Innholdsfortegnelse for September 16, 2013 i The New Yorker

Flannery O’Connor (“My Dear God,” p. 26) published her first novel, “Wise Blood,” in 1952. “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” her second collection of stories, appeared shortly after she died, in 1964, at the age of thirty-nine. “A Prayer Journal,” a notebook that she kept in 1946-47, is due out in November. George Packer (Comment, p. 21), a staff writer, is the author of eight books, including “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” which came out in May. Andrew Marantz (The Talk of the Town, p. 24; “Unreality Star,” p. 32) is a member of the magazine’s editorial staff. Paul Rudnick (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 31) contributes regularly to the magazine. “Gorgeous,” his first young-adult novel, came out in April. Stanley Moss (Poem, p. 35) is…

When you think about the talented children of famous parents, you don’t necessarily think about their gifts so much as their genes. Could the famous offspring’s renown be based on a kind of molecular nepotism? Would Liza Minnelli really have been Liza without Judy and Vincente? Would Jane Fonda’s righteous American quality be possible if Henry hadn’t gotten there first? I didn’t know who the twenty-six-year-old Condola Rashad’s parents were when I saw her last spring in “The Trip to Bountiful” (which runs through Oct. 9 at the Stephen Sondheim). All I felt, watching her, was excitement; she played her scenes with an unobstructed emotional steadiness that was completely stellar. Now Condola, the only daughter of the iconic actress Phylicia Rashad and the sports star Ahmad Rashad, has left that…

Kafka is hard to adapt to any visual medium. In Steven Berkoff’s 1969 play “Metamorphosis”—which most of us over here saw only twenty years later, with Mikhail Baryshnikov as Gregor Samsa, the man who is turned into a bug—the important thing was just Baryshnikov. Now the South African choreographer Arthur Pita is bringing his “Metamorphosis,” created for London’s Royal Ballet in 2011, to the Joyce, Sept. 17-29. Pita’s Gregor, Edward Watson, a Royal Ballet principal with an astonishing extension, yanks himself around with his feet practically around his neck. His near-naked body is covered with brown slime. (He gets it all over his bedsheets.) His parents scream and throw things at the sight of him. Only his little sister stands by him. She brings him food; she tries to straighten…

“Do you know Mr. Hur?” a Korean broadcaster said, pointing a camera at a minor-league pitcher warming up at Provident Bank Park, in Rockland County. “He’s a very rich, rich man.” The rich man, Hur Min, wore Harry Potter glasses and had a short ponytail sticking out of the back of his cap. A new signee with the Rockland Boulders, in the independent Can-Am League, he had recently flown in from Seoul and was scheduled to take the mound in an hour. The Boulders were playing the Newark Bears, whose alumni include Jose Canseco and Rickey Henderson. The game was to be streamed live on Korean ESPN. Min looked loose, if a little stooped. “Is he a good pitcher?” an onlooker asked, and the cameraman giggled before answering, “Maybe!” Hur…

For most of the past century, Americans have been the world’s greatest consumers. And usually consumption has meant ownership: just before the Great Recession, the average American household owned 2.28 cars, and had more television sets than people. But these days a host of new companies are trying to disrupt the paradigm—offering the benefits of consuming without the costs of ownership. Ride-sharing companies such as Lyft, Sidecar, and, in some cities, UberX, own no cars themselves. Instead, they sign up ordinary car owners: when you need a ride, you can use their apps to find a driver near you and ask to be picked up. Many other companies are trying to cash in on what’s often called “the sharing economy.” Airbnb now features more than three hundred thousand listings from…

Soon after Nick Lotz enrolled at Ohio University, in the fall of 2007, he grew deeply anxious. He was overweight, and self-conscious around women; worse, he thought that everyone sensed his unease. People who once seemed like new friends gradually stopped returning his texts. He went out four or five nights a week, and drank to mask his discomfort, occasionally to the point of blacking out. After such episodes, he worried that he’d said, or typed, something that he should have kept private. He suspected that people were posting embarrassing videos of him online, though he couldn’t find any on Facebook. Lotz, who wanted to be a filmmaker, largely ignored his classwork. Often, he’d draw the blinds of his dorm room and take Suboxone, an opiate that he bought from…

