Innholdsfortegnelse for November 25, 2013 i The New Yorker

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE (“ROCKET MAN,” P. 48) is a staff writer and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. LAURA SECOR (COMMENT, P. 39), a freelance journalist, is working on a book about Iran, entitled “Fugitives from Paradise.” NATHAN HELLER (“NAKED LAUNCH,” P. 68) is a staff writer. MICHAEL CERA (shouts & murmurs, p. 62), an actor, works in film and television. His most recent movie is “This Is the End.” He lives in New York City. KIM TINGLEY (“THE BODY ELECTRIC,” P. 78), a contributing writer for the Times Magazine, received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2012. CIRCE MAIA (POEM, P. 84) is a Uruguayan writer of poetry and prose, and was awarded the inaugural Delmira Agustini Medal by President José Mujica in August. Her novel…

LOU REED’S RECENT DEATH has focussed attention on his spiritual and musical heirs. One of the most direct—which is not to say the most straightforward—is Jonathan Richman. Born in the Boston area in 1951, Richman developed an early obsession with the Velvet Underground, to the point where he came to New York as a teen-ager and slept on the couch of the band’s manager, Steve Sesnick. Eventually, Richman’s band, the Modern Lovers, recorded a set of demos produced by John Cale that strongly recalled Cale and Reed’s earlier group. With a firm belief in Bo Diddley-derived rhythm guitar and urban deadpan, they delivered an album that included such classics as “Roadrunner” and “Pablo Picasso.” Richman was hardly shy about his inspiration; in 1992, he even recorded a song called “Velvet…

IN 1964, WHEN ORSON WELLES played the lead role of Falstaff in his film “Chimes at Midnight”—his condensation of Shakespeare’s history plays that feature the old and obese hedonist—he was forty-nine, a physical wreck, and a Hollywood has-been. Working in Spain with scant local financing, he was, in effect, a cinematic exile, but he was also at the peak of his artistic power. The movie is one of his greatest—an anguished psychodrama. (Anthology Film Archives presents a rare screening of it, in a 35-mm. print, on Nov. 22 in the “Middle Ages on Film: Shakespeare” series.) Adapting the fifteenth-century story of civil war in which partisans of Edmund Mortimer opposed King Henry IV, Welles focusses on the young Prince of Wales’s scandalous friendship with Falstaff, as well as the Prince’s…

Last year, Brooke Shields was on her way to a singing lesson in Chelsea and stopped at Starbucks for an iced green tea. She noticed a young woman looking at her. The woman had short bangs, a backpack, hiking boots—“She was a hipster, cool-looking, maybe a little artsy, seems-like-she-knows-what-she-wants kind of girl,” Shields recalled the other day. “A spunky girl, probably politically active.” Shields smiled at her, out of politeness. The woman said, “Can I show you a picture?” Shields’s mind raced. “Maybe her mother said she looked like me, or she dressed up as me for Halloween, or—I was bracing myself.” The woman showed Shields a photo of a for-sale sign propped up on the back of a maroon two-door 1983 Mercedes SEC. At the bottom of the sign,…

As rockets fell in Syria, Eliot Higgins was asleep at his house twenty-three hundred miles away, in Leicester, England. He woke a few hours later, roused his toddler daughter, Ela, and padded downstairs to make her porridge. It was August 21st, and it had been ten months since Higgins was laid off from his job as an administrator at a nonprofit providing housing for asylum seekers. His days now consisted of looking after Ela and writing blog posts. As he made breakfast, he checked Twitter on his phone, and noticed reports of a possible chemical-weapons attack in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. Similar reports had come out of Syria in recent months, but they had been difficult to verify. This time, the casualty estimates were in the hundreds. He opened…

Ever since humans invented computer chips, we have dreamed of plugging them into us, or plugging us into them. And why not? A living body is inherently electrical: once every second or so, a dime-size bundle of cells in the upper chamber of the human heart produces an electrical pulse that keeps the organ beating, until the pulse ceases and we die. Cells shuttle ions in and out, communicating in a language tantalizingly similar to the positive and negative charges of electrical circuits. Eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin—these are merely interfaces, ways for a body to chemically convert the uncharged outside world into current that, as it leaps through the brain, creates our thoughts and feelings. In millivolts, we rue our limitations. If we could synch our synapses with man-made…

Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights, signal to the left and turn to the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids. They have blind spots, leg cramps, seizures, and heart attacks. They rubberneck, hotdog, and take pity on turtles, cause fender benders, pileups, and head-on collisions. They nod off at the wheel, wrestle with maps, fiddle with knobs, have marital spats, take the curve too late, take the curve too hard, spill coffee in their laps, and flip over their cars. Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault. A case in point: The driver in…

