Innholdsfortegnelse for Apr-07-14 i The New Yorker

EVAN OSNOS (“CHEMICAL VALLEY,” P. 38), who is now based in Washington, reported from China for the magazine from 2008 to 2013. His new book, “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China,” comes out in May. JEFFREY TOOBIN (COMMENT, P. 19), a staff writer, is the author of “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court.” ANDREW MARANTZ (“OLD SCHOOL,” P. 24) is a member of the magazine’s editorial staff. CHARLES SIMIC (POEM, P. 28) won the 2014 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. His book “New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012” came out last year. KELLY STOUT (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 31) joined the editorial staff in 2010. KATHRYN SCHULZ (“FINAL FORMS,” P. 32), the author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin…

329 Greenwich St. (212-966-9255) AN ARANCINO IS AN ARANCINO is an arancino. Even when it’s filled with bone marrow and it sits in a puddle of Parmigiano aioli. Just as a deep-fried rice ball will always taste like oil and starch, a shrimp popper doesn’t taste all that different from its battered-jalapeño brethren. And seven dollars for three pigs in a blanket? This isn’t Costco, but you wouldn’t necessarily guess that in a blind taste test. It’s hard to know how much ironic distance was intended from TGI Fridays when Bill Telepan, the Upper West Side’s undisputed king of the greenmarket, put together the menu for his downtown venture, Telepan Local, but you might wish there’d been more. Not that there’s anything wrong with fried food. Once past the bar…

ON FRIDAY, AT THE 92ND Street Y, Edward Henkel, the associate director of its Harkness Dance Center, will oversee a panel on the role of dance in opera-a tortured and exciting subject. Probably the most awaited show of the spring-summer dance season is Mark Morris’s production of Handel’s "Acis and Galatea" (1718), a short pastoral opera (nymphs, shepherds), which, reportedly, was the Handel piece most performed during his lifetime. Morris believes that a lot of Baroque music is perfect for dancing, partly because it was so often based on dance forms-minuet, gigue, passapied, etc. Though we don’t know whether the original "Acis and Galatea” had dancers, there will be sixteen of them in Morris’s version. If not in “Acis,” dance figured heavily in opera from the seventeenth to the late…

Roseland Ballroom is the latest (but surely not the last) of New York City’s storied music venues to close its doors. Lady Gaga’s seven-show run, which began last Friday, on her twentyeighth birthday, will be the final one at the Fifty-second Street theatre, which has been at its present location since 1958, when it took over a building that once housed the Gay Blades Ice Rink. The three-story structure, with its Art Deco bar, will soon be razed and replaced with a fifty-nine-story residential tower. The place where Kurt Cobain miraculously recovered from a near O.D. to play a Nirvana show, in 1993, and where, in 2000, Fiona Apple had a spectacular mid-performance meltdown and fled the stage will be no more. For Gaga, the farewell shows mark her first…

One of the most influential hosts on hip-hop radio is a man named Peter Rosenberg. He is thirty-four years old and stocky, with a few days of stubble and a you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit approach to baldness. Hip-hop is an industry of calibrated personas, and Rosenberg, who was reared in an uppermiddle-class Maryland suburb, tries to project confidence without too much self-seriousness. “I will go toe to toe with almost anyone in terms of knowledge, trivia, and love of this music,” he told me. “That said, I don’t try to front like I’m cooler than I am.” He performs d.j. sets under the name Peter Rosenberg. He has called himself “the Jewish Johnny Carson,” and in particularly nebbishy moments—while ordering a salad with dressing on the side, or calling his wife to inquire…

It starts with a dead body, as so many mysteries do. A middle-aged man is found unconscious and rushed to a hospital. For four days, he lingers in a coma; on the fifth, he dies. The clues are few and dark and point in different directions. The man was a drug addict. He was diabetic. Some of his family members say that he acted strangely the last time they saw him conscious. Others disagree. The lab tests are inconclusive. Everything is inconclusive. If this were a mystery of the Conan Doyle kind, there would be a detective, and there would be a solution. In the event, there is neither. Instead, there is a young doctor, in her first year on the job, and there is a single piece of paper:…

Paul Espeseth, who was no longer taking the antidepressant Celexa, braced himself for a cataclysm at SeaWorld. He wondered only what form cataclysm would take. Espeseth had tried to veto this trip, making his case to his wife with a paraphrase of a cable-television exposé of the ocean theme park, one that neither he nor his wife had seen. Instead, his wife had performed judo on his argument, saying, “The girls should see these things they love before they vanish from the earth entirely.” So here he was. The first step, it seemed, involved flamingos. After he had hustled his four-year-old twins through the turnstiles and past the souvenirs, the stuffed-animal versions of the species they’d come to confront in fleshly actuality, his family followed the park’s contours and were…

