Innholdsfortegnelse for December 19, 2016 i The New Yorker

Judith Thurman ( “Visionaries: Grete Stern,” p. 100) is the author of several books, including “Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire,” a collection of essays. John Lahr (“Act of Grace,” p. 52) has written for the magazine since 1991. Elif Batuman (“Visionaries: Epictetus,” p. 84) is the author of “The Idiot,” her first novel, which will be out in March. Alan Burdick (“Present Tense,” p. 68), a staff writer, was previously a senior editor at the magazine. His book “Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation” will be published in January. Negar Azimi (“The Gulf Art War,” p. 74) is a senior editor at Bidoun, an artsand-culture magazine focussing on the Middle East. Reporting and photography for this article was facilitated by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on…

Holiday Train Show The New York Botanical Garden converts more than two hundred and fifty acres into a captivating train show, where models race through miniature landmarks, including the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and Rockefeller Center, made from natural materials. (2900 Southern Blvd., the Bronx. 718-817-8700. Through Jan. 16.) Make Music Winter Participants fill the streets with seasonal sounds at this annual parade. Now in its sixth year, the outdoor celebration groups hundreds of revellers for carols by headlamp and roadside jams. At City Hall Park, expect kalimbas, chimes, and handbells; B.Y.O.P. (bring your own percussion) to Washington Square Park for an Afrobeat drumline; and download a free app, designed by the composers Lainie Fefferman, Jascha Narveson, and Cameron Britt, that twinkles, strums, and splashes along to…

There are many reasons to worry about what a Trump Administration holds in store for women. The President-elect has vowed to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v. Wade. Some states will be emboldened to impose restrictive new laws that can become test cases; the Ohio legislature did so last week, passing a bill that effectively bans abortions, with no exception for rape or incest, after six weeks of pregnancy—a point at which many women do not yet know they are pregnant. Janet Porter, an activist against the “criminalization of Christianity,” who has been pushing for the Ohio law since 2011, said, “It’s a brand-new day with a Trump-appointed Supreme Court, and we are very hopeful.” Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are feeling bullish about finally achieving a…

Amy and Carl (both pseudonyms) had never met before they decided to move in together earlier this year. Amy was a twenty-four-year-old Upper East Sider with a live-in boyfriend, and Carl was a fiftysomething security guard with two kids. What brought them together was the fact that they have lazy eyes— Amy’s left, Carl’s right. A neuroscientist, Elizabeth Quinlan, of the University of Maryland, had found a way to treat lazy eyes in rodents by exposing them to an extended period of darkness, after which their brains readjusted to the light, like infants learning to see for the first time. A team led by Quinlan and Ben Backus, of the SUNY College of Optometry, had secured National Institutes of Health funding for a human trial, but, after a search lasting…

MOTOWN WAS HEADQUARTERED in Detroit, and so the Motown metaphors are industrial: the record label was a machine, a factory, an assembly line fitting songs together, part by part. But the heart of the company was human, and much of the art it produced can be traced to the exertions of two brothers, Brian and Eddie Holland, and their friend Lamont Dozier. With all due respect to Smokey Robinson, the Motown Sound as we know it was created by Holland-Dozier-Holland. “Heat Wave,” “Baby Love,” “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You),” and all the others: looking over a list of their best songs is like reading a snatch of pages from the American Songbook. In the eighth or ninth grade, when I decided to be the kind of…

THE STOIC PHILOSOPHER Epictetus was born a slave, around 55 A.D., in the Greco-Roman spa town of Hierapolis—present-day Pamukkale, Turkey. I first encountered his teachings in 2011, shortly after moving from San Francisco to Istanbul. I lived alone on a university campus in a forest. In the midst of a troubled long-distance relationship, I sometimes went days without talking to anyone but my boyfriend’s disembodied head on Skype. I was demoralized by Turkish politics, which made both secularists and religious people feel like victims. If you were a woman, no matter what you were wearing—décolleté or a head scarf—someone would give you a dirty look. The first line of Epictetus’ manual of ethical advice, the Enchiridion—“Some things are in our control and others not”—made me feel that a weight was…

WHEN HULK HOGAN faced off in court against the Web site Gawker, earlier this year, it was easy to become distracted by the rococo tawdriness of the spectacle. After all, the case centered on the leak of a surreptitiously videotaped sexual encounter between Hogan, the professional wrestler, and the wife of his erstwhile best friend, who is named Bubba the Love Sponge. The trial, which took place in St. Petersburg in March, laid out a sordid tale of betrayal and exposure, told mostly by Hogan, whose lavishly mustachioed visage remains one of the prominent faces of the sport of pro wrestling. (Hogan, who is now sixty- three, prefers to characterize wrestling as “sports entertainment,” because promoters stage matches in advance.) Even after the jury’s verdict—a gargantuan award of a hundred…

