Innholdsfortegnelse for Jan-20-14 i The New Yorker

CONNIE BRUCK (“THE BILLIONAIRE’S PLAYLIST,” P. 40), a staff writer, has published three books, including “The Predators’ Ball” and “When Hollywood Had a King.” MARGARET TALBOT (COMMENT, P. 19) has been a staff writer since 2003. “The Entertainer” is her most recent book. REBECCA MEAD (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 22) is the author of “My Life in Middlemarch,” which comes out this month. JOHN COLAPINTO (“THE REAL-ESTATE ARTIST,” P. 24) will publish his second novel, “An Upright Man,” later this year. JEROME GROOPMAN (“LIVES LESS ORDINARY,” P. 34) is the Recanati Professor at Harvard Medical School. His books include “How Doctors Think” and, with Dr. Pamela Hartzband, “Your Medical Mind.” DANA GOODYEAR (“DEATH DUST,” P. 52), a staff writer, recently published “Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless…

AT FIRST GLANCE, DISCLOSURE’S achievement is simple, and depends on two major decisions. First, the terrifyingly young brothers from Surrey—Guy Lawrence, twenty-two, and Howard Lawrence, nineteen—created a variant of house music that didn’t involve reinventing the genre. On the duo’s début, “Settle,” which came out last year, you’ll hear traces of the different styles of house that have developed in England over the years—two-step’s optimistic skip, bassline’s focussed intensity—but there are no great sonic innovations, or wild formal changes. Second, the duo approached the music less like d.j.s and more like a band, because that’s what they are. “We had our first three singles out before we had ever even touched CDJs”—the turntable of the CD world—“or any kind of dj equipment,” Guy Lawrence wrote via e-mail, “so a live…

415 Union St., Brooklyn (718-522-4340) Black Mountain Wine House, in Carroll Gardens, was designed with two places in mind: Stowe, Vermont, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The owner, Tyler Maganzini, has ties to both—though much of the décor (antique tools, wine keys, jugs) comes from the nineteenth-century Pennsylvania farmhouse where his girlfriend, Regina Myers, who is the manager, grew up; a farmhouse is a farmhouse is a farmhouse. “My parents love the fact that someone’s using stuff from the basement,” Myers says. On a recent Sunday evening, the cabinlike saloon (complete with a clapboard façade and Adirondack chairs out front) offered shelter from the biting chill, warmed by a working fireplace, golden light seeping through animalhide lampshades, and good cheer, as a large party of thirty-somethings heralded a pair of latecomers…

Bill de Blasio has lived in Park Slope since the Dinkins administration. He campaigned as the outer-borough Everyman, working out at the neighborhood Y and walking to the pizza parlor in dad jeans. But now he is the mayor, and he will be moving on up to Gracie Mansion, where he will have a private chef, a driver, and an unbeatable view of the East River. At noon on the first Sunday in January, to do penance for being a populist in fancy digs, de Blasio hosted an open house. Gracie Mansion has long been open to the public, but only to small groups, and for a fee. Tickets for the open house—seven thousand of them—were doled out online, free. Twenty-five hundred people showed up in a freezing drizzle. The…

East Garfield Boulevard, on Chicago’s South Side, could serve as a background in a big-city cop drama: driving just a few blocks, you pass empty lots, a discount muffler shop, a “food and liquor” emporium, and a Tax Service establishment. At the corner of Garfield and Prairie, though, the scene changes. Next to a boarded-up Harold’s Chicken Shack stands a gleaming two-story terracotta building, whose tall windows look into wide, airy rooms with varnished wood floors and paintings on the walls. The building, which opened last March after an ambitious renovation, is the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator. Built in the nineteen-twenties, the structure sat empty for two decades, until Theaster Gates, a Chicago-based conceptual artist whose raw materials include abandoned buildings and houses, persuaded the university to reimagine it…

