Innholdsfortegnelse for Nov-02-15 i The New Yorker

DIRECTORS OF AUTHORITY AND ORIGINALITY who imbue their work with personal themes and experiences have long been considered the artists of movies. Until recently, they’ve been rare in television. But in 1971 a miniseries by a feature-film director—a sort of manifesto on the artistic possibilities of television— was broadcast in France: Maurice Pialat’s six-hour, seven-episode drama, “The House in the Woods.” It screens Oct. 31-Nov. 1, at Museum of the Moving Image, as the closing work of a retrospective of Pialat’s films (the series will travel to other venues); though created for TV, it’s a cinematic masterwork. Pialat made the series at the age of forty-six, having directed only one feature film. He was a late starter, and “The House in the Woods” channels an urgent outburst of creative energy;…

There are fifty-two million items in the New York Public Library, if you count the artifacts, like pieces of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s skull and the walking stick that Virginia Woolf carried to the river’s edge. The other day, Thomas Lannon, a curator, was riffling through the collection, trying to find some objects that might interest Shaquille O’Neal, who was coming to the library that night as part of the N.Y.P.L.’s conversation series to talk about his new children’s book, “Little Shaq.” Lannon was stumped. He’d considered original Superman comics, but they’re stored off-site. “Shaquille O’Neal isn’t really a scholar,” Lannon said, as he wheeled two boxes into a makeshift greenroom. “But he does have a doctorate”— in education, and also a master’s in business. One of his many nicknames is…

For some years, I’m now prepared to admit, I somehow labored under the impression that Rocky Mount is the line of demarcation that separates the two principal schools of North Carolina barbecue. Wrong. The line of demarcation is, roughly, Raleigh, sixty miles west. The Research Triangle— the area encompassing Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill—is a sort of demilitarized zone, where someone who’s been concentrating on the barbecue scene, as I was on my most recent visit, half expects to see the distinctive blue helmets of United Nations peacekeepers. Rocky Mount is within the eastern North Carolina sphere of influence, where barbecue means the whole hog, chopped, with a vinegar-based sauce that is flavored with pepper. To the west of the DMZ lies territory controlled by the forces of what is…

Sitting in a pub one night a dozen years ago, Charles Spence realized that he was in the presence of the ideal experimental model: the Pringles potato chip. Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, runs the Crossmodal Research Lab there, which studies how the brain integrates information from the five human senses to produce a coherent impression of reality. Very often, these modes of perception influence one another on the way to becoming conscious thought. For instance, scientists have long known that whether a strawberry tastes sweet or bland depends in no small part on the kinds of organic molecule detected by olfactory receptors in the nose. Spence had been wondering whether taste might be similarly shaped by sound: Would a potato chip taste different if the…

New York’s sodium-vapor street lamps cast a soft, yellowish glow. The city is slowly replacing these with light-emitting diodes, which will burn more brightly, if less mellifluously, and will save fourteen million dollars a year in energy and maintenance costs. By 2017, if everything goes according to plan, all the old bulbs—including the one above, photographed recently in Tompkins Square Park—will have gone the way of the pay phone.…

WHO ARE THE SHOOTERS? The same phenomenon that Malcolm Gladwell describes in his piece about school shootings might apply to the readiness with which Americans purchase firearms and bring them to public places (“Thresholds of Violence,” October 19th). If your friends or neighbors are doing it, how strange or unsafe can it be? As a psychiatrist, I agree with Gladwell that young men who contemplate committing horrific acts are not necessarily suffering from serious mental illness. How far they go in translating their murderous fantasies into concrete actions speaks to the degree of their alienation. We must stop asking why these tragedies happen and pay more attention to the question of how. The N.R.A. promotes a program of disinformation that has influenced Republican politicians and muddied the reality of…

The two Dan Rathers eyed each other. The folksy, humid one was the former CBS anchorman, the watchful one was Robert Redford, who plays Rather in the new film “Truth.” They sat in a deserted classroom at the New School, waiting out a nearby screening of the film, which dramatizes the flawed investigation by “60 Minutes,” in 2004, into President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard, and the resulting ruckus, which culminated in Rather’s resignation. Rather drank coffee and wore a suit and a maroon tie; Redford sipped tea with his shirtsleeves rolled up. “Journalists, politicians, and hangmen always do their best work after midnight,” Rather said, to foster conviviality. It was 7:30 P.M. Redford recalled that they’d first met in 1974, when Rather interviewed him for “60…

In 1971, Stanley Elkin, a sorely underrated novelist of the postwar era, published a comic picaresque called “The Dick Gibson Show.” It remains the best book ever written about radio, exploring the breadth of American lunacy and beauty through the stories and the experiences of an itinerant radio host. Dick Gibson makes his living talking through the night with Arnold the Memory Expert, a nineyear-old millionaire orphan, and every manner of huckster and grifter imaginable. He was modelled on broadcasting oddballs like Long John Nebel, Joe Pyne, and Barry Gray, a night-club sophisticate who, as legend has it, got so fed up with playing big-band records on the air that he held the earpiece of his phone to his mike so that he could have an on-air conversation with Woody…

