Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar-31-14 i The New Yorker

MALCOLM GLADWELL (“SACRED AND PROFANE,” P. 22), a staff writer, is the author of “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.” GEORGE PACKER (COMMENT, P. 17) won the 2013 National Book Award for nonfiction for “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” which has just come out in paperback. REEVES WIEDEMAN (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 20) is a member of the magazine’s editorial staff. NICHOLAS THOMPSON (“MY FRIEND, STALIN’S DAUGHTER,” P. 30) is the editor of newyorker.com. His book “The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War” was published in 2009. BEN MCGRATH (“THE FOURTH QUARTER,” P. 38) has been writing for The New Yorker since 2002. JOHN LAHR (“JOY RIDE,” P. 50)…

21 Cooper Sq. (212-228-3344) ANDRÉ BALAZS, the real-estate developer and hotelier behind the Chateau Marmont and the Standard—with his golden tan and chiselled features, tastefully unbuttoned shirts and glamorous companions—does not look like a man who owns a cow. But there she is: Narcissa, her moony eyes staring blankly from a sepia-toned photo hanging next to the bar of the restaurant that Balazs named for her, on the ground floor of the Standard in the East Village. And there’s Balazs, his carefully mussed hair glistening in the incandescent light as he glides between two dining rooms that evoke a very rich and stylish person’s idea of a farmhouse, all sleek blond wood and subtle lace curtains and bespoke canvas chair covers. There’s nothing remotely rustic about the crowd, many of…

SINCE ITS OPENING, in 2008, the West Village music club (Le) Poisson Rouge has boldly redefined the New York concert experience, replacing the ostensibly stuffy feel of a mainline classical venue with a relaxed atmosphere, often with table seating, more akin to that of a jazz event. This was all healthy, and inevitable, catching up with the tastes of a younger generation for whom musical styles—classical, folk, world music, whatever—are arranged on a spectrum, not in a hierarchy. Yet those “stuffy” older places have their advantages—like good acoustics, which L.P.R. lacks. The bulk of the venue’s schedule is taken up by non-classical groups, and for contemporary classical artists that likewise use amplification, this isn’t much of an issue. But for shows with “unplugged” ensembles such as string quartets or solo…

In 2010, Matt Berninger was a rock star, and his younger brother, Tom, lived in their parents’ basement in Cincinnati. Today, Matt is still a rock star—he’s the front man of the lamentation-inclined band the National—and Tom lives in Matt’s garage, in Venice, California. In the intervening period, Matt hired Tom as the band’s assistant tour manager, trying to get him out of the house and out of his decadelong funk. A few days ago, over pints of Guinness in Hell’s Kitchen, the brothers agreed that Tom sucked at the job. “I was the wrecking ball in the world of indie-rockness,” Tom said. He was fired after eight months. But he’d brought a camera on the road, and when he went home he felt there might be a film in…

When Clive Doyle was a teen-ager, in the nineteen-fifties, he and his mother met an itinerant preacher outside their church, in Melbourne, Australia. He was a big, gruff Scotsman named Daniel Smith. The Doyles were devout Seventh-Day Adventists. But Smith was the follower of a self-proclaimed prophet named Victor Houteff, who became an Adventist just after the First World War and parted ways with the Church a decade later. The Doyles listened to Smith’s account of the Houteff teachings until the small hours of the morning and were impressed. “We were taught that if someone comes with a message based on the Bible, instead of trying to fight it, instead of trying to put it down or trying to prove it wrong, we should study the Bible to perceive whether…

Kobe Bryant and a business associate have a running bet on the staying power of the pop stars Katy Perry and Justin Bieber. Bryant, who wears self-discipline like a badge, has long favored the more predictable Perry’s odds, and found in Bieber’s recent tabloid episodes hints of a looming implosion: talent spurned. As he and the associate walked into the dining room at the Four Seasons, in downtown Miami, in late January, the associate, a Belieber, mentioned that Bryant had been giving him a hard time about it for years. He seemed almost ready to concede. That morning, elsewhere in Miami, Bieber had been caught drag racing and booked for driving under the influence. Bryant was a child star, too. In 1996, fourteen years before LeBron James earned infamy by…

