Innholdsfortegnelse for September 30, 2013 i The New Yorker

GEORGE PACKER (COMMENT, P. 21), a staff writer, is the author of “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” a National Book Award finalist. SOPHIE BRICKMAN (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 23) is a senior editor at Saveur. XAN RICE (“NOW SERVING,” P. 26) covers West Africa for the Financial Times. JANE SHORE (POEM, P. 31) teaches poetry at the George Washington University. She is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is “That Said.” CORA FRAZIER (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 34) is a writer and editor living in New York. JOSH EELLS (“NIGHT CLUB ROYALE,” P. 36) is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal. DEXTER FILKINS (“THE SHADOW COMMANDER,” P. 42), the author of “The Forever War,”…

BAR TAB DEAD RABBIT GROCERY AND GROG 30 Water St. (646-422-7906) In February, two bartenders from Belfast, Jack McGarry and Sean Muldoon, took the revival of bespoke cocktails full circle with their feisty Victorian-era parlor. The rabbit of which they speak is John (Old Smoke) Morrissey (1831-78)—Irish immigrant, pugilist, Dead Rabbits gang leader, nemesis of Bill (the Butcher) Poole, U.S. congressman. Back then the tip of Manhattan was a hotbed of gangland warfare; now an after-work crowd swarms the sawdust-covered taproom of an 1828 building, where young women dole out craft beer, more than sixty Irish whiskeys, and snacks, such as an improbably delicate bacon-wrapped sausage roll. (The “grocery,” which sells things like Shropshire blue cheese, is a nod to the Irish safe house, which often fronted an illegal bar.)…

“THERE ARE NO MOTHERS-IN-LAW IN ballet,” George Balanchine said. Part of what makes twentieth-century ballet look twentieth-century is economy, and the same is true in modern dance. José Limón’s “Moor’s Pavane,” from 1949, epitomizes the principle. Though Limón based it on Shakespeare’s “Othello,” he threw out everything that didn’t have to do with what he saw as the central theme: jealousy. So we get none of Shakespeare’s expansiveness: Cyprus, Cassio, race relations. There are only four characters—Othello, Desdemona, Iago, and Emilia—and an utterly headlong plot. (The fatal handkerchief is produced at the very start.) The most hair-raising moment is when Iago, needing to communicate some nasty suggestion to Othello, climbs up his back and whispers in his ear. He looks like a growth on the great general’s body. The skeleton…

On a recent sunny Sunday morning, a modern caveman, sitting on a bench by a south entrance to Central Park, finished a single espresso, took off his shoes, threw them in his backpack, and prepared for his weekly barefoot run. “It would be unhygienic to walk everywhere barefoot,” the caveman, John Durant, said. Durant is the author of “The Paleo Manifesto,” which was published last week. “It definitely depends which part of town you’re in. But Central Park is clean.” A man one bench over, deep in his newspaper, raised an eyebrow but kept reading. “People ask me about three things: broken glass, syringes, and dog shit,” Durant said. “Broken glass you scan for. Syringes were there maybe in the seventies? And dog shit—you’d look out for that anyway, plus…

In the summer of 2008, a forty-two-year-old chef named Ahmed Jama left London to live in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, where he was born. To his family and friends, it was a puzzling decision. Twenty years earlier, Jama had arrived at Heathrow Airport with a forged passport, no local contacts, and little command of English. He was now a British citizen, and the owner of a successful restaurant in London. He had a wife and three young children. Mogadishu was in ruins, and at war. In the latest of a series of conflicts that started in 1991, a group of Islamist insurgents, the Shabaab, was battling Ethiopian troops, who were propping up Somalia’s transitional government. In the previous eighteen months, gun battles and shelling had caused eight hundred thousand…

On the final Saturday night of 2012, Jesse Waits entered the Encore resort in Las Vegas and took a private elevator to the seventh floor, where a young d.j. named Afrojack was staying. Waits wore a black Tom Ford suit without a tie, and he was texting on two phones at once. Thirty-seven and handsome, with straw-colored hair, Waits is the managing partner of XS, a club on the Encore’s ground floor, which features a vast indoor dance space and an elevated openair stage that looks out over a swimming pool surrounded by palm trees. According to the magazine Nightclub & Bar, XS is the top-grossing night club in the country, bringing in between several hundred thousand and a million dollars a night. The Encore’s owner, the casino magnate Steve…