They have discovered, they say, the protein of itch — natriuretic polypeptide b — and that it travels its own distinct pathway inside my spine. As do pain, pleasure, and heat. A body it seems is a highway, a cloverleaf crossing well built, well traversed. Some of me going north, some going south. Ninety percent of my cells, they have discovered, are not my own person, they are other beings inside me. As ninety-six percent of my life is not my life. Yet I, they say, am they— my bacteria and yeasts, my father and mother, grandparents, lovers, my drivers talking on cell phones, my subways and bridges, my thieves, my police who chase my self night and day. My proteins, apparently also me, fold the shirts. I find in…

In 1937, Warner Bros. departed from its usual fare of jittery urban dramas and emotionally saturated women’s pictures. In a burst of ambition, it mounted a historical spectacle set in late-nineteenth-century Paris, “The Life of Emile Zola,” starring Paul Muni. “Zola” is meant to be a stirring man-of-conscience movie: after early struggles, followed by huge success, the writer, in self-satisfied middle age, gets drawn, with increasing fury, into the Dreyfus affair. “Zola,” which was directed by the German émigré William Dieterle, includes episodes that were interpreted at the time as indirect attacks on Nazi Germany: scenes of state-inspired mob agitation launched first against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army who is falsely accused of treason; and then against Zola for defending him—his books are publicly burned. At…

STAND YOUR GROUND Steve Coll, writing about Obama’s position on press leaks, conflates the regrettable persecution of the New York Times reporter James Risen with that of the whistle-blower Edward Snowden and the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange (Comment, September 2nd). Coll implies that Snowden and Assange were cowardly for not facing the law in the U.S., while Risen, whose reporting and legal fight are indeed heroic, has taken a higher road. Neither Snowden nor Assange is a reporter, nor does either of them work for what is arguably the world’s most powerful newspaper. The two men stayed away from the U.S. because the government is taking increasingly harsh measures against people who dare to shed light on the U.S. intelligence apparatus. Coll refers to Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning’s response, upon…

15 Main St., Brooklyn (718-858-1095)—A meal at Atrium might start with an olive-oil cocktail and oysters, followed by quinoa two ways and a sweet-corn panna cotta. Modern Mediterranean, maybe a little trend-obsessed. But this new restaurant in Dumbo, opened by a team of DB Bistro alums, is also an act of defiance against nature. It’s located around the corner from the carrousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park, which was engulfed by the East River during Hurricane Sandy, a moment captured in a now iconic photograph that showed the hooves of the glittering horses threatened by water and surrounded by darkness. The photo presaged the havoc Sandy would inflict on the Brooklyn waterfront and its businesses. In Dumbo alone, the River Café, the bobbing grande dame of the borough’s dining scene, was…

THE THEATRE PIECE OF MY HEART Sept. 20 For the actress playing Janis Joplin in the new bio-musical “A Night with Janis Joplin,” at the Lyceum, the vocal demands are so great that two people will alternate in the role. Mary Bridget Davies will take a break twice a week, when Kacee Clanton takes on the queen of rock. Randy Johnson wrote and directs. (212-239-6200.) NIGHT LIFE ON THE CASE Sept. 26 Recently, the alt-country chanteuse Neko Case released “The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You,” her first album in four years. She’s touring the country, and she performs at Radio City Music Hall later this month. (ticketmaster.com.) CLASSICAL MUSIC POPPING OFF Oct. 2 Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s opening-night gala concert…

A couple of weeks ago, the newest crop of pop starlets and boy bands strutted down the red carpet, into the Barclays Center, for the MTV Video Music Awards. The other evening, to significantly less fanfare, a flatbed truck cruised the wrong way along Atlantic Avenue, bringing another guest to the Brooklyn arena. Guards inside the lobby pressed up against the glass for a better look. She was late, but she would outlast all the other acts in town. “These bronze sculptures are easily good for two thousand years,” Andrew Pharmer, the general manager of the Polich Tallix fine-art foundry, in Rock Tavern, New York, said. He was talking about “Ona,” a nineteen-and-a-half-foot-tall, nearly twelve-thousand-pound art work by the sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, which had been commissioned as a permanent…

