Art’s series “The Great War,” which runs Aug. 4-Sept. 21. The program offers a wide range of superb movies, beginning with D. W. Griffith’s “Hearts of the World,” from 1918, the film that set the template for dramatizations of the war. Its protagonists, the Boy (Robert Harron) and the Girl (Lillian Gish), are expatriate Americans whose families live in a French village. They meet and fall instantly in love, but their wedding is postponed by the declaration of war and the Boy’s enlistment in the French Army. Griffith lends the local heroes the grandeur of legend. His vision has a Homeric scope, with its audacious…

Ansel Elkins, a thirty-two-year-old poet, lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. “I need silence and stillness when I’m writing,” she says. “If my husband is home, even if he’s just puttering around without talking, I sometimes get bitchy.” She lives from grant to grant. Recently, she won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She also accepts writers’ residencies. At Hedgebrook, an hour north of Seattle, “they put you up in your own cabin with a wood-burning stove, and they cook you all these organic meals. It’s lonely, but productive.” In May, Elkins applied for a different kind of residency, one organized by the Paris Review and the Standard East Village, a sleek hotel. The gig offered free lodging “to a writer who…

On May 24th, a few dozen people gathered in a conference room at the Central Library, a century-old Georgian Revival building in downtown Portland, Oregon, for an event called Radfems Respond. The conference had been convened by a group that wanted to defend two positions that have made radical feminism anathema to much of the left. First, the organizers hoped to refute charges that the desire to ban prostitution implies hostility toward prostitutes. Then they were going to try to explain why, at a time when transgender rights are ascendant, radical feminists insist on regarding transgender women as men, who should not be allowed to use women’s facilities, such as public rest rooms, or to participate in events organized exclusively for women. The dispute began more than forty years ago,…

The most important mystery of ancient Egypt concerned the annual inundation of the Nile floodplain. The calendar was divided into three seasons linked to the river and the agricultural cycle it determined: akhet, or the inundation; peret, the growing season; and shemu, the harvest. The size of the harvest depended on the size of the flood: too little water, and there would be famine; too much, and there would be catastrophe; just the right amount, and the whole country would bloom and prosper. Every detail of Egyptian life was shaped by the flood. Even the tax system was based on the level of the water, which dictated how successful farmers would be in the subsequent season. Priests performed complicated rituals to divine the nature of that year’s flood and the…

In October, 1988, my friends Janet Landay and Edward Hirsch flew to New Orleans to adopt a boy who was six days old. He was collected from the hospital by their lawyer, who brought him to the house where they were staying. Waiting for her, they stood in the street in front of the house. For several days, they worried that the mother, overcome by love or by guilt, might want the child back, but she didn’t. At the time, Hirsch was an associate professor at the University of Houston. He is now the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, but he is above all a poet. He has published eight books of poems, among them “Earthly Measures,” which Harold Bloom included in “The Western Canon.” Nominated by…

AN UNTAMED STATE, by Roxane Gay (Black Cat). How does one survive thirteen harrowing days in captivity? The question animates this commanding début, whose protagonist, Mireille, is kidnapped in broad daylight while driving to the beach in Port-au-Prince with her husband and young son. Gay unsparingly renders Mireille’s ordeal at the hands of her ruthless captors, and details the tensions afflicting the “untamed state” of Haiti: corruption, roaming gangs of bandits, and an expatriate community still yearning to return home. Mireille’s struggle to maintain a sense of self while being denied her freedom produces the novel’s most powerful chapters. “I was no one,” Mireille says repeatedly, as her mental state, too, becomes increasingly “untamed.” THE BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER, by Lawrence Osborne (Hogarth). Gambling has rarely seemed less…

Thank God for Brendan Gleeson. Long before the invention of CinemaScope, movies found space for big men—not the beanpoles or the beefcakes but the frame-fillers, ursine and glowering. Gleeson is not the last of the breed (Brian Dennehy is still at work), but, with James Gandolfini and Charles Durning passed away, he is the most unignorable; any scene, whatever its mood, feels solidly earthed by his presence. Seldom does he use his bulk as Broderick Crawford, say, once did, to bully those in the vicinity. Instead, there is a diffidence, or a need to retire into the burrow of his own thoughts, that goes beyond grumpiness and deepens Gleeson’s appeal. You cannot imagine him being taken aback by the sins of the world, even when they move him to pity…

JULIA STILES, WHO GREW UP in SoHo and began acting at eleven, has morphed seamlessly from intense, guarded teen (“Ten Things I Hate About You,” “Save the Last Dance,” “O”) to intense, smart-sexy action star (the “Bourne” trilogy), with a foray into cold-bitch territory, via a thankless role in “Silver Linings Playbook,” as Jennifer Lawrence’s uptight sister. Stiles’s stage work has included Shakespeare (“Twelfth Night,” at the Delacorte in 2002) and Mamet (“Oleanna” on Broadway), and now she’s taking a break from her film and TV work (lately in the misguided Fox-sponsored Web series “Blue,” as a woman who resorts to prostitution to support her math-prodigy son) to star in Scott Organ’s “Phoenix,” at the Cherry Lane. In the one-act dark comedy, which premièred at the Humana Festival in…

