Innholdsfortegnelse for Nov-16-15 i The New Yorker

K-Pop Bash This August, the Korean pop starlet HyunA released the video for “Because I’m the Best (Roll Deep),” a blitzing stream of neon lights and taut flesh that shocked fans who were accustomed to more innocent displays from K-pop stars. Three weeks later, if only to prove that she could go even harder, the singer leaked an unedited version, featuring a few more abdominal acrobatics and crotch shots. This wasn’t the first time that HyunA’s bold raunch blasted K-pop conservatism, but the release felt significant for its Western choreography and palette—in one frame, HyunA sports a singlet emblazoned with American dollars, fanning herself with a stack of bills. The clip is a testament to the shrinking distance between K-pop and the American art that it mirrors with fun-house…

Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar, winner of first prize in the male-vocalist category in the fifteenth International Tchaikovsky Competition, held in Moscow and St. Petersburg last summer, and winner of the competition’s Grand Prix, for over-all excellence, is a tall and rangy young guy. Offstage, he wears jeans, a dark shirt, a thin quilted vest, and shiny black ankle boots. Onstage, he wears black tie, which his shock of black hair complements. He walks with the confidence of someone whom the world is discovering and vice versa. No Mongolian has ever won the competition before. On a recent Saturday afternoon, Ganbaatar made his American début at Carnegie Hall, in the Tchaikovsky Competition Winners’ Recital, along with the first-prize recipients for cello, female vocalist, and piano. He talked to reporters in his dressing room…

It was a warm day in Paris, and the library of the Institut de France was stuffy and hot. Daniel Delattre, a distinguished French papyrologist, did not remove his suit jacket. The institute, which includes the Académie Française, is a jacket-and-tie sort of place. Delattre, who is sixty-eight years old and has a dreamy, lost-in-the-vale-ofacademe manner, was contemplating a small wooden box on the table in front of him which was labelled “Objet Un.” There are thousands of rare objects in the institute’s library; the fact that whatever was inside the box was Object One suggested that it was of some importance. An ornately hand-lettered card was taped to the outside. It said, in French, “Box containing the remains of papyrus from Herculaneum”—the Roman town destroyed, along with its larger…

“God blessed you with curly hair,” my mother used to say and dressed me like Shirley Temple. On my bare scalp, Australia: a birthmark that hid in the thicket of my hair. Unblessed in a downburst, I lost my leafy summer, my lovely, my crest, my crown. I sleep in a flannel nightcap. My wig sleeps in a closet, comb and brush in a drawer. I wake to a still life— a clock that marks the hour before it strikes. No skull on my desk. Just a face in the mirror, unrecognizable.…

NOTORIOUS RBG, by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik (Dey Street). It’s possible that the Clinton Administration’s most consequential decision was the nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. It was certainly the most consequential for women and the law. The title of this light-as-air yet intelligent scrapbook-like homage refers to Biggie Smalls, but the book is reminiscent of Jay Z’s memoir, “Decoded.” It’s not serious, exactly—legal scholars won’t feel threatened— but those who admire Ginsburg and her lifelong commitment to feminism will find a judge worthy of admiration. We get sharply edited quotations from her rulings and dissents, handwritten annotations to her pronouncements, and a moving portrait of her long and loving marriage. There is also the occasional recipe and needlepoint portrait, as well as an impressive…

FEMINIST CRUSADERS Gloria Steinem, profiled by Jane Kramer, deserves recognition for her achievements, but others who have also played critical roles in the struggle for women’s rights should not be dismissed (“Road Warrior,” October 19th). Kramer mentions one of the “mothers” of second-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir, writing that she “lived and travelled with the philandering Jean-Paul Sartre.” Leaving aside the fact that Sartre’s affairs are irrelevant, he and Beauvoir both had open extracurricular relationships. When Kramer asserts that Beauvoir “was not much given to the cause or company of other women,” she overlooks the ways in which she devoted her life to women, through her relationships and her political activism. An example of her solidarity: the “Manifesto of 343,” which appeared in the April 5, 1971, edition of…

Martin Knott, Jr., is the national finance chairman for Martin O’Malley, the Democratic Presidential candidate and former governor of Maryland. Not long ago, Knott and Damian O’Doherty, the head of O’Malley’s super PAC, flew to Kansas City, rented a car, and headed for Des Moines, to join O’Malley at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, a prerequisite for any caucus hopeful. Knott pursues one kind of donor, and O’Doherty pursues another—inside money, outside money, you might say. Election laws forbid them from coördinating, so they have to be careful when they travel together. “We are very strict about not ending up in jail,” Knott said last week. They listen to music and don’t talk much. Leaving Kansas City, Knott, a Grateful Dead fanatic, put on the Dead’s 1990 live CD “Without a Net.”…

“People observe art differently than they do ordinary objects,” Dushko Petrovich, a forty-year-old painter and writer, likes to say. Four years ago, soon after realizing that he was wearing plaid shirts exclusively, Petrovich began a series of plaid paintings. His latest project concerns his commute. Petrovich teaches visual art, as an adjunct, at Yale, RISD, and Boston University. He lives in Brooklyn, driving from job to job along the edges of what he calls the Commuter Triangle. “When I used to tell the joke in a fake Boston accent, commutah rhymed perfectly with Bermuda,” he said between classes the other day. “It can be kind of a trap.” “I’d hear about friends teaching in the same city on the same day, or people needing a ride,” he said. “I started…

