Innholdsfortegnelse for November 7, 2016 i The New Yorker

Emily Nussbaum (On Television, p. 64) won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She has been the magazine’s television critic since 2011. Amy Davidson (Comment, p. 15), a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment. She also writes a column for newyorker.com. Jiayang Fan (“The Emperor’s New Museum,” p. 28) became a New Yorker staff writer earlier this year. Lauren Collins (The Talk of the Town, p. 18) is the author of “When in French: Love in a Second Language,” which was published in September. Rebecca Mead (“Lost Time,” p. 46) has been a staff writer since 1997. “My Life in Middlemarch” is her latest book. Megan Amram (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 27), the author of the humor book “Science . . . for Her!,” is currently writing…

Goings On About Town has been part of The New Yorker since Harold Ross produced the first issue of the magazine, in February, 1925. For a time, Goings On was subtitled “A Conscientious Calendar of Events Worth While”—and that’s still exactly what it is. The section was conceived as a compendium of witty, incisive commentary on the best of New York City’s cultural offerings. To this day, Goings On continues its tradition of astute, snappy previews and critical reviews of theatre, art, classical music, rock, pop, jazz, cabaret, dance, movies, restaurants, and bars—and, in Above & Beyond, the quirkier events around town that are difficult to categorize, and all the more intriguing for it. The New Yorker remains one of the few publications to cover the breadth of the city’s…

NEXT WEEK, ON Nov. 14-16, at the Gerald W. Lynch Theatre, the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center will bring us an extremely valuable property, Monteverdi’s “Return of Ulysses,” designed and directed by the South African artist William Kentridge, who, in recent years, has wowed New York’s opera audience with his versions of Shostakovich’s “The Nose” and Berg’s “Lulu.” With him will come Cape Town’s Handspring Puppet Company, makers of the towering steeds for “War Horse,” and Brussels’s Ricercar Consort, with its passionate singers and its gleaming theorbo (a giant baroque lute) and viola da gamba. As befits an opera that is almost three hundred years old, Kentridge’s “Ulysses” has no truck with realism. The characters are nearly life-sized puppets, carved from wood. Standing next to them, and fully visible,…

In Williamsburg, around the corner from a shop selling “Western Inspired Goods,” there is a bar that is set in the imaginary Southern town of Belle Shoals. No further geographical specifics are offered—country bacon is served alongside mescal and aquavit. Embedded in a bookcase, in pride of place, is a Wurlitzer jukebox, accepting coins in exchange for the yearning voices of Ella Fitzgerald and James Brown. There’s an antique birdcage and a mellow oak bar, and cocktails like the Sunday Tea (peach moonshine, bourbon, sweet tea, lemon), which might lull you into a generic dream of the South. Nonetheless, Belle Shoals feels more Urban Outfitters flannel than Flannery O’Connor, who once wrote, “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader.” A…

AT THE STRAND BOOKSTORE, Laura Dern bent to caress a stack of copies of “The Catcher in the Rye.” Her davening torso and probing hands made her resemble a praying mantis. “This was the book, when I was fourteen, that made me love books,” she said. “Before that, I mostly read scripts.” The actress, the daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, appeared in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” at the age of seven, rode her bike to acting classes at nine, and, at fifteen, sued her parents for emancipation so that she could continue acting. Her best teacher, she said, was the director David Lynch: “Without him, I would not have made the acting choices I’ve made, because he required me to play the girl next door” (in “Blue…

EVERY LOVE STORY has to start somewhere, and I’m blaming this one on a boat. My husband, Mark, was looking for an art studio to rent, and a building in Park Slope a block from our apartment had a space available. He was going to look at it, and I’d been asked to come along, on a summer evening, to weigh in with a wife’s opinion. I liked the building from the moment the man who owned it swung open a barn-style garage door to let us in. From the outside, it looked like a normal, if dilapidated, red brick town house, but, inside, the studios were off a passageway that was so labyrinthine and long that there was no imagining where it might lead. Tools and welding equipment and…

In 2009, Russell Moore was a young theologian who occasionally served as the host of a Christian radio show. He liked to let callers have their say, drawing them out with friendly questioning before gently acknowledging, when necessary, that he firmly disagreed. One day in July, he found himself leading a discussion of Sarah Palin, who had recently called a surprise backyard press conference to announce that she was resigning the governorship of Alaska. (She blamed silly ethics charges and serious lawyers’ fees.) Moore’s guest was Richard Land, who had been praising Palin before most of the country knew her name. Land was the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-engagement arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, which made him the loudest voice of the biggest group…