IN 2011, ROCKAWAY BEACH WAS poised to become the next hipster frontier. McCarren Park Pool party organizers held “Rock Beach” indie-band concerts, the concession stand Veggie Island served kale juice and miso sandwiches, surfers and artists thronged the peninsula’s white-sand beaches—some even chose to forgo the hour-long A-train commute from Manhattan and moved there. But in 2012, just as the Rockaways seemed destined for a fair-trade knitting shop and a Café Grumpy, Hurricane Sandy brought fifteen-foot waves and ten-foot floods, leaving the place in shambles. Now Rockaway Beach, undeterred and still scruffy, is poised for a renaissance, with a beautiful new boardwalk being built, a site-specific PS1 exhibition curated by Klaus Biesenbach, and Mayor de Blasio’s promise to make good on the $4.2 billion Sandy recovery fund. It’s good news…

Because memory, particularly historical memory, fails unfailingly, this summer feels like a uniquely horrific season of dissolution and blood. “You name it, the world is aflame,” Gary Samore, a former national-security aide in the Obama Administration, told Peter Baker, of the Times, the other day. “We always have a mix of complicated interests. That’s not unusual. What’s unusual is there’s this outbreak of violence and instability everywhere.” The supposed tranquillity of earlier seasons is almost always an artifact of distance. And yet Samore’s “everywhere” is forgivable hyperbole. In eastern Ukraine, where hundreds of corpses, and a dozen or so planes, lay shattered in fields of wheat and sunflowers, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made clear his intention to base his legitimacy at home on defiance abroad. In Nigeria, the most…

R. J. Cutler spent decades making documentaries about the wily likes of Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney. A burly man with a red beard and a regal manner—Henry VIII without the wives and the panoply—Cutler has a knack for eliciting his subjects’ candor. In his newest film, though, he sought not clarity but ardent confusion. “You know how when you’re walking down the stairs and you think there’s going to be a step, and there isn’t, and for a moment you’re lost in space?” he said. “That’s the feeling I wanted to explore.” This existential quest helped lead him to direct a ten-handkerchief teen melodrama called “If I Stay,” which opens in a few weeks. One recent afternoon at Balthazar, the SoHo bistro, Cutler wore a gray suit over a…

At Lough Hyne parents rouse kidsto hiss but condemn the hissy fitwhen the order to ceaseis ignored, all incited and in the grip. Over-leaning a stone wall, stirringa pair of mute swans to eloquence,the combined hissestrigger a localized squall — an infectious hyperactivitythat makes an outing in “nature”an addictive spree, a confrontationwith beauty incarnate: the swans disdainful of such mockery,glaring back down their beaksat parents whose cygnetsare floundering in the deep.…

At around two-thirty in the afternoon on May 8, 1993, Marshall Morgan left his mother’s house, on the South Side of Chicago, and drove off in her lightblue Chevrolet Cavalier. Morgan was borrowing the car and, in return, had agreed to get it washed. It was a warm day, and he wore denim shorts, a blackand-white pin-striped shirt, and black sneakers. After he got the car cleaned, he planned to return home and spruce himself up: he had a date with his girlfriend that night. Morgan was a twenty-year-old sophomore at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he played point guard on the basketball team. The season had just ended, and he had performed notably well, averaging eighteen points and three steals a game; he had been the runner-up for…

My father was a suspicious man—and, as a widower, wounded, too. My mother died when I was ten, and he became overly concerned about my welfare. He showed it in the following way: he’d take me by the chin, lift my head, and smell it, as though examining a melon for ripeness. He was checking for cigarette smoke or a girl’s perfume, the reek of the poolroom or a back alley, for the odor of disobedience. He never smelled anything. Even so, to test me he’d say, “Where?,” meaning, “Where have you been?” He was thrifty in all ways, with money, with time; he always tore a stick of chewing gum in half and put the other half in his pocket for later. And he made sure to use the…

Maybe it was that beating heart kept in a glass jar, like a pet tarantula. Maybe it was the moment that a villain hissed, “Gratitude! Vat an effective leasssssh.” Maybe it’s the damp summer weather, or one too many serious cable dramas, but somehow I succumbed to “The Strain.” A new horror series on FX, “The Strain” is based on a trilogy of vampire books by Guillermo del Toro, the director of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the terrific “Hellboy” series. It was adapted in collaboration with Carlton Cuse, whose earlier genre experiment, “Lost,” began with huge ambition and then took a late-season nosedive. Both creators are proud nerds, and del Toro in particular is one of the world’s more lovable cheerleaders for the power of the grotesque, in every medium. “The…