She was in the brig when her husband came home. Below her, neighbors reclined on their stoops, laughing and relieved, shaking off winter with loud cries and sudden starts. Someone unseen scraped a broom over a little courtyard, the rhythmic sound of brownstones in spring. “In the brig!” Sarah called out and, with her wineglass at a tilt, looked down on the neighborhood. They called their six feet of concrete balcony overlooking the street the brig. The children’s voices carried in the blue air. Then the breeze came. It cut through the branches of the trees, turning up the silver undersides of the young leaves, and brought goosebumps as it went around her. The breeze, God, the breeze! she thought. You get how many like it? Maybe a dozen in…

TRAVELING SPRINKLER, by Nicholson Baker (Blue Rider). This tender novel finds Paul Chowder, the poet narrator of Baker’s previous novel “The Anthologist,” driving around Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and speaking into a handheld recorder. His subjects include Minnie Driver, his ex-girlfriend Roz, patterns of sunlight (“I live for dappled shade”), and the C.I.A. (“It was begun with an executive order by a president and could be ended just as easily”). Uninspired as a poet and hoping to win back Roz, Chowder takes up songwriting. His tone is an appealing mixture of goofy and elegiac, and his pronouncements hold an odd, warm authority: “I’m eating Planter’s trail mix and I’m not killing anyone.” What at first seems meandering turns out to be intricately patterned, and moving NIGHT FILM, by Marisha Pessl…

IN THE PIPELINE Ryan Lizza reports that, because the proposed TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline crosses an international border, the project will require approval by the State Department and by the President (“The President and the Pipeline,” September 16th). This decision will be based on the State Department’s final environmental review; a draft, issued in March, concluded that the pipeline will not significantly affect the trajectory of global climate change. The source of this assessment, however, is Environmental Resources Management, a consultancy with alleged financial ties to TransCanada. The State Department is currently investigating this conflict of interest. Other environmental issues, beyond the use of fossil fuels, remain unaddressed. The Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies both irrigation and drinking water to eight states, lies in the path of the Keystone XL…

José Ramírez-Ruiz and Pamela Yung make their own rules. After stints in high-profile kitchens all over New York, the chefs, who are also a couple, decided to jump on the pop-up bandwagon: their food, their life savings, someone else’s space. “If we’re gonna go down, we’re gonna go down doing exactly what we want,” Ramírez-Ruiz said. More than a year later, Chez José, their roving reservation-only restaurant, is thriving. They started out in a South Williamsburg coffee shop, making do with just a hot plate and a small induction oven, then moved around the corner to Lake Trout, a shuttered fish-sandwich shop they’ve left untouched. And so, for now, their elegant, vegetable-focussed tasting menu is served beneath a Dairy Queen-style menu board advertising “cheese fish” and “Western fries.” (Unwitting passersby…

Every year, the United Nations issues hundreds of solemn documents, written in the clotted prose of international bureaucracy, and they disappear without a trace, while horrors continue unabated. Last week’s “Report on the Alleged Use of Chemical Weapons in the Ghouta Area of Damascus on 21 August 2013” might prove the exception. Its language is studiedly neutral, its conclusions deliberately limited, but its findings are devastating and could mark a turning point in Syria’s civil war. Under severe time constraints, due to the fighting, U.N. investigators interviewed and examined thirty-six survivors in two locations. The oldest was sixty-eight; the youngest was seven. Many had lost at least two family members; a pair of brothers were the only survivors among forty relatives who all lived in the same building. The warheads…

Harry Dean Stanton knows how to build a silence. The character actor with the windblown hair and hound-dog face sat on the roof deck of Manhattan’s Nolitan Hotel one recent afternoon, wearing a seedy black suit and smoking American Spirit cigarettes. At eighty-seven, he exhibited the self-possession of a man swimming across a vast dark lake. Every so often, he’d crush a butt under his boot, then flick it fifteen feet, over the rail. Stanton came to wide notice in the eighties, when he starred in “Repo Man” and “Paris, Texas.” But in Hollywood he had long been a legendary barstool sage at Dan Tana’s, close harmonizer with Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson, pal of Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, and womanizer (perhaps implicit from the above). Now he’s the…

