Innholdsfortegnelse for January 16, 2017 i The New Yorker

Sheelah Kolhatkar (“Total Return,” p. 34) became a staff writer in 2016. Her book, “Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street,” will be published in February. Kadir Nelson (Cover) is an artist whose work will be included in the Society of Illustrators’ exhibition “Illustrators 59: Book and Editorial,” on view February 1st-26th. Vinson Cunningham (“Making God Famous,” p. 26) is a staff writer. Corey Van Landingham (Poem, p. 58), the author of the poetry collection “Antidote,” was awarded a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Ian Parker (“The Culling,” p. 42) has been a staff writer since 2000. David Denby (Books, p. 76), a staff writer and a former film critic for the magazine, is the…

Paul’s Casablanca 305 Spring St. (212-620-5220) The other night, in west SoHo, two young men were rebu!!ed at the entrance o! a bar. “Is this Casablanca?” they asked. A bouncer in a balaclava shook his head. Fifteen minutes later, after wandering up and down the street, they found themselves underneath a neon sign that read “McGovern’s Bar.” Could this be the place? Another bouncer, this time in a hood, nodded. “We’re at capacity,” he said, waving through a man in a bone-white fur and matching spectacles. They would have to wait. This is because the Casablanca they sought is Paul’s Casablanca, the latest venture from Paul Sevigny, begetter o! the Beatrice Inn, baron o! the Baby Grand. Sevigny’s new bar draws a little from both o! those but has…

BEN PASTERNAK DROPPED out of high school in Sydney, Australia, last year and moved to New York, with the goal of making what he called “the No. ! app in the world.” One recent afternoon, he woke up at one o’clock, in his twenty- seventh-floor, forty-two-hundreddollar- a-month apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. He put on one of his six identical pairs of Zanerobe black pants. “You can save, like, a year and a half of your life if your outfit is pre-chosen,” he said. “We did the math.” He walked to the kitchen, past inspirational quotes taped to the wall —“Life is divine chaos” (misattributed to Keats); “Listen to the kids, bruh” (Kanye)—and opened the refrigerator: seven bottles of Soylent drink and some cheese dip. “I was up until five-thirty,”…

IT’s HARD TO describe in a word what Kirk Franklin does for a living. Franklin, forty-six, is the most successful contemporary gospel artist of his generation, but he isn’t a singer. He plays the piano, but only intermittently onstage, more to contribute to the pageantry than to show o( his modest chops. Above all, he is a songwriter, but in performance and on his albums his role more closely resembles that of a stock character in hip-hop: the hype man. The best hype men—Flavor Flav, Spli( Star, the early Sean (P. Diddy) Combs—hop around onstage, slightly behind and to the side of the lead m.c., addressing the microphone in order to ad-lib or to reinforce punch lines as they rumble by. But a hype man is, by definition, a…

ONE DAY IN early 2013, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, met with his deputy, Richard Zabel, about one of the biggest cases of his career—a crackdown on insider trading in the hedge-fund industry. Although the fi nancial crisis had receded, popular rage against Wall Street bankers and traders was still strong; most Americans had seen their incomes stagnate while the fortunes of the wealthiest continued to swell. For the previous few years, Bharara and the prosecutors who worked under him at the Southern District, along with investigators at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission, had been studying phone logs, wiretapping traders’ calls, and flipping witnesses, one after the other, as they worked their way deep into some…

As for the beer, I bring my own. I haven’t touched another human in twenty-three days, not even someone’s palm passing my change. I forget—because I am in heels, because California still owns a portion of my body, and is on .re—my socks. The owner of the alley lends me his daughter’s, who is behind the concession counter and looks, in braces, blond hair twisted on top of her head, like she could be mine. They’re clean, he tells me. Crew, bleached white, mid-Atlantic preteen packaged. She wants, I am sure of it, something synthetic. She wants, in pink polka dots, in patterned tiny stereos, to forget the same .ve boys corralling the boxes of M&M’s, sodas sweating in their Styrofoam cups. Peeling out on the simulateddriving games, they…

