Innholdsfortegnelse for December 5, 2016 i The New Yorker

D. T. Max (“Sombre Colors,” p. 42) is a staff writer and the author of “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery.” Joan Acocella ( Dancing, p. 82) became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998. She is writing a biography of Mikhail Baryshnikov. James Wood ( “The Teacher,” p. 28) teaches at Harvard. “The Nearest Thing to Life” is his latest book. James Surowiecki (The Financial Page, p. 26), a staff writer since 2000, writes about finance for the magazine. Anthony Lane (The Current Cinema, p. 86) has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. Daniel Smith (The Talk of the Town, p. 22) is the author, most recently, of “Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety.” Emily Nussbaum (On Television, p.74), the magazine’s television critic,…

THE DISTINGUISHED COMPOSER Kaija Saariaho, who is sixty-four, would not have seemed to be the type of musician who would excel in the world of opera. Finnish-born, but long a paragon of the Parisian institutional avant-garde, Saariaho writes music that, like that of many of her colleagues, is a rigorously scientific exploration of the inner life of sound. In many a Saariaho piece, an arresting sonic statement is presented at the start, big in impact but full of small voices that subtly fragment, bloom, or disappear. Listening to it can be a dazzling experience, though it is essentially a static one; the music lacks the narrative thrust that musical drama usually requires. What sets her apart, however, is her gift for weaving elements of mysticism and sensuality into that…

THE MORNING AFTER the Presidential election, the Washington Post reported that a “palpable sense of dread” had settled on the U.S. intelligence community. That community is large—tens of thousands of people, working for seventeen agencies—so the reasons for such feelings varied. Among the many contenders: Trump’s statements during the campaign about America’s intelligence workers (“I won’t use them, because they’ve made such bad decisions”); his dismissal of the conclusion, by the office of the director of National Intelligence and by the Department of Homeland Security, that the Kremlin was committing cyber espionage; and his cavalier attitude toward nuclear proliferation. “Everyone I’ve spoken to is freaking out,” one intelligence official said. (Depressed, he had called in sick.) “No one knows what to expect. We’re in uncharted waters.” The following Saturday, the…

Going into Election Day, few industries seemed in worse shape than America’s private prisons. Prison populations, which had been rising for decades, were falling. In 2014, Corrections Corporation of America, the biggest private-prison company in the U.S., lost its contract to run Idaho’s largest prison, after lawsuits relating to understaffing and violence that had earned the place the nickname Gladiator School. There were press exposés of shocking conditions in the industry and signs of a policy shift toward it. In April, Hillary Clinton said, “We should end private prisons.” In August, the Justice Department said that private federal prisons were less safe and less secure than government-run ones. The same month, the department announced that it would phase out the use of private prisons at the federal level. Although most…

EVERY SO OFTEN, it seems, visual artists are stricken by the urge to perform. The “happenings” movement in the nineteen-sixties—young painters and sculptors doing nonverbal theatre— was explained as a response to Pollock, de Kooning, and other gestural Abstract Expressionists: it was the gesture without the painting. In the seventies, when skill, craft, and mastery went out of fashion, a lot of visual artists moved into performance works that were considerably less entertaining than “happenings”—live or filmed or videotaped presentations of oneself doing something not particularly difficult, like walking a straight line in the studio. Robert Rauschenberg, the most protean artist since Picasso, became so obsessed with dancing in the fifties and sixties, when he was creating sets and costumes for Merce Cunningham’s company, that he choreographed and performed…

ONE MORNING IN March, in a courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, a young woman named Norma attended the sentencing of a former boyfriend, who had gone to grotesque lengths to humiliate her online. Four years earlier, when she was seventeen, she had met Christopher Morcos, who was then nineteen, at a Starbucks near her home, in Nutley. He was a business student at a local college, and Norma, who is soft-spoken, liked that he was outgoing. He was her first boyfriend, and they dated for two years. Like a lot of young men these days, he asked Norma to send him explicit selfies, and, like a lot of young women, she did. She made him promise that he would keep the pictures to himself. He assured her that he had…

IN THE FIRST episode of “ Rectify,” Daniel Holden (Aden Young) is released from death row, and he gives a speech to journalists and protesters gathered outside the prison. Rather than assert his innocence or talk about justice, he offers a zigzagging meditation on the nature of fatalism. “I had convinced myself that kind of optimism served no useful purpose in the world where I existed,” he explains, in an underwater monotone, as the protesters look on, baffled. “Obviously, this radical belief system was flawed and was, ironically, a kind of fantasy itself.” Humbly, as if ending a philosophy seminar, he concludes, “I will seriously need to reconsider my world view.” For three years, “Rectify” has been a small marvel, an eccentric independent drama, filmed in Griffin, Georgia, and airing…

