Innholdsfortegnelse for January 9, 2017 i The New Yorker

Nicholas Schmidle ( “Can Football Be Saved ?,” p. 38), a staff writer, is a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton this spring. Tad Friend ( “California Dreamin’,” p. 32) has been a staff writer since 1998. Jerome Groopman (Books, p. 70), the Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard, has written several books, the most recent of which is “Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You,” with Dr. Pamela Hartzband. Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 19) teaches in the journalism program at Columbia University. Jena Friedman (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 31) is a comedian and filmmaker. Her standup special, “American Cunt,” will be available on iTunes later this month. Kelefa Sanneh (“Secret Admirers,” p. 24) is a staff writer. Ian Frazier (“High-Rise Greens,” p. 52) recently…

Three Kings Day Parade For many New Yorkers, the holiday season doesn’t end with the calendar year. El Día de los Reyes, which marks the adoration of Jesus by the Three Wise Men, gives children one last chance at gifts, on the twelfth day of Christmas. For the fortieth annual Three Kings Day Parade, in East Harlem, families are invited to join a morning procession through the neighborhood, starting on the corner of 106th Street at Lexington Avenue and ending at 115th Street at Park Avenue. Attractions include camels, colorful puppets, musical performances from local bands, and traditional Puerto Rican food. El Museo del Barrio, which hosts the parade, offers free admission throughout the day. (El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Ave. elmuseo.org. Dec. 6 at 11 A.M.) READINGS…

THIS IS THE year you swear you are going to eat less saturated fat, learn Latin, enjoy life to the fullest, blah blah blah. Chances are you will do none of the above. But if your to-do list includes getting rid of your old stuff to make room for new stuff, help is on the way. One morning not long ago, Mike Cardona and Darryl Bradley, both thirty-three and dressed in black T-shirts, cargo pants, and baseball caps, showed up at a one-bedroom apartment near Sutton Place to pick up a sleep sofa, love seat, sideboard, and ottoman. The two men are employees of the Junkluggers, “the Robin Hood of furniture removal,” Zach Cohen, the twenty-nine-year-old owner of its New York City franchise, said the other day, in his…

My wife calls. She left the eggs she’d gathered in a small tin pail and would I bring them in so the dog doesn’t eat them. Or maybe he already has. They’re by the shed where we’re trying to trap the rat or maybe by the greenhouse. I walk out in my robe and slippers, crushing some mint which rewards me with its sharp identity. And there is the pail by the coop. And there are two eggs, cold and whole with a fleck of wood shaving stuck to one, as though a child had just begun to decorate it, maybe making a horse with a tiny fetlock.…

Had she been born in a different era, Becky thought, and without the education to qualify as a governess, she might have become a wet nurse, offering nourishment in the most mindless form to an infant from a wealthy family. But the idea, explored in detail— what, who, when, where, why, how, those questions Becky had obediently followed in grade school without recognizing the terror of such scrutiny—was disturbing, not even a legitimate secret. “You know, I hate museums.” The man next to Becky leaned over so that she alone could hear this confession. She nodded. To be a wet nurse one had to be a mother first. What was the point of wishing for that profession, then? “It makes me angry,” the man said as he and Becky joined…

THE RUSSIAN PIANIST Daniil Trifonov creates a furor. The term is a familiar one in the annals of supervirtuosity. “pianist creates furor” was a headline in the Times when Vladimir Horowitz first played at Carnegie Hall, in 1928. Paderewski left furor in his wake, as did Sviatoslav Richter, the young Martha Argerich, and the young Evgeny Kissin. Americans usually don’t create a furor, at least on American soil. Russians are more prone to do so. It should be noted that a furor is not the same as a sensation. (Lang Lang creates a sensation.) Furor pianists exhibit intelligence as well as dexterity; they often make curious interpretive choices that cause head- shaking at intermission. They give a hint of the unearthly, the diabolical. They tend to walk onstage hurriedly…

