Innholdsfortegnelse for October 7, 2013 i The New Yorker

KOFI AWOONOR (POEM, P. 62), a Ghanaian poet and a lecturer in English and African literature at the University of Ghana, was killed in the recent Westgate shopping-mall attack, in Kenya. A collection of his work, “Promises of Hope: New and Selected Poems,” is due out in February. ATUL GAWANDE {COMMENT, P. 25) is a surgeon and a staff writer. He is the author of, most recently, “The Checklist Manifesto.” CLAUDIA ROTH PIERPONT (“THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER,” P. 30) has been writing for The New Yorker since 1990. Her new book, “Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books,” will be published in October. PETER HESSLER (“KEEPING THE FAITH,” P. 38) is a staff writer who lives in Cairo. “Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West” is his most recent…

180 West St., Brooklyn (347-987-3666) When you’re a ten-minute walk from the G train, you might hope to pay a little less than nine dollars for a pilsner. But as irate Yelpers have discovered, that’s not the case at Achilles Heel, a remote spot by the water in Greenpoint—and a rare misstep from the creator of two of Brooklyn’s most effortlessly elegant destination restaurants (Diner and Marlow & Sons). The room has a by now familiar louche appeal (peeling paint, tin ceiling), but haphazardness is less charming from a bartender, even if this is meant to be a laid-back neighborhood joint. One drinker’s request for a not too sweet cocktail resulted in a garden-variety Aperol spritz, which was delivered without explanation or follow-up. The food is taken more seriously: pates…

WHEN WALLACE SHAWN WAS A boy, he used to go to the theatre with this magazine’s Off Broadway theatre critic, Edith Oliver. (His father, William Shawn, The New Yorkers editor from 1952 to 1987, didn’t love theatre.) They saw all sorts of shows together, so it was only natural that when Shawn’s own plays started being produced, in the seventies, Oliver was on the aisle. Oliver wasn’t initially a supporter of his work; she thought he should have become a judge. It’s a funny idea, but one that seems perfectly plausible, given that so much of Shawn’s work is about justice—justice as a kind of Platonic truth, and truth as the less theatrically exciting cousin to lies, political and personal In Shawn’s 1996 play, “The Designated Mourner,” for instance, the…

NO SEX, PLEASE In the British imagination, Americans often feature as prudes—“American women would view the whole notion of ’wine o’clock’ with horror,” the former M.P. Louise Mensch, who moved to New York last year, recently wrote in the London Times. When it comes to online pornography, however, it lums out that the British maybe more puritanical. This summer, Prime Minister David Cameron announced a plan to fit every new broadband account in the U.K. with a “family-friendjy” filter, so that, beginning later this year, Brits who want access to the seamier corners of the Internet will have to “opt in” in order to view them. ’Tear off your genitals, smash up your wanking headphones, because porn as we know it is over,” Clive Martin wrote on Vices British Web…

Philip Roth went through the editing of an entire book, with Veronica Geng before they finally met and became fast friends—or, as Roth recalls, before “we began to make each other laugh.” Geng was an editor at this magazine, as well as a writer of sharp-edged social satires, when she sent a letter to Roth, in the late seventies, saying how much she admired his work and asking if he had anything that The New Yorker might publish. It was more than fifteen years since he’d appeared in these pages, and the magazine had widely come to be considered Updike country; Roth says he had concluded that the powers that be just “didn’t care for my stuff!” He had no short stories to offer. But he had recently completed a…

At eight-thirty on the morning of June 21st, Alan Rusbridger, the unflappable editor of the Guardian, Britain’s liberal daily, was in his office, absorbing a lecture from Jeremy Hey-wood, the Cabinet Secretary to Prime Minister David Cameron. Accompanying Heywood was Craig Oliver, Cameron’s director of communications. The deputy editor, Paul Johnson, joined them in Rusbridger’s office, overlooking the Regent’s Canal, which runs behind King’s Cross station, in North London. According to Rusbridger, Heywood told him, in a steely voice, “The Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Attorney General, and others in government are extremely concerned about what you’re doing.” Since June 5th, the Guardian had been publishing top-secret digital files provided by Edward Snowden, a former contract employee of the National Security Agency. In a series…

