Innholdsfortegnelse for May 30, 2016 i The New Yorker

Patrick Radden Keefe (“The Bank Robber,” p. 36), the author of “The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream,” is a staff writer. Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 17) received the 2015 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism for his New Yorker columns on race, politics, and social justice. Jack Handey (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 27) has written several humor books, including the recently self-published volume “Squeaky Poems: Rhymes About My Rat.” Reeves Wiedeman (“A Full Revolution,” p. 28) is a writer living in New York. Nicholas Schmidle (The Talk of the Town, p. 18) joined the staff of The New Yorker in 2012. R. Kikuo Johnson (Cover) is an illustrator and a cartoonist who teaches cartooning at the Rhode Island School of Design.…

In the program booklets of the New York Philharmonic, it is the house style to leave out a composer’s first name if the person is deceased. “BRAHMS,” “SCHUMANN,” or “CRAWFORD,” for example, belong to history: a boldly upper-cased escutcheon provides all the information necessary. But many in the contemporary-music community will feel a tug of the heart when, during the new edition of the NY Phil Biennial (through June 11), the name “STUCKY” appears all alone, without the “Steven”— though it could have been just “Steve,” the appellation by which this superb composer was known to a legion of grateful and admiring colleagues. The inclusion of music by Stucky (who died in February) in the Biennial, curated this time by the Philharmonic’s music director, Alan Gilbert, along with its composer-in-residence,…

Paul Burton, a retired British commando, was in Washington, D.C., recently to brief a group of journalists on how they might survive a week in Cleveland. “Don’t wear black,” he said. “You don’t want to look like one of those anarchist photographers.” Burton took part in the invasion of the Falkland Islands and ran operations in Northern Ireland. He is now the training director for Global Journalist Security, an outfit that specializes in preparing reporters and aid workers for hostile environments. That often means war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq, but Burton, having noted the scuffles that have been breaking out at Donald Trump’s rallies, designed a new course specifically for journalists covering the upcoming Conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia. “Trump’s supporters have been primed to be aggressive,” Burton told…

Robert Wilson, the veteran experimental-theatre director, is celebrated for his attention to light—for spending hours making fractional adjustments to tone and color. Who better, then, to comment on the photic implications of the proliferation of cell phones in contemporary life? “Take them away, and throw them right in the middle of the Hudson River,” Wilson declared one recent afternoon, while creating an experiential installation for Hermès, the luxury-goods company, in a warehouse in Chelsea. “It’s only a block and a half away,” he continued. “Throw away every one of them. It drives me crazy.” He brought up an opera that he had created with Philip Glass: “I did ‘Einstein on the Beach’ in ’76, and I had everyone onstage doing this”—he stuck a finger out in front of him and…

One night in April, at the Pacific Rim Championships, in Everett, Washington, the nineteen-year-old American gymnast Simone Biles approached the balance beam. A competitor from New Zealand had just finished her floor routine, set to the theme from “Game of Thrones,” and now Biles, who wore a pink leotard studded with more than four thousand Swarovski crystals, looked sternly down the length of the four-inch-wide balance beam, on which she was about to perform nine flips. “It comes down to this,” Al Trautwig, the NBC commentator, said. That wasn’t strictly true. Biles was one of the last medal contenders to compete, but she was so far ahead in the competition that anything short of catastrophe would earn her gold. Since the world last paid attention to gymnastics, at the 2012…

At Oberlin, it started in December, when the temperatures ran high, although the weeping willows and the yellow poplars that had flared in the fall were bare already. Problems had a tendency to escalate. There was, to name one thing, the food fight: students had noted the inauthenticity of food at the school’s Afrikan Heritage House, and followed up with an on-site protest. (Some international students, meanwhile, complained that cafeteria dishes such as sushi and bánh mì were prepared with the wrong ingredients, making a mockery of cultural cuisine.) There was scrutiny of the curriculum: a student wanted trigger warnings on “Antigone.” And there was all the world outside. A year earlier, a black boy with a pellet gun named Tamir Rice was killed by a police officer thirty miles…