IT’S HARDER TO breathe in the humid north, up there so close to Brazil and Paraguay, the rushing river guarded by mosquito sentinels and a sky that can turn from limpid blue to stormy black in minutes. You start to struggle as soon as you arrive, as if a brutal arm were wound around your chest, squeezing. And everything is slower; during siesta there is only a rare bicycle in the empty streets, the ice-cream shops seem abandoned, with their ceiling fans spinning for no one, and the chicharras shriek hysterically in their hiding places. I’ve never seen a chicharra. My aunt says they’re horrible creatures, spectacular flies with green wings that vibrate and smooth black eyes that seem to look right at you. I don’t like the word chicharra.…

IN THE SUMMER of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was dismayed by what he learned. For a generation, the U.S. government had been lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. He put the first of the volumes in his briefcase, praying that the security guards at…

PROSECUTORIAL ETHICS 101 Stephanie Clifford, in her eye-opening piece about the former New York Police Department detective Peter Forcelli and the wrongful-conviction case of Edward Garry, which is winding its way through the judicial system, says that “there is no manual that Forcelli could write that would stop police departments from pressuring detectives for results or prosecutors from taking on dubious cases” (“A Shot to the Heart,” October 24th). Actually, such a manual does exist for prosecutors: the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which has been adopted by more than a dozen states in the country, including New York. One rule states that the prosecutor in a criminal case “shall refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause.” In…

MARK ROTHKO was a great artist with highfalutin aims, which he summarized, in 1956, as “tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” That’s a lot to claim for fuzzy rectangles on paper or canvas. But at least the “and so on” holds true. No other painter can occasion feelings so intense, so directly. His pictures are emphatically objects. They are in scale with a viewer’s body, but their color and brushwork have a disembodying effect. You may endorse the artist’s terms for this flustering tension, at a risk of tipping sensation into sentimentality. But his best work will unsettle even a skeptic’s rational ken. The drama persists, though with diminished power, in “Rothko: Dark Palette,” at the Pace gallery (on view through Jan. 7), a show that is long on doom.…

The rich history of Chumley’s precedes its latest iteration. Opened during Prohibition, in 1922, by the activist Lee Chumley, the bar was a reliable place to get a stiff drink for writers including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and Dylan Thomas. It even has its own contribution to the lexicon, as the birthplace of the term “eighty-sixed,” derived from the back door at 86 Bedford Street, through which patrons were advised to skedaddle when the police were en route. Chumley’s lived on for decades as a boozy dive proud of its literary history, with sawdust on the floor, grungy graffiti- carved wooden tables, and book jackets lining the walls, until 2007, when a major chimney mishap caused extensive structural damage. This fall, it finally reopened, reimagined by the…

Alex Susong Jones—“Susong is Anglicized French, or so I’m told”— was born in Greeneville, Tennessee, to a newspaper family. His grandmother founded the Greeneville Sun; his father became its publisher. “It was something I grew up in,” Jones said the other day. “Eight years old, melting pig iron for the letterpress machine—OSHA would have had a fit.” When Jones grew up, he covered the newspaper business for the Times (byline: Alex S. Jones). He won a Pulitzer, wrote two books, became the inaugural host of NPR’s “On the Media,” and then took a job at Harvard, as the director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. “Soon after I started there, I got a call in my office,” he said. “This was shortly after 9/11. The…

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump made many promises he doubtless won’t keep and a few he apparently doesn’t remember. But his nomination of Representative Tom Price, a hard-core conservative from Georgia, to be Secretary of Health and Human Services is a sign that repealing Obamacare is one promise he’d like to carry out. In every Congress since the Affordable Care Act was passed, Price has sponsored a bill to replace it. And there’s something else that should worry supporters of Obamacare: he’s a doctor. To be fair, that makes Price more qualified than most of Trump’s Cabinet picks. But doctors have a history of opposing health-care reform of all kinds. The most famous instance is the American Medical Association’s campaign against the creation of Medicare. (In 1961, it hired…