I was walking down High Street to the funeral home when I spotted Ed Hankey coming toward me. He said, “Jay,” then, “Guess who’s sick?,” then blinked and concluded, “Murray Cuder.” Sometimes bad news takes the form of a greeting. I hadn’t seen Hankey for more than twenty years, and I assumed that this abrupt announcement was a tactic to overcome his awkwardness. So I didn’t want to reply by explaining that I was back in Medford Square after so long because my father had just died. Family tangles, bereavement, and failure send us home, seldom happiness. I was headed to Gaffey’s to meet my mother and my sister, to choose a coffin and arrange the viewing. Perhaps Hankey already knew about my father and was avoiding the subject by…

THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS, by Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking). Gilbert’s sumptuous third novel, her first in thirteen years, draws openly on nineteenth-century forebears: Dickens, Eliot, and Henry James. The plot concerns a botanist named Alma Whittaker, whose conclusions, based on a lifetime’s study of mosses, rival those of Darwin in significance, although she never publishes them. Alma is driven to understand “how the world was regulated... the master clockwork behind everything.” The quest leads her to eminence in science but to utter devastation in the realm of romantic love; the central episode of the novel hinges on an act of cruelty that Alma can never undo. Gilbert’s prose is by turns flinty, funny, and incandescent. THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS, by J. M. Coetzee (Viking). In the latest novel by…

The superb Polish-French painter Balthus—an anti-modernist beloved of modernists, including Picasso—charms the eye and rattles thought. For more than six decades, until his death, in 2001, at the age of ninety-two, Balthus depicted young girls in gamy poses, attributing any perceived eroticism to viewers with unclean minds. His other perennial subject was the cat, his totem animal. A fat feline nuzzles his leg in a self-portrait made when he was twenty-seven; the artist cuts an imperiously Romantic figure and dubs himself, in an inscription in English, “The King of Cats.” It is the first painting in “Cats and Girls,” a focussed retrospective, finely curated by Sabine Rewald, at the Metropolitan Museum. Then come girls, by the dozen, often with cats in attendance. Was Balthus a pedophile? His interest, if not…

SAVING SYRIANS George Packer concludes his analysis of the Syrian crisis with a dilemma (Com­ment, September 16th). As we seek to formulate a policy that is ethically defen­sible and that also serves our interests, Packer, after reviewing many factors in play, suggests that there is no easy way to end the conflict He continues, “An easier case can be made for doing nothing—letting the war burn on for years,” a policy that “would have the virtue of being clear and consistent.” Such comments recall the Iran-Iraq War, during which several neighbors of the warring parties were content to sit by in the hope that both nations would be weakened by the fighting. Some may also see a possibility of fine-tuning this Syrian conflict by aiding the side we favor…

7 Spring St. (646-370-6650) SO MANY THAI JOINTS ARE the same old mix-and-match variety—noodles or curry, chicken or beef—and function as delivery systems for a few variations on one basic, albeit delicious, theme. At Uncle Boons, a subterranean den of wood panelling and curated kitsch, the married chef-owners, Matt Danzer and Ann Redding, who met while cooking at Thomas Keller’s Per Se, diversify the repertoire. They decide what goes with what. Fried rice, for example, gets fresh crab—pillowy and sea-salty and comforting—and the deep-brown gravy of a massaman curry is made explicitly for tender beef cheeks. But on a menu full of earthy curiosities—like creamy chicken livers and pineapple cubes, served with sublime roti, and a smoked-catfish-and-pork spread that sounds horrible but tastes wonderful as a dip for market crudites—adventure…

Ours can be an unforgiving country. Paul Sullivan was in his fifties, college-educated, and ran a successful small business in the Houston area. He owned a house and three cars. Then the local economy fell apart. Business dried up. He had savings, but, like more than a million people today in Harris County, Texas, he didn’t have health insurance. “I should have known better,” he says. When an illness put him in the hospital and his doctor found a precancerous lesion that required treatment, the unaffordable medical bills arrived. He had to sell his cars and, eventually, his house. To his shock, he had to move into a homeless shelter, carrying his belongings in a suitcase wherever he went This week, the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, which provides…

Jimmy Webb, the writer of songs such as “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman,” described by James Taylor as “evocative American songs, which go past any kind of analysis and right to the heart,” has a new record and is on tour, but what he wanted to do the other day was visit the Intrepid museum, on the Hudson River, to see the Concorde on its pier. Wearing a dark suit with a purple shirt, Webb arrived in the middle of the afternoon with his wife, Laura Sa-vini. “He’s super excited,” Savini said. “He’s been wanting to do this for years.” Webb collects Concorde memorabilia. “I’ve got probably a hundred pieces of hardware, and a hundred pieces of cabin items, such as Wedgwood crystal and multiple sets of china,” he said. “I…

