Innholdsfortegnelse for May-11-15 i The New Yorker

Fifty years ago, the Holiday opened at 8 A.M., a former bartender recently told a proprietor, so that high-rise window washers could come in “to get a little courage.” In later years, it was a beloved dive—sticky, grimy, lit by Christmas lights, and known for its cheap booze (bartender’s choice) served in tiny cups. It closed in 2012. This March, it reopened after a threeyear restoration by the building’s new owner, Robert Ehrlich, the creator of Pirate’s Booty; the neighborhood heromensch Barbara Sibley, owner of La Palapa, next door, who recently hosted a benefit to support victims of the Second Avenue explosion; and Michael and Danny Neff, the craft-cocktail innovators who revived the Rum House. The renovation unearthed both damage and treasures—there were “a million magical saving moments” in the…

On Saturday, His Holiness the Seventeenth Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the top lama in the Karma Kagyu order of Tibetan Buddhism, led a prayer ceremony at Riverside Church for the victims of the earthquake in Nepal. It is for such work (alleviating suffering, raising funds) that he’d come to America, in March, to take a tour of colleges and temples—and perhaps why he’d been born, if you believe, as Tibetans do, that he is the embodiment of Chenrezig, the Buddha of compassion. But is the Karmapa not a man? A few weeks before the earthquake, His Holiness was eating vegan Thai takeout at the home of a Princeton chemistry professor, which overlooked a golf club’s sixteenth fairway. Someone asked the Karmapa to name his favorite food. “Meat,” he said. “But…

One of those afternoons with Elan and his South Beach tanIn a floor-length coyote coat and matching tamDriving through the roadblock by Cabrini-GreenTo Jetro Cash & Carry restaurant depotWhere we watched a man buy ten cases of glass CokesAnd a skinned goat over his shoulder like an Isaac.I resolved to fill the tarnished pewter bowls with pub mix,Use the private john with its dual Tender Vittles bowl,And smile thankfully at Otto and Laura in the drink well;To smile smile smile as the Edith Piaf impersonator tinkledUnheard beneath the cocktail roar that was my glory.There are worse fates than squeezing into a red velvetCabaret banquette to overhear through bulk-wine tangShe knows how to program the shit out of an event.I worried over the pancake-pink walls of the antiquePowder room, its peculiar…

CONGRESS AND IRAN In his column about President Obama’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran, Steve Coll argues that the call for congressional review of a deal is unwarranted (“Dangerous Gamesmanship,” April 27th). I am a co-author of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act. It is true that Presidents may negotiate international deals, short of treaties, without congressional review, but fundamental to these negotiations is what Iran must do to get out of economic sanctions imposed by Congress. The bill would allow the President to grant relief from executive and international sanctions without congressional review. But Congress must have a thirty-day period to review any grant of statutory-sanctions relief in a final deal. Unless Congress votes to disapprove it and overrides a Presidential veto, sanctions relief can be implemented. The bill…

RadioLoveFest Radio celebrities are a special breed, typically known by their voices and names alone. Their height, hair length, and other features are often mysteries. The second annual RadioLoveFest changes that for New York listeners: Terry Gross (“Fresh Air”), Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad (“RadioLab”), Leonard Lopate (WNYC), and Brooke Gladstone (“On the Media”) will all appear live. Some more familiar faces will be present, too. Molly Ringwald is hosting “Don’t Look Back: Stories from the Teenage Years,” and Parker Posey is part of “Selected Shorts.” There will also be a live episode of NPR’s joke quiz show, “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!”; a one-day marathon of all thirty-two of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, performed by a rotating cast of musicians; an all-female comedy show, hosted by…

Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist, and her girlfriend, Holly Rae Taylor, an artist, were in town for the Broadway opening of “Fun Home,” a musical based on Bechdel’s graphic memoir of the same title, with a book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori. The couple, who live in Vermont, had rented a studio apartment on the West Side, near Central Park, and on the morning of the première Bechdel was in the Park to watch Taylor compete in a women’s half-marathon. It promised to be a long day. “I don’t do mornings well,” Bechdel said. She had slept for only three hours, and had sliced her thumb while making toast. (Nervous anxiety is her default mode.) “I’m missing Donald,” she explained. Donald is her cat—a female, named…

