Innholdsfortegnelse for May 16, 2016 i The New Yorker

Bayou N’ Brooklyn Music Festival The Louisiana spirit descends on King’s County for a three-day festival of Creole and Cajun food, music, and entertainment. The sixth annual Bayou N’ Brooklyn Music Festival gathers top talent, both local and Louisiana-native, for workshops, dance lessons, and a jambalaya supper. On Friday, Blake Miller and Courtney Granger perform; on Saturday, a community jam and open stage invites the best local players; and Sunday closes out the fest with the C’est Bon Cajun Dance Band and the Dirty Water Dogs. (Jalopy Theatre and School of Music, 315 Columbia St., Brooklyn. bayou-n-brooklyn.com. May 13-15.) Spring Fling Lincoln Center hosts this spring welcome weekend, which invites parents to bring their children out to the plazas for an afternoon of activities and performances. The Fling offers…

Alexandre Alajbegovic, a thirtytwo-year-old Frenchman, strolled through the campus of Columbia University the other day, freshly arrived from Lourmarin, a small town the color of a sunset, concealed in the hills above the Côte d’Azur, where Albert Camus is buried, and where Alajbegovic helps manage the writer’s estate. Camus made a similar voyage to New York when he was thirty-two, in 1946, on his only visit to the U.S. The war had ended, and Camus watched with relief, from the deck of the S.S. Oregon, as the “very edge of a wounded earth” receded and gave way, several weeks later, to the “orgy of violent lights” of Manhattan. He complained that he was the only passenger to be detained at immigration—the F.B.I. had heard that he ran a Paris newspaper…

I do not think you cannot have meant I assume it’s in error it comes to my attention it rises from the muck it sways elephantine in a Gulf Stream breeze you surely meant other you must have encountered others you are much mistaken in this and in all other circumstances I assume it’s in error I cannot think you mean to suggest it comes from a childhood spent waiting for someone to notice it comes from an unexamined life it clings to your skin like gold leaf there is no other explanation for your hubris your Jacobean politics your glitter and spit I assume it’s in error you cannot mean what I have meant but I have taken it back you must take it back also you must scoop…

Cole Kennedy moved to New York a year ago. He was twenty-three and had recently graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in English. He applied for copywriting jobs all over, and assumed that he’d end up in the Midwest. “Moving to New York seemed cool, but it was, like, a thing that happens to other people,” he told me. Then his lottery ticket arrived: a paid internship at Foursquare, the search-and-discovery app, which is based in Manhattan. First stop: Craigslist, for a place to live. Kennedy was unfamiliar with the city’s neighborhoods, but he’d seen HBO’s “Girls,” and, he said, “I pretty much knew I was going to be in Brooklyn.” He checked out one-bedroom apartments in Williamsburg, where the average monthly rent is around three thousand…

When You Were Mine Nothing passed us by. Baby, you’re much too fast. In 1990 we had us an early 80s party— nostalgic already, I dug out my best OPs & two polos, fluorescent, worn simultaneously— collar up, pretend preppy. When Blondie came on— Rapture, be pure— things really got going & then the dancing got shut down by some square. What was sleep even for? Housequake What was sleep even for? The year before, a freshman, I threw a Prince party, re-screwed the lights red & blue— the room all purple, people dancing everywhere—clicked PLAY on the cassette till we slow-sweated to “Erotic City” or “Do Me Baby.” I’m going down to Alphabet Street. Did anyone sleep alone that night? “I Feel For You.” Shut up already, damn— cabbage…

The landscape architect Adriaan Geuze hopped onto the grass, cupping his hands to his ears. “You can hear a million insects,” he said, in his vowelly Dutch accent. “You think, Wow, you are in the jungle.” I heard crickets, birds, a passing jet. Purple and yellow wildflowers crowded the edges of the asphalt path where I was standing, which was dramatically lined with snow-white concrete. Not quite a jungle, but it was hard to believe that we were seven minutes from lower Manhattan, deposited by ferry on Governors Island. The island has shimmered with architectural possibility since being sold back to the people of New York for a dollar, in 2003. Now, because of Geuze, when you pass from the island’s historic district through a vaulted archway in Liggett Hall,…

