Innholdsfortegnelse for November 18, 2013 i The New Yorker

ARIEL LEVY (“THANKSGIVING IN MONGOLIA,” P. 26) has been writing for the magazine since 2008. PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE (“BUZZKILL,” P. 40) is a staff writer and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. GEORGE PACKER (COMMENT, P. 21) has published eight books, including “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” a 2013 National Book Award finalist. DAN WINTERS (PORTFOLIO, P. 62) is an award-winning photographer whose new book, “Road to Seeing,” will be published in December. JOHN COLAPINTO (“HOT GREASE,” P. 32), a staff writer, is the author of “As Nature Made Him” and “About the Author.” His next novel, “An Upright Man,” is due out in 2014. PETER HESSLER (“THE BURIED,” P. 52) lives in Cairo. “Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West” is his most…

FOR THE FIRST TIME in his thirty-year career, the experimental New York choreographer Tere O’Connor brings a work to Brooklyn. “Bleed,” an hourlong piece, two years in the making, premières at BAM Fisher, an intimate new performance space (Dec. 11-14). In his blog, O’Connor wrote that his work confronts “a morass of contradictory realities that must find a poetic restructuring through investigation.” Despite this challenging intellectual approach, the movement is warm and full-bodied. In early snippets posted online, the dancers—including the great Heather Olson and Silas Riener—spiral their torsos and windmill their arms, creating patterns before abandoning them. Sprawling soundscapes by his longtime collaborator James Baker accompany O’Connor’s “investigations.” Like other young ballet choreographers, the New York City Ballet corps member Justin Peck found success making works for his colleagues,…

IT MIGHT BE HARD TO remember, after all the sequels, that the original “Rocky” movie, from 1976, was an honest, hardscrabble ode to the underdog. That Sylvester Stallone could barely pronounce his lines made it feel all the more real. The director Alex Timbers—who brought a daffy energy to “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” on Broadway in 2010 and twisted “Love’s Labour’s Lost” into a zany pop-culture mash-up at the Delacorte in August—helms “Rocky,” a musical adaptation, produced by Stallone, who also co-wrote the book, with Thomas Meehan (“The Producers”). Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (the team behind “Ragtime”) wrote the score, and the leads are relative unknowns: Andy Karl stars as the self-made boxer, and Margo Seibert plays the shy love of his life. (Previews begin Feb. 11, at the…

THE TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD Canadian singer-songwriter Basia Bulat plays the Autoharp, the piano, the violin, and a variety of other instruments, but she can make remarkable music without any of them. Bulat has a singular voice, with a confident yet vulnerable tone, and she sings with an impassioned yearning that suggests the vast wilderness of her homeland. She’s been nominated for a Juno Award and short-listed for the Polaris Music Prize, and her third album, “Tall Tall Shadow,” recently released, shows her maturing as a songwriter. Bulat is touring the States, and is at the Bowery Ballroom on Nov. 23, with backing musicians—not that she really needs them. Christmas comes early for fans of sterling soul and R. & B. The legendary singer Bobby Womack is playing three nights at City Winery,…

Last Tuesday, a conservative Republican governor with an aura of moderation won big in pale-blue New Jersey, a liberal Democratic mayoral candidate with a talent for speechmaking won even bigger in midnight-blue New York City, and a moderate Democratic moneyman was barely elected governor of burgundy Virginia. The percentage of Virginia voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine dropped by six points from last year, while the percentage of those older than sixty-five rose by four points and the percentage of women fell by two. In Colorado, a proposal to raise the state income tax to fund education was soundly defeated, while in New Jersey an increase in the minimum wage received even more overwhelming approval than did Chris Christie, who opposed it. The winners in Virginia and New…

Frank Tavares teaches organizational communication at Southern Connecticut State University, and he recently published a not quite best-selling collection of short stories—both fine accomplishments, but not ones that are likely to get him recognized on the street. Strangers do occasionally pause, however, when they hear him speak, at which point they ask, “Have we met?” They usually haven’t, but Tavares knows why they think they have, so he will recite the words “Support for NPR comes from” and wait for their eyes to light up. For the past thirty-one years, Tavares has been the voice of National Public Radio’s underwriting credits, declaring in a consistent monotone that funding has been provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation or Lumber Liquidators or, around the holidays, the Pajamagram Company.…

So a guy walks into a bar one day and he can’t believe his eyes. There, in the corner, there’s this one-foot-tall man, in a little tuxedo, playing a tiny grand piano. So the guy asks the bartender, “Where’d he come from?” And the bartender’s, like, “There’s a genie in the men’s room who grants wishes.” So the guy runs into the men’s room and, sure enough, there’s this genie. And the genie’s, like, “Your wish is my command.” So the guy’s, like, “O.K., I wish for world peace.” And there’s this big cloud of smoke—and then the room fills up with geese. So the guy walks out of the men’s room and he’s, like, “Hey, bartender, I think your genie might be hard of hearing.” And the bartender’s, like,…