THE REGULATORS Siddhartha Mukherjee’s article about twins and epigenetics misrepresents the processes by which genes are regulated and how the environment influences the genome (“Same but Different,” May 2nd). Mukherjee centers his article on the work of David Allis and Danny Reinberg, who think that “epigenetic” mechanisms play a causative, instructive role in gene regulation. But many researchers consider these mechanisms to be downstream processes, secondary to the work of proteins called transcription factors, which turn genes on or off. Ignoring the vast body of work on gene regulation from the past half century, Mukherjee gives the lay reader the impression that “epigenetics” is providing new answers to an unsolved problem in biology, when scientists already have a very good understanding of how the environment influences the genome. (And,…

“The vision, for me, is to make Flushing world-class,” Helen Lee, the co-owner of this Queens cocktail lounge, said on a recent Thursday night. The rooftop bar, opened by Lee and her business partner Todd Leong last year, makes a compelling case for that dream: it’s refined but comfortable (warm woods, flattering light) and disarmingly luxe. The parking lot below is an expensive game of Tetris played with Bentleys, Porsches, and MacLarens. (“Like the baby strollers?” Lee asked Leong. “Like the racecar,” he responded.) But around the corner soup dumplings at Nan Xiang are still $5.25. When pressed about the disparity, Lee asked, “Do you know the term fuerdai?” Indeed, the neighborhood known for blue-collar Asian immigrants is making way for China’s billionaire youth. (They could afford Park Avenue, Lee…

Beware nineteen-eighties nostalgia. For every welcome return of Pee-wee Herman or “Ghostbusters,” there’s a revival of “Cats” or a Hulk Hogan sex tape lurking in the wings. At the head of the worst-of-the-eighties parade, of course, is Donald Trump, whose political rise has given New Yorkers enough flashbacks to the “greed is good” era to last a lifetime. Have we entered some kind of thirty-year wormhole? Perhaps inevitably, signs have pointed to a comeback for another eighties billionaire supervillain: Leona Helmsley. The hotel empress, whose iron-fisted management style earned her the nickname the Queen of Mean, grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of a hatmaker, and married the real-estate developer Harry B. Helmsley in 1972. In ad campaigns, she cast herself as the nitpicking monarch of the Helmsley Palace Hotel…

As Dana Geraghty recalls it, March 16th was a “rather quiet Wednesday.” That afternoon, she was in her cubicle at the Open Society Foundations, on West Fifty-seventh Street, where she helps oversee the nonprofit group’s pro-democracy programs in Eurasia. The Foundations are the philanthropic creation of George Soros, the hedge-fund billionaire, who is a prominent donor to liberal causes, including Hillary Clinton’s Presidential bid. Soros, who has spent nineteen million dollars on the 2016 Presidential campaign, is regarded with suspicion by many conservatives. National Review has suggested that he may be fomenting protests against Donald Trump by secretly funding what it called a “rent-a-mob.” Geraghty, who is twenty-eight, had programmed her office phone to forward messages from unfamiliar callers to her e-mail inbox. She was about to review several messages…

The climate is pretty. I wrote everything on it. That’s the activity where it gets relatively inauspicious. They all got your e-mail, looking presidential or not. I’ve been meaning to pick up a bag of lettuce on my way home. This is the thing that I needed, where he relates. On an emulsion? Well, there are worse things to build on. ‘Cause I’m not going to. What’s it supposed to be of? Why so many engineered? The account is unreceivable. People also look for “just not rollicking.” Which is my advice to you in my capacity as “can’t do that any more.” It was O.K. but it was hurting. Norma Face Card offered a million but you had to wear contrasting piping. And you were sitting there in the night…

Once upon a time, there was a man whose therapist thought it would be a good idea for the man to work through some stuff by telling a story about that stuff. The man lived in a one-bedroom efficiency cottage all by himself, in a sort of dicey part of town. One day, the man woke up and realized that this was pretty much it for him. It wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t great, either. And not likely to improve. The man was smart enough to realize this, yet not quite smart enough to do anything about it. He lived out the rest of his days and eventually died. The end. Happy now? The man could see that his therapist was not amused. A rather unsatisfactory ending, the therapist opined,…

In Yaa Gyasi’s début novel, “Homegoing” (Knopf), a boy greeting the line of mourners at his grandfather’s funeral encounters a beautiful girl. “Respectfully, I will not shake the hand of a slaver,” she says, withholding the customary gesture of condolence. The boy, James, is dumbfounded. Both of them are West Africans, members of the Akan people, although she is Asante, from the interior of what we now call Ghana, and he is Fante, from the coast. “James had spent his whole life listening to his parents argue about who was better, Asante or Fante, but the matter could never come down to slaves,” Gyasi writes. “The Asante had power from capturing slaves. The Fante had protection from trading them. If the girl could not shake his hand, then, surely, she…