The side door of the police van slid open, rattling, and he was shoved inside. There were seven or eight men already sitting on the floor in the dark, their wrists handcuffed behind them. Nobody said anything. The van started with a jerk, then picked up speed. His legs were stretched out in front of him, and he tried to use his cuffed hands to balance himself, but the plastic cuffs tightened, and he and the other men went rolling across the floor like loose bottles. This was the first time that Gautama had been arrested. Before calling the prostitute, he had Googled the number in the ad to make sure that it wasn’t being used by the police. In the van, he remembered how, as he was being hurried…

Guapa, by Saleem Haddad (Other Press). Rasa, the narrator of this vibrant, wrenching début novel, is a young gay man living in an unnamed Arab city. During the Arab Spring, he joined protests, but now an autocratic regime rules while zealots seethe in the slums. Worse, Rasa’s fiercely traditional grandmother has just seen him with his lover, and his lover is growing distant. In the course of a day, as Rasa hunts for a missing friend, who has likely been hauled in by the vice squad, his city and his memories roil, sensuous and caustic, full of smoke and blood. A lavish political wedding that forms the book’s final set piece brings revelations and epiphanies, but they don’t feel forced. Hard Red Spring, by Kelly Kerney (Viking). This century-spanning…

FAMILY MATTERS Siddhartha Mukherjee, in his article on genetics and mental illness, reflects that our psychoses, anxieties, and manias, however destructive, are inextricable parts of our identity (“Runs in the Family,” March 28th). The complexities of the “self” is a conversation we begin even in childhood. In my school cafeteria, a group of classmates began talking about a friend who had been prescribed antidepressants to treat manic depression. Having grown up with a mother who suffered from clinical depression, I suggested that maybe she needed the medication, saying, “It might make her brain go back to how it should be.” But other friends insisted, “When she takes the pills, she’s just not herself anymore.” Like Mukherjee noticing his uncle’s sweetness despite his schizophrenia, we could see the paradox of…

Last Monday afternoon, in Trump Tower, twenty floors up from the Trump campaign headquarters, Donald Trump, Jr., surveyed his desk, on which sat a bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt, a rifle cradled in his arm and a Cape-buffalo skull at his feet. “He was a big hunter and started much of the conservation movement in this country, which is why we have as much public land as we do,” Trump, Jr., said, adding that, as “a brash New Yorker,” Roosevelt might seem “an unlikely advocate” for such things. “But he was all about getting away from the city and out into the woods.” On a table lay a camo cap bearing the words “Make America Great Again.” Trump, Jr., the thirty-eight-year-old eldest son of the presumptive Republican candidate for President,…

If you listened only to speeches from the Presidential campaign trail, you’d come away with the strong impression that, eight years after the financial crisis, Wall Street reform has been a bust. Every Republican candidate called Dodd-Frank, the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s reform effort, a dismal failure. Donald Trump called it “terrible”; Ted Cruz said that it had only helped “the big banks get bigger and bigger and bigger.” Hillary Clinton has been tepid in her defense of Dodd-Frank, and Bernie Sanders called it “a very modest piece of legislation” that changed little about the way the Street does business. Tell that to the bankers. Banks performed dismally last year, and their 2016 first-quarter-earnings reports show that this one is off to an even worse start. Returns on equity…

This spring, I donated to Dress for Success a box of high heels that I—over decades—almost bankrupted myself for: four-inch sandals with leafy vines that twine up your leg, five-inch leopard pumps I could lurch about five feet in. The money I spent on them might have freed me to retire by now. And had the high heel never bulldozed its way back into popularity, in the nineteen-fifties, thanks to designers like Dior, who never suffered a woman’s social mandate of daily wear, I wouldn’t be visiting a pricey podiatrist. Add on the four-figure plaster foot cast, which gets tossed at year’s end, because the bastards know your beleaguered and bunioned foot will keep spreading like yeasty dough. The neuroma between metatarsals will inflame more nerve endings. (For the uninitiated,…

