Innholdsfortegnelse for Nov-23-15 i The New Yorker

Robert Corrigan holds a doctorate in urban rodentology from Purdue University, and students and colleagues call him the Rat Czar. As a boy growing up in East Flatbush, Corrigan fancied himself a terrestrial Jacques Cousteau; rats were his fish. Now he and his wife split their time between Indiana and New York City. The other day, Corrigan, who has a company called RMC Consulting, was in town in his role as principal lecturer at the Rodent Control Academy, a threeday course in rat management, taught at the Department of Health, on Worth Street. It was a good time for a brushup: the city’s complaint hot line anticipates a record-breaking number of rat-related calls this year; one woman told the A.P. about an Upper West Side colony that resembles the “Burning…

Few things currently spook investors more than the future of media companies. Just a couple of weeks ago, when Time Warner reported disappointing earnings and a gloomy outlook for 2016, its stock fell more than six per cent, and it’s now down nearly twenty per cent for the year. The company blamed exchange rates and new investments, but investors saw only the deeper problems for the industry, including, most obviously, the rise of “cord cutting”— people abandoning traditional cable packages for streaming services. Richard Greenfield, a media and tech analyst at BTIG Research, told me, “The way people watch TV really is changing dramatically. And no traditional media company is doing a good job of dealing with it.” But one part of Time Warner is thriving in the new media…

On the fifth floor of the medical school, sequestered from public view, a black slab lab table lined with old apothecary jars and twist-top jars sealed with paraffin wax, a shoal of not-fish treading bronzy water, each homunculus labelled in terms of in-utero days and weeks. In this jarscape, a palm-size one sitting with legs crossed, arms raised protectively, clasping the top of his head like a child expecting blows in a parental brawl, and this golem, a perfect mini-person, holds fingers curved lightly in front of him, as if playing a piano chord, and this quelque chose has blackened soles— in the womb, a douen meant to range the barefoot forest, those faceless stillborn and early-dead children with backward feet, who lure human playmates to the woods and fill…

Everybody wants a piece of me. I have been weighed and measured, tested and standardized, throughout my young life. It happens to everyone, or to everyone with my ability. Now I live quietly and mostly in the dark, amid sawdust and sheer or streaky wooden surfaces. My role, when I reach maturity, may be to help people behave more sociably, and reduce the irritations of summer, or else to make it easier to eat. For reasons I cannot fathom, I weep when it rains. My handlers keep me wrapped in awkward cloth. They will not let me touch my friends or show any curves. They have taught me how to shave. A few twigs and dragonfly wings got caught near the center of me long ago; they serve to distinguish…

“No weather will be found in this book,” Mark Twain declares in the opening pages of his 1892 novel “The American Claimant.” He has determined to do without it, he explains, on the ground that it usually just gets in the way of the story. “Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it,” he writes, “because of delays on account of the weather.” Twain was not alone in mistrusting meteorological activity in fiction. As literary subjects go, weather has a terrible reputation. More precisely, it has two terrible reputations that do not get along. On the one hand, weather is widely regarded as the most banal topic in the world—in print as in conversation, the one we resort to when we have…

EATING FAST . . . Michael Specter, in his article about the varying modes of the fast-food industry, writes that “fast food” has come to mean many things (“Freedom from Fries,” November 2nd). There is Sweetgreen, which serves salads in three minutes, and then there are Mc-Donald’s burgers and fries. But there is a third way, at least where I live, in Texas. Most supermarkets are now also fast-food joints that offer a variety of ready-made dishes and fresh preassembled meals that you take home and put in an oven for fifteen to thirty minutes. The fare at the H-E-B down the street is deli sandwiches, sushi, and salads (greens-based, with or without meat, slaw, potatoes, beans, and pasta). The food is good and fresh, and most is healthy-ish.…

At this frantic Harlem bar the other evening, amid a roaring throng, a young man in a faded leather jacket offered a seat to another man. Where was this kind person from? “Africa.” Where in Africa? “If a man at a bar says he’s African, that’s enough. If you were a lady, that’d be a different story. But you’re not, so get outta here! Have a good night.” The venue once housed a community center called the Black United Fund Plaza; the sign now reads “Black United Fun Plaza.” Older couples sat on benches along the walls, hung with African objets d’art, and watched svelte men with armfuls of Red Stripe and vodkacolas pressing toward the dance floor, where both drinks and their carriers were clutched at by colorfully outfitted…