Anna Magnani overflowed with vital energy in comedy and tragedy alike, as seen in Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective (through June 1). She gained international fame in Roberto Rossellini’s Second World War drama “Rome, Open City,” but her career (and his) soon changed course. Their next collaboration, “L’Amore,” from 1948, includes an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s play “The Human Voice,” in which Magnani spends nearly a half hour on the phone. The stakes were different, but Magnani’s passion remained intact. THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS An Act of God Sean Hayes stars in a return engagement of David Javerbaum’s comedy, in which the Almighty comes down to earth to clear up a few misconceptions. Joe Mantello directs. (Booth, 222 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. Previews begin May 28.) Cirque…

Lower East Side Festival Not only can this long-standing free New York event claim true roots on the Lower East Side, as of this year it’s reached the legal drinking age. The twenty-first annual festival takes place this Memorial Day weekend, hosted by the community cultural center and playhouse Theatre for the New City. An array of local actors, musicians, dancers, aerialists, and artists celebrate their neighborhood pride: highlights include an immersive theatre experience about city violence, staged by the songwriter and playwright Ian Ellis James, formerly of “Sesame Street”; a performance by the environmentally minded composer David Avram; and an appearance by the multifaceted club performer Phoebe Legere, whose blend of Tin Pan Alley musicality and bedazzled stage antics still echo in the work of Lady Gaga and…

Being Roy Kim is either remarkable or unremarkable, depending on the day, because Roy Kim is famous only in certain places. In South Korea, his face has appeared on billboards advertising Cass beer, and his fans, who call themselves Royroses, frequently propose marriage via Twitter. In Washington, D.C., he is an anonymous student, albeit an unusually handsome one, with perfect skin. On a recent spring day, he walked east into Georgetown the neighborhood from Georgetown the university, where he is a sophomore. He entered a café, ordered a coffee, drank it, and left, all without attracting attention. “In Seoul, or even in, like, Koreatown in L.A., this wouldn’t really be possible,” he said. Kim, who is twenty-three, is a Korean musician, and Korean-language pop—K-pop—is a global sensation. But, Kim explained,…

A few days before Christmas in 2008, Hervé Falciani was in a meeting at his office, in Geneva, when a team of police officers arrived to arrest him. Falciani, who was thirty-six, worked for H.S.B.C., then the largest bank in the world. He was on the staff of the company’s private Swiss bank, which serves clients who are wealthy enough to afford the minimum deposit—half a million dollars—required to open an account. Falciani had been at H.S.B.C. for eight years, initially in Monaco and then in Geneva. He was a computer technician who helped supervise security systems for the handling of client data. He had grown up in Monaco, where as a young man he had worked as a croupier at the Casino de Monte-Carlo, and developed an excellent poker…

O n the early May evening I saw Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter’s “Formation” tour, at Houston’s NRG Stadium, the dominant feature, onstage and off, was ass. It was a warm night. Before the show began, clusters of young black and Hispanic women lingered outside the vast auditorium, sporting outfits— pom-pom shorts, close-fitting skirts, Spanxless silk trousers—that both suited the weather and showcased the part of their anatomy that the voluptuous thirty-four-year-old Houston-born star first celebrated way back when black was starting to be beautiful—again. Beyoncé’s first group, Destiny’s Child, went through a few incarnations before finally hitting on the successful, no doubt Supremes-inspired, TLC-tinged formula of Beyoncé on lead vocals, with Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams singing backup. The band released its first album in 1998, when Beyoncé was sixteen, and…

The Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota (Knopf). Sahota’s second novel, short-listed for last year’s Man Booker Prize, chronicles in immersive detail the lives of Indian immigrants in Sheffield. Three men, in England illegally, live in an overcrowded house with other recent arrivals, working long hours at construction sites and takeout counters. Nearby, a devout Sikh woman lives alone, in constant fear that the immigration authorities will discover that her marriage to one of the men was purely to get him a visa. Sahota is a clear-eyed, unflinching storyteller, switching seamlessly between the characters’ desperate present circumstances and the crises at home that led to their migration. The book is a major achievement, a compassionate tale about the cruelties of twenty-first-century immigrant life. And After the Fire, by…