The women in my wife’s family all snored, and when we visited for the holidays every winter I got no sleep. Elida’s three sisters and their bombproof husbands loved to gather at her parents’ house in Golden Valley, an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis. The house was less than twenty years old, but the sly tricks of the contractor were evident in every sagging sill, skewed jamb, cracked plaster wall, tilted handrail, and, most significantly, in the general lack of insulation that caused the outer walls to ice up and the inside to resound. Every night the sounds were different. Helplessly cognizant, I formed mental scenarios while drifting in and out of sleep. One memorable night, I tossed and turned in a metalworking shop. From the far end of the second-floor…

In the stately world of academic presses, it isn’t often that advance orders and publicity for a book prompt a publisher to push forward its publication date. But that’s what Belknap, an imprint of Harvard University Press, did for “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” a sweeping account of rising inequality by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Reviewing the French edition of Piketty’s book, which came out last year, Branko Milanovic, a former senior economist at the World Bank, called it “one of the watershed books in economic thinking.” The Economist said that it could change the way we think about the past two centuries of economic history. Certainly, no economics book in recent years has received this sort of attention. Months before its American publication date, which was switched from…

The new musical “Rocky” (at the Winter Garden) is an immense spectacle. But it’s a spectacle of waste. Based on the 1976 movie, which starred Sylvester Stallone as the eponymous working-class hero, the show centers on Rocky’s struggle to love and hope in Philadelphia’s dirty world of boxing. Stallone wrote the scripts for the original film and all five sequels, and although this show borrows little from the later movies, the oversized production—directed by Alex Timbers, with a book by Stallone and Thomas Meehan, and music and lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, respectively—has the unvanquished air of being part of a franchise, a canned commodity destined to sell and sell. The film, which was shot in just twenty-eight days, on a million-dollar budget, was one of the great…

RENEWED ENERGY I am involved in the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva, Switzerland, which is similar in scale to that of ITER (“A Star in a Bottle,” by Raffi Khatchadourian, March 3rd). My team recently started discussing how to fund our next, even larger project, and whether it is socially responsible to do so. Our situation is very different, as our quest is to understand how the universe is structured, what we are made of, and how it all fits together. If, how, and on what time scale this will lead to practical applications cannot be answered at this time. The case for fusion energy does not need to be made, however; we cannot burn carbon-based fuels for centuries, and it seems unlikely that solar,…

235 W. 12th St. There are perks to being at Wallflower: chief among them is drinking a Calvados-and-cider cocktail with a polka-dotted straw from a little soda bottle in which it has been carbonated. If only the over-all experience were as fizzy. The cocktail list is heavy on brand names and obscure ingredients (bergamot juice, allspice dram) and inevitably requires smartphone-assisted navigation, yet the resulting creations are often one-note. Mother’s Milk, made with kaffir lime and oolong-tea-infused Avuá Prata Cachaça, Thai coconut milk, and lime juice, was like the final stage of a juice detox: creamy, frothy, and not much else. The food options are disconcertingly refined for a place that encourages serious drinking: there are some sandwiches, but one’s made with foie gras, and another with brandade. If you…

Annexation has an ugly sound, owing to an unhappy past. The term describes, among other tragedies, Saddam Hussein’s attempt, in 1990, to swallow Kuwait whole, as the nineteenth province of Iraq; Indonesia’s invasion, in 1975, of East Timor; Morocco’s absorption, the same year, of Western Sahara; and Israel’s declaration, after the 1967 war, of East Jerusalem as part of a united capital. The German word for it is,Anschluss. Like most coerced unions, annexations come wreathed in clouds of lofty, dishonest language—key themes are popular will, historic grievance, divine providence—but they almost always happen at the end of a gun. Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Kremlin last week, asking a compliant Duma to ratify Crimea’s self-declared status as a new Russian republic, was a memorable example of annexation rhetoric. Putin opened…

Earlier this month, a group of Knicks fans, exhausted by their team’s ineptitude—most recently, seven straight losses—decided to stage a protest before an upcoming game. “I feel like I’m in a damaged relationship,” Michael Brown, one of the protest’s organizers, told the Times. The abusive partner was James Dolan, the C.E.O. of Cablevision and the owner of the Knicks, who has been accused for years of meddling in the team’s basketball affairs, to ill effect, and then refusing to explain his decisions. In a perfect world, Dolan would sell the team, but the group settled for more practical demands, which they published on Facebook: that Dolan be more open, and that he leave the team’s coaches and managers to do their jobs. Momentum built—Whoopi Goldberg mentioned the protest on “The…