Though M.I.A. and Eminem are stylistically worlds apart, they share a sincere desire to upend expectations. M.I.A.’s previous album, “MAYA,” from 2010, was thrilling and discordant, but seemed to baffle some of her core audience, as if she were going off some sort of aesthetic deep end. Without a hint of apology or anxiety, she has returned with a double-barrelled coup: “Matangi” is an entirely coherent pop album that makes no concessions to anything currently popular in North America. For Eminem, the challenge was simply to return to form and to prove his physical and artistic health. In the last decade, he engaged in a publicly reported battle with prescription drugs, after which he disavowed two albums, writing off an extended, commercially successful stretch of his career: “Encore” and “Relapse”…

An old lady sways back and forth onstage, working her jaw. “Can’t no old man do nothin’ for me but bring me a message from a young man,” she says. Her eyes widen, her lips twist, and the crowd roars. The legendary black comic Jackie (Moms) Mabley used to wreck the Apollo with that routine. In her raggedy housecoat and floppy cap, Moms—“the original cougar,” as the media scholar Bambi Haggins calls her—was a persona that Mabley had honed since she was in her twenties. In geriatric drag, Mabley could work blue, be salty, get ugly. Over the decades, she became an outlier, the rare bankable comedienne, leaping from the all-black Chitlin Circuit to headlining at the Apollo. She aged into the character she played, and in the sixties was…

The face of Toni Servillo is one of the treasures of modern cinema. If it is not a wholly modern face, that only increases the depth of its appeal. Certainly no better face could be imagined for a film like “The Great Beauty,” which takes place in Rome, and which draws all its energy, as well as its majestic lassitude, from that city. Servillo, playing a writer named Jep Gambardella, is the ever visible star. Our first sight of him, typically, comes in mid-bacchanal, on his sixty-fifth birthday, with rooftop revellers cavorting around him. We see gray hair, swept back and curling at the nape. Then he turns, in closeup, to confront the camera, and reveals a long visage creased in delight, with a cigarette stuck in the smile—half Pulcinella,…

THE FUTURE OF FARMING Michael Specter’s article on the Climate Corporation, an insurance and software service that uses National Weather Service data and historical yields to model climate impact on agriculture, was missing a few important points (“Climate by Numbers,” November 11th). First, modern industrial farmers convert fossil fuels into food calories, and the assumption that modern industrial agriculture will continue in its present form is retrograde. Without cheap diesel and gasoline, this type of farming will have to adapt. Second, the service’s analysis is based on monoculture farming, which depends mostly on large fields that even out small fluctuations within each field. But there can be differences in soil type, microbial levels, and available nutrients in even one hundred square feet of soil. Treating a thousand-acre field as…

37 Canal St. (212-777-7518) DINNER AT SKAL, which means “cheers” in several Nordic languages, can feel surreal. The owner, Oli Bjorn Stephensen, designed the place to evoke a baðstofa, the communal living-and-sleeping room in the grass-covered cottages of his native Iceland. Situated on a fairly desolate corner where Chinatown and the L.E.S. meet, the restaurant is cleaner and brighter than anything around it. Soft light emanates from floor-to-ceiling windows, and a stuffed raven, a bird prominent in Icelandic folklore, perches above the formidable black linoleum bar. The pale-green solid-wood tables are far too big and too many for the narrow room, a problem compounded by the bulky school-desk chairs, but there’s something charming about the miscalculation, as if you’ve fallen through the looking glass. In the kitchen, Ben Spiegel, who…

COMMENT: TALKING OR WALKING A week ago, negotiations in Geneva between Iran and six world powers adjourned without a deal. At issue was an interim agreement that would have frozen Iran’s nuclear program while the group worked out a broader, long-term settlement. By most accounts, the negotiations foundered over the late introduction of more stringent language about one of Iran’s facilities—a heavy-water reactor near Arak—and the removal of an explicit allowance for low-level uranium enrichment on Iranian soil. But meetings were set to resume this week, and, last Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Iran has not expanded its nuclear program since August, when President Hassan Rouhani took office. Just six months ago, productive talks with Iran—the kind that hold out the possibility of a historic breakthrough—were unthinkable.…

In the early nineteen-sixties, Leon Kassman was a Ph.D. student in psychology at the Research Center for Industrial Behavior, at N.Y.U. On learning of the death of President John F. Kennedy, in November of 1963, he immediately wrote a questionnaire, made nine hundred and fifty copies of it, gave a few of them to N.Y.U. students, and mailed the rest to people whose addresses he took, at random, from the Dallas and New York phone books. The questionnaire began, “Describe where you were, who you were with, what you did and how you felt in the first few moments after you heard President Kennedy had been shot.” Kassman is seventy-one now, a softspoken, intense man, with confidence in his abilities. On a recent morning, at his apartment in Rockville Centre,…