In January, 1946, while studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flannery O’Connor began keeping a journal in a ruled Sterling notebook. O’Connor, who had left her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, for Iowa, turned twenty-one in March and had her first short story, “The Geranium,” accepted for publication that month. She was a devout Catholic, and over a year and a half she filled the notebook with a series of entries addressed to God. The following excerpts from her journal chart her thoughts on the subject of faith and prayer, and her hopes for her fiction. Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all…

On the day of his second Inauguration, in January, Barack Obama delivered an address of unabashed liberal ambition and promise. As recently as early April, before the realities of the world and the House of Representatives made themselves painfully evident, the President retained the confidence of a leader on the brink of enormous achievements. It seemed possible, even probable, that he would win modest gun-control legislation, an immigration-reform law, and the elusive grand bargain with Republicans to resolve the serial crises over the federal budget. And he seemed determined to take on even the most complicated and ominous problem of all: climate change. The President, who had a mixed environmental record after his first term, vowed that he would commit his Administration to combatting global warming, saying that “failure to…

Returning home from the cemetery where he had just buried his father, Mohamed felt as though the burden he carried had become heavier. He was bent, aged. He walked slowly. He had just turned thirty. He’d never celebrated his birthday. The years went by, and they were all alike. Poverty, deprivation, and a vague resignation imbued his life with a sadness that had, over time, come to seem natural. Like his father, he never complained. He was not a fatalist, or even religious. But his father’s death had turned his life upside down. He was the eldest, and was thus responsible now for the family. Three brothers and two sisters. A diabetic mother, not yet an invalid. Mohamed’s latest job hunt, like many before, had yielded nothing, and now he…

Enon, by Paul Harding (Random House). An extraordinary follow-up to the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning début, “Tinkers,” this novel takes its title from the name of a tiny New England village, where Charlie Crosby, a housepainter, is ravaged by sorrow after losing his teen-aged daughter in a bike accident. Charlie is the last of the family line, and he spends his days devouring painkillers, having shattered his hand by punching a wall in his grief; his nights are devoted to walking the old paths and byways of the wooded town in a near-hallucinatory state, trying to account for his suffering. Harding’s subject is consciousness rooted in a contemporary moment but bound to a Puritan past. His prose is steeped in a visionary, transcendentalist tradition that echoes Blake, Rilke, Emerson, and…

THIS WEEK THE THEATRE FIRST AMENDMENT In 1991, a group of erotic dancers challenged an Indiana State law that banned public nudity, in the U.S. Supreme Court case Barnes vs. Glen Theatre. In “Arguendo,” Elevator Repair Service stages the oral argument, word for word, at the Public. (See page 8.) NIGHT LIFE ALL IN THE FAMILY The T.J. Martell Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to raising money for cancer and AIDS research, was founded by the veteran music executive Tony Martell in 1975 after his son died of cancer. It’s having a Family Day at Roseland, with the singer-songwriter Jason Mraz, the young singer Austin Mahone, and the rising phenom Ed Sheeran. (See page 9.) ART AFTER THE FIDDLER In “Chagall: Love, War, and Exile,” the Jewish Museum exhibits thirty…

The famously publicity-averse filmmaker Chris Marker used the cinema like a giant megaphone, as in the 1962 documentary “Le Joli Mai,” a new restoration of which opens at Film Forum on Sept. 13. Working with the cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, Marker filmed interviews with a wide range of people in and around Paris—poor families in suburban hovels, stockbrokers and their young couriers, African immigrants, workers on strike, utopian architects and engineers—but his archly literary voice-overs (spoken by Yves Montand and Simone Signoret) and supertitles, together with his dryly ironic editing, turn the panoramic vision into an ode to Communist ideals. Yet the interviews—and the filmmakers’ curiosity and empathy—overflow their ideological container and present the idiosyncratic characters tenderly. The movie’s forecast of political upheavals, with allusions to censorship and terrorism, is trumped…