The lazy Susan, in antiquity, would have been a fire. Drinking all night, the parents never get drunk. This is an ancient brew, with nuts, seeds, fruit to fuel the hours, to light a center. The tea dispenser’s orange light reminds us: they’re in the dining room, laughing in Chinese while we play Scrabble or Monopoly out here. They’re telling stories we don’t bother to record because the nights are long. We’ve heard them before. We don’t comprehend the punch lines. They’re tired. They live this way because of us. We live this way because of them. We don’t comprehend the punch lines. They’re tired because the nights are long. We’ve heard them before, telling stories we don’t bother to record. While we play Scrabble or Monopoly out here, they’re…

Substitute, by Nicholson Baker (Blue Rider). In 2014, the author spent four weeks as a substitute teacher in his Maine school district—in an effort, at a time of fraught debates about education policy, to “know what life in classrooms was really like.” In his finely detailed chronicle, each day becomes a chapter. Baker is genial and patient, doling out compliments to his endearing, snarky, overmedicated, and underengaged charges, who range in age from kindergarten to high school. Over time, he grows irritated with teachers’ methods of crowd control and with the “diabolical worksheets” of a one-size-fits-all educational philosophy. His ideas are provocative—he proposes slashing the school day to two hours—and his general view is unenchanted: “School isn’t actually about efficient teaching, it’s about free all-day babysitting while parents work.”…

AMERICAN UTOPIAS Akash Kapur’s essay on utopias and the recent spate of books that focus on them felt strikingly relevant, despite the fact that the whole notion of utopia is predicated on its rarity (“Couldn’t Be Better,” October 3rd). The question the piece inspired in me was whether America itself is a utopia. Founded on the dreams of the dispossessed, in many ways it is. Democracy is, after all, just a theory, adapted and adopted from past civilizations, most notably Greece and Rome. It was molded by religious fundamentalists, the early colonists, who were fed up with the loose interpretation of Protestantism by the Church of England and sailed across the Atlantic to have it their own way. This year, the cracks and fissures in the American experiment have…

Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival This year, the annual series asks participants to turn their gaze inward and mull over the nature of humanity. The WNYC producer John Schaefer, who hosts “Soundcheck and New Sounds,” engages the festival’s theme the most explicitly, inviting prominent thinkers in the disciplines of evolution, psychology, religion, and art to find parallels that point to a common human experience. At the Stanley Kaplan Penthouse, guest speakers include the paleoanthropologist Alison S. Brooks and the theologian Pamela Cooper-White. (165 W. 65th St. whitelightfestival.org. Nov. 5 at 4.) New York Adventure Club This group specializes in rare, intimate tours of treasured city spaces, often at nontraditional hours: past events have included a late-night walk through Grant’s Tomb and a hard-hat tour of an abandoned hospital on…

“Paris will not stand by and do nothing while the Mediterranean becomes a graveyard,” Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, said earlier this year, announcing a plan to create the city’s first official refugee shelter. With the destruction of the “jungle” camp at Calais last week, this shelter is likely to become even more vital. On July 15th, Julien Beller got a call from the Mayor’s office. Beller, an architect who has thrown festivals in brownfields and installed toilets in shantytowns, seeks to “work for a just city, built with pleasure, where each person makes his place.” His mission: to turn a disused railroad depot in the Eighteenth Arrondissement into a habitat for four hundred people, in short order. He cancelled a vacation to Finland. Beller had only a week…

KENNETH LONERGAN, the screenwriter, director, and playwright, wears a wristwatch that is set fifteen minutes fast—an effort, he told me when we first met, to correct a stubborn habit of lateness. The trick doesn’t fool him into thinking that it’s the wrong time, but it is mysteriously effective at keeping him on schedule. Compensating for an undesirable behavior, he acknowledged, is not the same as understanding why it occurs in the first place. “It’s a hard habit to break,” he said. “I think it is partly gluttony for wanting to keep doing what I am doing, and also a lunatic resentment at being expected to do anything. But I don’t like being late. So I am trying.” Much of Lonergan’s work is driven by the idea that the conscious and…

FULL DISCLOSURE: late one night, while watching Fox News, I donated two hundred and fifty dollars to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. My husband is Canadian. I’m Jewish. In the early nineties, my dad worked in the Clinton White House, but although I love him we are not political clones. My bias, in sum, is as blatant as a Celtic arm tattoo. My first real encounter with Fox News came during the second Bush Administration, when my nearly blind grandmother listened to Bill O’Reilly at high volume. An immigrant garment worker widowed by a union organizer, she slowly tipped from left to neocon, which happens a lot among your elderly New York Jews who watch Fox. We had a few arguments, over the years, about whether anti-Semitism persisted in America or whether…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, the small Long Island town where I live—a seaside village of a few thousand people—held its municipal election. The choice was between a party that favored development and another that opposed it, and the lead-up to the vote was tense. Leaflets flooded mailboxes. Signs, bigger each week, sprouted on lawns. On Facebook, voters insulted the candidates and one another with frank exuberance; around dinner tables, talk was of the irreparable damage one party or the other would inflict on village life. “It really is a shame that every four years the Village has to deal with the smut and name calling that has seemingly become a tradition,” one party spokesperson lamented on Facebook. Perhaps, the spokesperson continued, this was symptomatic of a broader condition: elections across the…