Dancing. Ban dancing. Break its legs and bury it. And don’t make me do it. Don’t make me dance. Jesus, the indignity. I’d sooner defecate on live TV than dance at your wedding. I vaguely remember my first visit to a night club; must’ve been around 1988. I was seventeen and sober; the music was shockingly loud and my limbs had no idea what was expected of them. I tried to join in, but it was immediately clear that this was a physical language I was never going to grasp. A hundred years later and nothing has changed. People who dance voluntarily are unknowably alien to me. I don’t relate. See, I’m awkward at the best of times. Expecting me to coördinate my movements in time to music, in what…

I hereby uninvent the conference call. That’s right, there is now no means by which six or twenty or— God forbid—a hundred people can all meet and discuss a topic over the phone. Personally, I feel like that brief sentence alone should be enough for anyone to pause and think, Multiple people trying to speak at once? That sounds unwieldy and inefficient. It is. But, for those of you who need further convincing that we can do away with conference calling, allow me to explain. Imagine this: You are collaborating on a project with a group of people who live in different cities or work in separate spaces. In an e-mail, someone blithely suggests, “Let’s set up a call.” Thirty to a thousand e-mails later, a day and a time…

A familiar Victorian superstition claims that a mirror’s reflection captures a portion of the soul; breaking a mirror, therefore, injures the spirit of the person who broke it. For this reason, the use of a mirror entailed a set of safety guidelines and instructions: if a relative had recently died, mirrors in the home would be covered to prevent his or her soul from becoming trapped, and children under two years of age were to avoid them, as their souls were still developing and could be stolen entire. These days, we no longer shield our souls from the mirrors in our home, but the residue of old phobias lingers in the anxiety with which we approach our reflection. We seek the mirror’s approval, we fear what it has to tell…

It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely novelist than Samuel Richardson. The son of a carpenter, he attended school only intermittently until he was seventeen, when his formal education ended and he was apprenticed to a printer. He didn’t publish his first novel until after he turned fifty. The undertaking was almost accidental. He had become the proprietor of a printing press when, in 1739, two London booksellers asked him to put together a “letter-writer,” an etiquette manual consisting of letters that “country readers” might use as models for their own correspondence. Richardson quickly expanded the project’s scope. A diligent worker who had risen from tradesman to middle-class property owner, he longed to impart what he had learned. He wanted, he wrote in the book’s introduction, to teach readers not…

The Toronto rapper and singer Drake got his big break in 2009, back when describing someone as both a rapper and a singer still seemed like a way to undermine his credibility. That year, he released “So Far Gone,” a mixtape that showcased him as a oneman distillation of modern hip-hop and R. & B. In the past, the impassive outlaw rapper and the gushing doe-eyed singer crossed paths only as a way of combining their genres’ respective charms for a hit single. Drake cracked the code: he collapsed the distance between these archetypes, seeming equally comfortable rhyming about dodging bullets and baring his insecurities in a come-hither hook. There had been artists before him, like Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott, who toggled between rapping and singing. But what distinguished…

New York City pigeons get a bad rap. But for every Woody Allen, who dismissed them onscreen as “rats with wings,” there’s a Nikola Tesla, who fell in love with a female bird that flew into his room at the St. Regis. The artist Duke Riley sides with ardor in “Fly by Night,” his new piece for Creative Time. Each weekend until June 12, Riley will tie little L.E.D. lights to two thousand homing pigeons and release them at sunset from a Vietnam-era aircraft carrier, docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Somewhere, Tesla is smiling. ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Metropolitan Museum “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World” Closed for renovations until 2019, Berlin’s Pergamon Museum has sent the Met its greatest marbles and effigies from the…

