Innholdsfortegnelse for Sep-07-15 i The New Yorker

IF THERE’S ONE INSTRUMENT THAT sums up the spectrum of possibilities at the Stone, the snuffbox-size room for avant-garde performance that John Zorn established on Avenue C in 2005, it would be the guitar, which has inspired expert practitioners across the classical, jazz, folk, rock, and experimental-music genres. September is a great month to hear three of the best of them, in an array of concerts which reveals Zorn’s light but lasting control over the venue’s programming. The young American guitarists Gyan Riley and Julian Lage represent, between them, a broad range of interests: Riley, a son of the legendary composer Terry Riley, has deep roots in the classical and contemporary realms, while Lage, who produces silken sounds with effortless ease, is a master of both jazz and folk idioms.…

Zoe Markowitz is sixteen and in the eleventh grade at Eleanor Roosevelt High, on East Seventy-sixth Street. “My dad is a lawyer, and my mom is a banker at JP Morgan,” she said one morning, while strolling up Madison Avenue. “They, like, don’t know who I am or where I came from.” Markowitz has long brown hair and wore bright-pink lipstick and big Kate Spade sunglasses. She has taken a fashion-design class at Parsons and describes her style as “elegant punk.” She used to do Model U.N., and she’d like to get back into it. In the meantime, she’s serving as the youngest member ever on Community Board 8. “I applied when I was fifteen, which you’re not really supposed to do,” Markowitz said. “My principal sent an e-mail basically…

The stock market is not the economy. That’s a simple financial truth, but it’s hard to keep in mind in the midst of a sell-off like the one we saw last Monday, especially with headlines screaming about a “BLOODBATH IN GLOBAL MARKETS.” So, even as the market rallied last week, concerns lingered over the possibility that the sharp decline in stock prices boded ill for the U.S. economy as a whole, giving us front-page stories fretting about the “real threat to the American economy” and warning of “a leaner era ahead.” These worries are almost certainly unfounded. The market sell-off in the U.S. wasn’t just a matter of panic— it reflected investors’ genuine anxieties about the future. But those anxieties have surprisingly little to do with the current state of…

On a bitterly cold night in February, William Bratton, New York City’s police commissioner, joined several hundred uniformed officers for an informal memorial service at the corner of 107th Avenue and Inwood Street, in Jamaica, Queens. It was past midnight, and everyone was waiting for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was due to speak. Twenty-seven years earlier, on February 26, 1988, a twenty-two-year-old officer named Edward Byrne was shot and killed on that corner, on orders from a drug dealer, as he sat in his patrol car guarding the home of a witness. The memorial is an annual rite for many city cops, and is a reminder of how much tougher New York’s streets were at the time of the murder. That year, there were eighteen hundred and ninety-six homicides…

Mike Hauke opened a pizza and sub shop in Atlantic City in 2009, but only after he had failed in nine tries to rent the space to somebody else. He had bought the building three years earlier on the advice of his father, an accountant who considered distressed real estate a smart long-term bet. This piece of real estate seemed to test the proposition. It was a bedraggled three-story clapboard house that years of neighborhood demolition and neglect had stranded at the edge of several mostly vacant blocks, which together formed an urban badlands reaching all the way to the dunes. This was the South Inlet, a once thriving part of town and now more or less a desolate slum at the northeastern end of Absecon Island, the landmass that…

The first shot of Catherine (Elisabeth Moss), the presiding figure in “Queen of Earth,” is not a pretty sight. Her face, filling the screen, is a war zone of tears and maddened makeup, and her voice cracks with every plea and plaint: “Why are you doing this to me?” and “I don’t want you to see me like this”—quite a statement, with the camera looming as close as a confessor. She is in the throes of being rejected by her boyfriend, James (Kentucker Audley), who—both in this opening scene and elsewhere—is barely half a character. His motives are of little consequence; he is a mere moon, striving to free himself from Catherine’s gravitational pull. Good luck to him. The bulk of the film, which was written and directed by Alex…

ATTICUS AND AMERICA Adam Gopnik’s article about “Go Set a Watchman” attributes the longevity of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in America’s literary memory to Harper Lee’s depiction of childhood (Books, July 27th). Consider that the release of “Watchman” coincided with furor over the Confederate flag: at the same time that we are acknowledging the flag’s evocation of racism, we’re discovering that Atticus Finch—a beloved moral and civic authority—is a bigoted old man. We stumble upon the unmistakable truth that, even as much of this country has been congratulating itself for progress in race relations, injustice endures. Atticus is not, in either of Lee’s novels, another Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who confessed to the murder of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston. But our…