Pope Francis already has distinguished himself from his predecessor with a more down-to-earth style. Now he is both unnerving the Vatican and delighting the faithful by picking up the telephone and spontaneously calling people, earning the nickname “the Cold Call Pope.” —The Times, The phone rang while I was watching “Good Morning America” and wondering if they could ever pay me enough to fake being that cheerful. “Hi, is this Muriel Kesselman of Ros-lyn, Long Island?” a voice in accented English asked “Yes, who is this?” “It’s me, Pope Francis. His Holiness—although that’s so formal. It’s Fran.” “Is this a prank? Sharon, is that you? Because it’s the same voice you used when you pretended to be Enrique Iglesias.” “No, it’s really me, and I knowthatthis is out of the…

In Belarus, the fourteen-year-olds one thin flight away Heard Oswald singing in the shower, In his cool American. It was 1959. In crush They sent a note to say how sweet A songbird he was then. Dear Girls, he wrote, I want very much to meet you, too. Four Novembers later, not far from West Virginia, we were scooped Back home from elementary school in rain not-quite-yet snow To put our heads down in the mink-skin of our mothers’ laps. Open Carry is the law in Oklahoma now. I just feel more safe, said Joe Wood, cocked Among the waffles and the syrups and the diners At the diner there. On the jukebox, Lefty Frizzell Is singing “Long Black Veil” inside the flannel rain. Well back beyond the Iron Curtain,…

Masters of Sex,” a new hour-long drama on Showtime, is a fizzy, ebullient quasi-historical romp about the team of scientific pioneers who transformed American attitudes toward sex. But let’s not bury the lead: it’s also a serious turn-on. For many viewers, this will be reason enough to watch, and there’s no shame in that gamq this is adult cable television’s bread and butter, after all. Luckily, the show has an appeal beyond solid date-night viewing. “Masters of Sex” is based on Thomas Maiers lively 2009 book of the same tide, which tells the story of the rise of William Masters, a renegade who aimed to study sex in the lab, using human subjects. In nineteen-fifties St. Louis, where Masters was a prominent ob-gyn, this was an idea outrageous enough that…

An opera about the strange life and sad death of Anna Nicole Smith, the Playboy model turned reality-TV star, sounds like an expensive joke. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Anna Nicole,” which was first seen at Covent Garden two years ago and just had a run at BAM, in a co-production with New York City Opera, is, in fact, a hard-driving, ambitious piece, with aspirations toward tragedy. It positions the title character as a pop-culture version of Frank Wedekind and Alban Berg’s Lulu—a figure who, in the words of Karl Kraus, succumbs to “the revenge of the world of men, which dares to avenge itself for its own guilt.” It also launches an acerbic assault on celebrity culture. The result is a mesmerizing grotesquerie, one of the more deftly constructed operas to have…

In Alfonso Cuaron’s frightening and beautiful space thriller, “Gravity,” the musical score, by Steven Price, builds to brain-assaulting volume, only to break suddenly into silence. The quiet registers on our emotions with greater violence than the ferocious din. In this movie, silence is not only the sound of chilly outer space; it’s the stillness of death, whose easeful allure beckons from the opening sequence to the last “Gravity” is not a film of ideas, like Kubrick’s techno-mystical “2001,” but it’s an overwhelming physical experience—a challenge to the senses that engages every kind of dread. There’s strong pleasure in it, too; the movie is an adventure story in which each clumsy movement of mass and bodies stardes. At the beginning of the film, an experienced astronaut, Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), is…

ART, CHRIS BURDEN once said, is “a free spot in society, where you can do anything.” Early on, Burden’s work was performance, excruciatingly physical actions that came to a halt in 1974, when he spent forty-five hours straight lying under a sheet of plate glass. After that, the L.A. artist, now sixty-seven, turned to sculpture, often inspired by the mainstays of playrooms: toy soldiers, Erector sets, blocks. Beginning this week, the New Museum devotes its building to the artist’s career, including its façade, where “Ghost Ship,” a crewless, self-navigating yacht that sailed the North Sea in 2005, is now dangling. ART MUSEUMS SHORT LIST Metropolitan Museum Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations.” Through Jan. 12. MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9400)—“Magritte:…