I am certainly not going back into the house where something bad or creepy has happened to me already. I am never going to a carnival or a fair, particularly if there is happy calliope music playing. You will not find me owning, or spending any time with, a ventriloquist’s dummy, or the kind of doll that “walks” and “talks.” If I become an astronaut, am I leaving the spaceship under any circumstances? No, I am not—not to fix anything on the outside of the spaceship while tethered to it by one not-thatstrong cord; not to explore the terrain of the planet we land on, a dusty place that looks like it has no life-forms but surely will have, ones that do not wish me well. If I get arrested…

People exchange words, words exchange people. Every day love plays with another tongue, with other lips, and wears thongs underneath its habit. The worst that can happen—says the word—is to get stuck to things, that’s as boring as a conversation after sex with someone you don’t know and do not want to know. Sometimes person bumps into a person, death into a death, cat into a cat. Then they clamp their mouths shut and end up in the dictionary forever. (Translated, from the Polish, by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.)…

I did not lead my life although my life followed me, not in lockstep or formed flight but in the second line, calling me new names, Mr. Danke Schoen, Dr. I’m Sure It’s Nothing. A parade of sorts because isn’t life just one person after another, a whispering campaign of family sayings: “At the top of the mountain, keep climbing,” and “Thunder’s the promise, fulfillment’s the rain.” Behind me, red-headed girls from Chelsea whose collars match their cuffs, a trip to Itchycoo Park, and the cats Mirabelle and Edward who wake me at dawn though both are dead. Yes, it rained but there were not a lot of tears, only a very large one breaking over everything. Dogs barked but the parade went on, and a life followed me though…

There is a remarkable moment in Elena Ferrante’s novel “The Lost Daughter” when the narrator, a middle-aged professor of literature, recalls a scene from her married life. She has just quarrelled with her husband, and wants to run from the house, “forget it and forget everything.” Her two young daughters enter the kitchen. One of them, Bianca, picks up an orange and a knife, hands them to her mother, and asks her to peel the fruit. Make a snake, she says. The girls sit in front of their mother, quietly expectant. “I felt their gazes longing to tame me,” the narrator recalls, As often in Ferrante’s pleasingly austere writing, a savage ambivalence hangs over domestic life. Home, family, maternity are actually embraced and ideally escaped. but more brilliant was the…

Tall, awkward, and heavily shod, Vivian Maier was a nanny. Born in 1926, she never married, and had no children. Much of her working life was spent in Chicago. Toward the end, alone and truculent, she lived in Rogers Park, on the southwestern corner of Lake Michigan. A neighbor recalls her eating cold cornedbeef hash out of a can. Maier had cared for many children, some of whom remembered her with fear, others—the majority—with gratitude and wonder. Once known, she was not easy to forget, but to the wider world she remained invisible. She died in 2009, and left no heirs. She did, however, leave a legacy. A trove of her belongings—she hoarded almost every document, receipt, and tchotchke that came her way—was moved to a storage facility. Other boxes…

NINA ARIANDA CATAPULTED to fame with her first role out of college, as Vanda in David Ives’s “Venus in Fur,” at Classic Stage Company in 2010; when the show moved to Broadway, the following year, she won the Tony. Arianda holds an audience with more than her odd-pretty Ukrainian looks; her seductive power lies in her catenation of bold intelligence, shy vulnerability, and classic comic timing. After popping up in a few small film roles (see if you can find her in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”), she returns to center stage, alongside Michael Esper and Tina Benko, in David Grimm’s “Tales from Red Vienna,” for Manhattan Theatre Club. Arianda stars as a First World War widow who turns to the world’s oldest profession. MUSEUMS SHORT LIST METROPOLITAN MUSEUM…

FILM FORUM’S COMPLETE HITCHCOCK RETROSPECTIVE reaches a suitable climax on its last day (March 27) with a showing of “Frenzy,” the director’s fifty-second movie. Released in 1972, “Frenzy” has been partly forgotten, put into half-shadow by the extraordinary popularity of “Psycho” (1960) and the extraordinary renown of “Vertigo” (1958), a movie that, in a recent international poll of eight hundred and fifty writers, academics, distributors, programmers, and critics, displaced “Citizen Kane” as the greatest film ever made. With its sharp-edged shower and its dried-up corpse, “Psycho” is a loony pop-gothic horror movie, and I’ve never taken it very seriously. “Vertigo” is in a different league, and it prepares us for the very real—and quite different—virtues of “Frenzy.” At the heart of “Vertigo” is the perverse longing of a middle-aged San…