A WALK THROUGH THE NEW Whitney Museum reminds us of what is glorious, heartwrenching, and unique about American art—and what makes it weird, too. The museum’s curator of performance, Jay Sanders, recently showcased dancenoise, the potent performance duo who’ve done so much to break down those old theatre walls and make politics the locus of a frenzied, amusing, and thought-provoking style. One playwright who would fit well in Sanders’s kind of programming is Lucas Hnath. He is an artist whose particular brand of American strangeness grows along with his strengths, many of which—a sense of high drama, and a deep understanding of how the patriarchy wants to hold on to just that—are not immediately apparent in his minimal scripts, which look, on the page, less like dialogue than like poems.…

900 Fulton St., Brooklyn (347-763-2537) For a decade, Atchudta Barkr and her son, Ali, ran a cavernous hardware store in Clinton Hill. Photographs of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and the astronaut Mae Jemison hung on the walls. Soul tunes played while local tinkerers wandered the humid aisles, eying rentable drills and rabbits’ feet. When the building’s owner hiked the rent on Sister’s Community Hardware, the shop moved to Atlantic Avenue. It became Hardware 2.0, and its former home became Sisters, where, thirty feet above a long, white, curving bar, an enormous skylight lets you know when it’s time to order a stimulant (doors open at 7 a.m.) or a drink (they serve absinthe straight). Décor includes peeling oversized mirrors and Carraramarble tiles; house cocktails include the mescal-based Hidden Hand (tastes…

The sparkle of clear water on white sand in the Florida Keys; and somewhere, remote and hidden within that sparkle, an even more thrilling sparkle: gold! As a boy, this amateur treasure hunter (unsuccessful, now retired) used to dream about the lost treasures of the Keys. Often he visited Mel Fisher’s Treasure Salvors museum, in Key West, when the amateur’s grandmother lived nearby. Mel Fisher was the greatest treasure hunter of all time. In that island city of long shots, no shot as long as Fisher’s ever came in so spectacularly. In 1985, after sixteen and a half years of searching, Fisher’s crew found the wreck of the Spanish treasure galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha, and the discovery rocked Key West to its white coral foundations. No treasure ship as…

Where have you gone, my little saving grace?Iona or Iola of the laughlike falling silver . . . Now nothing’s in its place,and all’s as light and cold as that blue scarfI lost or left without, or I don’t own.Everything shames me. Every card declined.You slid between the stalls and you were gonethough I scoured the field for hours, hoping to findyou sat with “the silent children of the fair”or some such nonsense, though I always knewyou’d taken another hand, the way kids do,not looking up. This place again. It’s whereI wake up and recall I have no daughteror fall asleep and dream I have no daughter.…

We were as excited as when we’d bought our new car,and it, too, weighed a ton, the entire historyof the world and everything in iton two whole shelves in our family room,sitting like a judge over our new color TV.We fact-checked over dinnerto settle arguments erupting like Etna (Volume 8)while the Caesar salad was being served.In which movie does Charlie Chaplin eat a stewed shoe?What was the exact date of Kristallnacht?Before we had our Encyclopædia Britannica,everybody had opinions instead of facts,which they stuck to, uncorrected, unto death.But you couldn’t pick a fight with the Encyclopædia Britannica.Even saying its name upped my I.Q.It was written by Einsteins, by presidentsand professors—people brainier than anybodyin my house, on my street, in my town—experts—unlike my mother,who never finished high school.Its index of topics was…

If there is one thing most Americans have been able to agree on over the years, it is that getting an education, particularly a college education, is a key to human betterment and prosperity. The consensus dates back at least to 1636, when the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony established Harvard College as America’s first institution of higher learning. It extended through the establishment of “landgrant colleges” during and after the Civil War, the passage of the G.I. Bill during the Second World War, the expansion of federal funding for higher education during the Great Society era, and President Obama’s efforts to make college more affordable. Already, the cost of higher education has become a big issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign. Three Democratic candidates—Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and…

In January of 1842, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s firstborn child, Waldo, contracted scarlet fever and died within a week. He was five. He had been his father’s exuberant companion, who had, Emerson wrote, “touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact & circumstance in the household.” Henry David Thoreau, who had lodged with the Emersons, “charmed Waldo by the variety of toys whistles boats popguns & all kinds of instruments which he could make & mend.” The death was a shock to the entire village of Concord, Massachusetts. When the nine-year-old Louisa May Alcott came to the Emersons’ door to ask about Waldo, she was greeted, she wrote, by an Emerson “worn with watching and changed by sorrow.” All he said was “Child, he is dead.” Alcott called it her “first…