Toward the end of last week’s Senate hearing on American military action in Syria, Tim Kaine, of Virginia, admitted to being confused. Secretary of State John Kerry had been repeating for hours the Administration’s line that the purpose of bombing Syria was “limited”: to punish Bashar al-Assad for gassing more than a thousand of his own people, including hundreds of children, and to discourage him from doing it again. On the other hand, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had tersely acknowledged that the act of destroying Syrian military assets would inevitably hurt Assad’s ability to fight the rebellion—so the effects might not be so limited after all. Meanwhile, the American goal in Syria remains a negotiated settlement. Since no one from the Administration would…

SCENE 1: A black-box theatre on Barrow Street, in the West Village. Seven actors—three male, four female—flit about, rehearsing. They are members of the New York Neo-Futurists, a theatre company known for its avant-garde ethos. Upstage, a blue scrim represents “a glassy tropic sea”; an array of vintage hats hangs from two clotheslines. The stage is a square on the floor, demarcated by masking tape. It is two hours before curtain. Tonight’s performance will be called “The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill, Volume 1: Early Plays/Lost Plays.” (Volume 2 will be performed this Saturday, in Highland Lake, New York.) Text by Eugene O’Neill; condensing by Christopher Loar, the director. Loar—thirtyish, faint mustache, wearing a ski hat by the surf clothing brand O’Neill—sits downstage, eating pizza, and watches…

A prominent Russian screenwriter working on a film of Tchaikovsky’s life that has just received state financing caused an uproar this week by saying that the biopic will not focus on the homosexuality of the composer because “it is far from a fact that Tchaikovsky was a homosexual.” The biopic is being directed by Kirill Serebrennikov . . . on his Facebook page on Wednesday, Mr. Serebrennikov posted what he described as a synopsis of a film about Tchaikovsky in which the composer encounters his first love at a ball only to find that she is married. When she leaves her husband, the composer dies of cholera with her at his side. One commentator on the post noted that Mr. Serebrennikov had, in fact, posted the synopsis of “Es War…

The staggering was all wrong. And the flailing? Unacceptable. Bryan Cranston turned from the video playback with a grin. A few weeks before, he had shot the last episode of “Breaking Bad,” the AMC series that gave him what he calls “the role that will undoubtedly be the first line of my obituary.” Now he was on the set of “Godzilla,” a Warner Bros. remake. In this scene, Cranston, playing the top scientist at a Tokyo nuclear facility, was having an intense argument that’s interrupted by a seismic jolt. Behind him, jumpsuit-wearing extras had begun reeling about as if they were in a cheaply enjoyable fifties version of the story, rather than in the expensively enjoyable version that Warner Bros. hoped to produce. “Doesn’t work, does it?” he said. The…

There are many ways in which “Wadjda” could have gone wrong. It could have been cute beyond endurance. Consider the setup: a lively girl of ten or eleven, an only child, with a smile that can be switched on like a lamp, adores her father but seldom sees him. She also knows that his gaze is drifting away from her mother, with whom the girl lives a sedentary and sometimes fractious life. Put like that, the tale has the sad sound of a children’s book from the days of “A Little Princess,” and there is something antiquated in the object of our heroine’s desires: a bicycle, which she longs to possess, and on which her hopes of change and escape—her only plausible ones—are pinned. The movie could also have been…

Who are the Millennials? Narcissists, that’s who. Entitled types who actually expect to be paid for the work they do. A generation foolish enough to have graduated into a recession—“liking” rather than loving, stealing Wi-Fi, twerking molly (or whatever it is you do with molly). Takers of selfies! This unfortunate demographic, which has become an easy target for anti-technology pundits, a peg for prurient essays on hookup culture, and a marvellous resource for op-ed columnists in a rush, is now in possession of its very own cable channel: Pivot, which débuted, very quietly, last month. Launched by the producer Evan Shapiro, whose résumé includes executive roles at Sundance and IFC, two of the more innovative small cable networks, the network has a sly slogan: “It’s Your Turn.” And so far,…