From Cairo, it’s only about three hundred miles to Abydos, in Upper Egypt, but the distance feels much greater. This region has been a world apart ever since Pharaonic times. The ancient Egyptians separated their land into Upper and Lower, a division that confuses moderns who orient themselves by the compass rather than by the Nile. Upper Egypt lies to the south, where the river has carved a deep gorge into the North African plateau. At Abydos, the gorge is about fifteen miles wide, flanked on both sides by high cliffs that are the color of sand. There’s no rain to speak of, and the surrounding desert is absolute: from the air, the narrow corridor of green along the Nile appears hopelessly isolated. Head due west and the next river…

“More and more each year we have felt about us the pressure of tremendous forces,” Amos Pinchot, a prominent Progressive, wrote in a 1912 pamphlet called “What’s the Matter with America.” “Our country is going through a terrific period of unrest. Something is wrong. . . . Where starts the mighty river of discontent that is destroying our respect for government, uprooting faith in political parties, and causing every precedent and convention of the old order to strain at its moorings?” A century ago, when the First World War and all the other horrors of the twentieth century were still over the horizon, the Progressives were convinced that the country was in a dire state. They understood American life before the Civil War to have been simple, provincial, agrarian, and…

The wide-screen black-and-white images in Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska”— of fields, plains, and distant hills—have a stirring vastness, and a great beauty, too, but the life has been taken out of them. Nothingness is at hand: the vistas are overcast with melancholia, and the towns—blank, empty, shuttered—are dead. The film chronicles a forlorn journey from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, and it could be called a wrong-way epic—it moves East rather than West, as mythic American narratives once did. Woody (Bruce Dern), an elderly alcoholic with long, lank white hair and a tendency to wander down any available road, believes that he has won a million dollars in a sweepstakes and has to go to Lincoln to pick up the money. His son David (Will Forte), whom he has always regarded…

A JUST PROFESSION James B. Stewart, in his analysis of the demise of the law firm Dewey & Le-Boeuf, attributes the firm’s downfall, in part, to a culture that lacked coöperation and mutual respect (“The Collapse,” October 14th). I got to know some of the principals of the LeBoeuf firm in the nineteen-seventies, and the change in attitude toward the practice of law since then, from a profession emphasizing integrity and seeking societal justice to a business seeking profits, is the key to understanding its debasement. The publication of legal-income statistics led partners to consider themselves free agents rather than bound by professional ideals. An emphasis on materialism flooded law schools with students whose objective was financial gain. If this type of environment continues, we may see additional firm…

LATE LAST MONTH, PRESIDENT OBAMA CAME to Brooklyn and picked up some cheesecake from Junior’s. He used to live in the borough in the mid-eighties, in Park Slope. Junior’s is an institution, and cheesecake is the sort of food politicians need to be seen eating, but if Obama had wanted to observe how his old neighborhood has changed, he could have gone a little further up Flatbush to Marco’s, an Italian restaurant that is both rustic and refined, and which exemplifies how much Brooklyn dining has changed since he lived there. Marco’s is run by the people who ten years ago opened Franny’s in the same spot. Franny’s, which has moved nearby to a more spacious, stroller-friendly space, is a pasta and pizza joint, but the back of the menu…

THE GRAND SURPRISE OF Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest film, “Inside Llewyn Davis” (Dec. 6), set in 1961, in the Greenwich Village folk-music circuit, is that they relegate their sardonic humor to the supporting actors and approach their hero with uninhibited empathy. Oscar Isaac brings a simmering energy to the title character, a respected but penniless singer-songwriter, no longer young, whose increasingly frenzied struggle for a foothold in the business wreaks chaos among friends and family. The Coen brothers re-create the sixties milieu with a disabused fascination, and their portrait of a great man trapped in a mediocre career delivers straightforward pathos with an ironic sting; as ever, their best joke is a cosmic one. In “Oldboy” (Nov. 27), Spike Lee remakes Park Chan-wook’s 2003 classic of the grotesque, forcefully…

WHEN THE EPIC SYMPHONIES of Mahler and Bruckner were brought into the repertory, at the end of the last century, other composers got crowded out. Remember Borodin? His atmospheric tone poem “In the Steppes of Central Asia” was once a regular in the concert hall—as were the “Polovetsian Dances,” a vibrantly tuneful excerpt from his opera “Prince Igor.” Now Borodin’s opera, a mythic tale of early Russia which few in the West have ever heard before, is back: the Metropolitan Opera, for the first time in ninety-eight years, will mount the work (beginning Feb. 6), in a production by the daring young director Dmitri Tcherniakov, whose recent staging of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Czar’s Bride” was a hit in Berlin. Gianandrea Noseda, well versed in the Russian classics from his years at…