In September, 2010, Andrew Hamilton, the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, stood before a crowd of dignitaries and announced, “Leonard Blavatnik is a man who has truly lived the American Dream.” Hamilton was presiding over a ceremony to launch the new Blavatnik School of Government, and to celebrate its namesake, who had pledged a hundred and seventeen million dollars to finance its construction. Hamilton’s speech gave the barest elements of an up-by-the-bootstraps story: Columbia University, Harvard Business School, the founding of a “highly successful industrial group.” He didn’t mention that Blavatnik, who was born in Ukraine, had made his fortune in the tumultuous privatization of aluminum and oil that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Blavatnik now lives mostly in London and New York, and his public-relations people strenuously object…

As far back as I can remember, my parents have bothered each other. In India, we lived in two concrete rooms on the roof of a house. The bathroom stood separate from the living quarters. The sink was attached to one of the exterior walls. Each night, my father would stand before the sink, the sky above him full of stars, and brush his teeth until his gums bled. Then he would spit the blood into the sink and turn to my mother and say, “Death, Shuba, death. No matter what we do, we will all die.” “Yes, yes, beat drums,” my mother said once. “Tell the newspapers, too. Make sure everyone knows this thing you have discovered.” Like many people of her generation, those born before Independence, my…

ORFEO, by Richard Powers (Norton). The protagonist of this novel, Peter Els, is an avant-garde composer who, at seventy, takes up garage genomics. He wants to “customize a living thing”—to splice a musical score into the DNA of a bacteria. His home lab is raided by the Department of Homeland Security, and Els flees. The media becomes fixated on the “Biohacker Bach,” as Els, driving cross-country, relives his past and visits his ex-wife, his best friend, and his daughter (his “only decent composition”), whom he abandoned when she was eight. Some aspects of the topical plot seem implausible, but Powers deftly dramatizes the obsession that has defined Els’s life: “How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?” STARTING OVER, by Elizabeth Spencer (Liveright). The title…

WORDS AND DEEDS James Carroll’s article about Pope Francis includes several compelling details, not least that Mary McAleese, the former President of Ireland, called for the Pope to involve ordinary Catholics in the 2014 synod on the family (“Who Am I to Judge?,” December 23rd & 30th). There is a precedent for such involvement. In the nineteen-sixties, Pope Paul VI involved ordinary Catholics in the papal birth-control commission discussion about whether to lift the ban on contraception. A miracle of sorts occurred when these laymen persuaded the Pope’s handpicked clergymen to revoke the ban. Sadly, the findings of the commission were suppressed for fear that they would cause a revolution in the Church and lead to questions about other teachings. These events may cause those in charge of the…

“East Ville des Folies” Webster Hall, which was founded in 1886, has hosted everything from a labor-union rally with the anarchist Emma Goldman to a masquerade ball with the artist Marcel Duchamp. During Prohibition, it was rumored to be owned by Al Capone, and the Jazz Age is being celebrated at this second annual gathering. It features four floors of whiskeys and beers from around the world, burlesque dancers, swinging jazz bands, “Burning Man”-like circus acts, and speakeasy-themed drinking areas. There’ll be a d.j. with a phonograph, and also a photo booth, so that partygoers can memorialize their period attire. Proceeds go to the Third Street Music School Settlement, a nonprofit organization that offers music and dance instruction. (125 E. 11th St. 212-353-1600. websterhall.com/evdf. Jan. 18 at 2:30.) “Ask…

Last week, Americans got a reminder that it sometimes takes lawbreakers with a conscience to bring to light more profound violations. On March 8, 1971, burglars broke into an F.B.I. field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole hundreds of the agency’s files. Nearly forty-three years later, several of them owned up to what they’d done, first in “The Burglary,” a new book by Betty Medsger, a former Washington Post reporter, and then in interviews with the Times. The instigator of the break-in, it turns out, was a Haverford College physics professor named William Davidon, who spoke extensively with Medsger before he died, last November. Among the others who came forward were a married couple, John and Bonnie Raines. In 1971, he was a professor of religion at Temple University, she…

On the first morning of the New Year, a few dozen people stood in a line on the sidewalk in front of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, at 135 West Thirty-first Street. The sky was still dark. Nearby, in an entry to Penn Station, leftover New Year’s Eve partyers lay here and there. Crushed plastic top hats, shish-kebab skewers, ribbons, tassels, and other festive detritus littered the streets. One man waiting in the line wore outsized spectacles that spelled out “2014” in green lights, but he was otherwise as subdued as those around him. They were the early arrivals to the church’s daily breadline, which gives out food, coffee, and sometimes clothes or other necessities every morning at seven o’clock. The breadline has existed since September, 1930, and…

