Innholdsfortegnelse for Jan-13-14 i The New Yorker

REBECCA MEAD (“WRITTEN OFF,” P. 36), a staff writer, will publish “My Life in Middlemarch” this month. ADAM GOPNIK (“THE PEOPLE WHO PASS,” P. 22) has been writing for the magazine since 1986. His books include “The Table Comes First” and “Winter.” LAWRENCE WRIGHT (COMMENT, P. 17), a staff writer, is the author of “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” and, most recently, “Going Clear.” JOHN HODGMAN (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 29) brings his one-man show, “I Stole Your Dad,” to the Under the Radar festival, at the Public Theatre, this month. EVAN OSNOS (“CONFUCIUS COMES HOME,” P. 30) is the author of “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China,” which comes out in May. BEN MCGRATH (“SAMBA SOCCER,” P. 44)…

SINCE THE HEYDAY of the French New Wave, movie lovers have longed for a successor—another group of like-minded Parisbased filmmakers who help one another and are also endowed with inspiration and originality. Recent New York screenings of Sophie Letourneur’s “Les Coquillettes” and Guillaume Brac’s “A World Without Women” suggest that there’s something new in the air over there. Perhaps the most flamboyant film to come from this batch of young directors, Antonin Peretjatko’s “The Rendez-Vous of Déjà Vu,” will be shown in the “First Look” series (running Jan. 10-19, at Museum of the Moving Image), which also includes two documentaries that put it in context. Peretjatko’s film is a loopy and audacious comedy with an explicitly political setting. It centers on a group of young adults who, in the face…

THE NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD BRITISH singer-songwriter Jake Bugg has visited New York City often in the past thirteen months, headlining bigger venues each time: the Slipper Room, Bowery Ballroom, Webster Hall. This week, he and the same drummer and bassist he’s toured with all year come to Terminal 5, a forbidding three-story space near Eleventh Avenue that evokes a concrete opera house. Wherever Bugg plays, and whatever the size of the crowd—whether he’s in a small room, solo, or opening for the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park with his band—his presence is the same: hardworking, laconic, and polite, all his energy channelled into his music, which ranges from folk to skiffle to rock. He’s not a dancer or a vamper or even a head-bobber, and he doesn’t tell stories between songs. He…

Please. No one is criticizing. No one. It just needs to be made clear that the noisy celebration (mostly from the music—oy) one recent weeknight in the vaulted-ceilinged brass-chandeliered refectory of the General Theological Seminary, in Chelsea—an event attended by hundreds of stylish strivers wearing red Kabbalah bracelets and red felt yarmulkes imprinted with the host company’s logo—was a prototype. This was not—not yet, anyway—the gold standard for a fusion bar mitzvah. The principal celebrant was Jonah Disend, forty-one years old, trim, dark-bearded, the founder and chief executive of Redscout, a branding and product-development company that opened for business in his apartment in 2000 and now occupies two floors of a building in the Flatiron district plus an office in San Francisco, with clients all over the map. Among Redscout’s…

The Gare du Nord, the great cast-iron train station at the northern end of Paris, has always been a tense place—tendu, as the French say. They regard it as both stressful by nature and drawn taut by difference. Every European train station has some of that character: on a continent where rail still carries people in large numbers, many kinds of people come together where the railroad ends. Outside the Gare du Nord, there are people streaming from the Eurostar, tourists looking for a week’s pleasure, mingled with travellers recently arrived from Bulgaria and Romania, looking for a job or a new life. The kinds cross, with the French, permanently frowning and suspicious, among them, and the tension rises. On a damp, cold, smoky November morning, a group of four…

Early one morning in November, five hundred clinicians gathered at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott for the twenty-third annual Renfrew Center Foundation conference, devoted to the understanding and treatment of eating disorders. The keynote speaker, Jennifer Weiner, the best-selling novelist, was there to offer a personal perspective on weight issues, with a talk entitled “The F Word: On Growing Up Big, Speaking Out Loud and Raising Betty Friedan Girls in a Britney Spears World.” The Renfrew foundation’s Web site described Weiner’s 2001 début, “Good in Bed,” now in its fifty-seventh printing, as “the first ‘chick-lit’ novel featuring a large protagonist.” The character, Cannie Shapiro, established the template for a number of Weiner’s subsequent heroines: clever, quippy young women whose dress size tends to be well into the double digits. Her characters…

