Innholdsfortegnelse for November 4, 2013 i The New Yorker

DANA GOODYEAR (“BEASTLY APPETITES,” P. 72) lives in Los Angeles. Her new book, “Anything That Moves,” comes out in November. LAUREN COLLINS (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 41; “FIRE-EATERS,” P. 47) is a staff writer. AKHIL SHARMA (“BUTTER,” P. 55) will publish “Family Life,” a novel, in April. REBECCA MEAD (“JUST ADD SUGAR,” P. 56) is the author of “My Life in Middlemarch,” which comes out in January. B.J. NOVAK (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 64), a writer and an actor, will publish “One More Thing,” a collection of stories, in February. ADAM GOPNIK (“BREAD AND WOMEN,” P. 66; A CRITIC AT LARGE, P. 100) is the author of “The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food.” GABRIELLE HAMILTON (“FAMILY MEAL,” P. 71), the chef and…

WE’RE MORE THAN A DECADE into the “post-classical” era: classical musicians of all stripes are reconsidering the repertoire they play, and reimagining the way they play it. And the string quartet—once the focus of connoisseurs, now a sturdy off-road vehicle for sonic exploration—has been at the forefront. In New York, the movement has been personified by Brooklyn Rider, the fun-loving foursome whose smoothly ingratiating style emerges from a combination of new-music, early-music, and world-music influences, in addition to deep classical training. But recently, Brooklyn has had some healthy competition from Los Angeles. In the past several years, the Calder Quartet, four Californians in their early thirties, have matured from energetic upstarts to a first-rate ensemble. The Hollywood and Angeles String Quartets flourished in Los Angeles, but the art of the…

38 Prince St. (646-580-5720) “HOW Y’ALL DOIN’ TONIGHT?” called Sarah Simmons, the founder of City Grit, which originated as a private dinner club and has evolved into a reservations-only “culinary salon” in Nolita. We were fifty-some-odd strangers gathered in a back room of a defunct Catholic school, now an antique shop packed with weathered tables, mismatched chairs, and assorted bric-a-brac (funky lights, funky cabinets). Simmons, who grew up in North Carolina and was formerly a retail strategist and an avid home cook, hosts dinners made by different chefs several nights a week. That evening, titled Collards and Carbonara, was named after a cookbook by Andrew Ticer and Michael Hudman, the owners of the Memphis restaurant Hog & Hominy. Before even one boiled peanut hit the table, Ticer and Hudman, friends…

WAR IS HELL. That much we know. But it has also inspired some great art, from Goya to Picasso, and some extraordinary and incendiary photographs, from Mathew Brady’s Civil War reportage to recent news images from Afghanistan and Iraq. Since the invention of the daguerreotype, in the mid-nineteenth century, much of what we think we know about war has been based on photographs, even after the advent of film and television. But how a picture is framed, captioned, and distributed can blunt, heighten, or pervert its effect. Are we being informed or manipulated? Reassured or enraged? Is war horrific or a heroic adventure? “War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” which opens at the Brooklyn Museum on November 8th, approaches the subject from a broad historical and cultural context,…

It’s the kind of late-October Sunday that they sing songs about, or did once—sunny and cool, fareless cabs plying Seventh Avenue, wordless brunchers slouching at their tables in the many varieties of morning-after. A short line of gossipers and smokers stand outside Film Forum, on Houston, waiting for “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Tokyo Story.” Around the corner, at 160 Varick, up on the eighth floor of the public-radio building, nearly vacant today, Jonathan Schwartz, a man in the melancholy blue of his years—handsome once, a little fragile now—sits alone at a microphone in a soundproof studio. He is wearing roomy jeans, a denim shirt, and a Red Sox cap. A record ends, and the dead seconds fall away, russet leaves off an oak. The air on WNYC-FM is as…