FRENCH FRENCHMAN IN TRAIN COMPART. MENT: Wow, this American guy looks so stupid. SECOND FRENCHMAN IN TRAIN COMPARTMENT: Yes, American guys are all stupid, both in their looks and in their brains. FRENCHMAN: Luckily, he can’t understand what we’re saying, because, most likely, he only speaks English. SECOND FRENCHMAN: That is definitely a safe assumption to make about him. FRENCHMAN: Yes, Americans can only speak English. That is something that I know for sure. It is a fact. SECOND FRENCHMAN: Let’s continue to insult him in front of his dumb American face. FRENCHMAN: Yes, it is so much fun, because it feels at once safe, since he doesn’t speak French, and dangerous, because of his close proximity. ME: Actually, I speak French fluently and I understand what you are saying…

In 1977, the San Joaquin Valley—the swath of agricultural land that runs through central California—was designated a disaster area. Record-low runoff and scant rainfall had created drought conditions. At the beginning of Christmas week, the weather was normal in Bakersfield, the city at the Valley’s southern end, but in the early hours of December 20th a strong wind began to blow from the Great Basin through the Tehachapi Mountains. Hitting the ground on the downslope, it lofted a cloud of loose topsoil and mustard-colored dust into the sky. The plume rose to five thousand feet; dust blotted out the sun four counties away. Traffic on Highway 5, the state’s main artery, stopped. At a certain point, the anemometers failed; the U.S. Geological Survey estimated wind speeds as high as a…

However many holes are in you, always there’s room for another. However much you carry, you can hold more. Like a saint making a joke, imperfection of surface suits you. Your seams remind of quiet tectonic plates. Chthonic corkboard, always beneath even when hung on your vertical side, your waiting thumbtacks seem to me a glittering affection, the mi casa, su casa of a door standing open in every weather of invitation. I apologize to you, corkboard— I, who would like to be more like you in spirit, cover you over with maps, plans, bills. Even these words that praise you further disguise you.…

IIn the British director Andrew Haigh’s first movie, “Weekend,” from 2011, two strangers have a one-night stand that promises to last forever. They collide like pool balls, in bars and beds and kitchens, for days. In many ways, the film is a classical indie romance, with two opposites talking themselves into love. There’s even a kiss by train tracks. But, because they’re both men, a stranger wolf-whistles and yells out a slur, and the more guarded of the two finds himself nearly lunging toward the voice. It was a moment that felt at once discreet and defiantly political. Now Haigh is directing a TV show called “Looking,” for HBO, written by Michael Lannan, and based on Lannan’s short film “Lorimer,” from 2011. Their collaboration is a real beauty, the standout…

ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Charles Bradley Inspired by James Brown, Bradley started singing at fourteen, and he has held on to hopes for a professional career throughout his rough-and-tumble life. He ran away from home as a teen-ager, worked as a cook in Maine, and eventually established himself as a James Brown impersonator in Brooklyn, where, late in life, he was discovered by Gabe Roth, of Daptone Records. In 2011, when he was sixty-two, Bradley released his first studio record, “No Time for Dreaming,” and his second album, “Victim of Love,” came out last year. Bradley’s sound may be a throwback, but his voice has a timeless intensity. (Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. 212-533-2111.…

16 W. 8th St. (212-260-5407) WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO the intellectual cafés of Greenwich Village, where struggling artists could order a cup of coffee (not a Venti), read a newspaper (not an iPad), and talk to someone sitting across from them (not via text message)? Most of those tiny cafés have been priced out of the neighborhood, replaced by the Think Coffees, the La Colombes, the Stumptowns (don’t even mention that other place). Café Nadery is a descendant of those bohemian coffeehouses, with a twist—it’s owned by a collective of some twenty Iranian-Americans, and pays homage to an Iranian landmark. The renowned Naderi Café, built in 1928 in Tehran, was the place where writers and philosophers went to hobnob in its mid-twentieth-century heyday. New York’s Nadery, on West Eighth Street…