I stared for a while at the placid face of Long Island Sound before I could make out Bren Smith’s farm. It was a warm, calm morning in September. Sixty buoys bobbed in rows like the capped heads of synchronized swimmers. It wasn’t until Smith cut the engine of his beat-up boat, Mookie, that I knew for sure we had arrived. The farm, a three-acre patch of sea off Stony Creek, Connecticut, starts six feet underwater and descends almost to the ocean floor. From the buoys hang ropes, and from the ropes hang broad, slippery blades of sugar kelp, which have the color and sheen of wet Kodak film. At first, the local fishermen thought that Smith was growing some kind of marine hemp; that seemed cool. When they found…

Like many of their millennial peers, Kathleen Davis and Andrea Nguyen eat out a lot. “Nothing fancy,’’ Davis told me one recent evening, as she took a sidewalk table next to mine at Sweetgreen in Nolita. “We want what we eat to be healthy and tasty,’’ Davis said. “Decent prices matter, too.” The women were working their way through one of the restaurant’s seasonal specialties— the “wastED” salad, which consists almost entirely of carrot peels, broccoli stalks, roasted bread heels, cabbage cores, and other ingredients that are usually tossed out. Ten years ago, no American would have regarded a bowl of vegetable scraps dressed with lime-cilantro or spicy pesto vinaigrette as fast food. Many people wouldn’t have considered it food at all. But millions of diners, fuelled by concerns about…

I’m waiting for this shrub to sew itself back in its soil.Hearing its roots rip when I transplanted it made me ill(though a cress or a lettuce remains my most favorite food).A wind tore it up again, or it was undermined by flood.Through the sorghum fields between Victoria and Lavaca,a supercell, spurting electricity, smothered the ton of lava,mounted in the sky, that characterizes sunset there.But the tapestried sorghum fields created an atmospherethat defied the monotony I associate with agriculture.Planting, for me, means flowers, fitting embouchurefor birds; or aloes, answering to a sculptural imperativeto induce repose, and not just keep us, Lord, alive.This hardy Duranta attracts hummingbirds and butterflies.May it thrive, and sew itself in as the soil dries.Between Victoria and Lavaca, in my mind’s eyeI saw a thousand Comanche in…

Formally, Lauren Groff’s new novel, “Fates and Furies” (Riverhead), resembles a bed that long marital use has unevenly depressed: it tells the story of an apparently successful marriage from two different perspectives, the husband’s and then the wife’s, and it explores the fierce asymmetry of the two tellings. Essentially, the man’s view of things (a section titled “Fates”) is happy, open, naïvely victorious, and complacent; the woman’s (“Furies”) is secretive, damaged, less happy, and, accordingly, much less complacent. The story’s form not only promises a stereoscopic account of the mythological monad that is marriage but holds the tempting possibility that the angrier second version might modify the easier first one, forcing it out of untruth with corrective revelation. Lotto (short for Lancelot) and Mathilde meet at a party, near the…

THE BLUE GUITAR, by John Banville (Knopf). The narrator of this novel, Oliver Orme, is a former painter and lifelong thief who has “purloined” the wife of a friend. When the affair is discovered, he begins to write the pages we read— detailing the affair and an artistic crisis, and the philosophical concerns triggered by each. The book is thus composed largely of Orme’s remarkably self-centered and grandiose musings. This is offputting at times, though it works well when the characters are absorbing the fallout of their various deceptions. In any case, it is intentional: Banville’s story is a consideration of solipsism, and Orme’s thoughts often circle to the center of uncertainty: “Don’t you understand yet, even yet, that I don’t understand anything?” THE INCARNATIONS, by Susan Barker (Touchstone).…

The other day, I sat with Sir András Schiff, the Hungarian-born, British-based pianist, in a practice room at Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, contemplating a great musical mystery: the trill in the eighth measure of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-Flat, D. 960. “It’s the most extraordinary trill in the history of music,” Schiff said, peering at my copy of the score. Sixtyone years old and an undisputed master of the Germanic repertory, Schiff has earned the right to make this sort of pronouncement, although he delivered the remark softly and haltingly, with a sense of wonder. Schiff had played the B-Flat Sonata at Disney the night before, as part of a multi-year series of concerts called “The Last Sonatas,” in which he has explored late-period music of Haydn,…

OCT / NOV 2015 WEDNES DAY 28TH THURS DAY 29TH FRI DAY 30TH SATUR DAY 31ST SUN DAY 1ST MON DAY 2ND TUES DAY 3DR MOST OF THE RAP we hear today is sourced from, or in debt to, Atlanta. This cultural and aesthetic swing from north to south has kept the aging genre composite and writhing. Big K.R.I.T. is one of the more curious cases spawned from this shift. The self-crowned “King of the South,” from Meridian, Mississippi, has gained borderless praise for infusing a swamp-level Southern philosophy with rich soul loops and funk drums, from his 2010 breakout, “K.R.I.T. Wuz Here,” to this fall’s surprise, “It’s Better This Way.” A New York crowd infamously booed K.R.I.T. at the Highline Ballroom in 2010; it was akin to trying…

