Innholdsfortegnelse for January 18, 2016 i The New Yorker

Below a hat shop in SoHo, through a door marked only by the Chinese characters for “tavern,” this speakeasy engages nightly in a quiet revolution. At first glance, it’s a precise study in standard downtown cocktail lounge: Edison bulbs light an elegant white-marble counter while vested bartenders chat with patrons. But, on closer inspection, the bar’s shelves are stocked with bottles, casks, and mason jars of baijiu—high-proof Chinese spirits notorious for their umami-heavy funk. Lumos hopes to hook New Yorkers on what is, by volume, the most imbibed liquor in the world. (1.3 billion people can’t be wrong.) “We don’t want this to be a place just to party,” the co-founder Qifan Li said on a recent Tuesday. “We want you to come over and maybe become a little educated…

In 2006, Mr. and Mrs. KLondike moved downtown from the Upper East Side apartment where Mrs. KLondike had grown up. (The KLondikes are so named here to reflect the way that, in movies and on TV, fictional phone numbers always begin with 555, or, in the old days, KLondike 5, to protect the innocent holders of actual phone numbers.) Mrs. KLondike wanted to transfer her old phone number to her new apartment. She’d had it her whole life. On a call with Verizon, she learned that this would not be possible. “I was devastated,” she recalled recently. The old number was one of those easily remembered, symmetrical ones. The Verizon agent was sympathetic and spent more than half an hour on the line with Mrs. KLondike, scanning the system for…

One Sunday night in March, 1985, Michele Murray, a sophomore at Texas Tech University, tried to find a parking space near her dorm. In the preceding months, four women had been raped on or near the Texas Tech campus, in the small plains city of Lubbock; local newspapers speculated about a “Tech rapist,” but the police had no solid leads. As Murray parked in a church lot, a man wearing a yellow terry-cloth shirt and bluejeans approached the car. She felt a pang of fear, but at second glance the man seemed harmless—not particularly tall or muscular, with gaunt cheeks and bulging eyes. She rolled down the window. “Do you have jumper cables?” he asked. She said no. For a moment, the man stared vacantly up at the night sky.…

MIAMI UNDERWATER As a resident of South Florida for thirty years, I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s piece about the region’s flooding with interest (“The Siege of Miami,” December 21st & 28th). For the past five years, I have noticed environmental changes too obvious to ignore. Many of our beaches now are more water than sand, and many coastal roads regularly flood. High tides wash into beachfront condos on many of our islands. When Governor Rick Scott was asked about climate change a few years ago, while running for reëlection, he replied, “I’m not a scientist.” Needless to say, he kept his job. Stacie M. Kiner Hypoluxo, Fla. Residents of South Florida in the era of rising sea levels face a daunting array of climatological, infrastructural, and political problems. Kolbert’s article…

“Circus Now” Nine award-winning, innovative companies gather to reimagine the circus once again. More than fifty entertainers, acrobats, and aerialists will push traditional boundaries at “Circus Now: International Contemporary Circus Exposure 2016,” a three-night celebration of the centuries-old art. Acts from France, Sweden, Canada, and beyond perform ceiling-scraping stunts that add new layers to classic circus tricks. The Finnish aerialist Ilona Jantti says her tightrope routine, performed against a multicolored video projection that serves as her dance partner, seems “more dangerous than it is.” “Circus Now” has extended its stay in New York by popular demand for this second run. (N.Y.U. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. 566 LaGuardia Pl. 212-992-8484. Jan. 14-16.) READINGS AND TALKS Intelligence Squared More than four million Syrians have fled from the civil war…

The Austrian-born artist and teacher Rainer Ganahl has a few guidelines for his prospective students: 1. Don’t expect him to like you; 2. Don’t expect him to like your work; 3. Expect to be criticized. “That is the life of an artist,” he writes in his pedagogical manifesto, “Strange Teaching: The Artist as Excellent and Miserable Teacher.” Even in Germany, the birthplace of this sort of Nietzschean tough love, “there are students who don’t dare come to my class,” Ganahl, who is fifty-four, said on a recent afternoon at the Sump, a scrappy music venue in Ridgewood, Queens. He was hosting a two-week residency there for thirty art students from Vienna, Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, and Stuttgart, where he is a professor, though he lives primarily in New York. Ganahl, who…

As famous as a broken disc,thanks for coming all this way.That’s why I have to do it,to be a goon that mattersinto another person’s life.You have a lousy voice, buta good tenor. There, I’ve said it.You’ll have to quickly get backon the job, brothers brothers.In her transparent hairshe is, well, just a person,Bruce confessed.And that stuff is now getting cold.I’ll be there for you;they want to cut them off from otherpoppy-seed cakes,getting—getting old again,frustrated bobby-soxer.Hold that opera—you made the lyrics.You remind me of you.We had been up to Speculator once before.Off you go then.…

At a corner table in the dining room of Marea, a restaurant on Central Park South, the conversation was smooth but disputatious. Three men in suits were drinking red wine and eating pasta that cost thirty-four dollars a serving. One of them was a hedge-fund manager, a famous short seller. Another was the financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. The third man, in from London, was the actor Damian Lewis. Sorkin had made the introduction. The hedge-fund manager and Lewis were doing most of the talking. “Does your business have a societal benefit?” Lewis asked. He wanted to know what made a hedge-fund manager more than “a paper shuffler.” The hedge-fund manager said that he and his peers basically function as market-based regulators—that they have a financial incentive to expose wrongdoing.…