The love that the sensational Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga share as Richard and Mildred Loving, in the director Jeff Nichols’s astonishing “Loving,” is palpable, and it frames the landmark 1967 case that nullified laws banning interracial marriage. This intimate movie, like the current film “Moonlight,” paves the way for a new kind of American cinema—serious but not ideological, and reflective of the diversity that has always gone into the making of that complicated character otherwise known as America. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Beach House The surprise album drop, having become a standard of popular music, is taken one step further by some more ambitious camps, such as the Baltimore dream-pop mainstays…

Donald Trump’s best Indian-American friend is a sixty-sevenyear-old billionaire from Chicago named Shalabh Kumar. One recent Saturday, the candidate accepted Kumar’s invitation to speak at a fund-raiser in New Jersey, organized by the Republican Hindu Coalition, a group that Kumar founded last year, with the blessing of Newt Gingrich. In 2013, Kumar took American congressmen to India to meet Narendra Modi (now the Prime Minister), a Hindu nationalist, who, at the time, had been banned from the United States, owing to allegations that he’d played a role in the killing of hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat. Kumar donated almost a million dollars to Trump’s campaign, after the two bonded over Modi’s leadership and the threat of Islamic terrorism. “A lot of people think that Trump is somewhat of a racist,”…

In 1960, the Department of Justice indicted executives from several companies for involvement in a huge price-fixing scheme across much of the electrical industry. The story was like a bad spy novel—secret hotel-room meetings, conversations in code—and its chief villain was General Electric, which was then the world’s biggest company. Sixteen G.E. executives were convicted of violating antitrust laws, and the affair is still known as the Great Electrical Price Conspiracy. It was never proved that G.E.’s top brass knew what was going on, but, even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, it was a profound management failure. Yet Ralph Cordiner, G.E.’s chairman and C.E.O., not only escaped prosecution; he even got to keep his job. John Stumpf should have been so lucky. The other week, Stumpf…

“It’s nice to come home to Shanghai,” the Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian told me one day in February, four months after gaining worldwide notoriety by spending a hundred and seventy million dollars on a painting by Amedeo Modigliani. We had just sat down in his office at the Long Museum West, one of two privately run art museums that he has opened in the city, when his face contorted and a sneeze of atomic force burst out, unhindered by tissue or hand. Liu unself-consciously wiped himself down with a Kleenex, cleared his sinuses copiously, and balled up the tissue, placing it on a glass coffee table between us. Then he returned to the subject of his home town: “It might not have a long history, this city, but it is…

THE DOG WAS the color of a maraschino cherry, and what it had in its jaws I couldn’t quite make out at first, not until it parked itself under the hydrangeas and began throttling the thing. This little episode would have played itself out without my even noticing, except that I’d gone to the stove to put the kettle on for a cup of tea and happened to glance out the window at the front lawn. The lawn, a lush blue-green that managed to hint at both the turquoise of the sea and the viridian of a Kentucky meadow, was something I took special pride in, and any wandering dog, no matter its chromatics, was an irritation to me. The seed had been pricey—a blend of Chewings fescue, Bahia, and…

ROUGHLY A THIRD of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them. Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals. Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty: Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he…

NOTHING IN THE brilliant operatic career of Gioachino Rossini became him like the leaving it. When, in 1829, “Guillaume Tell” had its première, at the Paris Opéra, the composer was thirty-seven; he had written some forty operas and attained wealth and fame. Although he went on composing for decades—his “Stabat Mater,” completed in 1841, and “Petite Messe Solennelle,” from 1863, showed how much music remained in him—“Tell” was his final opera. Biographers have long debated the reasons for Rossini’s withdrawal, failing to reach consensus. We are left with a gnomic remark that he reportedly made in 1860, eight years before his death: “I decided that I had something better to do, which was to remain silent.” The last scene of “Tell” is, not by accident, colossal and sublime. The titular…

CONTEMPORARY performers who write their own material seldom escape the trap of having written their own material. The impulse to perform— to write with your body in front of others—is different from the push it takes to author a script, which requires that you dream alone. A number of monologuists, including Wallace Shawn, Spalding Gray, Karen Finley, and Anna Deavere Smith, started producing diverse, substantial work decades ago, but many of the younger performers who’ve tried to follow suit have failed to understand that one’s “I” is rarely enough—or, in some cases, can be entirely too much. Often, writerperformers confuse the actor’s desire to be seen, to be “exposed” before an audience, with expository writing that’s shapeless because it insists on telling all. This is solipsism, not theatre (or, at…