Innholdsfortegnelse for October 28, 2013 i The New Yorker

GEORGE PACKER (COMMENT, P. 21) is a staff writer and the author of “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” a National Book Award finalist. DAVID SEDARIS (“NOW WE ARE FIVE,” p. 26) has written eight books, the most recent of which is “Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls.” EVGENY MOROZOV (“ONLY DISCONNECT,” p. 33) is the author of “To Save Everything, Click Here,” which came out earlier this year. DEAN YOUNG (POEM, P. 35) holds the Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent collection is “Bender.” IAN FRAZIER (“HIDDEN CITY,” P. 38), a longtime contributor, edited the collection “Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings,” which came out in August. MARGARET TALBOT (“HOME MOVIES,” P. 50) has been a staff writer…

IN A SERIES OF INTERVIEWS conducted with the British-born playwright Harold Pinter in 1971, Mel Gussow said that he was struck by the emotion and lyricism in some of the author’s post-“Homecoming” works, such as “Silence” (1969) and “Old Times” (1971). Gussow went on to ask the forty-one-year-old playwright if he felt that he had to “guard against emotion.” Pinter, giving a rather Pinteresque response, said, “I don’t quite understand you.” Then: “What I’m interested in is emotion which is contained, and felt very, very deeply. Jesus, I really don’t want to make a categorical statement about this.” Not that it would have helped. Ever since his plays began captivating audiences, in 1960, Pinter had defied certain expectations, including what a play was. A series of pauses? A subversion of…

LOTTE LENYA NEVER FORGOT the moment when she felt the musical world shift. It was in the rarefied setting of the German Chamber Music Festival, in Baden-Baden in 1927. “Mahagonny Songspiel,” the first collaboration between Lenya’s husband, Kurt Weill, and Bertolt Brecht, had just had its premiere. At a late-night reception, Lenya felt a presence towering behind her: the conductor Otto Klemperer, a protege of Mahler’s. Clapping a hand on Lenya’s back, Klemperer sang, “Is here no telephone?” Soon, the entire company was reprising “Benares Song,” one of the show’s catchy anticapitalist ditties (“Alabama Song” would become the most famous). A revolution had occurred: Weill had fused contemporary classical styles with jazz and cabaret, creating a hybrid language that would shortly lead to “The Threepenny Opera,” not to mention “The…

Oh, the Era of Good Feelings. Those were the days. We’re talking 1817 to 1825, the Administration of James Monroe. The appellation, though partly ironic, refers to how the decline of the Federalists effectively left the nation with just one political party, the Democratic-Republicans, who, without an opposition, had to settle for finding opposing points of view among themselves. There were plenty, and before long two parties emerged out of one, the National Republicans (later the Whigs) and the Democrats, and there ensued an Era of Bad Feelings, nearly two centuries long. The latest bummer, of course, was the debt-limit showdown, a seemingly peerless episode of cynical self-immolation, ideological piety, and brinkmanship. As the battle wound down last week, a befuddled citizen, awaiting word of Senator Ted Cruz’s next move,…

In late May of this year, a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, my youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide. She was living in a room in a beat-up house on the hard side of Somerville, Massachusetts, and had been dead, the coroner guessed, for at least five days before her door was battered down. I was given the news over a white courtesy phone while at the Dallas airport. Then, because my plane to Baton Rouge was boarding and I wasn’t sure what else to do, I got on it. The following morning, I boarded another plane, this one to Atlanta, and the day after that I flew to Nashville, thinking all the while about my ever-shrinking family. A person expects his parents to die. But a sibling? I…

I was being ushered somewhere to be beaten when I ran into my old friend Harry. He looked slicked down like he’d had help licking his wounds and when I told him where I was going he said, Ha, they don’t even know how to beat a fly there. That’s Harry for you. Don’t let him see you dragging your trash to the curb because he’ll have to produce a bigger heap, carry it on his back even if his chin almost scrapes the ground like a dung beetle. Tell him about your heart transplant and he’ll say, Didn’t know you had a heart. Lately he’s been concentrating on contemporary poetry of all things, kinda a relief like if Hitler had stayed interested in painting more than politics. Besides, it…

The word “zoo” is a zoo for the zoo. A fountain is a zoo for water, the song is a zoo for sound, the harmonica is a zoo for the hot breath of Neil Young, vagina is a zoo for baby. Baby, girl baby, is a zoo for vagina. The rose is a zoo for the smell of the rose, the smell of the rose rattles its cage, the zookeeper throws something bleeding to it, the something bleeding is not enough, a toddler fell into the cage of the rose, the toddler was entirely eaten. His name was Rilke, it was in all the papers. A Little Pine Box is a zoo for him now, it said in all the papers. Then all the kids started doing it. Falling into…