SOME NIGHTS—more than I like, lately— I wake to the sound of the bedside clock. The room is dark, without detail, and it expands in such a way that it seems as if I’m outdoors, under an empty sky, or underground, in a cavern. I might be falling through space. I might be dreaming. I could be dead. Only the clock moves, its tick steady, unhurried. At these moments I have the most chilling understanding that time moves in only one direction. I’m tempted to look at the clock, but I already know that it’s the same time it always is: 4 a.m., or 4:10 a.m., or once, for a disconcerting stretch of days, 4:27 a.m. Even without looking, I could deduce the time from the ping of the bedroom…

Refugio from Mexico is not Mexico, nor is every man who makes other men small in the convex mirror of his buckle Refugio, who turned his daughter gold in the mirror of his own—the last world unknowable to Refugio—the night he carried her out of Mexico before the war to give her Mexico before the war, before a man named refuge in his native tongue could be hung from an overpass in the sun for something smaller than his buckle: the figures of the men unmade inside it, the thousands vanished in its glass.…

I’ve been in dreamland quite a while And just woke up with blissful smile From nodding off I don’t know when. I must’ve missed a lot since then. Now Christmas comes! The snow grows deep! I’m glad I didn’t oversleep. Sit close and give your bard a kiss, And tell me, dears, what did I miss? One thing I’m really hoping, dearies, Is that Cleveland won the Series. God love Bill Murray—was he there? And David Ross—how did he fare? Now that I’m clothed and on my feet, There’s tons of folks I’ve gotta greet. So for a start I’ll open with A big “Noel!” for Sula Smith, And send a storm of Yuletide glee To weatherperson Ginger Zee. I’ll carol odes of ancient stock For Prof. G. W. Bowersock…

In 1948, the avant-garde photographer Grete Stern, a German Jew living in Buenos Aires, was hired by Idilio, a popular women’s magazine, to illustrate a weekly column called Psychoanalysis Will Help You. The column solicited readers’ dreams, and thousands responded—a majority with nightmares. Anxiety, domination, and entrapment were common themes. The dreams were interpreted by two male intellectuals who—embarrassed to be “agony aunts,” as one of them put it—signed their work with a joint pseudonym, Professor Richard Rest. Stern may also have considered the assignment mildly demeaning, at least initially. She had a job with the Buenos Aires urban- planning agency, documenting the city’s architecture, and she believed that photography had to have “a social function.” A Marxist critic for the prestigious journal Sur had praised her style for its…

THERE ARE MANY accounts of the genesis of Watson. The most popular, which is not necessarily the most accurate—and this is the sort of problem that Watson himself often stumbled on—begins in 2004, at a steakhouse near Poughkeepsie. One evening, an I.B.M. executive named Charles Lickel was having dinner there when he noticed that the tables around him had suddenly emptied out. Instead of finishing their sirloins, his fellow-diners had rushed to the bar to watch “Jeopardy!” This was deep into Ken Jennings’s seventy-four-game winning streak, and the crowd around the TV was rapt. Not long afterward, Lickel attended a brainstorming session in which participants were asked to come up with I.B.M.’s next “grand challenge.” The firm, he suggested, should take on Jennings. I.B.M. had already fulfilled a similar “grand…

“Should we do something?” Dory asks her boyfriend, Drew, as screaming voices leak through their bathroom wall. “There’s no point,” Drew says. “Something terrible could be happening!” “Yeah,” he says. “Something terrible is happening. Everywhere. All the time.” “Search Party,” on TBS, is a shrewd dark comedy starring the wonderful and soft-faced Alia Shawkat as Dory, a recent college graduate turned Nancy Drew. Blending screwball fizz and sticky melancholy, it basically invents a new genre: the noir sitcom. It is also, at ten episodes, exactly the right length. Even the costumes are on the money. At times, “Search Party” reminded me of “Fleabag” and “Catastrophe,” two recent series that were only six episodes long but entirely satisfying. This year, television has produced more than its share of high-end mysteries that…

When Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, and Moss Hart put together the musical “Lady in the Dark,” in 1940, Freud was big. The great man’s thinking had yet to come under wide attack, and psychoanalysis— at least, here in America— was still a relatively new phenomenon, a science for the privileged. Liza Elliott, the protagonist of the musical, who runs a fashion magazine called Allure, has lots of power but no outward oomph. Depressed and anxious, she works with her analyst to figure out why she, an arbiter of taste, can’t take her own editorial advice and swathe herself in furs and delicious self-regard. As her story is revealed through troubled dreams, it turns out that Daddy and the other men who rejected Liza early on are responsible for all that…