The former New York City traffic commissioner Sam Schwartz, who is better known as Gridlock Sam, was away in Aruba last week, but the big news in his field reached him all the same. “Believe it or not, it was on the front page of Aruba Today,” Schwartz said, over the phone. “‘ROAD RAGE,’ with a picture of Chris Christie.” Last September, we now know, Chris Christie’s office, if not the New Jersey governor himself, conspired with the Port Authority to close access lanes to the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, the world’s most heavily trafficked span, apparently out of spite. The targets of this attack, according to e-mails and text messages, were “Buono voters”—that is, Democrats who were likely to vote for Barbara Buono, Christie’s opponent…

Dressed in black, and carrying a frayed silver Kevlar-and-canvas shoulder bag, Anthony Roth Costanzo made his entrance at P.S. 37, in the Bronx, early one Monday morning just as first period was ending. “Getting kids engaged in what’s emotional about opera—that’s what I’m interested in,” Costanzo said as he ascended to the second-floor auditorium entrance. Costanzo, who is thirty-one, is slight of build and vivacious of manner. He visits public schools as often as he can, as part of the Metropolitan Opera’s education-outreach program. As a countertenor—he is appearing in “Die Fledermaus,” at the Metropolitan Opera, in the role of Prince Orlofsky—he has what he calls “this built-in novelty factor.” Twenty-five fifth graders trooped in, and seated themselves on benches onstage. The school serves the Kingsbridge neighborhood, where seventyeight per…

Gwen Lorimier has more than a dozen doctors, overseen by a new kind of pediatrician. Gwen Lorimier is eleven years old and has been in and out of hospitals all her life. When she was one and a half, she was given a diagnosis of a rare disorder of the mitochondria, the tiny structures within cells that generate most of the body’s energy. Viewed under a microscope, her muscle fibres, rather than being neatly arranged in rows, are frayed and disorganized. In cases like Gwen’s, the condition takes an especially hard toll on the liver, the gastrointestinal tract, and other organs and tissues that require large amounts of energy. But when we first met, in the dark-wood surgery library at Boston Children’s Hospital, Gwen showed no outward traces of being…

1 Upon the black hole Cygnus X-1 that wobbles as if boffed by an invisible companion, upon a silk stocking the color of bees rolling itself up down a leg, upon the soft dip over the clavicles, which accept only tongued kisses, upon the tongue that slowly drifts into the other’s mouth and chats there with her opposite number, gravity exerts the precise force needed. 2 In the wings of the Eskimo curlew flapping through the thin air of the Andes, in the sacral vertebrae of the widow who stoops at the window to peer behind the drawn blind, in the saggy skin under the eyes of the woman who is in love with a man incapable of love, who lives on in the heaviness of emotional isolation, in the…

In the nineteen-thirties, one in four Americans got their news from William Randolph Hearst, who lived in a castle and owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities. Hearst’s papers were all alike: hot-blooded, with leggy headlines. Page 1 was supposed to make a reader blurt out, “Gee whiz!” Page 2: “Holy Moses!” Page 3: “God Almighty!” Still, you can yank people around for only so long. Wonder ebbs. Surprise is fleeting. Even rage abates. In 1933, Hearst turned seventy. He started to worry. How would the world remember him when he could no longer dictate the headlines? Ferdinand Lundberg, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, was beginning work on a book about him; no one expected it to be friendly. Hearst therefore did what many a rich, aging megalomaniac…

Chris Pine has startlingly bright blue eyes, thick, dark eyebrows, and a way of seeming to look for something special even when he’s just staring into space—a gift of intentness that works well for him in “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” where he plays the latest incarnation of the intellectually dazzling C.I.A.- analyst hero of many books by Tom Clancy. Early in the movie, a thug tries to kill Ryan in a Moscow hotel, and Pine also gives a successful impression of a man frightened to death—eyes darting wildly, mouth open wider than most acting coaches would advise. He’s an enjoyably talented actor in these early scenes. Like “Batman Begins,” “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” and “Man of Steel,” the new movie begins as a myth of conception, or, as it’s more commonly…