In mid-December of 2011, Brady Bennett went out drinking at Adobe Gila’s at the Greene, a Mexican restaurant in Dayton, Ohio. After two beers, the bartender offered him a free shot. Bennett chose Patrón tequila with apple schnapps. Soon, he recalled, his throat began to swell. He struggled to breathe, and his nose, mouth, and lungs “felt as though they were on fire.” He called for an ambulance, moaning, and was taken to the hospital. A year later, Bennett filed a lawsuit against Adobe Gila’s, claiming that the bartender had spiked his drink with extract of the bhut jolokia, or ghost chili. (Adobe Gila’s denies the allegations.) “It wasn’t as if they gave him a little Tabasco,” Jeff McQuiston, Bennett’s lawyer, told the Dayton Daily News. “This stuff is lethal.”…

Red shoe under the bed, black sock nestled inside it, burn mark the size of a man’s thumb on the nightstand: what has been ended here? Or what begun, since from such origins no long continuance could stay itself as my long marriage testifies by its repeated passages of middling weather. Tracery of cigarette ash on this windowsill . . . Who has stood where I stand before or after love, asking why he came here, why this blue spruce I’m looking on, unflinchable, resists the winds as people never can or why this highway encircling me, alone again— my conference done, tomorrow I go home— drives some to lives of rich desserts, some lives of stolen crumbs, and for me neither. Home! I have to find a small squall…

Baby T’s a no-show. Well, not exactly a no-show. She showed, on time even, but she was numb and weird, her face freckled with dried blood and ripe-looking bruises across her eyes. She’s scheduled to be the lunch cook, and I am scheduled to put up a new dinner menu—fifty items by 5 P.M. I’m not sure how we’re going to run lunch without her, and how we’re going to have a dinner service if I don’t get started immediately, but now we are both in a car on our way to the E.R. It was already a day—a get-the-two-kids-to-school solo-parent morning, a meeting, savory prep, errands, pastry prep, phone calls, lunch service, then dinner service. There is not one loose, extra minute to even wonder about the dark story…

Family legend: I am four. It’s midafternoon, between mealtimes, and my mother has a friend over. They are chatting in the living room and I am playing in a corner when the buzzer rings (another guest has arrived) and I cry out, “Dinner’s here!” We are being raised on delivery, but it’s a fight. Every day around 6 p.m., my parents come home (from their studios, which are two floors below in our building, on Broadway, with its rounded fire escapes) and the dinner debate rages. Our nanny is an Irish girl who was in a car accident that made it so her mouth opens only a little bit. Once a day, she has to stretch her jaw with a special plastic tool resembling a shoehorn, and sometimes she lets…

I’d been having a bad time, a breakdown, a couple, actually—this was a few years ago, long enough ago to think of as over, though, let’s face it, not that far back in time—and it went on awhile, a stretch of months, or, rather, years, when added up; at any rate, I was out of the hospital and more or less on my own in the world; and I knew that the doctors were worried about me, a man of a certain age alone at home; and, naturally, the doctors’ worry made me worry about myself, too; and, though I was discharged and off the ward, I wasn’t out of, as they say, harm’s way; and because I was spilling things and bumping into furniture, falling short of motor competency,…

LONGBOURN, by Jo Baker (Knopf). This delightful re-imagining of “Pride and Prejudice” from the servants’ perspective centers on Sarah, the orphaned housemaid. Her duties include emptying chamberpots, feeding pigs, and scrubbing stains out of the Bennett sisters’ laundry. Abovestairs life appears to her a “a country dance, where everything is lovely, and graceful, and ordered, and every single turn is preordained.” The achievement of Baker’s reworking is that Sarah is no mere foil for Elizabeth Bennet; her notions of individual agency and the pursuit of happiness push more forcefully against the class and social strictures of her time than any character in Austen’s novel. The result is a heroine whom it’s impossible not to root for, although the reader knows that her story contains a dash of Cinderella-style fantasy.…

Valery Gergiev, the longtime artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, in St. Petersburg, has attained a level of worldly power perhaps unmatched by any living classical musician. The Russian edition of Forbes has placed him at No. 3 on a list of the wealthiest and most popular Russian celebrities, behind the tennis player Maria Sharapova and the singer-songwriter Grigory Leps. Gergiev’s annual income is said to be $16.5 million. He was recently given the title of Hero of Labor by President Vladimir Putin, who has been on friendly terms with the conductor since 1992, when Putin was a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Last spring, Gergiev presided over the opening of a seven-hundred-million-dollar addition to the Mariinsky complex. Putin was in attendance, and offered a birthday toast to Gergiev, who…

