Innholdsfortegnelse for Oct-19-15 i The New Yorker

MALCOLM GLADWELL (“THRESHOLDS OF VIOLENCE,” P. 30) has been writing for the magazine since 1994. His books include “David and Goliath” and “Outliers.” AMY DAVIDSON (COMMENT, P. 25), a staff writer, contributes regularly to Comment. CORA FRAZIER (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 39) has written humor pieces for The New Yorker since 2012. KATHRYN SCHULZ (“POND SCUM,” P. 40) became a staff writer earlier this year. She is the author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.” JANE KRAMER (“ROAD WARRIOR,” P. 46), the author of “Europeans” and “The Politics of Memory,” has written for the magazine since 1964. A collection of her New Yorker food essays is due out next year. ADAM SHATZ (“DRAWING BLOOD,” P. 58) is a contributing editor at The London Review of Books.…

TO ATTEMPT BROAD STATEMENTS about what the youngest generations of composers are thinking is to risk producing something like one of those cringe-inducing Sunday think pieces about Millennials, Facebook, “Girls,” and selfie sticks. More than eighty composers under the age of forty are featured in the SONiC festival, which will overrun venues across Manhattan and Brooklyn from Oct. 15 to Oct. 23. Is this cohort open to diverse influences, attuned to technology, inclined toward multimedia configurations, and fond of hybridized genres? So suggests the scholar and critic William Robin, in an essay heralding the festival. But he is wary of excessively sweeping claims, as are the composers whom he interviews. “Once you start generalizing,” Hannah Lash says, “the noise in your head becomes greater than the noise of the music,…

The day after the New York Metropolitans’ final regular-season game— a 1–0 adios to the Washington Nationals that averted a six-game-losing-streak hangover en route to the playoffs—Keith Hernandez, the former All-Star–Gold Glove–M.V.P.–Mets captain first baseman and current First Amendment crusader in the SNY broadcasting booth (“What is he doing? What is he doing! What a rockhead!” . . . “That slide—you can put that slide in the toilet”), began a slightly bumpy transition to his other occupation, man of leisure. His alarm went off at 6 A.M., a shocking hour, so that a driver could deliver him to Kennedy Airport for a promotional event. Discovering upon arrival that he was a day early, he rebuked himself (“Idiot!”), then retreated to Sag Harbor, his seasonal abode. In the early afternoon, he…

In the wake of the massacre at Umpqua Community College, in Oregon, Hillary Clinton promised that if she is elected President she will use executive power to make it harder for people to buy guns without background checks. Meanwhile, Ben Carson, one of the Republican Presidential candidates, said, “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” The two responses could hardly have been more different, but both were testaments to the power of a single organization: the National Rifle Association. Clinton invoked executive action because the N.R.A. has made it unthinkable that a Republican-controlled Congress could pass meaningful gun-control legislation. Carson found it expedient to make his comment because the N.R.A. has shaped the public discourse around guns,…

One of Riad Sattouf’s favorite places in Paris is the Musée du Quai Branly, a temple of ethnographic treasures from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, not far from the Eiffel Tower. One morning in mid-July, Sattouf, a French-Syrian comic-book artist who has recently emerged as France’s best-known graphic novelist, took me there, along with his year-old son, his son’s Ivorian nanny, and her three small daughters. He was dressed like a college student, with jeans, a black Lacoste T-shirt, white Stan Smith sneakers, and backpack. We were met in the lobby by Stéphane Martin, the museum’s president, who is a long-standing admirer of Sattouf’s work and has commissioned him to produce a graphic novel about the museum for its tenth anniversary, next year. No French Presidency is complete without…