Some evenings ago, a pair of drinkers moored themselves at the bar of this cocktail lounge, at the bottom of a long staircase, reached through an unassuming black door on Lafayette Street, near Grand. There are no prizes for guessing the decorative theme of the Ship, but, thankfully, it’s not so excessively nautical as to present a drowning risk: benches and booths are subtly upholstered with off-white sails, and large ships’ vents hang from the two-story-high ceiling, like Cyclopean worms poking their heads in to check out the space. It’s where Captain Haddock would meet Tintin, if he trimmed his beard and had a loft in SoHo. The conditions outside were cold and windy, so the Where There’s Smoke ($14), a “steamed” mix of mezcal, pear liqueur, lemon juice, and…

Nine years after the popping of the last real-estate bubble, we may be in the latter stages of another. The market for super-luxury apartments that no one ever seems to occupy (let’s call them billionaeries) has softened, but in the first quarter of 2016, for the first time ever, the average—average—sale price of an apartment in Manhattan was more than two million dollars. The high costs still trickle down. Low interest rates manifest as tall towers, steep rents, vacant storefronts, and long commutes. How does this make us feel about elevators? Vertical-transportation enthusiasts often remind us that elevators enable height, and therefore density, and therefore energy efficiency and cultural ferment—urbanity itself. Opponents of tall buildings, sometimes citing Jane Jacobs, say that they cast a pall over neighborhoods, like gated communities…

At Trail Ridge Middle School, which is forty minutes north of Denver, in Longmont, the old Colorado is giving way to the new. A stuffed grizzly that once stood at the entrance has been banished to a dusky back hallway, and many of the students are the children of tech workers. On a recent weekday morning, Anna Mills, a sixthgrade science teacher, shouted from the front of the classroom, “Grab your iPads and your Spheros!” When her command didn’t work, she clapped twice, and this code was successful: her two dozen students clapped back, roughly in unison, and began getting up from their desks. Mills had divided her class into groups of three, and the leaders of each trio hurried over to a counter where ten Spheros—milky white orbs about…

On a bitter, soul-shivering, damp, biting gray February day in Cleveland—that is to say, on a February day in Cleveland—a handless man is handling a nonexistent ball. Igor Spetic lost his right hand when his forearm was pulped in an industrial accident six years ago and had to be amputated. In an operation four years ago, a team of surgeons implanted a set of small translucent “interfaces” into the neural circuits of his upper arm. This afternoon, in a basement lab at a Veterans Administration hospital, the wires are hooked up directly to a prosthetic hand—plastic, flesh-colored, five-fingered, and articulated—that is affixed to what remains of his arm. The hand has more than a dozen pressure sensors within it, and their signals can be transformed by a computer into electric…

The other day I saw my father, who is ninety-two years old, and in very poor health. Physically, he’s a wreck, and mentally he’s not much better. At his peak, he was a capable and intelligent man, by nature rational to the point of coldness. But the other day he was full of childlike fear of the darkness that lay ahead. He’s religious, in an austere way. So I knew what he meant. “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “You’re a good man, and you lived a good life.” In fact, neither thing was true. But what else could I say? I’m sure he said the same to his own father, for the same reasons, and with the same reservations. Don’t we all? Ten thousand fathers ago, we would have said…

It’s not personal. I never learned anything in the Saturday-morning Chinese school I was forced to attend as a child, but that’s not what motivates my choice here. There were plenty of reasons for my poor performance in those classes—my resentment at having to miss the “Super Friends” cartoon being just one of them—so I don’t blame Chinese characters for my failure. No, my objection is a practical one: I’m a fan of literacy, and Chinese characters have been an obstacle to literacy for millennia. With a phonetic writing system like an alphabet or a syllabary, you need only learn a few dozen symbols and you can read most everything printed in a newspaper. With Chinese characters, you have to learn three thousand. And writing is even more difficult than…