Whenever a friend asks me if I have any interesting tales involving text-messaging, I think of Jeremy. Jeremy, a man I am no longer in touch with, was someone I once considered a friend. It started out very simply: one day I received a text message from a phone number I did not recognize. Intrigued, I replied, and thus began an intimate and illuminating correspondence. I wish to share with you now my record of this peculiar kinship. UNKNOWN NUMBER 12/5 9:46 PM sup you comnig to this thing? MICHAEL 12/5 9:46 PM hi oops I don’t know this number. I’m Michael, who is this? UNKNOWN NUMBER 12/5 9:58 PM oops my mistake MICHAEL 12/5 9:58 PM hahahaha no problem—happens… where are you anyway? Like what city? Los Angeles? or……

I thought she was exaggerating a little when she said that every one of her hummingbirds—she had five— had a distinct name and that they flew freely in her garden, where they had distinct feeders. “If not, they fight too much.” But it was like that, just like that: I saw them once, when the house, alone, invited a visit to the open back garden. There they came flying like tiny winged envoys with urgent notices and warnings. No name fit them well. Useless words. Astonishment at the rapid movement of the wings: the not being able to look at them the approach of their tiny hearts beating so incredibly rapidly close, very close, and then suddenly shooting off, high, unattainable. Beings of our world but also of another, only…

It’s not like his songs are going to simply evaporate, but since the news I can’t stop listening to him on endless shuffle—familiar, yes, inside me, yes, which means I’m alive, or was, depending on when you read this. Now a song called “Sad Song,” the last one on Berlin, sung now from the other side, just talk, really, at the beginning, then the promise or threat, I’m gonna stop wasting my time, but what else are we made of, especially now? A chorus sings Sad song sad song sad song sad song. I knew him better than I knew my own father, which means through these songs, which means not at all. They died on the same day, O what a perfect day, maybe at the same moment, maybe…

“We’ll have a war all of our very own,” W. H. Auden promised Christopher Isherwood as they sailed for Hong Kong in January, 1938, to write a book about Japan’s invasion of China. Whereas the Spanish Civil War was, as Isherwood later wrote, “already crowded with star literary observers,” hardly anyone in the West seemed to be paying attention to the Guernicas of the Second Sino-Japanese War—including the rape and massacre of tens of thousands of civilians by Japanese soldiers in Nanjing. Auden, in his sonnet sequence “In Time of War” (1939), wrote, “Maps can really point to places / Where life is evil now. / Nanking. Dachau.” In Wuhan, China’s besieged wartime capital, Isherwood intuited that “hidden here are all the clues which would enable an expert, if he…

From Zadie Smith’s 2013 essay “Joy”: “If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It’s not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives.” I think I know what she means. Because after joy flares up and inevitably dies, what are you left looking at, through the smeared window of the everyday? The same old predictability, the grocer putting out his wares again, the children off to school, your usual self. As Shakespeare wrote, “Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament; / Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.” More than most artists, Shakespeare…

AFTER A RUN ON LONDON’S West End, Dame Eileen Atkins and Sir Michael Gambon (pictured above) bring Samuel Beckett’s rarely performed 1957 radio play, “All That Fall,” to 59E59 Theatres. Atkins, seventy-nine, has seen many of her British hits transfer to Broadway, starting with “The Killing of Sister George,” in 1966; she was also a co-creator of the television show “Upstairs/Downstairs.” Gambon, seventy-three, once a member of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, at the Old Vic, gained new fans as the beloved Dumbledore in the “Harry Potter” series. He is also a Beckett veteran—in the last decade alone, Gambon has played the absurdist’s often bewildered characters in “Eh Joe,” “Endgame,” and “Krapp’s Last Tape.” NIGHT LIFE FOOD & DRINK | ART DANCE | MOVIES THE THEATRE CLASSICAL MUSIC ROCK AND…

443 E. 6th St. (212-614-6818) This tiny East Village “bitters tasting room,” cozy as a Gypsy caravan, is mostly amor: on Halloween, three couples sat around its tiled bar, talking to the bearded bartender and admiring a parade of waisthigh karate masters and ballerinas who came in for lollipops. The amargo—bitter—seasons every drink, and it draws a devoted group of connoisseurs with a taste for complexity: the popular Sharpie Mustache (amaro, the apéritif Bonal, rye whiskey, gin, and Tiki bitters) has “notes of leather” and a hint of licorice. A “dealer’s choice” Old-Fashioned included habanero bitters and mescal. It tasted like smoke and intrigue—or, one drinker suggested, bacon and fried onions. The music switched from Sonny Rollins to the Specials, and a man in a checked shirt explained his elaborate…