WHAT’S IN A WORD? Hilton Als, in his review of the play “Sweet Charity,” takes the director Leigh Silverman to task for her seriousness of purpose (“Dear Heart,” December 5th). “The problem is that she’s too serious about theatre; she wants her shows to count—to have a moral purpose,” he writes. “Sometimes a play is just a play, and not all of her productions can bear the weight of her imperative.” Throughout the review, Als stops just short of telling Silverman, “Smile more!” Have we really not moved beyond this tired critique of women’s work and ambition? How can The New Yorker justify taking aim at a woman because she wants her work to “matter”? This unexamined cliché is disheartening, and diminishes both Als and your publication. “A play…

SHORTLY AFTER ELECTION DAY, before the interference of Russian hackers became front-page news, a group of thirty-one high-school students gathered at N.Y.U.’s Tandon School of Engineering, in Brooklyn, for Cyber Security Awareness Week. Their mission: to solve a murder mystery involving a fictional Presidential race by analyzing digital “evidence” of security breaches. In the prompt given to the students, a candidate named Candice Deyte collapses and dies onstage at an event where she was to discuss important “cyber topics” with a famous hacker named Pat Rogers. Using a trail of clues that included Deyte’s smartwatch, leaked e-mails, and Rogers’s computer, teams of pubescent cyber-forensic investigators were tasked with determining the culprit. (The hacker did it.) During a break, a trio of teammates from Dos Pueblos High School, in Goleta, California,…

WE’RE ALWAYS HEARING about “firestorms of protest,” but they seldom involve actual fire. In November, though, people who owned New Balance sneakers began setting them alight, posting videos of flaming footware to social media, and calling for a boycott of the company. Like so much else these days, it’s because of Trump. The night that he was elected, a New Balance spokesman told the Wall Street Journal, “With President-elect Trump, we feel things are going to move in the right direction.” The spokesman was actually making a fairly limited point about trade policy. Trump has promised to scrap the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal secured by President Obama that would reduce trade barriers between many Pacific Rim countries. That suits New Balance, which still manufactures some of its shoes in the…

No. 212 Rome Street, in Newark, New Jersey, used to be the address of Grammer, Dempsey & Hudson, a steelsupply company. It was like a lumberyard for steel, which it bought in bulk from distant mills and distributed in smaller amounts, mostly to customers within a hundredmile radius of Newark. It sold off its assets in 2008 and later shut down. In 2015, a new indooragriculture company called AeroFarms leased the property. It had the rusting corrugatedsteel exterior torn down and a new building erected on the old frame. Then it filled nearly seventy thousand square feet of floor space with what is called a vertical farm. The building’s ceiling allowed for grow tables to be stacked twelve layers tall, to a height of thirtysix feet, in rows eighty feet…

THE GERMAN WRITER Gregor Hens smoked his first cigarette when he was five. His mother gave it to him. It was New Year’s Eve, and the Hens family, like many Germans, were out in the snow setting up fireworks. But they couldn’t light the fuses, because Gregor’s two older brothers were fighting over the lighter. Frau Hens finally lost patience: “She pulled out a cigarette, lit it and held it out to me.” Little Gregor took this wonderful thing and held it to the fuse of one of the rockets, which shot into the sky. Then he saw that the cigarette’s ember had ceased to glow. “You have to take a drag on it, my mother said out of the half-darkness.” He took a drag, the ember glowed again, and…

JANUARY 4 - 10, 2017 Lee Fields has earned the grit that coats his voice. With more than four decades of wear, his imperfectly preserved instrument might sound familiar to devotees of Stax and Chess. The North Carolina native, who plays Irving Plaza Jan. 7 with his band, the Expressions, is more revisionist than revivalist, performing as if the horns and Rhodes pianos of soul music had never given way to disco. His latest side, “Special Night,” arrives via Big Crown Records, a budding Greenpoint soul label pressing seven-inch singles. ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Metropolitan Museum “Jerusalem, 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven” In this captivating show of some two hundred objects from the era of the Crusades, there are manuscripts, maps, paintings, sculptures, architectural fragments, reliquaries, ceramics, glass, fabrics,…

