Innholdsfortegnelse for September 12, 2016 i The New Yorker

Ariel Levy (“The Secret Life of Plants,” p. 30) is working on a book, to be published next spring, based on her New Yorker article “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” which won a 2014 National Magazine Award. Elizabeth Kolbert (Comment, p. 25), a staff writer, is the author of “The Sixth Extinction,” for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Rachel Corbett (The Talk of the Town, p. 26) is the executive editor of Modern Painters. Her book “You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin” has just been published. Tom Kizzia (“The New Harpoon,” p. 38) has written extensively about rural Alaska. He is the author of “Pilgrim’s Wilderness” and “The Wake of the Unseen Object.” Patrick Radden Keefe (Books, p. 72) is the…

A Comeback Suzanne Farrell talks about restaging “Gounod Symphony.” In late 1956, George Balanchine was leading his New York City Ballet on a European tour when his wife, Tanaquil Le Clercq, was diagnosed with polio. “God will help us, I believe,” Balanchine wrote to the company’s general manager, Betty Cage. His prayer was not answered. Le Clercq, twenty-seven years old, was paralyzed in both legs. At the time, she was the only one of Balanchine’s ballerinas who was trained from the beginning in his style, and it was on her, his friends said, that he had pinned his highest hopes. He left the company to care for her. There were rumors that he would never come back, either to N.Y.C.B. or to ballet. Then, a year later, he returned,…

 Tribute in Light Fifteen years on, the attacks of September 11th have settled into history: heightened security measures have gone from a temporary fix to a fixed way of life; political tremors have shaken out identity and border politics with the power to shape elections; and the city feels less in transition and more in suspension. Still, this memorial exhibit remains a constant—there are New Yorkers who have grown up in the glow of these twin beams, shown annually since 2002, who will take history courses this fall which attempt to contextualize on paper what many remember seeing with their own eyes. Twelve million people within a sixty-mile radius can see the beams, which was the intention of the independent artists and designers who first staged the memorial, under the…

 WHAT A TIME to be a woman in America. Soon, there could be a Madame President. Or, if things go a different way, the Oval Office may be occupied by an orange fellow who once, confronted with a lawyer preparing to pump breast milk, ran out of the room screaming, “You’re disgusting!” Thankfully, the comedians Jo Firestone and Aparna Nancherla have teamed up to create an instructional Web series called “Womanhood,” on the YouTube channel RIOT. Season 1 covered everything from “Puberty Tips” (“What you didn’t know is that you have about seven holes down there”) to “Menopause: The Start of Your Body Entering Witchhood.” Season 2 premières September 22nd. On a recent afternoon, Firestone and Nancherla swung by a Drybar salon on West Sixteenth Street to get womanly…

 My great-grandmother Luise Gönner had a keen eye for dead people. She would see them sitting by the side of the road sometimes when she worked in her garden in the morning, or waiting by the village crossroads at dusk, a look of mournful reproof in their eyes. Whether the sight alarmed or consoled her, I can’t say. Luise was born in 1871 and died six months after my mother’s birth, in 1935. I know only the stories about her that my mother heard growing up. She says that Luise was in most ways a sturdy, commonsensical soul, so I like to imagine that she took her visitations in stride: old friends and neighbors stopping by to pick up the conversation where they’d left off. Herzogenweiler, the village where Luise…

A FTER GABRIEL CARDONA was sentenced, in 2009, press photographers took his picture through a pane of protective glass, as if he were some exotic beast. There was something unthinkable about what he had become, a ghoulish contradiction too awful for the culture to assimilate: a child assassin. Yet there he sat, in pristine white prison scrubs, reciting a catalogue of macabre achievements in the matterof-fact tones of a college interview. When Cardona was arrested, he was nineteen, and his delicate-featured face retained a dissonant boyishness. But he blinked when he spoke, in nervous flurries, and his interlocutors found themselves staring at a tattoo of a second set of eyes, blue-black and smudgy, that had been inked onto his eyelids. In the past decade, as the death toll from Mexico’s…

PHILOSOPHER OF FEELINGS I read Rachel Aviv’s Profile of Martha Nussbaum with a mixture of awe and dismay (“Captain of Her Soul,” July 25th). I loved Nussbaum’s call for a “blushing patriarchy” and for feminists to return to the abject body; her embrace of the Stoic notion that thought and feeling are divisionless; and her belief that being a good human or living a virtuous life requires “a kind of openness to the world . . . that can lead you to be shattered.” But although Nussbaum espouses the value of vulnerability, she seems to strive to exist in an entirely different realm. It’s as if she were speaking to those humans, over there, the herd, while her tanned, toned, leggy self—running as she recites opera, living methodically, and eating…