Somewhere in the bowels of the Belasco Theatre, long considered to be haunted by its namesake, the actor Mark Rylance has installed a Ping-Pong table. “I like to encourage a playful place backstage,” he said the other night. Rylance, the former artistic director of the Globe, in London, has played most of Shakespeare’s leading men, and a good share of his women. At the moment, he is alternating between the title character in “Richard III” and Countess Olivia in “Twelfth Night,” in an all-male repertory production that includes the actor and writer Stephen Fry. Two hours before curtain, Rylance bounded into a cavernous backstage area fitted as a rec room. “This is the Two Elephants Pub, where Houdini kept two elephants,” he explained. “He would drop one of them through…

Rachel Roth, a physician, and her fiancé, Jon Cohen, who works in finance, are getting married on May 18, 2014. On a recent Thursday evening, they went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to attend a cocktail hour and a sit-down-dinner tasting for couples who are planning to be married in one of the garden’s wedding venues, the glass-domed Palm House and the slightly smaller Atrium. “It’s nice to talk to people who are in the same position,” Roth said. “It’s a really supportive environment during what can be a stressful time. We’re all trading tips and taking notes.” On the menu she was holding, she’d put a star by “crudités station.” A hundred and forty people—engaged couples, a smattering of future mothers-in-law and best friends—schmoozed at the cocktail hour, in…

A few months ago, in a clanging, hissing plant on the outskirts of Newark, a tanker truck backed up to a deep reservoir and delivered thousands of dollars’ worth of raw material—what people in the rendering industry sometimes refer to as “liquid gold.” The plant’s owner is a company called Dar Pro, and the C.E.O., Randall Stuewe, looked on while a hose from the truck gushed a brown fluid, filled with fine sediment and the occasional mysterious solid. Slowly, the pit became a pool, whose surface frothed and eddied and gave off a potent odor of old French fries, onion rings, and batter-fried shrimp. “Used cooking oil,” Stuewe told me. “We process two billion pounds a year.” Stuewe, a former farm kid from Kansas with a wide girth and a…

We’ve owned this house for—what—twelve years now, I reckon. Bought it from an elderly couple, the De Rougemonts, whose aroma you can still detect around the place, in the master especially, and in the home office, where the old buzzard napped on summer days, and a little bit in the kitchen, still. I remember going into people’s houses as a kid and thinking, Can’t they smell how they smell? Some houses were worse than others. The Pruitts next door had a greasy, chuck-wagon odor, tolerable enough. The Willots, who ran that fencing academy in their rec room, smelled like skunk cabbage. You could never mention the smells to your friends, because they were part of it, too. Was it hygiene? Or was it, you know, glandular, and the way each…

DOUBLE DOWN, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (Penguin Press). “I am wired in a different way than this event requires,” Barack Obama said, according to the authors, as he prepared for his second debate with Mitt Romney and tried to redeem his disastrous performance in their first round. “I just don’t know if I can do this.” The book goes some way toward explaining how he did win in 2012, at least as viewed from certain strata in both campaigns: top aides, establishment brokers, and bundlers. It’s replete with insider dialogue, in and out of quotation marks, and newsy tidbits. Ideology is relatively uncharted, as is the rise of the Tea Party. By the end, Romney’s flaws as a candidate are clear, but there is only a glimpse…

Jérôme Bel and Theatre Hora Much of the provocation in the provocations of this French choreographer derives from the works’ simplicity. In “Disabled Theater,” he presents this Swiss-German troupe of actors with developmental disabilities. Their responses to the tasks he gave them—state your name and age, choreograph a short dance, critique the show—are their own, repeated each performance but not predetermined by Bel. Our responses—embarrassment, surprise—are as free. (New York Live Arts, 219 W. 19th St. 212-924-0077. Nov. 12-16 at 7:30 and Nov. 17 at 3.) Garth Fagan Best known for his choreography for “The Lion King,” Fagan returns to the Joyce with two programs that combine new and older works, including a revival of “Easter Freeway Processional” (1983), an exuberant work full of fluid patterns. His latest, “No…

102 St. Marks Pl. (212-777-6707) At Manhattan’s tiniest beer-zealot hideaway, malt-liquor bottles double as water carafes, and arrestingly angular stemware hangs behind a copper bar. “RARE, NEW and UNUSUAL BEER” is scrawled on a mirror, referring to a rotating list of dozens of offerings that range from a Texan farmhouse ale to a Swedish stout, along with cider, mead, and wine. While the sliver of a space has expanded to the street, it retains the coziness of a speakeasy—it has just eighteen stools and one table—though with its framed images of skulls, roses, and other vintage tattoos it brings to mind the rowdier end of St. Marks Place. “Everyone here has worked in both fine dining and dive bars,” said a server with heavily inked arms, as he manned a…