When Isaac and I first met, at the university, we both pretended that the campus and the streets of the capital were as familiar to us as the dirt paths of the rural villages where we had grown up and lived until only a few months earlier. The capital in those days was booming with people, money, new cars, and even newer buildings, most of which had been thrown up quickly after independence, in a rush fuelled by the ecstatic promises of a socialist, Pan-African future that, almost ten years later, was still supposedly just around the corner. On the bus ride to the capital, I gave up all the names my parents had given me. I was almost twenty-five but, by other measures, much younger. I shed those names…

Enthusiasts of the maker movement foresee a third industrial revolution. ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL In January of 1903, the small Boston magazine Handicraft ran an essay by the Harvard professor Denman W. Ross, who argued that the American Arts and Crafts movement was in deep crisis. The movement was concerned with promoting good taste and self-fulfillment through the creation and the appreciation of beautiful objects; its more radical wing also sought to advance worker autonomy. The problem was that no one in America seemed to need its products. The solution, according to Ross, was to provide technical education to the critics and the consumers of art alike. This would stimulate demand for high-quality objects and encourage more workers to take up craftsmanship. The cause of the Arts and Crafts movement…

The director of “Labor Day” is Jason Reitman. In “Thank You for Smoking,” “Juno,” “Up in the Air,” and “Young Adult,” he presented a fairly full set of comic credentials, even if most of them were edged in black. “Labor Day,” based on the novel by Joyce Maynard, is his first straight-up drama, with the smiles cut off: a risky move, as Woody Allen demonstrated when he stepped from “Annie Hall” into the gloom of “Interiors.” The action unfolds over the Labor Day weekend of 1987, in the home of Adele (Kate Winslet) and her son, Henry (Gattlin Griffith), who is thirteen. Adele is divorced, and incapacitated by sorrow. So we are told, in voice-over, by the grownup Henry (Tobey Maguire), who reflects on past events and makes sure that…

MAN ON WIRE Ryan Lizza, in his article on the secret surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency, offers a frightening account of why N.S.A. overreach has been allowed to persist (“State of Deception,” December 16th). It could have included one more fact: the director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, told NBC News that he had given Senator Ron Wy den the “least most untruthful” answer during a hearing. Beyond all the Fourth Amendment issues raised by engaging in extensive domestic surveillance without probable cause, the Clapper episode makes it clear that knowingly providing false testimony to an intelligence-oversight committee carries no consequences. When government officials deceive Congress, they deceive citizens. There ought to be a penalty for that. Gene Krzyzynski Tonawanda, N.Y. Lizza writes about an…

157 Duane St. (212-587-1089) YOU CAN GET AN ANIMAL’S face on a salad just about anywhere these days—even in midtown, at Xi’an Famous Foods, where bits of lamb tongue, nose, and cheek are jumbled up with chili-coated cucumber in a gloriously oily mess. (Perhaps soon we’ll see a whole head at Chop’t: “Cartilage & Crunch.”) And yet it’s still a little bit thrilling to hear that the special at Khe-Yo, a new Laotian restaurant situated amid the baby gyms and branded nail salons of Tribeca, is a pig’s-face salad. Even more so is the fact that the dish turns out to be rich, springy, and bright. Khe-Yo is not, improbably enough, the only place in the neighborhood with a connection to Laos: a couple of blocks away, Mangez Avec Moi…

Edward Snowden has started a critical debate about the legality and the effectiveness of the N.S.A.’s practice of collecting unlimited records of telephone calls made to, from, and within the United States. Last month, two federal judges came to opposing conclusions about these issues. On December 16th, Judge Richard J. Leon, in Washington, D.C., ruled that the indiscriminate hoarding violates the Fourth Amendment right to privacy and its prohibition of unreasonable searches. Two weeks later, in New York, Judge William H. Pauley III ruled that the metadata-collection program was lawful and effective. Judge Pauley invoked the example of Khalid al-Mihdhar, a Saudi jihadist who worked for Al Qaeda. On 9/11, he was one of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. In early 2000,…