As a magician, I can never reveal my secrets. But I can offer you the following hints: • Are you really able to pick any card, as I invite you to do? Or are you more inclined— subconsciously, at least—to pick the one that’s not covered in larvae? • When I choose a “volunteer,” whom I’ve “never met,” watch closely as the two of us pass each other onstage. Was that a wink you saw? And—if you look very closely—was the wink followed by a twenty-five-minute reminiscence about college? • When I leave the stage approximately every fifteen minutes, often in the middle of a trick, is it really to feed the meter? • You probably didn’t give it much thought, but is the dove that flies out of my…

It was lunchtime before my afternoon surgery clinic, which meant that I was at my desk, eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich and clicking through medical articles. Among those which caught my eye: a British case report on the first 3-D-printed hip implanted in a human being, a Canadian analysis of the rising volume of emergency-room visits by children who have ingested magnets, and a Colorado study finding that the percentage of fatal motor-vehicle accidents involving marijuana had doubled since its commercial distribution became legal. The one that got me thinking, however, was a study of more than a million Medicare patients. It suggested that a huge proportion had received care that was simply a waste. The researchers called it “low-value care.” But, really, it was no-value care. They studied how often…

When I died, there was no one around to see it. I died all alone. It’s fine. Some people think it’s a great tragedy to die all alone, with no one around to see it. My high-school boyfriend wanted to marry me, because he thought the most important thing to have in life was a witness. To marry your high-school girlfriend, and have her with you all through life—that is a lot of witnessing. Everything important would be witnessed by one woman. I didn’t like his idea of what a wife was for—someone to just hang around and watch your life unfold. But I understand him better now. It is no small thing to have someone who loves you see your life, and discuss it with you every night. Instead…

“Herzog” is the book that made Saul Bellow famous. He was forty-nine years old when it came out, in 1964. He had enjoyed critical esteem since the publication of his first novel, “Dangling Man,” in 1944, and he had won a National Book Award for “The Adventures of Augie March” in 1954. But “Herzog” turned him into a public figure, a writer of books known even to people who don’t read books— an “author.” At a ceremony honoring the success of “Herzog” at city hall in Chicago, Bellow’s home town, a reporter asked the mayor, Richard J. Daley, whether he’d read the novel. “I’ve looked into it,” Daley said. You get enough people saying that and you have a best-seller. “Herzog” sold a hundred and forty-two thousand hardcover copies and…

A self-portrait by the American poet Terrance Hayes graces the cover of “How to Be Drawn” (Penguin), Hayes’s fifth book of poems. If you want to be drawn, one straightforward plan would be to draw yourself, as Hayes has done; change the word to “represented,” and the political meanings of his title become clear. Hayes is black. In American poetry, if a black person wants to exist at all, he can either submit to representation by white artists or choose to portray himself. But words are trickier than charcoal and pencil: Hayes can’t make a poem that “looks” like Terrance Hayes, by the standards of visual art, since “Terrance Hayes,” by the standards of poetry, doesn’t exist until his words invent him. Authors, after all, aren’t causes; they’re effects produced…

MAY 2015 WEDNESDAY 6TH THURSDAY 7TH FRIDAY 8TH SATURDAY 9TH SUNDAY 10TH MONDAY 11TH TUESDAY 12TH NOT EVERY MAN WANTS his wife swapping spit with total strangers, but the British conceptualist Ryan Gander’s marble bust (above) indulges the fantasy: it’s both a portrait of his wife leaning in for a kiss and a water fountain. That playful spirit is typical of the works, by eleven international artists, newly installed along the High Line, as part of the yearlong show “Panorama,” organized by the park’s imaginative curator Cecilia Alemani. Also on view are an absurdly tall bronze telescope, by the Scandinavian duo Elgreen & Dragset; an intricate mini Manhattan, carved from marble by the Japanese sculptor Yutaka Sone; and a model of a volcanic island, by the Icelandic artist Katrín…