SEPTEMBER 2015 WEDNESDAY 2ND THURSDAY 3RD FRIDAY 4TH SATURDAY 5TH SUNDAY 6TH MONDAY 7TH TUESDAY 8TH NINE YEARS BEFORE “HAMILTON,” the 2006 musical “Spring Awakening” gave the American stage a fresh sound. Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s adaptation of the 1891 Frank Wedekind drama set the repressed sexuality of nineteenth-century German teen-agers against the modern release of rock and dance. The show won a slew of Tony Awards, including Best Musical, but closed on Broadway after little more than two years. Fortunately, it’s back, in an inventive revival by Deaf West Theatre. Performed in sign language and spoken English (characters are double-cast with deaf and hearing actors), Michael Arden’s production, at the Brooks Atkinson, features more than twenty performers making their Broadway débuts, including Austin McKenzie and Sandra Mae…

Dollypalooza Bevin Branlandingham—a performance artist by night and a lawyer by day—founded this event last year, after a trip to Dollywood. Wanting to create a New York tribute to the rhinestoned country singer, she brought in burlesque and drag acts as well as other performers. There will be appearances by Sequinette, Merrie Cherry, and Lady Quesa Dilla, and the likely showstopper is a set from Doll Parts, a local Parton cover band. There’s also a silent auction in support of Imagination Library, which supplies books to children in need, featuring vintage Dolly memorabilia, inspired fan art, and a trip to Dollywood. (Littlefield, 622 Degraw St., Brooklyn. dollypalooza.com. Sept. 4 at 8.) Paper Jam Small Press Festival This biannual gathering is a window into the world of zines, chapbooks, political…

“You are seeing me at my absolute fucking worst,” Monica Lewis said cheerfully. The ninety-three-year-old entertainer had taken a fall a few days earlier in her apartment at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home, near Los Angeles. It fractured her right hip and badly bruised her face. “I’m so surefooted—I’m a dancer, I’ve done pratfalls, all kind of stunts—and I trip over my own rug!” She glared at the rug, then laughed. The pink caftan she wore set off her nail polish, a shade of fuchsia called Hollywood Sunset, and her smile was wide. Her publicity photos as a singer and actress always had a lot of wattage. “They used to joke about Nanette Fabray that when she opened the refrigerator door and the light came on she’d…

Sit down and talk with your kids about it. If you don’t think you have time in your family’s busy schedule, make time to talk about it. Your kids should hear about it from you, as soon as is convenient, in a setting that’s familiar and unthreatening. Chances are, they know about it already, and will be grateful to you for dealing with it openly. The first time we talked about it with our kids I followed the advice I’m giving you now. Marjorie and I gathered them together after supper and told them that we needed to talk about something very important. Then we all sat down around the kitchen table—and I can’t stress too strongly how important it is to sit down. Some of the kids kept wanting…

In 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft. The sorcery materialized in January. The first hanging took place in June, the last in September; a stark, stunned silence followed. Although we will never know the exact number of those formally charged with having “wickedly, maliciously, and feloniously” engaged in sorcery, somewhere between a hundred and forty-four and a hundred and eighty-five witches and wizards were named in twenty-five villages and towns. The youngest was five; the eldest nearly eighty. Husbands implicated wives; nephews their aunts; daughters their mothers; siblings each other. One minister discovered that he was related to no fewer than twenty witches. The population of New England at that time would fit into Yankee Stadium today. Nearly to a person,…

It was a little after 7 A.M., and outside in the garden her nine-year-old son, Finn, was stringing a tennis net between two trees, stringing it not in the normal fashion, the way one might to play tennis, but horizontally, like a hammock. He was wearing a pair of too short trousers, perhaps the trousers from last year’s school uniform, and no shoes. The grounds on this side of the property were ragged but pretty, bounded by a low stone wall that allowed views across the fields to the gray slate roofs of Portlaoise. “I think it might’ve been a mistake to tell him about the ducks,” Bill said. “It’s not about the ducks,” she said. “If it wasn’t the ducks, it would be something else.” They were having coffee…

WORLD WITHOUT END, by Hugh Thomas (Random House). Thomas concludes his three-volume history of the Spanish Empire with Philip II’s expansion of his territory in the late sixteenth century. Sweeping across the Americas to the Philippines, Spain built the largest empire since the Romans, and maintained it, in an unparalleled feat of bureaucracy, for three centuries. Thomas challenges historical views of the empire as unflinchingly cruel and rapacious, noting particularly the educational achievements of the Jesuits. The aim is less apology than a full accounting of a complex, often baffling story, one in which conquistadores binge-read chivalric romance novels; Indians pursue litigation to settle disputes with their conquerors; and committees convene to discuss the King’s right to invade China. GOD AND JETFIRE, by Amy Seek (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).…