FOUNDING MYTHS Ari Shavit’s courageous article detailing the expulsion of the Palestinians deserves to be commended (“Lydda, 1948,” October 21st). I am an American Jew working for a Muslim civilrights and advocacy organization, and, in my three decades observing Jewish-Muslim dialogue and Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation efforts, I have concluded that national and religious self-criticism is at the heart of peacemaking. Since 9/11, Muslim organizations, religious leaders, and scholars have condemned extremist violence committed in the name of Islam, although this has been largely unreported. Jews must face the bitter historical truth: as Shavit points out, Israel’s birth was accompanied by the Jews’ destruction of another people. As in post-apartheid South Africa, the acknowledgment of past crimes can open a door to a more peaceful future. The values of justice, mercy,…

ASIDE FROM THE OCCASIONAL OUTFIELDER, there’s not much Boston has that New York wants. But ever since Toro, the popular South End tapas restaurant, opened a location on the West Side Highway several weeks ago, New Yorkers can’t seem to get enough. The hundred-and-twenty-seat dining room, which takes reservations, is consistently booked, and the line at the door is long with hopeful walk-ins. Five-thirty may be an unfashionable hour for dinner, but it’s perhaps the best time to eat at Toro, before the crowds swarm into the hangar-like industrial space, outfitted in heavy wood, exposed steel beams, and neat rows of hanging hams. By eight, the acoustics can be deafening (the cranked-up club music doesn’t help), and the servers, friendly but aggressive (hold on tight to your drinks), dart around…

15 E. 7th St. (212-473-9148) Socially, this East Village saloon has evolved beyond the “Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies” era—women have been welcome since 1970—but the wooden bar, the icebox, and, one suspects, the mood of near-conspiratorial intimacy have changed little since it opened, in 1854. As for the drinks, they have only two: light and dark ale. On a recent weeknight, firemen in dress blues, and one in a kilt, toasted a promotion, bearded musicians discussed a gig, and hoodie-wearing men and women spoke French. The ponytailed server, Gregory de la Haba, knew the regulars’ names (“Take care, Lenny”; “Good to see you, Bud”). “I’ve been coming here since I’m fourteen,” de la Haba said. “My grandfather delivered the coal and the ice for forty years. And…

In the late nineteen-sixties, Mitch McConnell came to Washington to work as an aide to Senator Marlow Cook, a Kentucky Republican. Cook backed clean-air standards and limits on strip mining. It was a time of political diversity among Republicans: in 1970, Senate Republicans endorsed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. McConnell was briefly a fellow-traveller of those who regarded government as a source of public protection. He once called the Nixon Administration “at worst, completely reactionary.” In 1984, McConnell was elected to the Senate, on the coat-tails of Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection. By then, a movement of Southern and evangelical conservatives was rising within the Party. McConnell tacked right periodically, saluting the new Republican leaders. During the Administration of George W. Bush,…

Two weeks ago, Mohamed Abdi Hassan travelled to Brussels, to participate in what he thought was going to be a documentary about his life. Instead, he was arrested at the airport and charged with having led an attack on a Belgian ship off the coast of East Africa. That is how you would tell the story in regular English. But in the morning paper, as Robert Hutton explains in “Romps, Tots, and Boffins,” his guide to “the strange language of news,” such an event must be rendered in headlines as (in the Australian) “MOVIE.PROMISE STING NABS SO. MALI PIRATE” or (per the slightly chattier Associated Press) “HOLLYWOOD.STYLE STING NABS ALLEGED PIRATE KING. PIN.” Hassan might have been called a buccaneer, except that, according to Hutton’s lexicon, the word refers to…

The most important thing was loyalty. My older brother had been brain-damaged in a swimming accident and was unable to move or talk. We took him home from the hospital and started caring for him ourselves. This was awful, but loyalty required us to pretend that it was not. My mother packed my school lunches in the white plastic bags in which my brother’s medical supplies arrived. The bags were printed with the pharmacy’s name and a list of items they might contain, such as urinary catheters, irrigation trays, liquid suppositories. Sitting in the cafeteria, I worried that someone would notice the bags and I would have to explain. I could have asked my mother to send my lunches in ordinary paper bags. But doing so would have lessened my…