Haiku has been called the original Twitter, treating the vicissitudes of life in seventeen syllables: “Wrapped in my work; / all the while the wheat is growing / ever taller.” The author of that poem is Herman Van Rompuy, the former Belgian Prime Minister, who now leads the European Council, which comprises the heads of each of the twenty-eight member states of the European Union. (He is a bit like the President of the Presidents of the E.U.) In 2010, Van Rompuy published “Haiku,” a book of poems. Recently, he released a second collection, “Haiku 2,” which features hooting owls, bobbing daffodils, and a “solitary oak, / rammed into the field, single, / no likes around.” It makes you wonder if the executive branch doesn’t get a little lonely. “Dealing…

Honey Florem Peach Frutti is not the alias of a porn star. It is the name of a bracelet by the French jewelry designer Victoire de Castellane. The bracelet looks like a succulent flower with twenty carats’ worth of yellow, pink, and orange sapphires and eight free-shape diamonds. It would definitely jazz up a black sweater, even more so if you paired it, on your other wrist, with its fraternal twin, Honey Florem Red Frutti: yellow gold, with ruby and sapphire reproductive organs. In case you didn’t know, flowers have sex. And the women for whom Castellane designs her jewels are, one infers, no shrinking violets on that score. Her work celebrates carnal pleasure. The designer is a Parisian in her early fifties. Since her youth, she has projected the…

On April 21, 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin, bounded down the stairs of a Swissair plane at Kennedy Airport. She was forty one years old and wore an elegant white double-breasted blazer. “Hello there, everybody!” she exclaimed to the crowd of reporters on the tarmac. “I am very happy to be here.” Svetlana immediately became the Cold War’s most famous defector. She was the only living child of Stalin, who had died in 1953, and she had been known as “the little princess of the Kremlin.” Until a few months earlier, she had never left the Soviet Union. But, at Kennedy, she talked of the freedom and opportunity that she expected to find in America. She was coquettish and funny. She spoke fluent English. The Times published…

By nine-thirty in the morning on Martin Luther King Day, a blustery Arctic wind had emptied West Fortysecond Street of most pedestrians, but on the neon-lit fourth floor of the New 42nd Street Studios the mood was the opposite of frigid. It was the first day of work on a musical adaptation of Woody Allen’s 1994 movie “Bullets Over Broadway,” a high-spirited story of gangsters, showgirls, and theatre, set in Manhattan in 1929, just before the crash. (The show opens at the St. James, on West Fortyfourth Street, on April 10th.) Susan Stroman, the show’s director and choreographer (Allen wrote the book), had arrived early for a ten-o’clock call and was inspecting a miniature model of the set, designed by Santo Loquasto. Two weeks before, she had taken two dance…

When it comes to “The Americans,” FX’s eighties spy drama, you gotta start with the wigs. There’s the Vamp. The feathered Farrah. The Clark, a nerdy number that resembles a flattened cairn terrier. There’s the Handyman’s Ponytail, the Blond Meringue, and the Klute—all stored, presumably, in some magnificent wig safe in a house outside Washington, D.C., where Philip and Elizabeth Jennings have lived for nearly twenty years, in a marriage that was brokered by the K.G.B. The wigs are splashy fun—at times, they’re as over the top as anything in “American Hustle”—but they’re not a superficial element of the series. “The Americans,” now in its second season, is a show about human personality as a cruel performance, even (and sometimes especially) with the people we claim to love. It’s about…

EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF, by Teju Cole (Random House). In this slim novel, previously published in Nigeria, a man travels from the U.S., where he lives, to visit family and friends in Lagos, his childhood home. Accompanied by the author’s photographs, the narrative consists of digressive accounts of random encounters around the city, which is viewed with both the curiosity of a foreigner and the intimacy of a native. The narrator is infuriated by local corruption—the threat it poses to everyday activity and to the serenity he needs to work. Yet he also feels pity for American writers, who “must hoe the same arid patch for stories.” In Nigeria, “the pungent details are all around me.” IN THE ORCHARD, THE SWALLOWS, by Peter Hobbs (Europa). The narrator…