Visitors to Laurie Anderson’s installation “Habeas Corpus,” which occupied the Park Avenue Armory for three days at the beginning of October, were confronted with sights and sounds of imposing strangeness. Suspended from the ceiling of the Armory’s Drill Hall was an oversized disco ball, which, fixed in cold beams of light, could have doubled as the Death Star. Myriad reflected dots created the impression of a night sky, one that curled around the walls and onto the floor. The ball turned slowly, giving the vertiginous illusion that the vast room was rotating. Playing over speakers was an ominous electronic rumble: pings and beeps, distorted voices suggestive of military transmissions, murmurs of recorded conversation, howling wind. The dominant element was a mass of feedback generated by six electric guitars leaning against…

PAID FOR, by Rachel Moran (Norton). Moran is an Irish activist who became a prostitute at the age of fifteen. Her polemical memoir critiques well-meaning liberals for framing prostitution as a professional choice. When familial abuse, poverty, and homelessness form the context of such choice, as they did for Moran and other women she knew during her seven years on the streets and in the brothels of Dublin, “coercion” is an apter term than “choice.” Moran is adamant that there are no “happy hookers”; there are only those who survive that charade, at crippling psychological cost. The book is grimmest when detailing the lessons a prostitute internalizes: don’t gag, don’t cry, stun with alcohol and drugs. PARADISE OF THE PACIFIC, by Susanna Moore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This richly…

POETIC JUSTICE I read Alec Wilkinson’s piece on the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith with history in mind (“Something Borrowed,” October 5th). The twentieth-century Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid was experimenting with poetic collage nearly a century ago, in the nineteen-twenties; an early example is his long poem “To Circumjack Cencrastus” (1930). The technique became more and more apparent in his lengthy later works, such as “The Kind of Poetry I Want,” and “Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn” (1943), reaching its culmination in “In Memoriam James Joyce,” published in 1955. Where does plagiarism end and creativity (O.K., “uncreativity”) begin? Mac-Diarmid got into some trouble for his poem “Perfect,” lifted holus-bolus from a short story by Glyn Jones. And yet, in its new form and context, it has a magical identity…

New York City Ballet In the final week of the season, the company alternates between a program of new works and a double bill of high-spirited dances from years past. Among the latter is Balanchine’s lighthearted “Harlequinade,” created, in 1965, to feature the talents of the company’s most charming couple at the time: Edward Villella and Patricia McBride. The love story, based on a 1900 ballet by Petipa, is populated by commedia-dell’arte stock characters: Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, Pierrette. In the second act, they are joined in a lively divertissement by dozens of young dancers from the company’s school. • Oct. 13-15 at 7:30 and Oct. 17 at 2: “Harlequinade” and “N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz.” • Oct. 16-17 at 8: “Common Ground,” “The Blue of Distance,” “Polaris,” “New Blood,” and…

308 Malcolm X Blvd. (212-289-2220) Waitresses in cocktail dresses and spiked heels part a velvet curtain for guests climbing the stairs to this uptown speakeasy. “It’s very sexy,” a Russian blonde who owns a catsuit business commented the other night, pointing to the hushed room’s gilded mirrors and tufted booths. “I feel like I’m in Moscow.” She scanned the menu and settled on the Smokey Bandit, a tequila-andmezcal cocktail with a spicy kick. At other tables, people sipped Ramos Gin Fizzes, heavy on the egg white and nutmeg, and puffed mint-scented smoke from hookah pipes. As the drinks arrived, a man wearing a red shirt with a wide collar spread over his jacket announced from the stage that the night’s show was about to begin. Thursdays are the Harlem Sessions—“a…

When the composer Duncan Sheik was nineteen, he visited Los Angeles, hoping to land a meeting with a music publisher. He stayed with an older relative, a longtime member of the Soka Gakkai International, a Buddhist lay organization headquartered in Japan. She and Sheik debated spiritual matters, until she told him, as he recalled the other day, “Unless you actually sit down and practice, it’s not really going to have an effect on your life.” So Sheik kneeled before her Gohonzon—a Buddhist scroll—and chanted. Then the music publisher called. “I thought, Oh, wow, Buddhism works!” The deal never materialized, but Sheik kept chanting when he returned to Brown for his sophomore year, perplexing his roommates. For the past twentysix years, he has chanted nearly every morning and night: through his…