DECODED, by Mai Jia, translated from the Chinese by Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This unusual spy thriller has neither page-turning plot twists nor a master villain. Instead, it fastidiously traces the childhood, the career, and the subsequent mental breakdown of a Chinese code-breaker named Rong Jinzhen, who is abandoned by his birth family in the early years of the last century and then recruited into China’s counter-intelligence service. Assigned to decipher two menacing codes, Rong breaks one but is unable to crack the other; his work prompts examination of the relationship between cryptography and psychology. Mai plays adroitly with literary genre and crafts a story of Borgesian subtlety and complexity that also feels specific to the politics and pathologies of revolutionary-era China. DUST, by…

THE MYTH OF APATHY As Nicholas Lemann writes, Abe Rosenthal was indeed responsible for creating a myth regarding the circumstances surrounding the murder of Kitty Genovese, but the myth was not, as Lemann suggests, that some three dozen people heard and failed to report screams on a March night fifty years ago (Books, March 10th). Instead, it was Rosenthal’s insistence that the cause was moral decay, urban alienation, or “apathy,” which Rosenthal considered a disease, “a symptom of a terrible reality in the human condition.” Unconvinced by Rosenthal’s claim that simply “by happenstance all thirty-eight did that night what each one alone might have done any night,” four colleagues—John Darley, Judith Rodin, Lee Ross, and Richard Nisbett—and I designed experiments to test the idea that the number that made…

514 Union St., Brooklyn (347-223-4410) On a recent evening, the Royal Palms’s truly enormous bouncer, Anthony, scanned the converted Gowanus warehouse: no high jinks seemed imminent from the thirty-somethings who milled around the perimeter of the ten regulation shuffleboard lanes, sipping tropical drinks from Mason jars, while a band played surf rock. Anthony had an official-looking earpiece, but rumor has it that it streams NPR. Ashley Albert (singer-songwriter of the children’s rock band the Jimmies) and Jonathan Schnapp (Web developer, piñata-maker) opened the space in February. Now they spend their nights roving past vintage Floridian pennants, by striped cabanas, and down to the courts to offer counsel to patrons. Cocktails are named for legends of the game—the Earl Ball is made with Old Forester bourbon, fresh pineapple and lemon juice,…

The Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s perpetually beleaguered health-care initiative, received a jolt of good news last week. As the first deadline for coverage in 2014 drew near, the Administration announced that the number of people who signed up had passed six million. That’s short of the original goal of seven million, owing largely to the disastrous launch of the federal Web site last fall. The methods for tallying beneficiaries, like everything else about the law, are being disputed, and regional disparities remain severe. Still, it’s clear that the law is helping a lot of Americans. Three million young people remain on their parents’ health-care plans; more than eight million uninsured people are eligible for Medicaid; and, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than a hundred…

Jonathan Schell, who died last week, was for many years a central figure both at this magazine and in the intellectual life of the nation. He wrote arguably the most important book of reporting from Vietnam (“The Village of Ben Suc”) and the most perceptive reflections on the Watergate scandal (“The Time of Illusion”). But he will be remembered first for his book “The Fate of the Earth.” In it, and particularly in the first section, “A Republic of Insects and Grass,” he managed to do what no one had accomplished in the first four decades of the nuclear era: bring home the sheer reality of what it would mean to explode our atomic arsenals, summoning up not mainly the visceral, personal fear of the duck-and-cover drill but the far…

Now that it’s warm to sit on the porch at night Someone happened to remember a neighbor, Though it had been more than thirty years Since she went for a little walk after dinner And never came back to her husband and children. No one present could recall much about her, Except how she’d smile and grow thoughtful All of a sudden and would not say what about, When asked, as if she already carried a secret, Or was heartbroken that she didn’t have one.…

On the morning of Thursday, January 9, 2014, the people of Charleston, West Virginia, awoke to a strange tang in the air off the Elk River. It smelled like licorice. The occasional odor is part of life in Charleston, the state capital, which lies in an industrial area that takes flinty pride in the nickname Chemical Valley. In the nineteenth century, natural brine springs made the region one of America’s largest producers of salt. The saltworks gave rise to an industry that manufactured gunpowder, antifreeze, Agent Orange, and other “chemical magic,” as The Saturday Evening Post put it, in 1943. The image endured. Today, the Chemical Valley Roller Girls compete in Roller Derby events with a logo of a woman in fishnet stockings and a gas mask. After decades of…

Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the rise of the bad fan. “The program you are about to see is ‘All in the Family.’ It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show—in a mature fashion—just how absurd they are.” This nervous disclaimer, which was likely as powerful as a “Do not remove under penalty of law” tag on a mattress, ran over the opening credits of Norman Lear’s new sitcom. It was 1971, deep into the Vietnam War and an era of political art and outrage, but television was dominated by escapist fare like “Bewitched” and “Bonanza.” “All in the Family” was designed to explode the medium’s taboos, using an incendiary device named Archie Bunker.…

Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah”—an epic farrago of tumultuous water, digital battle, and environmentalist rage (think of Al Gore glaring at the apocalypse)—is the craziest big movie in years. But how could it not be mad? A half century ago, the Biblical spectacular, with its sanctimony and its roiling clouds, became a laughingstock. If a modern Biblical picture is to live, a director must take serious risks. When Mel Gibson made “The Passion of the Christ,” he drained the spirituality and the understanding from Jesus’ last days and replaced them with sadism and anti-Semitic accusation. The movie may have been despicable, but it certainly wasn’t dead. Now Aronofsky, the ambitious indie director of “Pi,” “The Fountain,” and “Black Swan,” has poured his own dark obsessions into Genesis, whose stories are strange and…

ALYNDA LEE SEGARRA, the front woman and driving force of the old-timey group Hurray for the Riff Raff, has travelled far. A twenty-seven-year-old Bronx native of Puerto Rican descent, she grew up following the punk scene in the East Village and left home at seventeen, hopping freight trains before landing in New Orleans. Along the way, Segarra picked up the banjo and the guitar and started singing. Her band’s latest album, “Small Town Heroes,” takes on familiar folk subjects like heartbreak and violence, with a feminist punch. Hurray for the Riff Raff plays the Knitting Factory on April 2, and the following night the band is atop New York City, with a show at the Kaplan Penthouse, in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series. PHOTOGRAPH BY TIERNEY GEARON CLASSICAL MUSIC…

A director’s shift from screen to stage. IN A WORLD RIFE with shifting realities and the vagaries of “truthiness,” some real things still happen, such as this: the playwright and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, round-chested and bespectacled, was drinking water in the large, sunlit room in Hell’s Kitchen where the fifty-one-year-old author’s first full-length play, “The Library,” was being rehearsed. None of the actors in the drama, now in previews at the Public, were present. Moments later, the show’s fifty-one-year-old director, Steven Soderbergh, entered the space. Known for his vast array of films, ranging from his 1989 breakthrough effort, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” to his 2000 films “Erin Brockovich” and “Traffic,” which earned Soderbergh a Best Director Oscar, the prolific filmmaker is making his directorial début for the New York…

The traffic engineer Sam Schwartz has a spiel about the haphazard allotment of tolls for the city’s bridges and tunnels. He likes to imagine a group of Martians planning a visit, armed only with the knowledge that New York is Earth’s most desirable destination, and with telescopes powerful enough to discern bottlenecks via car headlights. Which borough would they choose to visit first? “Take us to Staten Island!” Schwartz said the other night, standing in front of a crowd of several dozen in a SoHo restaurant and channelling a Martian voyager. “That’s got to be the hottest place in New York!” Behind Schwartz was a PowerPoint slide showing a map of the Martians’ favorite borough and listing the inbound tolls for each of the four bridges that lead to it:…

When the Malaysian Prime Minister announced, last week, that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had gone down in the southern Indian Ocean, it brought to a close the orgy of theory-mongering that had dominated the news ever since the plane disappeared. The peak (or nadir) of the speculative frenzy came when the CNN anchor Don Lemon wondered aloud whether the plane might have been swallowed up by a mini black hole. There were plenty of other outlandish scenarios: we were told that the plane had been pirated to Kazakhstan, that it had flown underneath another plane to escape detection, that it had been “cloaked” from radar by technology invented by some of the passengers, that it would soon be used by Iran in an attack on Israel. Nothing is more natural…

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Who is there to help you but the person who is answering your questions? If I’m in someone’s presence and attempting to conduct an interview, I am wishing I were with Kafka on the ceiling. I’d much rather watch people do what they do than talk to them across a desk. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in the passenger seats of their pickups, often far from pavement, bouncing from scribble to scribble. Under a backpack, and hiking behind the environmentalist David Brower, I walked across the North Cascades, up and down the switchbacks, writing in a notebook. Even across a desk, an interviewee will sometimes talk so fast it’s impossible to keep up—like Alan Hume, M.D., a surgeon in Waterville, Maine. Nothing was unforthcoming about Dr. Hume. He talked clearly,…

“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,” Paul Fussell wrote in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” his classic study of the English literature of the First World War. “But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since.” The ancient verities of honor and glory were still standing in 1914 when England’s soldier-poets marched off to fight in France. Those young men became modern through the experience of trench warfare, if not in the forms they used to describe it. It was Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Lawrence who invented literary modernism while sitting out the war. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen—who all fought in the trenches and, in the last two cases, died there—remained tied to…