In this bonsai-esque universe where molecules are even smaller than motionA girl prayed for a set of Lionel trains minus the trains— Just thumbnail shrubbery, tiny plastic people she could maneuver, Position in indefensible battle, infuse honey-honesty into their unprotestingZipped lips, force them to love each other with their clothes on.She’d lift the roof off the tiny saloon where men gathered after their shittyShifts & spray shaken Pepsi, calling it a carbonated hurricane. MountaintopsWere conveniently paint-dipped with permanent snow, the winter itself a replicaOf the smallest imaginable season, a season that lasted only a split second. ButWhen the actual bridge collapsed the train majestically fell into the saltwater,The Icarus speck of the engineer never found. The bipolar halves of the city wouldNot reconnect for months. Naturally there were a dozen…

Stephen Potter, the English satirist and the inventor of “Lifemanship,” pointed out once that the essence of “reviewmanship,” being one up in book reviews, is perverse praise: giving writers credit for qualities they are supposed to lack, or criticizing them for not having ones that they clearly possess— i.e., extolling the open sadism of Jane Austen or lamenting the sexual timidity of D. H. Lawrence. It may then seem Potterian to say that the later Henry James obviously looks more appealing in his nonfiction than in his novels, but something close to that conclusion may present itself to the reader happily making his way through the two books of Jamesian autobiography, “A Small Boy and Others” (1913) and “Notes of a Son and Brother” (1914), just reissued in a single…

ON THE OCCASION OF its twenty-fifth anniversary, Big Dance Theatre—the genre-defying performance company led by the married duo Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar—is treating itself to an evening at the Kitchen. The compilation, titled “Big Dance: Short Form,” unspools like a clever anthology of vignettes focussed on dance, one melting into the next with deceptive informality. Parson and Lazar’s approach is characterized by a keen poetic intelligence; the vignettes are surreal, but so tightly constructed and lucidly performed that they feel familiar. As always, the source material is remarkably varied, ranging from the nineteenth-century children’s novel “Heidi” to the writings of Tatsumi Hijikata, a founder of the postwar Japanese expressionist dance style Butoh. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera Penny Woolcock’s gorgeous new production of “Les Pêcheurs de Perles” (“The…

On Christmas Day, 1988, someone gave Donald Trump a star in the sky. “The buyer is listed as Donald J. Trump,” Elaine Stolpe said recently from her office at the International Star Registry, in Glenview, Illinois. “But I don’t think it’s from him. It’s probably a gift from people who worked for him. 725 Fifth Avenue—do you know if that’s his address?” The star, situated hundreds of lightyears from Earth, is one of four named either Donald John Trump or Donald J. Trump, registered between 1988 and 2007. There is also a star called the Donald, which was registered on Christmas Day in 2000 by an unspecified person. “It could be anybody,” Stolpe said. She continued with the astronomy lesson: “The first Donald John Trump star is in the constellation…

Forbes March wasn’t always in the firewood business. He spent three seasons on the ABC soap opera “One Life to Live,” playing the doomed winery owner Nash Brennan, who falls to his death through a skylight window. Soon after, in 2009, March quit acting, moved to Jeffersonville, New York, and established the New York Firewood Company. The firm now supplies kiln-dried, plastic-wrapped bundles of logs to seventy-five restaurants and hundreds of private residences in and around New York City. “I’ve fallen into everything,” March said on a recent Saturday morning, as he navigated his forty-foot delivery truck through Manhattan traffic. March and a helper, a burly man with tattooed shoulders named Ronald Stickle, had set out from Jeffersonville at 4:30 A.M. They had fourteen stops to make: a house in…

In the sixties, hippies placed daisies in the barrels of guns. In new photographs, the American artist Taryn Simon captures a different kind of flower power: bouquets that sat on the tables where world leaders were brokering deals. In 2005, Alexander Rumyantsev (pictured above), then Russia’s atomic-energy minister, travelled to Iran and signed an agreement to provide the country with nuclear fuel. The accord was attended by a froth of Colombian carnations, Portuguese gladioli, Dutch daffodils, and American ferns—or so Simon deduced after researching archival images with a botanist. Simon imported four thousand botanical specimens from the world’s largest flower market, in the Netherlands, and created three dozen stilllifes, evoking diplomatic accords made between 1968 and 2014. The images shed light on the artifice underlying politics. Simon’s weighty concept has…

There once lived a painter so destitute that he couldn’t afford a single crayon, let alone brushes and paints. He tried to draw on the pavement with pieces of brick, but janitors and patrolmen didn’t appreciate such art. He would have painted on walls or on fences, but every wall and fence belonged to someone. Besides, brick doesn’t really draw on walls; it only scratches. At least the painter had a roof over his head—sort of. The janitor in the apartment building where the painter had once owned a unit partitioned off the dark corner under the stairs, where he kept his brooms, shovels, and work clothes, and advertised the makeshift cupboard as a “Private Apartment for Rent—No Running Water.” This was where our painter slept: on the floor, with…

DEATH BY WATER, by Kenzaburo Oe, translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm (Grove). In this sombre autobiographical novel by a Nobel laureate, an aging writer who has long been plagued by dreams about the night his father drowned returns to his childhood village. He intends to examine the contents of a red leather trunk, believing that it contains clues to whether the drowning was an accident, a suicide, a politically heroic gesture, or a cowardly act. The trunk does not yield much, but family and friends offer recollections: their revisions, obfuscations, and digressions illustrate Oe’s abiding interest in the elusiveness of personal and national memory in postwar Japan. THE MARK AND THE VOID, by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Claude Martingale, a Frenchman working at a…