On the evening of April 29th last year, in the southern Minnesota town of Waseca, a woman was doing the dishes when she looked out her kitchen window and saw a young man walking through her back yard. He was wearing a backpack and carrying a fast-food bag and was headed in the direction of the MiniMax Storage facility next to her house. Something about him didn’t seem right. Why was he going through her yard instead of using the sidewalk? He walked through puddles, not around them. He fiddled with the lock of Unit 129 as if he were trying to break in. She called the police. A group of three officers arrived and rolled up the unit’s door. The young man was standing in the center. He was…

You’re told this deck was found in some shattered bothy or croft north of the Great Glen, missing its six of diamonds, shuffled and dealt to a soft pliancy, greased with lanolin and you’re told this deck lived behind the bar in a barracks town and came out to play most nights, cut between the Falklands and Iraq, its spring long gone, dark-edged with mammal sweat and you’re told this deck is the one recovered from a halfway house where fatty stalactites grew in a microwave oven, where a bottle of Famous Grouse was brandished in a fight and it might be a pack of lies or it might be a sleight of hand, and you can’t tell which is a bluff because words are a good disguise for holding…

O reasonably well-known driver of the overrated light-blue convertible, why do you bend machetes with your gray eyes? There’s stagefright in the way you take left turns. When you pout, you spill dark thoughts in a pot. I suspect you come from the line of Baskervilles, post-dog. — Commission or no commission, your paintings are full of spiders. You measure poltergeists in your home to predict the shrinking of St. Kilda’s sheep. A distracted Charon, retired from Lethe, always picks up the ashes of your diary. — A carillon rings in your head, and you resent its sound but enjoy the slow-boil resentment. Even your mellow dog digs a good bone to pick. — I saw you on Brighton Beach the day after Christmas, just as you came out of…

Travelling from Germany to the Paris International Exposition, in the summer of 1937, Leni Riefenstahl went under an assumed name. She had no desire to confront reporters. In Paris, she won the fair’s gold medal for a film she had directed, a documentary-style celebration of the Nazi Party congress three years earlier. Yet she was also forced to defend herself, in interviews, not against her Nazi ties but against the swirling rumors that she had fallen into disgrace with the leaders of the Reich. Was it true that Goebbels had repudiated her? Were some upper-echelon Nazis unhappy that a woman wielded so much power? On her way back to Berlin, exhausted, she stopped off in Berchtesgaden, where she was escorted to Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat, so that she could describe…

Robin Coste Lewis’s début poetry collection, “Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems” (Knopf), derives its title from a notorious eighteenth-century engraving by Thomas Stothard, “The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies.” The image was slavetrade propaganda: it shows an African woman posed like Botticelli’s Venus on a weirdly upholstered half shell. She glides serenely across the Middle Passage, attended by an entourage of cherubs and dolphins and escorted by a predatory Triton, who looks as though he’d read the poem on which the engraving is based: Isaac Teale’s “The Sable Venus, An Ode,” which celebrates the pleasures of raping slave women, since black and white— Sable Venus and Botticelli’s Venus—are, after all, the same “at night.” “The Voyage of the Sable Venus” has…

CARL THEODOR DREYER, one of cinema’s first great auteurs, had nothing to do with the original musical scoring of “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” his stark, silent masterpiece from 1928, and was never quite satisfied with any of the music that was subsequently attached to it. Over the years, the film has been shown with music in all sorts of styles, including post-minimalist, indie rock, and Baroque pastiche. But the Orlando Consort, the renowned early-music vocal ensemble, has devised a radical solution. This week, Miller Theatre will screen the film twice (Oct. 14 and Oct. 16), with live accompaniment provided by the singers, who will perform sacred works from the early fifteenth century by Dufay, Billart, and others—some of which young Joan, who never missed a Mass, may…

