Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-29-15 i The New Yorker

Brother Darryl Young, a sexton at St. James’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard in Newark, greeted a visitor who stopped by on the morning after the shooting of nine people at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. Brother Young was sitting at a desk by the church’s side entry. “Welcome, brother. Let me show you to the sanctuary. Take your hat off, sir,” he said. “It’s another sad day. Yes, it’s just another sad day in this world. They’re going to be talking right here about the shootings. That’s at one o’clock, about ninety minutes from now. You’re welcome to wait. Take a look, walk around our beautiful church. Enjoy yourself. God bless you.” St. James’s is a brownstone Gothic church, built in 1852,…

Evan Michelson, an owner of Obscura Antiques and Oddities, on Avenue A at Thirteenth Street, was waiting the other morning for the composer Danny Elfman, who lives in Los Angeles. Obscura sells “medical, scientific, and natural-history objects that are often overlooked,” Michelson said. “Things that tell a story but tend to be discarded.” Elfman, who will appear in July at Lincoln Center as part of “Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton,” is an ardent collector of peculiar things, some of which frighten him. When Elfman arrived, he said that he began collecting when he was travelling the world after graduating from high school. “I was in Bamako, Mali, and I bought a standing, smiling skeleton carved from a single piece of bone, probably an elephant bone,” he…

Mark and Sara Borkowski live with their two young daughters in a century-old, fifteen-hundred-squarefoot house in Rutland, Vermont. Mark drives a school bus, and Sara works as a special-ed teacher; the cost of heating and cooling their house through the year consumes a large fraction of their combined income. Last summer, however, persuaded by Green Mountain Power, the main electric utility in Vermont, the Borkowskis decided to give their home an energy makeover. In the course of several days, coördinated teams of contractors stuffed the house with new insulation, put in a heat pump for the hot water, and installed two air-source heat pumps to warm the home. They also switched all the light bulbs to L.E.D.s and put a small solar array on the slate roof of the garage.…

Every spring, the University of Alabama at Birmingham hosts a concert by its gospel choir, a student group that is also an academic elective. (Participants earn an hour of class credit for each year of singing.) The 2008 concert featured a new spiritual, “Nothing Goes Unnoticed,” that paid tribute to the victims of the massacre at Virginia Tech, in 2007; audience members were given glow sticks so they could wave along. To perform it, the choir brought out an unlikely soloist: a shaggy-haired white guy in khakis and cowboy boots, who strummed an acoustic guitar and delivered the lyrics in a quavering twang. The singer was a celebrity, but not a musical one: Sam Hunt, known to the student body as the starting quarterback on the football team. And he…

FIXING HEALTH CARE As a physician in training, I have witnessed the pervasive culture of overtesting and overdiagnosis in our healthcare system, described in Atul Gawande’s article (“Overkill,” May 11th). But there are also several countervailing forces that he does not mention. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education now emphasizes high-value care as a learning priority for medical residents, and the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation has created a campaign, called Choosing Wisely, to empower patients to initiate conversations with their physicians on this topic. More than seventy medicalspecialty societies are partners in the campaign, which is designed to promote discussions about often unnecessary aspects of medical care. The initiative does not contain mandates, and all patients should be aware that there is a professionally validated resource…

333 Douglass St., Brooklyn (718-522-2110) On a recent weeknight at Threes Brewing, a couple of paradigmatic Park Slope families with locally raised toddlers were stirring not shaking alongside twenty- and thirtysomethings. Most patrons had trickled outside to the spacious seashellcarpeted garden in search of light after the long winter. There was darkness for those who sought it, too—behind the bar were home-brewed beers called I Hate Myself and Words Have No Meaning. “It’s a pain to say a sentence when you just want to get a drink,” someone grumbled. Threes combats short attention spans by having different restaurants occupy its kitchen for brief residencies, which, alongside the ever-changing beer menu, keeps things novel. A chef from Insa, opening in Gowanus later this year, served up a flavorful Korean blood sausage…

Last week, with the status of a million rent-controlled and rentstabilized New York City apartments stuck in legislative limbo, Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to crack down on any landlords caught taking advantage of addled tenants. Meanwhile, one mega-landlord, the real-estate investor and art collector Aby Rosen, who’s been in the news for edging out a notable lessee—the Four Seasons restaurant, in the Seagram Building—roamed the Bowery, relaxed and graham-cracker golden after a week in St. Bart’s. Rosen was downtown to visit another of his holdings, the 1898 Beaux-Arts Germania Bank, at 190 Bowery, which he purchased from the photographer Jay Maisel last year, for fifty-five million dollars. Maisel picked up the thirty-eight-thousand-square-foot space in 1966, for a hundred and two thousand dollars; he and his family lived on the…

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, shortly after the convictions of six members of the House of Representatives and one senator in the F.B.I. bribery sting code-named Abscam, one of the bureau’s anticorruption units turned its attention to the California legislature, where an informant had reported that lawmakers were on the take. Agents posing as representatives of a shrimpprocessing company announced plans to build a plant near Sacramento, provided that a state-loan guarantee could be procured. They offered to reward legislators who would help secure their financing. The operation, inevitably, was known as Shrimpscam. Patrick J. Nolan, an earnest lawand-order conservative representing Glendale and Burbank, was the leader of the Republican minority in the assembly. He had already voted for a bill making the company eligible for the guarantee, but Governor George Deuk…