Jack London never felt that he got enough meat. When he was seven, he stole a piece from a girl’s basket—an incident that he called “an epitome of my whole life.” Although his mother claimed that “he didn’t go hungry in our house!” and a childhood friend recalled being served steak during a visit, London insisted that he had been deprived. “It has been hunger, nothing but hunger!” he wrote to a girlfriend at the age of twenty-two. “You cannot understand, nor never will.” He spent his short life—he died at forty—trying to make people understand. In his writing, which ranged from realist novels to memoirs and science fiction, he became a psychologist and economist of extremity. He was particularly fascinated by the idea of freezing and starving to death.…

We’re midway into the fall season, that dispiriting ritual when network pilots are shoved into prime time, then given the hook, until only the strong—or, often, the crass—survive. With shows axed earlier each year, few of the Big Four’s high-priced investments can afford to take risks. The result is an atmosphere of almost radical caution, a throwback to an earlier age, when being a TV critic was a form of intellectual slumming, and it made sense to rave about any show that displayed even mild signs of ambition. In this context, specialized tools are required: coded caveats, grading on a curve, and a bit of wishful thinking. Evaluating anything too early can feel like shaking a Magic 8 Ball whose answers consist of nothing but “Ask Again Later.” Certain shows…

THE PEACE CANDIDATE Alex Ross’s description of Thomas W. Devine’s book, “Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism,” reaffirms the prevalent judgment of Wallace as an eccentric, “dangerously incoherent politician” (A Critic at Large, October 14th). This view, though expressed in regard to Wallace’s eventual swing to the right, is dismissive of his brave Presidential run in 1948. Wallace believed that Harry Truman’s confrontational policy toward the Soviet Union increased the possibility of war, and he ran as a self-identified peace candidate. Truman’s special counsel, Clark Clifford, worried about Wallace’s appeal and sought to marginalize him, painting him as a Communist tool. The strategy worked: the G.O.P., which had profitably used the presence of Communists in government to discredit the New Deal in the 1946…

384 Third Ave. (212-725-4110) For a preview of what Manhattan’s far east side might look like if the Second Avenue subway line is ever completed, have a drink at Whitman & Bloom Liquor Company, in Kips Bay. The aesthetic of the two-and-a-half-level enterprise (including a basement piano bar) is speakeasy-meets-farmhouse chic, all wood and marble and romantic lighting. The cocktails, which err on the sweet side, include the Red Root, a pleasantly vegetal combination of Brooklyn gin, beet juice, ginger beer, and mint, and the Smoked Pina, like an updated Tequila Sunrise, with mescal, grapefruit juice, agave, and orange bitters. In the kitchen, the Israeli chef Eldad Shem Tov, who has cooked at both Alain Ducasse and Aquavit, serves dishes like lamb tartare, with olives, yogurt, and pine nuts, and…

Jenny Brown started working for the Internal Revenue Service right out of high school, in 1985, typing numbers from tax returns into a computer. Her home town, of Ogden, Utah, has not only a large I.R.S. facility but an Air Force base, Hill Field, where Brown’s father worked as a civilian. Her stepfather and her late sister used to work at the base; a brother, a son, and a nephew work there now. Her other son is with the Army in Afghanistan, and two other nephews are in the Air Force. “We’re really just a government family,” Brown said last week, on the second-to-last day of the shutdown. And Ogden is a government town, with twenty-four thousand federal employees. Brown grew up with the belief that a government job was…

Some pertinent background on a project called Shadow, which by means of a free app, available in December, intends to archive the dreams of people around the world: Hunter Lee Soik, the project’s founder, who is thirty-one, was born in Korea and adopted when he was two and a half by a couple in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. In 2000, after high school, he moved to California to try to be a professional skateboarder. Eventually, he enrolled at the Brooks Institute of Photography, in Santa Barbara, but left three days later, because, among other things, he didn’t like the curriculum. The school gave him back nearly all of his tuition in cash, and he bought camera equipment. In the meantime, he had been spotted by a casting agent in Santa Barbara,…