January 1st—Ha! That feels fun to write. I’m excited. I’ve been thinking about doing this for so long—I went through my notes and it turns out I came up with this idea all the way back on Day After Day After Very Cloudy Day. January 2nd—I’m still so excited about this calendar thing. It just makes so much sense. A thousand days a year, divided into twenty-five months, forty days a month. Why didn’t anyone think of this before? January 3rd—Getting so many compliments on the calendar. One guy came up to me and said he’s going to organize his whole life around it—literally, someone said that! January 4th—Best day ever (or at least so far) in recorded history. I talked to Alice at the bonfire for a long time.…

One night in the fall of2009, Crystal Galbraith, a slender twenty-six-year-old vegan activist with bleached-blond hair and a mole under her right eye, put on her best dress, a knee-length, tight-fitting black number by the Row, and set out to save the animals. Crystal had read the vegan manifesto “Skinny Bitch” in college—“I was a normal eater at lunch and by dinner I was vegan,” she says—and later saw “The Cove,” a documentary about the dolphin hunt in the former whaling town of Taiji, Japan. She became obsessed, volunteering at every screening, talking to viewers afterward. Eventually, she met one of the producers, Charles Hambleton, a soft-spoken man in his late forties, with a distracted, trembly affect he ascribes to all the tuna he ate on location: he and the…

The words “Italy” and “new gastronomy” were an oxymoron when the Modena chef Massimo Bottura opened the Osteria Francescana, in 1995, and started creating the dishes that would turn him into a luminary of the culinary avant-garde. Take Black on Black, his tribute, by way of squid ink, katsuo-bushi, and a black cod, to Thelonius Monk. Or Camouflage, his nod to Picasso, with a civet of wild hare “hiding” in custard under a blanket of powdered herbs and spices. Today, dishes like those have earned him three Michelin stars, raised Francescana to third place on San Pellegrino’s famous list of the best restaurants in the world, and put Italy on the map for the kind of travellers who prefer to eat their spaghetti and meatballs at home. Bottura gets emotional…

I picked up my father on a sultry morning with heavy, rumbling clouds on the horizon. My mother had thrown him out again, this time for his weight. She’d said that he was insufficiently committed to his weightloss journey and that if he hit two-fifty she wouldn’t live with him anymore. She seemed to know he’d be heading my way: I had been getting obesity-cure solicitations over the phone, my number doubtless supplied by her. I was tired of explaining to strangers that I wasn’t fat and of being told that a lot of fat people don’t realize how fat they are or wrongly assume that they can do something about it on their own, without paying. By the time my father got to me, he was well over…

THE SHOW IS OVER THE AUDIENCE GET UP TO LEAVE THEIR SEATS TIME TO COLECT THEIR COATS AND GO HOME THE TURN AROUND NO MORE COATS AND NO MORE HOME Like it or not, Christopher Wool, now fifty-eight, is probably the most important American painter of his generation. You might fondly wish, as I do, for a champion whose art is richer in beauty and in charm: Wool’s work consists primarily of dour, black-and-white pictures of stencilled words, in enamel, usually on aluminum panels; decorative patterns made with incised rollers; and abstract, variously piquant messes, involving spray paint and silk screens. Let’s get over it. A dramatic retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum confirms, besides the downbeat air, the force and the intelligence of a career that, according to legend, caught…

“The Sleeping Beauty” is the most conservative of great ballets. Telling of a princess who, cursed by an evil fairy, goes to sleep for a hundred years and then is restored to life by the kiss of a handsome prince, it brings us the one message we most need to hear: that everything is going to be O.K. Night will fall, with all its terrors, but the sun will rise again. (The princess’s name is Aurora.) Evil will entrap us, but goodness will return. The original Russian “Sleeping Beauty,” which had its première in 1890, in St. Petersburg, was born in the last blaze of Russian Imperial confidence. Within thirty years, war and revolution had brought down the empire. The tsar and his family were dead. Some Russians had feared…