The fire truck edged up onto the sidewalk. I was smitten with stooping in the iridescent rhubarb and with the expected cramping of moon. I was going philosophical over the body count in my favorite soaps— I know when I get bored they kill, say, the librarian-who-stutters just to ease me through my day. To be smitten with pain is a discipline, the priest used to say … The fire truck looked like a poor man’s meat loaf sweet with ketchup and onions. The firemen in large downturned boots walked toward me like dead commissioners of baseball looking for a reddening rib eye in the winter sunlight—this unusually long winter of rain … I loosened my bra with an innocent adjustment of my left shoulder. These guys don’t shoot down…

In 1968, when Patti Smith was twentyone and working in a Manhattan bookstore, she went to a Doors concert at the old Fillmore East. She loved the Doors. As she described the concert in her memoir “Just Kids,” everyone was transfixed by Jim Morrison, except for her. She found herself making a cold appraisal of his performance. “I felt,” she concluded, “that I could do that.” For many people, that response is the essence of rock and roll. To this way of thinking, rock and roll—the music associated with performers like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and the early Beatles— is music that anyone can play (or can imagine playing) and everyone can dance to. The learning curve for performing the stuff is short; the learning curve for appreciating…

THE THEME OF “PERFORMA 15,” the performance-art festival sprawling through New York City this month, is the Renaissance, and Juliana Huxtable is a Renaissance woman for the Internet age—she’s been known to describe herself as a cyborg. Born in Bible-belt Texas, the trans twenty-seven-year-old attended Bard College and worked as a legal assistant at the A.C.L.U. while honing her skills as a d.j. (Björk just tapped her for a remix), an emphatic poet (who favors all caps), and a model and muse (she’s walked the runway for DKNY). At MOMA on Nov. 13 and 14, Huxtable performs a new three-part ode to post-identity politics, “There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed,” linking such divergent subjects as South African shamans, the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, and cached…

Like its spiritual hero, Ron Burgundy, of “Anchorman,” this popular new Will Ferrell-themed bar on the Lower East Side is a loud, swinging, badtaste good time. Fan art hangs on the walls; a nook in the back is decorated with lava lamps, cowbells, and a (jazz) flute. But, like Ferrell’s George W. Bush, the bar can be fuzzy on strategery. Where Ferrell’s characters joyfully mock obnoxiousness, Stay Classy celebrates it, serving sweet cocktails whose jokey names (Smelly Pirate Hooker, Dirty Mike and the Boys) are printed in all caps on a laminated menu. The Glass Case of Emotion, a peachy whiskey drink with a sprig of rosemary, manages a frisson of dignity; the Milk Was a Bad Choice (vanilla vodka, vanilla schnapps, milk, and ice), a sort of psychedelic White…

Dame Harriet Walter is regarded as one of the greatest living Shakespearean actors: in the past decade, she has delivered revelatory interpretations of Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But because of her gender and her age—she is sixty-five—the roles available to her are dwindling. “Shakespeare just doesn’t do mothers,” she said the other morning, in the lobby of St. Ann’s Warehouse, on the Dumbo waterfront. “In one way, he’s very honest—he didn’t know much about women at that age. But he didn’t know much about so many things, and he could get into the Moor of Venice, so why couldn’t he understand an older woman? The longer I live with him, the more that feels like a sad little disconnect for me.” Fortunately, Walter has discovered…

“I am who I am,” Donald J. Trump said in August, on the eve of this season’s first G.O.P. Presidential debate, and what he meant by that was this: “I don’t have a pollster.” The word “pollster,” when it was coined, was meant as a slur, like “huckster.” That’s the way Trump uses it. Other candidates have pollsters: “They pay these guys two hundred thousand dollars a month to tell them, ‘Don’t say this, don’t say that.’ ” Trump has none: “No one tells me what to say.” Every election is a morality play. The Candidate tries to speak to the People but is thwarted by Negative Campaigning, vilified by a Biased Media, and haunted by a War Record. I am who I am, the Candidate says, and my Opponents…

At thirty-four, Feng Zhang is the youngest member of the core faculty at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. He is also among the most accomplished. In 1999, while still a high-school student, in Des Moines, Zhang found a structural protein capable of preventing retroviruses like H.I.V. from infecting human cells. The project earned him third place in the Intel Science Talent Search, and he applied the fifty thousand dollars in prize money toward tuition at Harvard, where he studied chemistry and physics. By the time he received his doctorate, from Stanford, in 2009, he had shifted gears, helping to create optogenetics, a powerful new discipline that enables scientists to use light to study the behavior of individual neurons. Zhang decided to become a biological engineer, forging tools to…

He pops the catch and lifts the rusty boot. Quivering with excitement, the dogs burst from the back of the car, squirm under the lowest bar of the fence, and bolt across the field in great arcing bounds. Leo and Fran, big chocolate-and-white pointers. He drops the chewed and ragged tennis ball into one jacket pocket, the coiled leather leads into the other, grabs the old gripless tennis racket, and slams the boot. He beeps the lock and climbs the stile. Grass stretches into the distance. Twenty acres. There are no sheep this year, so half a million buttercups hover just above the ground. He can smell the May blossom, the same chemicals that are in semen and corpses, so he read the other day. Wytham Woods rise beyond the…