Because she wanted to teach me a lesson about the natural world, my grandmother raisedHer .22 rifle—we were rabbit hunting, so the shotgun was at home under her blue chintz pillow—and broughtA quail down on the covey rise. Impossible shot you may be thinking. True. I said “my grandmother”Because if I’d said “my mother” you wouldn’t believe a word of it, since a mother should be leadingA research group, or running a software company, but a grandmother still can dress in buckskinAnd ride a fabulous palomino, doing handstands on the saddle, executing trick shots blindfoldWith a musket, reloading on the fly, while deep in the underbrush I gather the rabbits to meAnd we tremble together in the riptide of her passing.…

Outside an isolated Ojibwe country trading post in the year 1839, Mink was making an incessant racket. She wanted what Mackinnon had, trader’s milk—a mixture of raw distilled spirits, rum, red pepper, and tobacco. She had bawled and screeched her way to possession of a keg before. The noise pared at Mackinnon’s nerves, but he wouldn’t beat her into silence. Mink was from a family of powerful healers. She had been the beautiful daughter of Shingobii, a supplier of rich furs. She had also been the beautiful wife of Mashkiig, until he destroyed her face and stabbed her younger brothers to death. Their elevenyear-old daughter huddled with her now, under the same greasy blanket, trying to hide. Inside the post, Mackinnon’s clerk, Wolfred Roberts, had swathed his head in a…

Illusions generated a lot of talk in post war American theatre. The truth is that no amount of reality could compete with the Holocaust. So there was a turning inward. In 1947, Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois told audiences that she wanted not realism but “magic,” and that emotional honesty wasn’t necessarily synonymous with the truth. Six years later, in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” a play inspired by the hysteria of the McCarthy era, a young girl’s fears and neuroses turned reality into fantasy, a weapon of suspicion and dread. When Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band” opened Off Broadway, in 1968, it raised the curtain on certain aspects of gay male life, but it also showed that self-acceptance was still an illusion for gay people, who had spent too…

JUNE 2015 WEDNESDAY 24 TH THURSDAY 25 TH FRIDAY 26 TH SATURDAY 27 TH SUNDAY 28 TH MONDAY 29 TH TUESDAY 30 TH EVERY SUMMER, CARAMOOR, the most elegant of the Northeastern music festivals, offers concerts devoted to opera, orchestral music, roots music, and jazz. But since the festival’s founding, at the close of the Second World War, chamber music has been a vital part of the enterprise. In recent years, the quietly charismatic cellist Edward Arron (pictured above, with his wife, the pianist Jeewon Park) has been a major player here; this week, he joins several fellow-alumni of the festival’s prestigious younginstrumentalists program in one of his “Edward Arron and Friends” concerts. They perform two intimately connected pieces: chamber versions of Strauss’s “Metamorphosen,” a threnody originally written for…

“Surviving Twin” “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” goes the famous William Faulkner quote, and the singer- songwriter Loudon Wainwright III has personalized that notion throughout his career. “Although my father’s dead and gone, I’m his surviving twin,” he sings on the song that gives this one-man show its title. Wainwright’s father was a columnist for Life magazine, and the singer ruminates on his articles, reading some aloud, in a performance directed by Daniel Stern. (SubCulture, 45 Bleecker St. 212-533-5470. Wednesdays at 7:30, through June 24.) “Sleepless Nights” Daniel Felsenfeld has provided the music for this concert in the Center for Fiction’s “Notes on Fiction” series, drawing on texts by Rick Moody (from his novel “The Diviners”), Elizabeth Hardwick (for the title piece), Robert Coover (the…

Early this year, Matteo Renzi invited Angela Merkel to Florence for a tête-à-tête at the Romanesque guild-priory known since the Renaissance as the Palazzo Vecchio and now its city hall. Renzi comes from Florence and, like most Florentines, he is devoted to the city, which in his case elected him mayor in 2009, when he was thirty-four, and nurtured the native Machiavellian wiles that five years later brought him to Rome, at thirty- nine, as the youngest Prime Minister since Italy became Italy, in 1861. In Rome, the art of politics could be described as nets and tridents. Not Renzi’s style. In Florence, where the Renaissance charm of the city and the Renaissance stealth of its population still hold sway, Renzi is a master of both, so it isn’t surprising…

I stopped watching “Hannibal” in Season 1, after a corpse was carved into a cello, its vocal chords splayed like strings, then “played.” I stopped watching again when Dr. Frederick Chilton, played by the redoubtable Raúl Esparza, got his guts tugged out of his abdomen, like redsauced linguini, while he was still conscious. I stopped watching when an acupuncturist drove a needle through an eyeball, and again when a man’s leg was roasted and fed to him. Each time, the decision felt like a sane and, maybe, ethical position. Enough nihilism, enough torture, I thought. Enough serial killers glamorized as artists and geniuses. But that righteous high never lasted. I kept sneaking back, peeking through my fingers—a glimpse here, a binge there—either numbing myself or, depending on one’s perspective, properly…

THE GODDESS POSE, by Michelle Goldberg (Knopf ). “Traditional yoga is supposed to teach you how to renounce worldly goals,” Goldberg writes in this event-crammed biography. Yet for her subject, Indira Devi, yoga was about ambition. Born Eugenia Vassilievna, in 1899, she was a Latvian actress and socialite, who flitted through various jobs and countries before introducing yoga, still little known in the United States, in Los Angeles in the late forties. Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson were among the clients at her studio, on Sunset Strip. The second half of Devi’s life, similarly fast-paced, included stints in Saigon, Mexico, and Buenos Aires. She lived to be a hundred and two. IRREPRESSIBLE, by Emily Bingham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Henrietta Bingham, the great-aunt of the author of this haunting…