Not long ago, the real-estate Web site StreetEasy listed a one-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side for $1,795 per month, nearly seven hundred dollars lower than the average rent for a similar place in the neighborhood. In this apartment, which the listing described as having “old world style,” the shower is in the kitchen. Spencer Rogers, who works at the Flatiron School, a downtown tech startup, saw the listing and visited the apartment with Lorence Heath Dippolito, a real-estate agent. For the past four years, Rogers has been living in Fort Greene, in Brooklyn, where he shares a three-bedroom apartment with two roommates. Their rent, which had been three thousand dollars a month, is increasing to four thousand. “For a few hundred more, I could live on my own,”…

A Night of Philosophy”? What does it mean when we say this word “philosophy”? What does it mean when we say “night”? Does the former connote great ideas by celebrated thinkers who, by their elegance of presentation, illuminate for us the most profound questions? Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile? Is “night” an allusion to a metaphorical or metaphysical darkness? Perhaps we are speaking of twelve hours, 7 P.M. to 7 A.M.—perhaps, specifically, a recent Friday when thousands of people have come to the Cultural Services of…

After R.W. You could be home boiling a potof tea as you sit on your terrace,reading up on last night’s soccer shotbeneath a scarf of cirrus. You could be diving headlonginto the waves of Cocoa Beachor teaching Mao Tse-tungwhose theories are easy to reach or dropping off your dry cleaning,making the New Americans wealthier,or mowing your lawn, greeningup, but isn’t this healthier? Just imagine the hours you’renot squandering away,or the antlike minutes fritteredwith a tentative fiancé. Your whole body agrees you’drather lie here like a snailin my arm’s crook, nudeand oblivious of all e-mails. Yes, it’s nearly one o’clock,but we have more reasonsto kiss, to engage in small talk.For one, these blissful seasons are short, & tomorrow is neverinsured, so bounce downstairs:pour us glasses of whatever,a tray of crackers, Bosc…

“I really need to stop making so many white girls,” God, played by Paul Giamatti, groans, on Comedy Central’s “Inside Amy Schumer.” In this sketch, the blond ditz “Amy Schumer”—a self-lacerating version of the comedian who plays her—finds out that she’s got herpes from a hookup. Her irritated Creator notes that this is the first time she’s prayed to him in years. Schumer explains that she’s a role model now, and that young girls shouldn’t see her buying Valtrex. God says he’ll have to destroy a village in Uzbekistan to cure her; she’s cool with that. However, she refuses his demand that she stop drinking. “Can I just blow you?” she whines. “I’m gay,” he says, disgusted. Raunchy, rough, a destabilizing mixture of daffy and caustic, Schumer’s series débuted under…

ALL INVOLVED, by Ryan Gattis (Ecco). This novel, set in Los Angeles in 1992, chronicles the six days of riots after the Rodney King verdict. The action takes place on the periphery, outside “active rioting sites” and official casualty counts. A sprawling cast of characters, linked by violence, includes gang members, innocent bystanders, emergency personnel, and civilians turned vigilantes. Gattis employs shifts of perspective that blur the division between victims and perpetrators. It is plain that the desperation in these characters’ lives is not an anomaly; the riot does not create but, rather, exposes an already endemic brutality. “There’s a hidden America inside the one we portray to the world,” a firefighter observes. The novel, simultaneously empathetic and unsparing, succeeds in making this visible. THE SHADOW OF THE CRESCENT…

In 1997, the artist Mark Leckey returned to England after a few years in America, during which he couldn’t stop thinking about England. Leckey, who was in his mid-thirties, was nostalgic for the carefree tribalism of his youth, which was spent with friends at soccer matches and dance clubs. He devoted the next two years to making something that would express this sense of yearning—and also, ideally, exorcise it. The result, a spellbinding fifteen-minute video collage titled “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,” consists of found footage loosely documenting the history of British dance culture, from the discos and all-night northern-soul parties of the seventies to the illegal warehouse raves and decadent night clubs of the eighties and nineties. The fact that the dancing and the audio are rarely synchronized only heightens…