RAISING MONEY FOR HIS FIRST, improvised feature by going on a radio talk show, later putting his own money into his movies, filming family and friends at his home in dramas that erupt with a spontaneous vehemence, John Cassavetes set the practical and artistic paradigms for independent filmmaking. It’s no surprise that a complete retrospective of his films held last summer at BAM Cinematek—in Brooklyn, the epicenter of contemporary independent filmmaking—proved to be a big success; in response to evident demand (including sold-out screenings), BAM is bringing five of his best films back this week. Unlike the movies of many contemporary independents, Cassavetes’s work isn’t centered on the ambitions of youth. Cassavetes, who was bom in 1929, made films about his own generation and its conflicts: middle-aged people whose struggle…

If you are a casting director in search of a President, senator, C.I.A. director, district attorney, rear admiral, or other Guy Whose Job Is Really Important, chances are you’ve put in a call to Fred Dalton Thompson. Thompson, who is seventy-one, has made a career of being both an actual official and an actor who plays one. Before he was the district attorney on “Law 8c Order,” he was a lawyer for the Republicans on the Senate Watergate Committee. Before he was Senator Thompson, of Tennessee, he was Senator Hedges, in the Melanie Griffith film “Born Yesterday.” And, before his brief, befuddled run for President, in 2008 (he announced his candidacy on the “Tonight Show”), he was President Ulysses S. Grant, in the TV movie “Bury My Heart at Wounded…

Zick Hample caught his first major-league baseball when he was twelve—a defining moment in most American childhoods, but one that left him unsatisfied If I can catch one ball, he thought, why not a thousand? Two decades later, a thirty-six-year-old bookstore clerk, with a shaved head and a soul patch, he is now the world’s preeminent ballhawk. “I always enjoy batting practice more than the game,” he said recently, at Citi Field, having arrived three hours before a meaningless mid-September tilt between the Mets and the Nationals. ’If someone offered me a Game Seven World Series ticket in the front row, behind the dugout, but said, You can’t go earfy,’ Tm not sure I would take it” Hample has caught seventy-one hundred and thirty-seven major-league baseballs, the world record by…

On the first Friday after the bloodiest week in recent Egyptian history, when eight hundred people died in political violence, the preacher at the Aziz Bellah Mosque gave a sermon about patience. He began by proclaiming, “I see desperation, and I smell it!” It was late August, and Sheikh Mohammed Fakeeh had never spoken before at Aziz Bellah, an influential mosque in eastern Cairo. For years, he had been campaigning for a chance to preach to a large congregation. He grew up in a poor farming family on the banks of the Nile, where a childhood illness left him blind. Despite the disability, he had become a brilliant student, completing a Ph.D. with highest honors from Al Azhar University, which is part of the most important Sunni institution in the…

Monday night is karaoke night at the Applebee’s on North Rock Road in Wichita. One evening in April, patrons lined up at a microphone to deliver such songs as “Desperado,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” and “You Raise Me Up.” After someone bleated a selection from “Little Shop of Horrors”—“I am your dentist/And I get off on the pain I inflict”—the m.c. charitably said, “We’ve got a lot of talent in the house tonight.” They had more talent than they realized Sitting at a table in the back was the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, one of the world’s most celebrated opera singers. She had recendyperformed in Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda,” at the Metropolitan Opera, and was about to fly to London for Rossini’s “La Donna del Lago,” at the Royal Opera House. She had…

“Does the phrase ’over the top’ mean anything to you, young man?” the protagonist of an Allan Gurganus novella is asked. “Mean anything?” he replies. “It’s my goddamn credo!” Back in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, when Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver were muting and minimalizing American literary fiction, Allan Gurganus began revving up his maximalist synthesizer, a Radio City-size instrument capable of thundering oompahs, tinkling grace notes, and a whole one-man band of effects in between. Despite his Iowa M.F.A., Gurganus writes novels and short stories that don’t follow the usual workshop rule to show instead of tell. Nor do they break it in any simple way. Rather, they show you and tell you and then show you some more and tell you again. Along the way, adjectives compound themselves…

Writers, for the most part, find themselves not in writing but in revision. The “I” of personal narrative—the egotism it takes to display one’s point of view in a novel, a poem, or a play—tends not to reveal itself at the first stroke of the pen; even the most soul-baring authors usually have to work themselves up to the trauma of ruthless self-revelation, especially if the story involves other people, and it almost always does. Then comes what Joan Didion calls “the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.” Of course, endless revision can be a way of keeping that humiliation at bay, of keeping alive the hope that the text will achieve perfection in this draft or the next. Tennessee Williams was a notorious reviser. In the…