Four years ago, Chris Christie was all set to be the savior of the G.O.P., but now that he’s running for President a majority of voters in New Jersey want him to drop out of the race. “As a supporter, of course you wish he’d run when he had momentum,” Ryan Hager, the secretary of the Seton Hall College Republicans, said last Tuesday, a few minutes before Christie was to appear in the second-tier G.O.P. debate. “This time, there are so many candidates he hardly has ten seconds to get his message out.” Hager, a junior with a sunny disposition and a Christie-esque physique, was in a classroom at Seton Hall, in South Orange, New Jersey—a Catholic university where Christie attended law school— arranging bottles of water, bags of chips,…

You can’t tell a great deal about the Web site Erowid from its home page. A tagline reads, “Documenting the Complex Relationship Between Humans & Psychoactives.” This text is surrounded by photographs: a cactus, a cannabis bud, a bottle of ketamine, tabs of LSD. The design looks old, Web 1.0 old, with a simple typeface and a black background. The Tolkienesque name, the F.A.Q. page reveals, was coined with assistance from a dictionary of Indo-European roots. It means, roughly, “earth wisdom.” People who are interested in psychoactive cacti, ketamine, and LSD are generally unfazed by strangeness. Any such person will likely know of Erowid, as will most toxicologists and many E.R. doctors. When the site launched, in 1995, it served as a repository of drug-culture esoterica, drawing just a few…

On December 1, 2009, to commemorate World AIDS Day, Twitter announced a promotion: if users employed the hashtag #red, their tweets would appear highlighted in red. Megan Phelps-Roper, a twenty-three-year-old legal assistant, seized the opportunity. “Thank God for AIDS!” she tweeted that morning. “You won’t repent of your rebellion that brought His wrath on you in this incurable scourge, so expect more & worse! #red.” As a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, in Topeka, Kansas, Phelps-Roper believed that AIDS was a curse sent by God. She believed that all manner of other tragedies—war, natural disaster, mass shootings—were warnings from God to a doomed nation, and that it was her duty to spread the news of His righteous judgments. To protest the increasing acceptance of homosexuality in America, the Westboro…

Heidi and Bree were rear-ended on Route 1 by Sterne Clough, driving his brother’s Ford pickup. Neither girl seemed hurt. Sterne, though, felt the oddest sensation. It was as if someone had clamped an ice bag under his right armpit. It felt frozen and burned at the same time. Your body pulled all sorts of tricks on you when you turned sixty, and now he was seventy-four, so those tricks were less like pranks and more like extended jokes. He groped under his arm with his good hand, but felt only sweat. Nothing accounted for the pain, which was worse in his knee. Damn! His bad knee had banged the dashboard when the little car in front had accelerated and then stopped with no warning, just as the light turned…

The gross domestic product is a measure of all the goods and services that the United States economy produces in a year. It’s also a measure of all the income that the economy generates, and how fast it grows helps determine how rapidly over-all prosperity rises. Between 1947 and 1974, G.D.P. rose by about four per cent a year, on average, and many American households enjoyed a surge in living standards. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, growth dropped a bit, but still averaged more than three per cent. Since 2001, however, the rate of expansion has fallen below two per cent— less than half the postwar rate—and many economists believe that it will stay there, or fall even further. In economic-policy circles, the phrase of the moment is “secular stagnation.”…

GLAMOUR, ACCORDING TO JACQUELINE DE RIBES, “is a worldly style, lots of allure, a touch of flamboyance, a deep know-how, all wrapped up in natural seduction”—and, sometimes, wrapped in polka dots, too. This soigné silk-faille dress and sequinned cotton bolero, designed by the Paris-born countess in 1988, is one of sixty ensembles, both ready-to-wear and haute couture, in an exhibition devoted to the eighty-six-year-old’s impeccable style, which opens at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum on Nov. 19. While she has often worn gowns of her own invention, de Ribes has also been a favorite of such designers as Pierre Balmain, Yves Saint Laurent, Bill Blass, and Norma Kamali. In 1999, Jean Paul Gaultier even named an haute-couture collection in her honor: “Divine Jacqueline.” CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan…

Cranksgiving As the holiday season draws nearer and New Yorkers consider all the things for which they’re grateful (and all the gifts for which they won’t be), those who are less lucky come into sharper view. Still, not everyone is morally stirred by a simple can drive, donation pledge, or soup-kitchen sign-up sheet. Some need adventure with their altruism. Cranksgiving bills itself as “part bike ride, part food drive, part scavenger hunt,” calling on city residents to whiz between markets while ticking off a grocery list, the contents of which are donated to the Bowery Mission. It’s a fun concept for a noble cause, and it’s fed hundreds of families each Thanksgiving since its inception, in 1999. (Hudson Yards, 11th Ave. and 24th St. cranksgiving.org. Nov. 21 at 1:30.)…