CLASSICAL MUSIC FOOD & DRINK | DANCE ABOVE & BEYOND THE THEATRE | ART MOVIES | NIGHT LIFE MINTON’S PLAYHOUSE, the Harlem jazz club founded in 1938 by the saxophonist Henry Minton, hosted many of the greats—in the forties, Thelonious Monk appeared regularly, and Dizzy Gillespie jammed there on Monday “celebrity” nights, along with Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, and Ben Webster. Later, its popularity waned, and it closed in 1974, before reëmerging, briefly, in 2006. Now, under the patronage of Richard Parsons, the former head of Citigroup and Time Warner, Minton’s has reopened as an elegant supper club. Well-heeled jazz lovers can order from a prix-fixe menu that includes sherry she-crab soup and smoked quail with a giblet cornbread cake, while listening to the house band (two members of…

79 Richardson St., Brooklyn (718-878-3579) Before Prohibition, New York was home to hundreds of breweries and dozens of large-scale distilleries, but the current neo-speakeasy craze celebrates that one decade, in the nineteen-twenties, when gin was made in dirty bathtubs, rather than the preceding centuries of noble craftsmanship. Tom Potter, the co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery, seeks to address the imbalance with his New York Distilling Co., in Williamsburg, where he makes gin and rye in a huge warehouse and serves it in the warm glow of his in-house bar, the Shanty. Its narrow brick interior was once a truck-transmission repair shop, and a large window overlooks the metal vats and oak barrels that now line the factory floor. It feels a bit like after-hours in the manager’s office, where the spoils…

DANCE CONVEYS MEANING faster than words do. Even a Shakespeare play can be squeezed into a short ballet. Robert Helpmann, the early star of England’s Royal Ballet, made an eighteen-minute “Hamlet”; José Limón’s “Moor’s Pavane” is a twenty-one-minute “Othello.” “The Tempest,” with its fantastic ingredients—a magician, a monster, a sprite, a pair of drunks, a shipwreck, a banquet, a masque—would seem hard to condense into one act. Yet that is what Alexei Ratmansky, the artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre, is doing at this moment. His “Tempest,” fortysix minutes long, and set to music by Sibelius, will have its première at A.B.T. on October 30th. To hear him tell it, he hasn’t cut much from the play. “Did you keep the drunks?” I ask. (Drunk scenes often devolve into cliché.) “Yes,…

Local government is typically the province of the mundane: making trains run on time, rather than questioning the nature of time itself. Yet there was Daniel Garodnick, a councilman from Manhattan’s East Side, standing near the information booth in Grand Central Terminal, one Monday, contemplating the morning commute with an existentialist gaze. “I mean, look at every person walking around us,” he said. “Each one is moving with a sense of purpose based on his own clock, and the clocks that surround him.” The clock in front ofGarod-nick, above the booth, read nine-fifty. “According to my iPhone, it’s two minutes fast,” Garodnick said—the better, perhaps, for hastening travellers to the platforms before the doors close. Garod-nick called himself “a pretty punctual person,” and recalled having once missed an entire day’s…

This summer, Jordan Elpern-Waxman had a revelation. He’d quit his job in order to start a company that markets craft beer, and, as most new entrepreneurs do, he’d been paying for the whole thing himself. “I had gone through my savings and put everything on my credit card, and I woke up one morning and looked at the balance and said, ‘Holy shit, how am I ever going to pay this thing off ?’” Elpern-Waxman told me. So he did something unusual: he sold off a share of his future. He went to a new site called Upstart. Founded last year by former Google employees, it’s a crowdfunding marketplace where people looking to start a business, say, or pursue more education can raise cash from investors. In exchange, they pay…

In 1996, Hamdi Ulukaya, a twenty-fiveyear-old student from Turkey, was attending language school in Troy, New York. He had left home for America two years earlier. One day, his father called and announced plans to visit. In anticipation, Ulukaya shopped for the foods that his father customarily ate for breakfast: bread, olives, and feta cheese. But the only cheese that Ulukaya could find in the local supermarket was flavorless. His father, who was equally unimpressed after sampling it, made a suggestion: why not go into the cheese business and market a really good feta? At first, Ulukaya dismissed the idea—why come all the way from Turkey to do what he could have done back home? His grandfather had raised sheep and goats in eastern Turkey, near the Euphrates, and his…