Judas, by Amos Oz, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange (Houghton Mi_in Harcourt). In this novel of nineteensixties Jerusalem, Shmuel Ash, lovelorn graduate student and lukewarm socialist, abandons his thesis (“Jewish Views of Jesus”) to care for a frail, elderly Zionist living in a funereal villa. There he meets a cynical beauty who lost both father and husband in the mid-century wars, backroom and battle- /eld, that de/ned the contours of Israeli statehood. The novel has a clear message; as Shmuel says, “All the power in the world cannot transform someone who hates you into someone who likes you.” But Oz tempers this didactic edge by making Shmuel a hapless /gure—with walking stick, inhalers, and baby-powdered beard—unimpressive to the aristocratic recluses he’s stumbled among. The Terranauts, by…

MOSUL’S OTHER CRISIS Thank you for Dexter Filkins’s recent article about the grave risk that the Mosul Dam poses to Iraq (“Before the Flood,” January 2nd). Large dams, relying on shaky science (or ignoring good science), have for decades devoured development funds while creating more problems than they’ve solved. Dams are often built under authoritarian regimes, exacerbating political instability while destroying many citizens’ lives and livelihoods. History has shown that dams are too costly a method of generating electricity, and this is particularly true in Iraq, which has vast and unexploited solar potential. Factoring in the ninety-seven- per-cent average cost overrun for large dams, a new structure downstream from the Mosul Dam could cost around four billion dollars. Dams are also a foolhardy investment: in our changing climate, desert…

Zlatne Uste Golden Festival Eastern European and Middle Eastern music, dance, and culture coalesce at this annual festival, held in New York City for more than thirty years. Balkan traditions and customs unfold across two nights and four stages, where attendees can shop for folk arts and sample the wide array o# foods native to the region, spanning roughly from Romania to Greece and from Croatia to Turkey. The main draw is a marathon o" groups staging performances from the region, including Egyptian traditional dance, a Slavic chorus, a Balkan brass band, and a Mediterranean out!it o" violin, accordion, and clarinet. Pro!its generated from ticket sales will be donated to charitable and educational organizations aiding Balkan communities. (The Grand Prospect Hall, 263 Prospect Ave., Brooklyn. goldenfest.org. Jan. 13-14.) AUCTIONS…

SILAS FARLY,WHO is a dancer in the corps of New York City Ballet, became an aficionado of the Metropolitan Museum a few years ago, after he was given a membership by a donor to the School of American Ballet, where he was a student. “I call her my New York City ballet fairy godmother,” Farley, who is twenty-two, said recently. “I started to come all the time.” One Monday morning not long ago, Farley was back at the museum, at the invitation of Limor Tomer, who presides over the Met’s live performances. The goal: to walk through the galleries in the hope that the muse— Terpsichore, specifically—might strike. The tour began in Arms and Armor. “There are a lot of objects here, but, more importantly, the Met is a…

Marine helicopters on maneuver kept dipping toward swells at Black’s Beach, my board’s poise giving way to freefall of my wave tubing over me, nubs of wax under my feet as I crouched under the lip, sped across the face and kicked out— all over Southern Cal a haze settled: as if light breathed that technicolor smog at sunset over San Diego Harbor where battleships at anchor, just back from patrolling the South China Sea, were having rust scraped o" and painted gray. This was my inheritance that lay stretched before me: which is when I felt the underbrush give way and the fox that thrives in my brain, not looking sly but just at home in his pelt and subtle paws, broke from cover and ran across the…

AFTER TONIGHT HE'D never see any of these people again. Dom Whipple—the notorious corporate raider, the scourge of boardrooms near and far, the layo+ king—had traded his entire fortune for a one-way ticket to a distant planet, and even guys like Lenny Westerfeld, a man he had once blackmailed into an early retirement, had come to bid Dom farewell. “Every cent?” Lenny asked him. “You mean to tell me you really gave that church every single cent?” “It’s liberating, Lenny, it really is. I’ve never felt so free in all my life.” “Be honest, though. No secret investments squirrelled away? No o+shore accounts?” Dom shook his head. “Not a one.” “Well, I think it’s lovely,” Sheila Park chimed in. “I’d do it myself, only I’m probably not religious enough.…