Once upon a time, in the deeper reaches of your cable box, you could stumble across a show called “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” The program, which bounced across several networks from 1988 to 1999 and was known to its devotees as MST3K, was about a goofball named Joel, who, having been marooned in space and forced to watch crummy movies like “Teenagers from Outer Space” and “War of the Colossal Beast,” quipped his way through it all with the help of his wisecracking robot pals. The premise was shaky, but the execution was so delightful that the show inspired an industry of riffing on lame pop culture, from “Pop Up Video” to “Talk Soup” to “Chelsea Lately” to everyone live-tweeting the Oscars with zingers like “Nice dress—not!” A while back,…

Look, I never want to tell stories about my children, because it always seems a little lazy. Children tend to be sort of dumb, and, in the end, the stories are always the same: children say hilarious things, and I am old and dying. So when I tell you these stories about my children let’s just pretend they are about my cats. So my cats and I were watching “Downton Abbey” last year. (I have two cats, one girl cat, who is twelve—in cat years, obviously—and a boy cat, who is seven.) And at one point my younger cat turned to me and said, “What is that human woman trying to say to that other man?” And I said, “That is Mary Crawley. She is trying to tell Matthew that…

The last time Brazil hosted the World Cup, in 1950, two hundred thousand people—a tenth of the population of Rio de Janeiro—streamed into the newly completed Maracanã Stadium to watch their beloved national team, the Seleção, compete for the title against Uruguay. A monumental concrete bowl, intended to rival the Christ statue atop Corcovado, the Maracanã resembled a spaceship and was meant to embody, as the British journalist Alex Bellos writes in “Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life,” not only Brazil’s athletic ambition but also “the country’s place in the modern world.” Its capacity was greater by several magnitudes than any other Brazilian stadium. Some ten thousand men had contributed to its construction, practicing goal celebrations while they worked. They’d even, somehow, finished ahead of schedule. Then Brazil lost, 2–1.…

I judged them very carefully, as though I’d been given the charge to determine which are good or bad, and they were all good, even the slightly overripe ones with bruises had a bitter ferment that only brightened the scent. And the too young ones, firm and slightly sour, not yet softened by the sun. And the ripe ones, which felt like biting into my own flesh, slightly carnivorous. They had been elegant in the tree, tiny coquettes blushing more and more until I picked them, then they were minimalist and matte-colored in wooden bowls, so barely furred one couldn’t help but clothe them, enclose them with your hand, caress each one thoroughly before taking a bite, exploring the handsome freckles left from some minor blight. Now I stand under…

On my way to the post office this morning, I was feeling Pretty balanced, pretty good. I looked at the movie posters; I passed the tattoo-and-piercing establishment. Some Restaurant was frying up a batch of onions. I got over that and kept walking. I retrieved my mail. If I can be someone’s entertainment by being myself, I have no regrets. I believed in my footsteps. I crossed To walk through the gazebo. There were a few marigolds. The sun was tilted and coolly golden. A crippled woman Watched me from her car. It was a Tuesday; I remember that much.…

NOW PLAYING Ain’t Misbehavin’ Almost twenty years after his last political documentary, the director Marcel Ophüls (“The Sorrow and the Pity”), now eighty-six, delivers a self-portrait that ranges from the harshly self-revealing to the cheerfully self-promoting. Along the way, he offers lightning-flash illuminations of the fault lines of history and art at which he has had the equivocal fortune to live. His father, Max Ophüls, one of the supreme classic-era directors, and a Jew, was on the Nazis’ enemies list, and Marcel delivers a child’s-eye view of the family’s terrified wanderings through occupied France. Their arrival in Hollywood, in 1941, gives rise to memorable thumbnail portraits of Bertolt Brecht, Marlene Dietrich, Otto Preminger, and Preston Sturges, as well as to such intriguing byways as his father’s unrealized film with…

39 Essex St. (212-253-7747) When Mike Jarmuz, the owner of this tiny brick-walled wine bar and performance space, first moved to New York, he drove a cab, and one of his fares, surprised to see such a young guy at the wheel, remarked that taxi-driving was an “old man’s hustle.” The same might be said about owning a shop on the Lower East Side, where a legacy of independent art has segued into big profits, but Old Man Hustle celebrates raucous amateurism. The wine list is small but affordable, and hot dogs, topped with ethnic-inspired combinations like chopped onions and teriyaki sauce, are offered sporadically. There’s a stage in the rear, no bigger than a dunk tank, and the microphone is always on, goading visitors to perform. One recent evening,…