This One got to keep the Warhol. That One got an S.T.D. This One left & kept on walking, making That One his Penelope. Friends at first sided with This One. Later they jumped to That One’s side. Razor, pills, noose, & tailpipe for This—or That—One’s suicide. “Fifty-fifty’s fair!” shouted That One. So This One cut their dog in half. X marks the spot on That One’s cheek where This One slapped his autograph. That One drinks hot tears for breakfast; This One whiskey-on-the-rocks. When This One got the seven-year itch, That One scratched her chicken pox. Since This One left, That One’s singing. How should they divide the pelf? Now This One’s alone & so is That One. Each One wants a couplet to himself.…

Last February, some of Iran’s most influential leaders gathered at the Amir al-Momenin Mosque, in northeast Tehran, inside a gated community reserved for officers of the Revolutionary Guard. They had come to pay their last respects to a fallen comrade. Hassan Shateri, a veteran of Iran’s covert wars throughout the Middle East and South Asia, was a senior commander in a powerful, élite branch of the Revolutionary Guard called the Quds Force. The force is the sharp instrument of Iranian foreign policy, roughly analogous to a combined C.I.A. and Special Forces; its name comes from the Persian word for Jerusalem, which its fighters have promised to liberate. Since 1979, its goal has been to subvert Iran’s enemies and extend the country’s influence across the Middle East. Shateri had spent much…

Sketch comedy creates converts, not fans: stumble upon the right bit, and you’re an instant devotee. With “Key & Peele,” on Comedy Central, the only skit I’d seen from the show was the viral hit “Obama Anger Translator.” In it, Jordan Peele (the stocky guy) plays the ultra-calm President, while Keegan-Michael Key (the lanky bald one) plays Luther, the guy Obama’s hired to say what he can’t. “I am not a Muslim!” Luther howls through a megaphone, sputtering and cussing. The skit was smart, it was cathartic, but it also felt kind of like a one-joke gag. Then one day, killing time on You-Tube, I fell down a “Key & Peele” rabbit hole, and realized that, like Gob from “Arrested Development,” I had made a terrible mistake. The sketch that…

What happens when you pimp out the pop in a pop masterpiece? Does it cheapen the original work by association? An unfortunate aspect of the thirty or so modern-day screen adaptations of “Romeo and Juliet” is that they minimize the attention it takes to listen to the play; filmmakers tend to amp up the characters’ knowing youthfulness, while jettisoning much of the script’s literariness. Those film adaptations have made the play difficult for many people to sit through—you can’t fast-forward it, or leave it on pause—but it may be partly the fault of how the play itself is read. Looked at a certain way, “Romeo and Juliet” is a movie, or structured like one: in a series of relatively swift and visually sensational sequences, two bodies are joined together and…

JOHN ZORN, a master of both the jazz and the contemporary-classical genres, has exploited the possibilities of the present New York moment more inventively and comprehensively than any other musician—and this week the town is his. The Metropolitan Museum marks the month of Zorn’s sixtieth birthday with an entire day of concerts; Miller Theatre offers three rich programs of Zorn’s music for ensembles large and small; and Anthology Film Archives, where Zorn has often performed, presents a series of films that he has scored over the years. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera Robert Carsen’s minimalist production of “Eugene Onegin” was a challenge to the house’s conservative style in 1997, but it soon became a beloved staple—which means that Deborah Warner’s new staging (directed, in her absence, by Fiona Shaw)…

FIFTY YEARS AGO, THE NEW York Film Festival (which runs Sept. 27-Oct. 13) was launched at Lincoln Center as a noncompetitive “festival of festivals.” It was a time when the medium was still struggling to be taken seriously as an art form. Lincoln Center’s own chairman, John D. Rockefeller III, thought the event had no business being there, protesting, “Movies are like baseball.” The festival’s curatorial inclinations, formed in large measure by the French New Wave, ultimately spread to other festivals, such as Cannes, from which New York now draws many of its most enticing offerings. This year’s edition includes “A Touch of Sin,” an intricately constructed, fiercely angry drama by the Chinese director Jia Zhangke, which won the award for Best Screenplay at Cannes. The film’s four lightly but…