BAR TAB DUTCH KILLS 27-24 Jackson Ave., Long Island City (718-383-2724) The Dutch Kills Civic Association features a windmill on its logo, reminding visitors that the area once had more farmhouses and fewer strip clubs. Behind a brown door on a blasted section of Jackson Avenue, a whip-thin saloon that bears the neighborhood’s name is bringing back a version of the past, with the clink of hand-cut ice in tumblers and the waft of freshly cut orange peel. “We were here when there was nothing here,” Natalie, a mixologist with a sleeve of tattoos, said on a recent Wednesday evening. “Now it’s a destination bar. People come from all over the city.” She turned to a pair of patrons: “Do you like your drink sweet? Sour? Boozy? Refreshing?” Cocktails…

Twice a week, Dr. Gregory Skomal leaves Chatham harbor, on Cape Cod, to count white sharks. A spotter plane finds them for him. “The bigger ones, usually, you can get close to,” Skomal said, the other day. “Most will veer away, though. They see the boat and say, ‘I don’t know what that shadow is,’ and then it’s deep water.” Skomal, who works for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, is the only scientist counting white sharks in the Atlantic. White sharks are gray on top and white on the bottom, and the line where the colors meet forms a pattern that Skomal says is “like a fingerprint.” He can also identify a shark from its scars and the shape of its fin. When he reaches a shark, he lowers…

Not too long ago, for-profit colleges looked like the future of education. Targeting so-called “nontraditional students”—who are typically older, often have jobs, and don’t necessarily go to school full time—they advertised aggressively to attract business, claiming to impart marketable skills that would lead to good jobs. They invested heavily in online learning, which enabled them to operate nationwide and to keep costs down. The University of Phoenix, for instance, enrolled hundreds of thousands of students across the country, earning billions of dollars a year. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of bachelors’ degrees that came from for-profit schools septupled. Today, the for-profit-education bubble is deflating. Regulators have been cracking down on the industry’s misdeeds— most notably, lying about job-placement rates. In May, Corinthian Colleges, once the second-largest for-profit chain in…

In the colonnaded courtyard of the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, a former Jesuit boarding school in Mexico City, under a grove of magnolia trees hung with punched-tin stars, more than five hundred people had gathered to learn which restaurants would be proclaimed the fifty best in Latin America. The party was meant to be attended with a drink in one hand, a phone in the other. There were a multitude of bars: wine by Robert Mondavi, tequila by Casa Dragones, rum by Zacapa, champagne by Veuve Clicquot. The Modelo stand was manned by a team of studs in suspenders. Water sommeliers— white tie, white gloves, wearing tasting cups on silver chains—circulated with magnums of San Pellegrino. Inside the program, the event’s organizers, the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, had enclosed…

We watched him come in, how his steps faltered at the threshold of the classroom, how he just stood there, his first mistake, giving us enough time to size him up, not enough time for him to figure out who we were, what strategy might win us over. He coughed, as if that could mask his heavy breathing, almost a sigh, and then, with false resolution, he walked in and sat down behind the desk. He sat down where García used to sit, just like that, as if he had the right to do so. He smiled at us, another mistake, and then: “Maybe we should introduce ourselves,” he said. Ourselves? Was he referring to himself, pretentiously using the plural for his own person? Or did he include us? Was…

The poet John Wieners lived, from the early nineteen-seventies until his death, in 2002, at the age of sixty-eight, at 44 Joy Street, in Boston, on the back slope of Beacon Hill, where disembowelled couches and gooseneck lamps are abandoned curbside on the first of every month. A few blocks over, and a world away, Robert Lowell spent his childhood at 91 Revere Street; up the hill was the site of the house where Henry Adams had grown up “under the shadow of the Boston statehouse.” Wieners was part of a small enclave of dropouts and artists in that part of Boston, now replaced by medical students and first-year associates. New York poets ran a thriving mid-century avantgarde, led by Frank O’Hara; San Francisco had the Beats. Wieners dipped into…

When Will Toledo was in high school, he read an article about a New York indie band that was commanding the attention of the music industry. It seemed as if all the group had done was upload its songs to Bandcamp, a largely unregulated online store where people can sell their music and merchandise at any price. Inspired, Toledo began parking his family’s car in different places in his home town, Leesburg, Virginia, and recording songs on a laptop in the back seat, his only audience being the car’s headrests. In 2010, he uploaded a collection of these wobbly, fairly traditional pop songs under the name Nervous Young Men, told people at his high school about his music, and waited. It didn’t take long for him to realize that his…