As 2013 wound to a close and dismal year-end assessments poured in on the performance of the Obama Administration—the N.S.A. surveillance scandal, the botched Obamacare rollout—the President was looking for idea men. His move was to fly in a cadre of brainy Silicon Valley types. But he might have also dropped by Harlem, where a fund-raiser for the Burning Man Project, the nonprofit spinoff of the annual arts festival and bacchanal in the Nevada desert, had taken on a chin-stroking air. “You know what I’m really interested in?” Larry Harvey, the festival’s founder, said, in his remarks onstage. “Governance.” Burning Man is no Model U.N., but as a congregation of self-appointed outliers in silly hats it was a forerunner of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. The festival began…

Con artists are greedy hucksters who sell us dreams that never come true. But Americans have a soft spot for them. Witness the current success of “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle,” films that celebrate (sort of) the art of the grift. Somehow, living through two bubbles in which plenty of investors and homeowners were suckered by sugarplum visions hasn’t dampened our appetite for watching spectacles like Christian Bale duping almost everyone he encounters, including F.B.I. agents, and Leonardo DiCaprio hypnotizing a mark into buying worthless stock. It has ever been thus. The phrase “confidence man” was popularized in an 1849 New York Herald article detailing the arrest of William Thompson, a man of “genteel appearance” who for months had been approaching strangers on the street and somehow…

In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China’s most important philosopher. The temple, which shared a wall with my kitchen, was silent. It had gnarled cypress trees and a wooden pavilion that loomed above my roof like a conscience. In the mornings, I took a cup of coffee outside and listened to the wakeup sounds next door: the brush of a broom across the flagstones, the squeak of a faucet, the hectoring of the magpies overhead. It was a small miracle that the shrine had survived. Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West. He stressed compassion, ritual, and duty. “There…

In the medieval darkness of the Holland Tunnel with luminous green paint, on whitewashed walls of the Madrid zoo, in his thick-fingered handwriting onto dust at the dry Casablanca aquarium “When last I held you in my arms, my love, the West African Black Rhinoceros was still magnificent and still alive...” What have you been doing to Paul Vermeersch? He has searched for you encyclopedically in Albacete, in Zagora, in those cities whose names have changed, till the maps he relies on wear out. In what disguise did you leave him? So he will not recognize your gait anymore, or your stare out from a diorama. Hunt and Torment. Call but no Response. In the end words of love reveal just yourself. Not why or the wished-for thing. Only the…

For Devonté Hynes, 2013 was either the best year ever or the worst, depending on what’s more important, success or possessions. In November, the twenty-eight-year-old songwriter, performer, and producer released “Cupid Deluxe,” the second album credited to his third project, Blood Orange. The rec ord, which is an excellent assemblage of soigné R. & B., received almost unanimous praise and spread faster than any of his previous work. (For a week in September, underestimating his own popularity, Hynes was playing a rough draft of the album to strangers who responded to a tweet. He gave one kid his iPhone and let him walk around Washington Square Park with it for half an hour.) Hynes had become more visible toward the end of 2012, when he wrote breakout hits for Sky…

EMPRESS DOWAGER CIXI, by Jung Chang (Knopf). The author of “Wild Swans” sets out to rehabilitate the reputation of a woman who, she argues, helped modernize China. Cixi seized power in 1861, after her five-year-old son ascended to the throne. Under her leadership, China opened up to Western trade and ideas and experienced a surge of prosperity. Over the next forty-seven years, her influence fluctuated, as first her son and then an adopted son assumed power, but her political sense always remained acute. While Chang acknowledges Cixi’s missteps—such as allowing the Boxers to fight against a Western invasion, which led to widespread slaughter—she sees her as a woman whose energy, farsightedness, and ruthless pragmatism transformed a country. AMSTERDAM, by Russell Shorto (Doubleday). This entertaining history explores the Dutch capital’s…