Most of the dozen kids sprawled around a rehearsal studio on Forty-second Street the other day had on T-shirts and sneakers. It was a rehearsal for “School of Rock,” a Broadway musical based on the Jack Black movie, about a burnout who poses as a substitute teacher and inducts his students into the joys of AC/DC. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber, who composed the score, paced the back of the room in Nikes and jeans. But Julian Fellowes, the show’s book writer, best known as the creator of “Downton Abbey,” was dressed for teatime: double-breasted blazer, red suspenders, maroon tie. Hunched over a laptop taking notes, he barely looked up as a group of child actors rehearsed a scene in which they bang out a passage from “The Magic Flute.” The…

Strange house we must keep and fill. House that eats and pleads and kills. House on legs. House on fire. House infested With desire. Haunted house. Lonely house. House of trick and suck and shrug. Give-it-to-me house. I-need-you-baby house. House whose rooms are pooled with blood. House with hands. House of guilt. House That other houses built. House of lies And pride and bone. House afraid to be alone. House like an engine that churns and stalls. House with skin and hair for walls. House the seasons singe and douse. House that believes it is not a house.…

I. OMENS Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment at Oxford. Titled “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” it argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology— even nuclear weapons—and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction. Central to this concern is the prospect of an “intelligence explosion,” a speculative event in which an A.I. gains the ability to improve itself, and in short order exceeds the intellectual potential of the human brain by many orders of magnitude. Such a system would effectively be a new kind of life, and Bostrom’s fears, in their simplest…

When, two years ago, the German artist Thomas Struth photographed this robotic head, at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, it wasn’t his first encounter with a stiff upper lip: Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh had recently posed for him. (Janet Malcolm published a Profile of Struth in this magazine shortly afterward.) There’s an air of sangfroid in Struth’s pictures of people—in the taut portraits of families gazing straight at the camera, and in the famous images of museums swarming with distracted tourists. Technology is a more recent muse. In 2007, on a visit to one of the world’s largest shipyards, on Geoje Island, in South Korea, Struth saw a vast drilling rig under construction, the scale and complexity of which reflected the stealth power of…

Benjamin Franklin Wedekind, the iconoclastic author of “Spring Awakening” and the Lulu plays, had trouble deciding whether he was German or American. His parents, a gynecologist and a singer, were German expatriates who met and were married in San Francisco, then returned to Germany just before Wedekind was born in 1864. Although he never set foot in America, he purveyed a vaguely American style, going by Frank and adopting a streetwise look. Scholarship suggests that his attitude toward his lost homeland wavered between admiration and contempt: he prized the ideal of a free, open society, yet excoriated the greed and folly to which that society seemed prone. His work remains relevant. The Metropolitan Opera is presenting a new production, by the South African artist William Kentridge, of Alban Berg’s 1935…

THE YEAR OF LEAR, by James Shapiro (Simon & Schuster). In 1606, Shakespeare’s theatre company débuted “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” and “Antony and Cleopatra.” The Gunpowder Plot had just been foiled; King James sought to unite England, Ireland, and Scotland; plague had come to London; and Queen Elizabeth’s body had recently been moved. Such events, Shapiro writes, were “producing nightmares, tapping deep into Jacobean political and religious anxieties,” but they could be critiqued only obliquely. Shakespeare rose to the challenge with his elliptical, nightmarish stories of a king madly dividing his kingdom, the murder of a Scottish monarch, and a domineering queen. Deftly illuminating the plays’ more opaque passages, Shapiro captures a Shakespeare moved by—and moving—history. NEAR AND DISTANT NEIGHBORS, by Jonathan Haslam (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This history of…

Even in an age of downer comedies, “Getting On” is a hard sell. It’s set in a failing extended-care ward, whose patients are elderly women. The caretakers do a saintly job, but their own lives are stunted: the doctors are solipsists, the nurses are martyrs, and every patient is going to die. Both aesthetically and in its style of humor, the show leans hard into ugliness, with shit jokes, dementia jokes, and enough aging-vagina jokes to make Charlie Sheen blush. In other words, it’s a humiliation comedy, set in one of the more actively humiliating realms of life; a medical show with few of the healing truisms of “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Call the Midwife”; and a female-ensemble show stripped of illusions of empowerment. Yet “Getting On,” which is based on…