1. What did Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) not do during his twenty-one-hour not-really-a-filibuster? (a) Read Ashton Kutcher’s Teen Choice Awards speech. (b) Compare those not hostile to the Affordable Care Act to Nazi appeasers. (c) Perform his Darth Vader impersonation. (d) Acknowledge his resemblance to Senator Joseph McCarthy. 2. Who is John Culberson? (a) The Fox News psychiatrist who said that President Obama’s background—“going back to when his dad abandoned him, when his mother left him with his grandparents”—has led him to self-identify as the “victim-in-chief” (b) The Politico reporter who tweeted during a late-night pre-shutdown debate, “I’m not overexaggerating when I say I can smell the booze wafting from members as they walk off the floor.” (c) The Texas congressman who compared Republican efforts to de-fund the A.C.A. to…

For baseball games, Yankee Stadium seats 50,287. If all the homeless people who now live in New York City used the stadium for a gathering, several thousand of them would have to stand. More people in the city lack homes than at any time since . . . It’s hard to say exactly. The Coalition for the Homeless, a leading advocate for homeless people in the city and the state, says that these numbers have not been seen in New York since the Great Depression. The Bloomberg administration replies that bringing the Depression into it is wildly unfair, because those times were much worse, and, besides, for complicated reasons, you’re comparing apples and oranges. The C.F.H. routinely disagrees with Mayor Bloomberg, and vice versa; of the many disputes the two…

He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa. He lay flat on his back on the bed, looking at the ceiling. It took time for his eyes to adjust to the lack of light. The ceiling seemed to be a common, everyday ceiling of the sort one might find anywhere. Once, it had been painted white, or possibly a pale cream. Years of dust and dirt, however, had given it the color of spoiled milk. It had no ornament, no defining characteristic. No argument, no message. It fulfilled its structural role but aspired to nothing further. There was a tall window on one side of the room, to his left, but its curtain had been removed and thick boards nailed across the frame. An…

“Stay, Illusion,” the title of Lucie Brock-Broido’s new book of poems, her fourth in twenty-five years, is borrowed from Horatio’s fruitless command to the ghost of King Hamlet. Illusions don’t stay, of course—that’s how we know they were illusions—but poets often talk directly to them anyway. Brock-Broido’s poems, haunted by old words and meanings, full of occult spells and curses, nearly Pre-Raphaelite in their taste for gilt and gaud, have much to say to the dead. Her work offers autobiography not as memoir—the chosen mode of so many American poets—but, rather, as grimoire. Brock-Broido’s poems can be baffling, but because of their stylish spookiness (some combination of Poe and Stevie Nicks) they are never boring. Their aesthetic saturates every single word, so you can start out in her work almost…

Rumors, rumbles, and other pal. pitations have beset “Blue Is the Warmest Color” since it showed at the Cannes Film Festival, in May. The jury, chaired by Steven Spielberg, awarded the Palme d’Or to the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, and his two leading ladies. Clearly, this was a work to be reckoned with, but what did it contain? Sex, allegedly, and lots of it: untrammelled, unabashed, and practically unprecedented. We heard that the film was a love story about Adele (Adele Exarchopoulos), a high-school student, and Emma (Lea Seydoux), who is a few years older, and that the dramatizing of that love would make us claw our popcorn into tiny particles. We even heard that the performers had complained of their treatment at the hands of Kechiche. In short, this movie…

JAMES BROWN REMADE the sound of soul and funk, but he had to be seen to be believed. Whether spinning, jumping, sliding, or dropping to the floor in a split, Brown transfixed everyone from Michael Jackson to Mick Jagger. In “James Brown: Get on the Good Foot,” Philadanco, a Philadelphia-based dance company, performs new works set to his music by seven choreographers, including Ronald K. Brown, Camille A. Brown, Derick K. Grant, Otis Sallid, and Souleymane Badolo. The show premieres this week at the Apollo Theatre, where Brown (who is pictured above performing there in 1968) appeared more than two hundred times. OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS After Midnight Warren Carlyle directs and choreographs this musical, which reimagines the shows of the Cotton Club. The musical arrangements of Duke Ellington, performed…

IF YOU’RE HEADED to Glasserie, a new Middle Eastern restaurant in Greenpoint, it’s best to take a car, and a crowd. The car is because the former glass factory, situated at the mouth of Newtown Creek by the Pulaski Bridge, is nowhere near any subway. The crowd is because the best thing on the menu is a rabbit feast, designed for sharing. For seventy-two dollars—not including Arecibo car-service fares to and from the restaurant—it’s reassuring to see that the dish comes with “the works.” The rabbit is prepared three ways: as chewy kebab-style chunks, for drizzling with a tahini sauce; on a leg bone, well matched with lightly pickled vegetables; and in an umami-rich onion stew, the perfect excuse for eating more “flaky bread,” essentially a paratha that leaves a…