A New Jersey driver who had previously seen the Red Hook housing projects only while passing by on an elevated span of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway got off the highway the other day, parked, walked into the projects, and met up with Shaina Harrison, a young woman whose job is helping to prevent gun violence among kids in New York City. Harrison is twenty-six years old and has lived in the Red Hook projects all her life. Watching her approach, the Jersey driver wondered if that could really be she. She wore a necklace of big gold-colored links, a pumpkin-orange top, striped drawstring trousers, and cream-colored pumps with gold tips. She is five feet eleven inches tall. Her long, wavy hair, black streaked with cinnamon highlights, fell to below her shoulders.…

As the canine accompanying the married rock duo of Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent, who call themselves Shovels & Rope, Townes van Zandt has seen many things on the road, but one thing he may never have experienced is a vibrant shade of blue. That’s what the new Tribeca Dog Run, in Hudson River Park, promises his species. Dogs see a limited part of the color spectrum, and the blue-beige painted pavement of the dog run is designed to appear especially vivid to a dog. On a recent Friday morning, following Shovels & Rope’s joyous show at Webster Hall, T.V.Z. headed there with his owners to have his visual cortex blown. Hearst, who is blond and chatty, and Trent, who is dark-haired and quietly intense, made their way down…

The voice you have been hearing on my phone calls isn’t my real pitch. In person, my voice is lower in pitch. My frequent emoji use is a commentary on our increasingly nonverbal culture. Routinely calling a locksmith to let you into your apartment is a Millennial thing. I speak to my parents often to check in on them, because they’re eager to analyze pictures of weird bites, explain step by step how to fill out a change-of-address form, and tell me that feeling infertile doesn’t mean you’re infertile. I have only respect for robotic voices listing menu options. The following text messages, to various recipients, were all meant unseriously, and I encourage you to look for context clues: “Are my eyes too close together?” “How many hours do you…

“Fuck the Supreme Court!” Edith Windsor said, one hideously hot morning in June, when she’d had just about enough. Then she sighed and mumbled, “Oh, I don’t mean that.” What she really meant was that she was hot, she was tired of waiting, and, most of all, she was tired of being told what to do. “I’m feeling very manhandled!” she said. It was Windsor’s eighty-fourth birthday, and she was spending it staring at a laptop screen as information from scotusblog.com flashed by in a typeface too small for her to read comfortably. Four years earlier, Windsor’s partner of more than forty years, Thea Spyer, died, leaving Windsor her sole heir. The two were legally married in Canada, in 2007, but, because of the Defense of Marriage Act, Windsor was…

On January 25, 1995, at 9:28 A.M. Moscow time, an aide handed a briefcase to Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia. A small light near the handle was on, and inside was a screen displaying information indicating that a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from somewhere in the vicinity of the Norwegian Sea, and that it appeared to be headed toward Moscow. Below the screen was a row of buttons. This was the Russian “nuclear football.” By pressing the buttons, Yeltsin could launch an immediate nuclear strike against targets around the world. Russian nuclear missiles, submarines, and bombers were on full alert. Yeltsin had forty-seven hundred nuclear warheads ready to go. The Chief of the General Staff, General Mikhail Kolesnikov, had a football, too, and he was monitoring…

The new Ron Howard film, “Rush,” is about the rivalry between two young drivers who fought for the Formula 1 world championship in the nineteen-seventies. In one corner, we have the crowing rooster: a lusty blond Brit by the name of James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth), who competed for the good times, the glory, and the fun. In the opposing corner lurks Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl), born into Austrian wealth, whose demeanor was that of a highly organized rodent, and who approached every race as if it could be solved by quadratic equations. Never was battle joined with more fury than in 1976, when the outcome was decided in the final minutes of the final race, and settled by a single point. In the words of Tom Rubython, whose timidly titled…