Most Nativity scenes come equipped with shepherds, magi, and a camel or two, but Roman ruins and a poodle? Those are among the seventy-one elaborate crèche figurines, made in eighteenth-century Naples, that have adorned the base of the holiday spruce (pictured) in the Met’s Medieval Sculpture Hall for more than five decades. A tree lighting is held each afternoon at 4:30 (and at 5:30 and 6:30 on weekends). On Dec. 16, the museum hosts a performance of carols dating from the Byzantine Empire. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) After more than two decades as a champion of heady, often eccentric hip-hop, this Brooklyn rapper and actor seems to have…

John Lamb, the New York-born Revolutionary War hero, politician, and ardent Anti-Federalist, would have marvelled at the posh interiors of the John Lamb, a new bar and restaurant tucked into the basement of the Sago Hotel, on the Lower East Side. Indeed, Colonel Lamb, who made a successful living as a wine merchant, might have wondered, with a touch of trepidation, whether it’s a good thing to be “speakeasy meets steampunk,” as the bar bills itself, and how, exactly, one comes up with a cocktail named Bad Judgment (Jameson, cornflower syrup, egg white). Mike Belasco and Chris Judge, the resident mixologists, seem to draw inspiration from the pioneers’ America, with concoctions like the Johnny Appleseed, which is so indulgently dessert-like that you forget how little resemblance it bears to the…

Tours at the Tenement Museum, on Orchard Street, are usually benign educational affairs, celebrating the city’s immigrant past. But, since the election, conversations have grown contentious. One tour member, who could appreciate Ellis Island but would extend her sympathies only so far, said, “Immigrants back then were different,” starting an argument. Tour guides have been receiving special training to cope with what one docent called “the current political climate.” Still, the show must go on. A new exhibit, on postwar life on the Lower East Side, opens next year, and preparations are under way. Pamela Keech, the museum’s curator of furnishings, arrived at the Brooklyn Flea on a recent Saturday morning in search of a vase shaped like a brandy snifter. “Today’s really a scouting mission,” she said. She wore…

ON JANUARY 25, 2009, a jubilant Meryl Streep stood before a gala crowd at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, in Los Angeles, having just won an award for her role in “Doubt,” the film adaptation of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about sexual abuse, race, and the Catholic Church. Clutching her statuette, Streep gave a shout-out to the rest of the cast. When she got to Viola Davis—who had earned her first Academy Award nomination for her performance as the mother of an African-American boy a priest is accused of abusing—Streep saluted her colleague as “gigantically gifted,” then threw up her hands. “My God!” she said. “Somebody give her a movie!” The industry seems to have listened. Davis—“a newcomer at forty-five,” as Streep later joked—has made twentyone films…

What is the precise moment, in the life of a country, when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in an instant; it arrives like twilight, and, at first, the eyes adjust. Xu Hongci had been drawn to politics by the promise of dignity. Growing up in Shanghai during the Second World War, part of a downwardly mobile middleclass family, he resented the Japanese occupation and the Chinese leaders who failed to prevent it. “Japanese soldiers would fish in our pond, swaggering off with the biggest carp without paying a single penny,” Xu recalled, in a memoir he wrote years later. “Our nation’s tragedy awakened my political consciousness at a young age.” He dreamed of making China strong again, of erasing “injustice and darkness.” At the age of fourteen, he placed…

NO TRIP TO the American Museum of Natural History in New York is complete without a visit to the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life. It’s a blue-tinged room, booming with surf-roar and the cries of gulls and rimmed with marine dioramas: teeming kelp forests and coral reefs, a walrus lost in thought, dolphins and tuna fleeting through twilit seas. The hall’s vaulting showcases a life-size blue whale, midway through an eternal dive. Whenever I crane to look up at the expanse of its light-dappled underbelly, I think of how Sir David Attenborough described this leviathan in his television series “The Blue Planet”: “Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant. Its heart is the size of a car. And some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could…

Last Girl Before Freeway, by Leslie Bennetts (Little, Brown). The most notable revelation in this snappy biography of the comic Joan Rivers, who died in 2014, is that, after her husband’s suicide and a brutal professional failure, she considered killing herself, too. But the best parts of the book are tart evocations of the mid-century comic-club scene and of Rivers’s inimitable panache. Bennetts, who has previously written about women and work, doesn’t sugarcoat Rivers’s legendary harshness toward the rest of her sex, from stewardesses to Elizabeth Taylor, nor does the book downplay the positive effect that Rivers had on the visibility of women in show business. A shameless fabulist and social climber, who threw fax machines when she got angry, she was also brave and tireless, and these qualities…