THE NEW BIG deal in tap is Michelle Dorrance, whose troupe, Dorrance Dance, has just completed a run at the Joyce. Dorrance, who is thirty-seven, is a girl from North Carolina whose backstory might have been written by a press agent. Her mother, M’Liss Gary Dorrance, a ballet dancer (she performed in Eliot Feld’s first company), founded and directed the Ballet School of Chapel Hill. Her father, Anson Dorrance, currently the women’s soccer coach at the University of North Carolina, led the U.S. women’s soccer team to the World Cup in 1991. Put those two together, and you sort of get a tap dancer. Dorrance discovered early on that she was a natural. When she was nine, she was in an advanced tap class with eighteenyear-olds. She joined the North…

THE ELECTION’S AFTERMATH I have read much of The New Yorker’s election coverage, both in print and online, and I agree with all that was said about the dangers of Trump and what his Administration might mean for the country. However, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the content, because it simply reinforced my fears and did not suggest a path forward. The best way to recover from this horrific election is to take action—now. The lesson I learned from Russia, where I come from, is that, when something goes wrong, people merely “hope” that it will change. They wait, they “heal,” and they get back to “business as usual.” This is the last thing you want to do! Dictatorships are built on the control of information and the passivity…

At the back of this skinny Chinatown bar sits a large wooden sculpture in the shape of a 2. Its significance is mysterious—questions such as “Is there a secret brethren of even-number fanatics who meet here on a regular basis?” are not, perhaps, unwarranted. It is, however, a good suggestion of when to arrive at Beverly’s. As the hour slunk closer on a recent Tuesday morning, the dance floor squirmed with life. The occasion was a party whose poster asked, “What if you could only love places . . . and fashion?” Pressed up against a wall, an artist in a white vinyl dog collar was discussing advances in virtual reality while a British d.j. punctuated a slick electro set with Hi-NRG classics from the eighties. “Last call!” a barkeep…

JASON SUDEIKIS SAT at the back of the Bowery Poetry Club, waiting for open-mike night to begin. He had parked his black Vespa outside, having motored in from Clinton Hill, where he lives with his fiancée, Olivia Wilde, and their children, Otis and Daisy. At his side was a Contax G2 camera, which he keeps on hand for moments when the light is just right. “I was on the Manhattan Bridge on my way over here, and there was an awesome view of the sun right behind the Statue of Liberty,” he said. “I read this quote recently: ‘The camera is an instrument to teach people how to see without a camera.’ ” (Dorothea Lange.) Sudeikis, who on “Saturday Night Live” brought a devilish glint to figures like Joe…

Many famous directors retreat to the privacy of their own screening rooms, but Pedro Almodóvar still likes to see movies in theatres. He lives off a park on the western side of Madrid, and the art houses are clumped together near Plaza de España, not far away. He tries to go at least once a week. If a studio sends him a screener on DVD and he likes the movie, he will watch it a second time in a cinema. One day in September, his driver dropped him off near the Cine Renoir, which was showing “Neruda,” a film about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda directed by Pablo Larraín. As Almodóvar walked toward the theatre, carrying a Prada bag that held a bottle of water, locals recognized him. Spain is…

EARLY MORNING: THEY deliver my father’s corpse in the trunk of a ’49 Mercury coupe, dew still heavy on the taillights. His body is wrapped up tight in see-through plastic, head to toe. Flesh-colored rubber bands bind it at the neck, waist, and ankles— mummy style. He’s become very small in the course of things—maybe eight inches tall. In fact, I’m holding him now, in the palm of my hand. I ask them for permission to unwrap his tiny head, just to make sure he’s truly dead. They allow me to do this. They all stand aside, hands clasped behind their tailored backs, heads bowed in a kind of ashamed mourning, but not something you would question them on. It’s smart to keep on their good side. Besides, they seem…

THE POEMS OF Emily Dickinson began as marks made in ink or pencil on paper, usually the standard stationery that came into her family’s household. Most were composed in Dickinson’s large, airy bedroom, with two big windows facing south and two facing west, at a small table that her niece described as “18-inches square, with a drawer deep enough to take in her ink bottle, paper and pen.” It looked out over the family’s property on Main Street, in Amherst, Massachusetts, toward the Evergreens, her brother’s grand Italianate mansion, nestled among the pines a few hundred yards away. Dickinson had a Franklin stove fitted to a bricked-up fireplace to keep her warm, which meant that she could write by candlelight, with the door closed, for as long as she…