Rabbit House 76 Forsyth St. (212-343-4200) This exquisite wisp of a sake bar is tucked into a vibrant stretch of Forsyth Street, amidst Vietnamese restaurants, dumpling shops, and bubbletea parlors. Its name is a play on a term popularized by Westerners to describe Japanese abodes—a memo circulated by the European Commission in 1979 described the Japanese as “workaholics living in rabbit hutches.” But the bar’s smallness works to its advantage, and the place has been created with intense care and an idiosyncratic sensibility: there are warm woods and twinkling Edison bulbs; the bases of the water glasses are tuliped so they spin on their sides precariously but never spill. On a recent Sunday night, Yoshiko Sakuma, the owner, chef, and sommelier, asked a patron who had just stepped in from…

WHATEVER ATTRACTIONS the 1975, a British rock band, holds for its many fans, a shared interest in the year 1975 is probably not among them. Certainly the events of that nadir of a year, which include the fall of Saigon and the near bankruptcy of New York City, do not overly concern the band’s front man, Matty Healy, who was born in 1989 and grew up in Manchester, U.K. Nevertheless, on a recent visit, Healy gamely agreed to walk the winter blocks around his East Village hotel in search of the 1975 that New Yorkers of a certain age remember. He soon found himself in a café, Physical Graffitea, at 96 St. Marks Place—the building that, together with No. 98, appeared on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 album,…

THE MOST COGENT argument for electing Donald Trump was made not by Trump, or by his campaign, but by a writer who, unlike Trump, betrayed no eagerness to attach his name to his creations. He called himself Publius Decius Mus, after the Roman consul known for sacrificing himself in battle, although the author used a pseudonym precisely because he hoped not to suffer any repercussions. In September, on the Web site of the Claremont Review of Books, Decius published “The Flight 93 Election,” which likened the country to a hijacked airplane, and argued that voting for Trump was like charging the cockpit: the consequences were possibly dire, but the consequences of inaction were surely so. Decius sought to be cleareyed about the candidate he was endorsing. “Only in a…

Fangs through a balloon, an orange balloon stretched over a jam-jar mouth scrubbed-up bush standard—fangs dripping what looks like semen, which is venom, one of the most deadly, down grooves and splish splash onto the lens of the distorting glass-bottom boat we look up into, head of tiger snake pressed flat with the bushman’s thumb—his scungy hat that did Vietnam, a bandolier across his matted chest chocked with cartridges—pistoleer who takes out ferals with secretive patriotic agendas. And we kids watch him draw the head of the fierce snake, its black body striped yellow. “It will rear up like a cobra if cornered, and attack, attack!” he stresses as another couple of droplets form and plummet. And when we say, “Mum joked leave them alone and they’ll go home,” he…

Toussaint Louverture, by Philippe Girard (Basic). After leading a slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791— the only successful such revolt in history—Louverture became an anti-colonial icon. He emerges in this excellent biography as a man more complex than the myth of him would have it. His military and political stratagems coincided with a receptive mood in revolutionary France, which abolished slavery in 1794. In the restive period that followed, Louverture consolidated power, ultimately enforcing a labor code no less repressive than slavery. Girard writes thoughtfully about the various contradictions of Louverture’s life, which ended in a prison cell in France. While there, he wrote a memoir addressed to Napoleon, expecting to be acknowledged by him as an equal. Am I Alone Here?, by Peter Orner (Catapult). “Stories…

“TALKING TO YOUR yogurt again,” my wife, Pam, said. “And what does the yogurt say?” She had caught me silently talking to myself as we ate breakfast. A conversation was playing in my mind, with a research colleague who questioned whether we had sufficient data to go ahead and publish. Did the experiments in the second graph need to be repeated? The results were already solid, I answered. But then, on reflection, I agreed that repetition could make the statistics more compelling. I often have discussions with myself— tilting my head, raising my eyebrows, pursing my lips—and not only about my work. I converse with friends and family members, tell myself jokes, replay dialogue from the past. I’ve never considered why I talk to myself, and I’ve never mentioned…