RADICAL IS BEAUTIFUL in the art of Carrie Mae Weems, whose pointedly lyrical photographs, films, and videos reveal hard and tender truths about race and gender. In her staged scenes and appropriated pictures, which often incorporate words, Weems, now sixty, insists that history and identity are constructions as well. The African-American artist, who was recently awarded a MacArthur fellowship, has said, “Getting rid of that stereotype so that this person’s humanity actually shines through, that’s the project.” The Guggenheim surveys her threedecade-long career, beginning Jan. 24. On March 7, the always divisive Whitney Biennial opens, organized by Michelle Grabner, an artist and an influential professor at the Art Institute of Chicago; Anthony Elms, a young curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and Stuart Comer, who was just named…

That Tiny Playful God The Basque poet Kirmen Uribe first came together with the musicians Mikel Urdangarin, Rafa Rueda, and Bingen Mendizabal and the visual artist Mikel Valverde in 2003, for the show “Zaharregia, Txikiegia Agian” (“Too Old, Too Small Maybe”). They performed it at the Bowery Poetry Club that year, and later it became a book and a CD. They are back now with the première of a new multimedia presentation, combining poetry, song, and projections. The poet Elizabeth Macklin, who did the English translations, says to expect “anything zoragarria—enchanting in the most literal sense.” (Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, at Bleecker St. 212-614-0505. Nov. 18 at 9.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The horse race enters its final round, with a spate of contemporary-art sales. Sotheby’s leads off its…

The recent New York rollout of the LifeCan, a water-purifying device, began with Jeff Sharpe wheeling a black suitcase to the edge of the Pond, in Central Park. Sharpe is the C.E.O. of SimpliPure, the company that makes LifeCan. He lives in Southern California, near Laguna Beach, which is nearly an ideal place to live, he said, except that he has trouble getting his teen-age daughters off the beach. Sharpe or his partner, Tareq Risheq, the inventor of the LifeCan, have demonstrated their product beside the Nile, the Amazon, and the Chicago River and by the fountain of the Bellagio hotel, in Las Vegas. In the Park, Sharpe was accompanied by two young women from the P.R. firm The Woods & Co. One of the women, Mallory Liebhaber, who had…

My favorite game when I was a child was Mummy and Explorer. My father and I would trade off roles: one of us had to lie very still with eyes closed and arms crossed over the chest, and the other had to complain, “I’ve been searching these pyramids for so many years. When will I ever find the tomb of Tutankhamun?” (This was in the late seventies, when Tut was at the Met, and we came in from the suburbs to visit him frequently.) At the climax of the game, the explorer stumbles on the embalmed Pharaoh and—brace yourself—the mummy opens his eyes and comes to life. The explorer has to express shock, and then says, “So, what’s new?” To which the mummy replies, “You.” I was not big on…

One morning in August, Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at U.C.L.A., addressed the Seattle city council on the subject of marijuana. Kleiman is one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken analysts of drug policy, and for three decades he has argued that America’s cannabis laws must be liberalized. Kleiman’s campaign used to seem quixotic, but in November, 2012, voters in Washington and Colorado passed initiatives legalizing the use and commercial sale of marijuana. Immediately afterward, the State of Washington decided that it needed help setting up a pot economy. State bureaucrats don’t generally sit around pondering the improbable, so they had made no contingency plans. A call for proposals was issued. Kleiman assembled a team that beat out more than a hundred other contenders for the job.…

No clouds, now, nearer to Brooklyn Bridge than the Bridge is to the Heights. Half a block east, barefoot on shards of glass, a towel wrapped around his waist, shaving cream on the left side of his face—a block south, beside a fire hydrant, a leg is found severed at the knee. Internal or external— what difference does it make? I shake the snow from my coat, take off my gloves, set them on the counter. I step back onto Spring Street, and, on Greenwich, start downtown. Sight and sound reconfigured, details, truths, colors, and shapes round out the aesthetic. Things changed and unchanged, and not only in abstract ways. This young man, yellow pants, undershirt, stands eating from a garbage bin, patches of ice on the East River esplanade.…

Katy Perry has become one of the biggest pop stars in the world by not making us worry about her. We usually see our alpha pop stars—Beyoncé, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Eminem—as characters with a story, or as heroes with a mission. Lady Gaga likes to change her look every few months and has become probably the most visible (and credible) defender of L.G.B.T. rights in pop culture. Rihanna has grown into the Clint Eastwood of pop—slow of step, eagle-eyed, and unbiddable. But Perry is more like a talk-show host, the face for a team of professional entertainers, chipper and on time. We don’t worry that Perry has lost herself to this cult or to that bad boyfriend, because she’s never hidden the fact that she’s not staking her life on…