“SWEET CHARITY” (a New Group production, at the Pershing Square Signature Center) is both enervating and full of hope—yours. As you watch this revival of Bob Fosse’s 1966 hit, you keep hoping that, despite early signs of limpness, it won’t be drained of all its energy and sentiment by the end. But the director, Leigh Silverman, is adept at throwing ash on soap bubbles. The problem is that she’s too serious about theatre; she wants her shows to count— to have a moral purpose. Sometimes a play is just a play, and not all of her productions can bear the weight of her imperative. (I’m thinking of her work on Molly Smith Metzler’s “Close Up Space,” in 2011, and on David Greenspan’s “Go Back to Where You Are,” in…

In times of trouble, dependable sources of inspiration increase in value. By the late nineteen-seventies, when this photograph was taken, Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations” had been raising spirits—and the spirit—for nearly two decades. As Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre settles into City Center for its annual holiday run (Nov. 30-Dec. 31), the work retains an apparently inexhaustible power. It’s joined by new pieces, one that springs from speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., and one registering the pain of mass incarceration. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Art Department Kenny Glasgow and Jonny White d.j.ed and produced as a duo until just last year. Glasgow recently stepped out on his own to record and release…

The Poetry Brothel Guests at this temple of literary deviance are treated to readings enlivened by the aura of burlesque. A rotating cast of male and female poets perform as bordello troubadours, erupting into verse in public and luring guests into back rooms for private readings that may be overheard by voyeurs lurking just around the corner. The event transforms House of Yes into an immersive cabaret with live jazz, vaudeville, painters, and fortune-tellers—this week’s holiday- partythemed installment includes readings from the poet, author, and lawyer Monica Youn, a performance by the Hot Club of Flatbush, and the burlesque performers Puss N Boots and Foxx Von Tempt. (2 Wyckoff Ave., Brooklyn. houseofyes.org. Dec. 4.) Magic at Coney Island Illusionists, escape artists, mentalists, and closeup magicians descend on Coney Island…

ONE WEDNESDAY NIGHT earlier this fall, James Dyson, the British design engineer, billionaire, knight, and vacuum-cleaner magnate, threw a party at a loft in Chelsea. The occasion was the U.S. launch of the Dyson Supersonic hair dryer: a four-hundred-dollar magenta O on a stick, of a shape more microphone than popgun. Guests took a sort of disco freight elevator to the fourth floor; there, a video closeup of the impeller V-9, the tiny motor that powers the Supersonic, swirled on a wall-size screen, to gently carnivalesque music. When a Supersonic appeared on the screen, several guests held their phones aloft, recording. Dyson employees wore impeller V-9s on their shirts, like brooches. Each motor was the size of a beefy dime. Dyson delivered his version of a Steve Jobs-ian ta-da.…

I’ve given it time, as if time were mine to give.There was a dam, larger than Hoover or the President or the patentFor the metal creature that sucks up all the dust.Words had to stop and ask permission before crossing over.Oh, sometimes they were wild with the urgency of sweetAnd leaped—Mostly the rest were kept in the netOf swallowed or forbidden language.I want to go back and rewrite all the letters.I lied frequently.No. I was not O.K.And neither was James Baldwin, though his essaysWere perfect spinning platters of comprehension of the fightTo assert humanness in a blackandwhite world.That’s how blues emerged, by the way—Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess.The music, a sack that carries the bones of those left alongsideThe trail of tears when we…

A rose was throwing a tantrumdeep in the botanical gardens.An angel fell in the bathroom,knocked her front teeth outon the edge of the toilet.A long-haired dachshund wascrossing the Bosporus I’mjumping around here. A rose.A tantrum. An angel sayingit was the sink. A signon a dumpster sayingUNWANTED DIAMONDS.But it was the toilet.Was definitely the toilet.The rose shook slightlybut violently. Like a bruisehappening. Sound of cablestraining. The angel dancedall night in a club. Musicdeafening. Rum & cokes.Carpenter blokes. Driedblood on her chin. I felland smashed these inshe tried saying, pointingto her mouth. On the sink!Today! At noon! The sink!…

Thunder at the Gates, by Douglas R. Egerton (Basic). In 1861, the refugee slave Henry Jarvis arrived at Fort Monroe, in Virginia, and asked to enlist as a Union soldier. He was turned away and told that the war with the Confederates was not a “black man’s war” but one about keeping the nation together. The subsequent formation of three black regiments changed public opinion. Egerton’s history shows how the sacrifice of these recruits on the battlefields at Fort Wagner and Olustee not only proved that African-Americans could be dedicated fighters but also opened the way to securing rights, including equal pay for military service and the opportunity to be promoted into the ranks of commissioned officers.White Northerners may have enlisted to hold the nation together; it was their…