Open House New York This annual event opens the doors to hundreds of buildings throughout the city, many of which are usually closed to the public. In addition to sites featured on previous Open House weekends, such as the Grand Lodge of Masons and the TWA terminal at J.F.K. (which will soon be converted into a hotel), this year’s edition adds various first-time locations, including the renovated City Hall, Google’s Chelsea outfit, and the World’s Fair Pavilion. In a special series, the engineers for innovative structures such as the High Line park and the glass cube above the Apple store on 59th Street lead tours of their projects. All events are free, but some require advance booking. (ohny.org. Oct. 17-18.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES Swann’s sale of photographs (Oct. 15)…

Seth Rogen had some questions, and Woz had some answers. The actor and the engineer, Steve (Woz) Wozniak, got acquainted during the making of the new film “Steve Jobs,” in which Rogen plays Woz, who founded Apple Computer with Jobs. They recently met again for an advance look at “Silicon City,” an exhibition, at the New-York Historical Society, about innovations in technology. Rogen, who arrived late and a bit glassy-eyed, examined a conference table covered with gizmos and homed in on the Picturephone Model 2, from 1969, a “Jetsons”-style precursor to Facetime. “How did it work?” he asked. Woz, eager to explain the mechanics of everything, stroked his salt-andpepper beard and admitted, “This size screen, over the phones of that day—I do not know the answer myself.” Rogen uttered his…

Midnight Rose was restless that morning. Martha was taking off the horse’s saddle when she heard a sound. It was Augustus, the new stableboy, not yet eighteen. He strode in wearing tan jodhpurs and black boots. He appeared to have just woken, and was tucking a translucent white shirt into his pants and smoothing his long brown locks across his forehead. He and Martha exchanged glances, and he turned and walked out of the stable. Her heart beating fast, she followed Augustus into the early morning. The sun was rising pink and orange above the lake. On the bank of the glittering water, she watched as Augustus stripped naked and jumped in. Martha began to unbutton her muslin dress. She wasn’t afraid of the Redcoats, although she did fear the…

One day in the fall of 1997, Gloria Steinem was unpacking a carryon bag that in the course of a few weeks had seen the inside of more airplane overhead bins than most travellers’ do in a year, and, as she tells the story, that was when she knew it was time to write a book about her life on the road, rallying women to the fight for equal rights. Steinem was sixty-three then. She had been travelling for more than thirty years, speaking, advising, fundraising, organizing, testifying, demonstrating, educating, campaigning, and, in the process, introducing millions of girls and women to the feminist cause—and during that time she had also founded and presided over the magazine Ms., written books, published and edited collections, and, through the Ms. Foundation, which…

It started with bedtime. A coldness. A formality. Martin and Rachel tucked the boy in, as was their habit, then stooped to kiss him good night. “Please don’t do that,” he said, turning to face the wall. They took it as teasing, flopped onto his bed to nuzzle and tickle him. The boy turned rigid, endured the cuddle, then barked out at them, “I really don’t like that!” “Jonah?” Martin said, sitting up. “I don’t want your help at bedtime anymore,” he said. “I’m not a baby. You have Lester. Go cuddle with him.” “Sweetheart,” Rachel said. “We’re not helping you. We’re just saying good night. You like kisses, right? Don’t you like kisses and cuddles? You big silly.” Jonah hid under the blankets. A classic pout. Except that he…

A casual reader of the news from South Korea could be forgiven for wondering whether Koreans apologize more than other people do. Public expressions of contrition abound. Last year, President Park Geun-hye apologized for the government’s mishandling of the Sewol ferry disaster, and JoongAng Ilbo, one of the country’s major newspapers, ran a full-page apology for its sensationalist coverage of the tragedy. When, earlier this year, the MERS virus spread through Seoul’s Samsung Medical Center, the minister of health apologized “for causing concern and anxiety” by underestimating the disease’s contagiousness, and the heir apparent to the Samsung Group did the same, bowing deeply from the waist on national television. Then, there was last year’s “nut rage” incident, in which a Korean Air Lines executive went berserk after a flight attendant…