FRENCH WRITERS OF the airier, belletristic kind used to enjoy pointing out that Michel de Montaigne, the man who invented the essay, was born Michel Eyquem, in Bordeaux in ,-.., and that the family name and estate survive to this day in the name of Château d’Yquem, the greatest of all French sweet wines. The connection feels improbable— as though there were a Falsta/ Ale that really dates to Shakespeare’s Stratford—but also apt. Montaigne’s essays can seem like the Yquem of writing: sweet but smart, honeyed but a little acid. And, with wine and writer alike, we often know more about them than we know of them—in the wine’s case because it costs too much money to drink as much as we might desire, in the writer’s because it…

The soul of silent film is comedy—the knockabout, loose-limbed antics of vaudevillians who sacrificed speech and song to the movies’ technical wonders and expressive intimacy. This year’s edition of MOMA’s silent-era series, “Cruel and Unusual Comedy” ( Jan. 13-26), offers off-the-cuff rowdiness from overlooked artists, including Mabel Normand, who also directed ten of her own early short films. In “Mabel’s New Hero” ( Jan. 14 and Jan. 22), from 1913, she’s paired with Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle under the direction of the slapstick pioneer Mack Sennett. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera With a new production by Bartlett Sher, the Met !inally has a “Roméo et Juliette” that suits both Shakespeare’s tragedy and Gounod’s rhapsodic music. The curtain rises on a handsome Veronese piazza (designed by Michael Yeargan) where the chorus…

EVERY MORNING, Willie Degel, the proprietor of Uncle Jack’s Steakhouse, on West Fifty-sixth Street, less than an avenue away from Trump Tower, has a blunt conversation with his mirror. A couple of days before Christmas, he sat with a visitor at a slightly wobbly table upstairs at Uncle Jack’s and described his routine. “I look at myself and I say, ‘I’m the man,’ ” said Degel, a roundfaced, crewcut fellow in his late forties, with a sturdy build that was testing the seams of his three-piece suit. “I say, ‘Who’s the man? I’m the fucking man. Today, I’m going to work, I’m taking on this world, I’m making it the way I want it to be.’ And I’m uplifted, I’m inspired. You gotta say it three times. The third…

“THERE YEARS AGO, I had no idea what child sex tra2cking was,” Mary Mazzio said. The documentary filmmaker was at Smith & Wollensky, having lunch with a former New York City deputy mayor named Carol Robles-Román and the litigator David Boies, who was cross-examining the menu through rimless spectacles. “The images we saw were always the same,” Mazzio continued. “Fish-net stockings being pulled up, then a young African- American woman leaning in the window of a minivan. I’m embarrassed by how I bought into the ‘Pretty Woman’ scenario of child prostitution.” Mazzio’s “I Am Jane Doe,” which opens next month, is three films in one. She began by filming a retired managing partner at the law firm of Ropes & Gray, near her home, in Boston, who was representing…

LAST SUMMER,FIVE months after being released from prison, Albert Woodfox went to Harlem. It was there, in +,-,, during his last week of freedom, that he met members of the Black Panther Party for the first time. He had been mesmerized by the way they talked and moved. “I had always sensed, even among the most confident black people, that their fear was right there at the top, ready to overwhelm them,” he told me. “It was the first time I’d ever seen black folk who were not afraid.” Woodfox had intended to go to a meeting of the New York chapter of the Party that week, but he was arrested for a robbery before he could. Instead, he founded a chapter of the Party at the Louisiana State…

A BOY ASLEEP IN the country, is awakened by a strong light outside his window and some strange rustlings in the house. A few feet from his bed, a toy monkey claps its cymbals together—like a stick banging the floor three times in a French theatre, announcing the beginning of a show—and tanks and police cars spin and race around the room. The boy, who has a snub nose and wondering hazel eyes, is not at all afraid. A little later, the house is invaded again, this time not so gently: a Hoover suddenly sweeps across the floor, like a column of Roman soldiers, terrifying the boy’s mother. Out in the street, while light pours down from above, a row of mailboxes rattles furiously, as if under siege from…