On a recent Saturday morning, Corey Johnson sat in a downtown café trying to persuade his neighbors that hydrofracking isn’t an issue that just concerns people in the boonies. Johnson, who is thirty-one, was recently elected to replace Christine Quinn as the City Council member from the Third District, which includes Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, and the West Village. He was spreading the word about a brand-new pipeline that pumps fracked gas directly into the West Village. “Are you sure?” a woman with a gray miniature poodle asked. “All you hear about fracking is that it’s happening upstate and it’s the worst thing ever.” Johnson told her that the project, by the Houston-based company Spectra Energy, had been approved in May of 2012 and was completed on November 1st. Thousands of…

Twitter’s recent I.P.O. bonanza gave us all some striking numbers to consider. There’s the company’s valuation: an astounding twenty-four billion dollars. And its revenue: just five hundred and thirty-five million. It has more than two hundred and thirty million active users, and a hundred million of them use the service daily. They collectively send roughly half a billion tweets every day. And then there’s the starkest number of all: zero. That’s the price that Twitter charges people to use its technology. Since the company was founded, ordinary users have sent more than three hundred billion tweets. In exchange, they have paid Twitter no dollars and no cents. Ever since Netscape made the decision to give away its browser, free has been more the rule online than the exception. And even…

One Tuesday in January, 2007, Steve Jobs, the C.E.O. of Apple, sat backstage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center and prepared for the most audacious bluff of his career. The iPhone was about to be unveiled, but the device was not remotely ready for the public eye. Its external casing didn’t always fit together properly. Curious things would happen when you pressed the letter “E.” Jobs had been rehearsing for five days straight, but almost every time something went awry. The unveiling would be broadcast live, a bid for dazzling immediacy which now seemed extremely ill-advised. A few high-ranking Apple engineers and managers had concealed Scotch about their persons, and, as Jobs strode onstage with the phone, they took to drink. The iPhone’s problems were legion and unpredictable. It randomly dropped…

Among twenty-five million, they were two, speeding toward the glowing span of the Wonhyo Bridge on a warm spring night, the scooter trailing pink balloons. They were born in Seoul in 1985 and 1992. They were natives of the most wired city in the world, a megalopolis that is nearly twice as dense as New York but maintains the wide margins of the suburbs—roomy restaurants, boulevards lined with trees. The city belonged to them, beam ing its vital signs at speeds of more than fifty megabits per second to its citizens, who bunched and flowed in near-instantaneous reply. Their smartphones were lanterns, illuminating the urban grid. Bubbles within windows within browsers within screens: it was as though, through some mathematical trick, the smaller the interface the more freedom it afforded.…

It was a brand of imposition of which young people like Liana thought nothing: showing up on an older couple’s doorstep, the home of friends of friends of friends, playing on a tentative enough connection that she’d have had difficulty constructing the sequence of referrals. If there was anything to that six-degrees-of-separation folderol, she must have been equally related to the entire population of the continent. Typically, she’d given short notice, first announcing her intention to visit in a voice mail only a few days before bumming a ride with another party she hardly knew. (Well, the group had spent a long, hard-drinking night in Nairobi at a sprawling house with mangy dead animals on the walls that the guy with the ponytail was caretaking. In this footloose crowd of…

THE VALLEY OF AMAZEMENT by Amy Tan (Ecco). Tan’s first novel in eight years opens in early-twentieth-century Shanghai. Lulu Minturn, an American, runs a house of courtesans, and her mettlesome daughter Violet is horrified to learn that she is half-Chinese. The plot follows three generations of the Minturn women from Shanghai to San Francisco and a remote village in western China. The world of the novel is rendered in engrossing detail, but plot twists tend toward melodrama, and Tan is forced into a lot of plain historical exposition. And although Violet tells her daughter to “resist much, obey little,” the women’s toughness of spirit sits oddly with their often rather guileless actions. FIREFLY, by Janette Jenkins (Europa). This elegant novel imagines the final weeks of Noël Coward, after he…

I had planned to devote this space to a pair of Carnegie Hall concerts by the Minnesota Orchestra, which was to have performed the complete symphonies of Sibelius in the course of the season. The concerts, scheduled for November 2nd and 3rd, did not take place, and the remainder of the Sibelius cycle was cancelled. The formidable Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, who had been working wonders as Minnesota’s music director, resigned on October 1st, after a yearlong labor dispute. Citing deficits, the Minnesota Orchestral Association had announced a thirty-two-per-cent pay cut; the musicians balked, and the management locked them out. In the war of words that followed, the musicians easily held the high ground: the management had stooped to ruthless union-busting tactics, going so far as to buy up Internet…