A few weeks ago, the Chelsea Hotel acquired a new owner: Ed Scheetz, the C.E.O. of King & Grove, a luxury-hotel company. The other day, Scheetz took a tour of the hotel, which closed to guests two years ago, in the company of Sherill Tippins, the author of “Inside the Dream Palace,” a book about the Chelsea that will be published in December. “I think that activating the building again is what is really exciting to me,” Scheetz said, as he stood in what was formerly the residents’ private rooftop garden, which he intends to turn into an outdoor lounge space. Scheetz—who had been a minority partner with the hotel’s previous owner, the developer Joseph Chetrit, until he bought Chetrit out—said that he had never been on the Chelsea’s roof…

David Bukszpan’s big idea started out bigger. A freelance book publicist and echt Brooklynite, Bukszpan confesses to “an almost pathetic weakness for literary novels that don’t have much chance of getting noticed.” Last July, he took on “In Pinelight,” the sixth novel by Thomas Rayfiel, a quietly industrious Park Sloper who describes his imaginative methodology as “getting as far away from what I know as possible.” The narrator of “Colony Girl,” Rayfiel’s second and best-known book, is a fifteen-year-old aching to escape from a religious cult in rural Iowa. “In Pine-light” presents the monologue of an elderly retired deliveryman in upstate New York, a soul-shriving stream of consciousness that flows the length of a book punctuated by periods, question marks, and line breaks but not a single comma. What if,…

On November 16, 1924, Siegfried Kracauer, a luminary in the literary world of the Weimar Republic, published a feisty essay in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Trained as an architect, Kracauer was an acute observer of modernity and its impact on life in the city. He followed in the footsteps of his onetime teacher Georg Simmel, the sociologist whose 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” argued that overstimulated urban dwellers were prone to develop a “blase attitude,” a coping mechanism that blunted their ability to react to new sensations. Kracauer’s concerns went beyond that. “People today who still have time for boredom and yet are not bored are certainly just as boring as those who never get around to being bored,” he wrote in the Zeitung. The bourgeoisie “are pushed deeper…

Some directors are what Martin Scorsese calls smugglers: they make commercial movies and they work in established genres, but within those borders they slip in a secret cargo of personal preoccupations. Alexander Payne, whose filmography comprises “Citizen Ruth,” “Election,” “About Schmidt,” “Sideways,” “The Descendants,” and the forthcoming “Nebraska,” is one of Hollywood’s leading smugglers. His films have been financed by major studios; all but the first have made money; they have starred such A-list actors as Jack Nicholson and George Clooney; they have been nominated for, and won, Oscars. Yet they bear the fingerprints of an auteur, and are instantly recognizable as Alexander Payne films. His movies shuttle nimbly between humor and sadness, with Chaplinesque pathos often inscribed into physical comedy. In “The Descendants,” a distraught Clooney, having just learned…

Marie Antoinette continues to interest us because punishment does. Born in Vienna in 1755 and executed in Paris thirty-seven years later, she has never had what one might call a dramatically evolved self. But how could she? As the penultimate child of sixteen and the eighth daughter of Queen Maria Theresa of Hungary and Bohemia, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Francis I, Marie had parents whose focus was less on child care than on politics and strategy. Maria Theresa, the only female ruler in the history of the Habsburgs, always had much on her mind, including arranging marriages for her enormous brood—marriages that would benefit the state. As a girl playing in the Schonbrunn Palace’s white-and-gold halls, Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna—or Antonia, as family members referred to her—was close to…

SOMEONE, by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Mc-Dermott’s seventh novel is a remarkable portrait of an unremarkable life. Marie has grown up the child of Irish immigrants in working-class Brooklyn, married, and had a family. The novel unfolds in a series of elliptical, out-of-order memories as Marie, an obsessive observer of people, looks back over her life and tries to decipher the motivations, desires, and private feelings of those she has encountered. With virtuosic concision, McDermott assembles this swirl of seemingly mundane anecdotes into a powerful examination of love, mortality, and “the way of all flesh.” ELEVEN DAY!, by Lea Carpenter (Knopf). In this debut novel, set in 2011, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, a mother awaits news of her son, a soldier who has gone missing from an…