CONCERTS IN TOWN BAM: David Lang’s “The Loser” One never quite knows what David Lang—the composer of “The Little Match Girl Passion,” “The Public Domain,” and other works that unpretentiously disrupt the typical concert experience— is going to do next. He opens the Next Wave Festival season with this world-première opera, based on a novel by Thomas Bernhard; to further isolate the central character, a pianist who despairs at living in the shadow of Glenn Gould, the baritone Rod Gilfry stands on a slender platform suspended over a darkened theatre, with the audience seated only in the mezzanine. With the pianist Conrad Tao; Karina Canellakis conducts. (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn. bam.org. Sept. 7 and Sept. 9-10 at 7:30 and Sept. 11 at 3.) Resonant Bodies Festival…

MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Met Breuer “Diane Arbus: In the Beginning” Arbus once said, “The subject of the picture is always more important than the picture—and more complicated.” This show of early photographs, made between 1956 and 1962, reveals that she found her subject early on but took a while to land on her style, while shooting in movie houses (where Dracula glowers onscreen), at street fairs (where a little man bites a big woman’s breast), and at the morgue (where the photographer sought out a corpse). The pictures in the show are small, and often grainy; they’re not so unlike those of Arbus’s peers Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, and William Klein (whose photographs are included in a room here). When Arbus switched to a new camera, in 1962, its bigger,…

 The sculptor John Ahearn wasn’t looking for a new muse when he stopped by a high-school portrait show around the corner from his South Bronx studio two years ago. But he was struck by a realist oil painting depicting drowsy subway riders. “It was really deep and beautifully painted,” he recalled recently. When he met the artist, eighteen-year-old Devon Rodriguez, he was taken aback again: the boy’s angular black hairline and V-neck T-shirt reminded him “exactly” of a Picasso self-portrait from 1906. Ahearn said, “When I mentioned it to him, he picked up his iPhone and instantly goes, ‘You mean this one?’ ” Ahearn, who is sixty-five, was stunned. “It took him one second and he had the image for me! I had only used flip phones, so that was…

 Nelson Molina grew up in a housing project in East Harlem, in an apartment where his mother still lives. “Starting when I was nine years old, in 1962, I had a passion for picking up,” he said recently. “I had, like, a threeblock radius. I would look through the garbage and pick up toys that people threw out, and I would fix them. I had two brothers and three sisters, and I was like Santa Claus to them.” As if drawn by an irresistible force, in 1981 Molina went to work for the Department of Sanitation. His route, which he covered for thirty years, included his childhood neighborhood, and when he found something that he felt shouldn’t have been thrown away he put it into a special bin on…

 THE HANDSOME Senator from Texas, the Capitol’s leading heartthrob, a former astronaut, and a likely future President, was in bed with two ladies, a young intern and the more mature Secretary of the Interior (the Senator called her the Secretary of the Posterior and had just made several charming off-color but complimentary remarks about hers, bringing an embarrassed flush to all four of her cheeks, and giggles from the intern, who was playing with two of them), when his private security phone chimed with the news: “The Martians have landed! In Texas!” He kissed the ladies, donned his spacesuit and helmet, and sprang into action. The Senator flew his private jet directly from his ranch to the Martians’ landing site, not at all surprised that they had chosen the great…

The Huntress, by Alice Arlen and Michael J. Arlen (Pantheon). This entertaining biography of Alicia Patterson, the founding editor and co-publisher of Newsday, unfolds against a glittering backdrop of wealth, prestige, and print. A scion of the Patterson-Medill publishing dynasty (her great-grandfather and her father founded the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News, respectively), Patterson launched Newsday in 1940, on Long Island, quickly building it from a small suburban daily to an influential national paper. Patterson’s success came relatively late in life, and much of the book catalogues her various rich-girl-in-the-Jazz Age high jinks: ditching husbands one and two, hunting water buffalo in Indochina. Her family—forceful, dysfunctional, and fascinating—takes center stage in these chapters, and the result is a finely drawn, multigenerational portrait of life in the golden…

In her forty-five-year movie career, Isabelle Huppert has played classical and modern heroines, intellectuals and workers, for directors including Michael Haneke, Michael Cimino, Claire Denis, and Hong Sang-soo. This vast interpretive spectrum converges in her multifaceted role in the play “Phaedra(s),” at BAM’s Harvey Theatre, Sept. 13-18. The text, based on works by Sarah Kane, J. M. Coetzee, and Wajdi Mouawad, turns the tormented queen of Greek mythology into a figure of pornography, aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie.…

ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Mulatu Astatke This seventy-two-year-old master’s musical education began in the nineteen-fifties, when he came to North Wales from the small city of Jimma, Ethiopia, as a promising sixteen-yearold engineering student. Astatke began studying trumpet, clarinet, and piano, and continued his musical pursuits at Trinity College and in London jazz clubs. He became the first African student to enroll at the Berklee College of Music, before settling in New York, in the early sixties, where he formed the Ethiopian Quintet, a Latin-jazz band that played club dates and Puerto Rican weddings. That quintet contained the first traces of “Ethio-jazz,” a moody fusion of dark, evocative melodies, rooted in five-note Ethiopian scales and…

OPENING Cameraperson Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening Sept. 9. (In limited release.) • Demon In this thriller, directed by Marcin Wrona, a British bridegroom in Poland is possessed by a dybbuk. Opening Sept. 9. (In limited release.) • Kicks A drama, about a teenage boy in Oakland (Jahking Guillory) who plans to avenge the theft of his expensive sneakers. Directed by Justin Tipping; co-starring Christopher Jordan Wallace, Christopher Meyer, and Mahershala Ali. Opening Sept. 9. (In limited release.) • Sully Clint Eastwood directed this drama, about Chesley Sullenberger (Tom Hanks), the airline pilot who, in 2009, safely landed a disabled passenger jet in the Hudson River. Opening Sept. 9. (In wide release.) • When the Bough Breaks A thriller, about a surrogate mother (Jaz Sinclair) who becomes fixated on the…

O’Hara’s 120 Cedar St. (212-267-3032) On September 11, 2001, Mike Keane, a co-owner of this beloved Irish pub, just south of the World Trade Center, watched the first tower fall from the bar’s roof, where he’d gone to put out some small fires that had started when the plane hit. Keane made it to safety; the bar was badly damaged. When it reopened, seven months later, it became a haven for locals and Ground Zero workers. At a gathering a year after the attacks, a construction worker nicknamed Big John ripped an embroidered patch off a fireman’s uniform and stapled it to the wall; this became a tradition. Now more than seven thousand patches—London Ambulance Service, Lowell Fire Department, Emerald Society Pipes & Drums—are on display. On a recent, hopping Friday…

Richard Rhoades is a seventy-sixyear-old retired respiratory therapist and E.M.T. who lives with his wife in Poughkeepsie. Lately he’s been laid up with a broken back—“I can’t even lift my toothbrush right now,” he said by phone the other day—and he suffers from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of his time as a marine in Vietnam. “I go to the shrink,” he said. “We talk about why I swear like a sailor and destroy stuff. If I’ve got a baseball bat or a pitchfork when I’m mad, I’ll throw that at you! My neighbors, they don’t bother me.” Imagine, then, how Rhoades might respond to a caller making his landline ring, all the way on the other side of his bedroom, at four in the morning, particularly…

 The day after Apollo 14 landed on the moon, Dennis and Terence McKenna began a trek through the Amazon with four friends who considered themselves, as Terence wrote in his book “True Hallucinations,” “refugees from a society that we thought was poisoned by its own self-hatred and inner contradictions.” They had come to South America, the land of yagé, also known as ayahuasca: an intensely hallucinogenic potion made from boiling woody Banisteriopsis caapi vines with the glossy leaves of the chacruna bush. The brothers, then in their early twenties, were grieving the recent death of their mother, and they were hungry for answers about the mysteries of the cosmos: “We had sorted through the ideological options, and we had decided to put all of our chips on the psychedelic…

 PETE WELLS, THE restaurant critic of the Times, who writes a review every week—and who occasionally writes one that creates a national hubbub about class, money, and soup— was waiting for a table not long ago at Momofuku Nishi, a modish new restaurant in Chelsea. Wells is fifty-three and soft-spoken. His balance of Apollonian and Dionysian traits is suggested by a taste for drawing delicate sketches of tiki cocktails. Since starting the job, in 2012, he has eaten out five times a week. His primary disguise strategy is “to be the least interesting person in the room,” he had told me, adding, “Which I was, for many years. It’s not a stretch.” But he does vary his appearance. At times, he’ll be unshaven, in frayed jeans; in Chelsea, he looked…

1 Like an arched eyebrow travelling alone, you drift, sea-horse, a forgotten, persistent question. Despite your skeptical attitude, it’s true that your numbers are crashing. Still, you are rumored to consume up to 3,000 baby shrimp per day! 2 Who doesn’t want to be a revenant, to go back to basics in a big way on the small screen which, somehow, still survives? “Terrific” and “terrible” are cousins after all. Am I warm or cold? I’m halfrhyming, aiming right between quick and dead like we could thread that needle and keep going.…