Two muses, one loaf. Like many men who cook a lot, I’m good at doing several things that look hard but aren’t—béarnaise sauce, tuna au poivre—and not very good at doing some things that are harder than they look. I can’t make a decent vinaigrette, anything involving a “salt crust” baffles me, and, until quite recently, I had never baked a loaf of bread. For years, I told myself that I didn’t bake bread for the same reason I don’t drive a car: it’s a useful skill, unnecessary in New York. In New York, you don’t drive because you can take the subway practically anywhere, and you don’t have to bake bread because there are so many good bakeries. Even at the supermarket, there are baguettes from Tom Cat and…

In their brand-new caramel Cadillac, Julia and Walter arrived at four, Trunk stuffed with leather suitcases, Steaks, champagne, and oysters in a cooler, And Walter’s only drink—Johnnie Walker Blue. Julia, hands flaring, in the clunky music Of a pound of real gold charms, Walter in a tan linen jacket And shoes soft as old money. Sweet-tempered, sweet-tongued, He’d tease the women to blushing, And let his wife reign queen In a diamond ring to knock your eyes out. She was known from New York to L. A. For her fried chicken and greens, And didn’t hesitate, after hours of driving, To throw an apron over a French cotton dress And slap the flour on thirty or more pieces. Oh, the chicken breasts and thighs Spattering, juicy, in just the right…

The first time I ordered takeout in New York, two things confounded me: the terrific speed with which the food arrived, and the fact that, after I’d paid for it, the man from the Chinese restaurant and I stood on either side of the threshold staring at each other, though only one of us understood why. After a minute of this, I closed the door. An American friend sat on the sofa, openmouthed: “Wait—did you just close the door?” In London, you don’t tip for delivery. A man on a motorbike arrives and hands over an oil-soaked bag, or a box. You give him the exact amount of money it costs or wait and look at your shoes while he hunts for change. Then you close the door. Sometimes all…

Poets are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world, lucky for us, but they can be worldly judges of poetic legislators. Lincoln’s soul survives in Whitman’s words, and the response of American poets to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, fifty years ago, suggests that there really was, beyond the hype and the teeth, an interesting man in there. An entire volume of mostly elegiac poems, “Of Poetry and Power,” with a Rauschenberg silk-screen portrait of the President for its cover, came out within months of his murder. (It was even recorded, complete, on Folkways Records.) John Berryman wrote a “Formal Elegy” for the President (“Yes. it looks like wilderness”); Auden an “Elegy for J.F.K.,” originally accompanied by twelvetone music by Stravinsky. Robert Lowell—who in the Second World War had…

The Tri Angle record label, run by the British expatriate Robin Carolan and based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is an obscure operation that also happens to be the meeting point for several highly charged but very different strands of pop music. The artists on Tri Angle—who include the Haxan Cloak, Evian Christ, Clams Casino, Forest Swords, and Vessel, and who come from both the U.S. and Britain—are equally at home with commercial hip-hop and roiling, dark, atonal noise. Underlying this sonic mishmash is a gentle sense of melody—the inheritance of a generation raised less on discrete songs than on a mulch of songs that are routinely fed through software, sampled, and slowed down, until they dissolve into entirely different things. Around 2010, when this cohort of musicians first came together, attempts…

Some of the famous male movie actors of the past, like James Stewart and John Wayne, aged slowly and naturally, achieving greater depth in their roles as a privilege of years. Robert Redford’s superlative performance in “All Is Lost” is the major case, at the moment, for the power of ripeness. What has happened with Matthew McConaughey, now turning forty-four, is more abrupt and startling. The gleaming young man of a few years ago, with the brilliant smile and the golden torso—an easygoing sport who, temperamentally, never seemed more than fifty yards from the beach—has become one of the most inventive actors in movies. Just recently, McConaughey has given exploratory, strikingly intelligent performances in a wide variety of roles: the reticent Texas lawyer in “Bernie”; the happy-insleaze, male-strip-club owner in…