Innholdsfortegnelse for May-05-14 i The New Yorker

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE (“THE HUNT FOR EL CHAPO,” P. 38) is a staff writer and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream” is his most recent book. KELEFA SANNEH (COMMENT, P. 19) has contributed to the magazine since 2001. SARAH PAYNE STUART (“PILGRIM MOTHERS,” P. 24) will publish “Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town” in June. YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE (“A NEW KIND OF SPY,” P. 30), a staff writer for Science, is currently working on a nonfiction thriller entitled “The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell.” ELLEN BASS (POEM, P. 45) teaches in the M.F.A. program at Pacific University. Her latest poetry collection, “Like a Beggar,” came out in March. RACHEL AVIV (“PRESCRIPTION FOR…

IN THE NINETEEN-EIGHTIES AND NINETIES, all the greatest ballet choreographers of England and America died: George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins. Since then, everybody has been looking for replacements, dance-makers who, while remaining faithful to the classical steps, will save us from the classical bores, “Don Quixote” and the like. The newest candidate is Justin Peck, a soloist with New York City Ballet. Peck has a short résumé, but he is only twenty-six, and he is working like mad. In three years, he has created five ballets for N.Y.C.B., and right now he is making another. “Everywhere We Go,” to a score by the electronic/folk composer Sufjan Stevens, will have its première on May 8th. Peter Martins, N.Y.C.B.’s director, clearly values Peck. You can see why. N.Y.C.B. is…

One of the surprises of President Obama’s second term has been the prominence of a question that seemed peripheral to his first: the meaning of religious freedom. For years, opponents of the Affordable Care Act framed their objections in terms of economic freedom, but now some of the most noticeable challenges are coming from Christian groups who oppose the law’s contraception-coverage requirement. In January, the Supreme Court extended a temporary injunction for the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order that objects to having to file a form to obtain a religious exemption from the requirement. (When an organization files, the government effectively subsidizes its insurance provider, so that the employees’ contraception is still covered.) The Supreme Court will soon hand down a decision in the case of Hobby…

In SoHo, the lines stretch around the block for a Cronut™—the croissantdoughnut hybrid, trademarked, to distinguish it from copycat Singaporean “crodos,” British “dosants,” and Venezuelan “Mister Cronuts.” A few blocks north, tourists lap up pink buttercream frosting at the Magnolia Bakery, a shop made famous by “Sex and the City.” Due east from there, at Momofuku, pilgrims arrive in the wee hours to sample David Chang’s pork buns. David Sax, the author of the new book “The Tastemakers: Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up with Fondue,” was in New York the other day, visiting from his home in Toronto. He was way uptown, in Yorkville, a neighborhood where food trends go to live out their golden years and, eventually, die. “There are certain neighborhoods where trends filter out…

Greg Chung was at home on February 1, 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia fell from the sky. His son Jeffrey called to tell him the news: the ship had broken apart while returning to Earth, and all seven astronauts on board had died. “That’s not a good joke to make,” Chung said. An American citizen who was born in China, Chung lived with his wife, Ling, on a cul-de-sac in Orange, California. Until his retirement, a few months earlier, he had worked on NASA’s space-shuttle program. Among other things, he had helped to design the Columbia’s crew cabin. When he realized that Jeffrey was telling the truth, he hung up the phone and wept. In 1972, NASA outsourced the design and development of its space shuttles to the Rockwell…

All around the cavernous room of the Cal-Expo off-track betting, TVs blare simulcast as the crowd in jeans and sloppy sweatshirts treks to the betting windows, trampling an autumn’s worth of losing tickets. The old man doesn’t miss the emerald grass and red geraniums, the women with big hats at Churchill Downs. He never tasted a mint julep as the mahogany horses stepped out like carved statues. And he doesn’t mind the smell of stale beer or the damp cold that seeps through his jacket and stiffens his already stiff hands. He’s spent weeks lying on his bed in the board and care waiting for this moment when Zenyatta, the mare who never lost a race, called in the Times “the coolest horse in the world,” goes for twenty out…

I told no one, but the snows came, anyway. They weren’t even serious about it, at first. Then, they seemed to say, if nothing happened, Snow could say that, & almost perfectly. The village slept in the gunmetal of its evening. And there, through a thin dress once, I touched A body so alive & eager I thought it must be Someone else’s soul. And though I was mistaken, And though we parted, & the roads kept thawing between snows In the first spring sun, & it was all, like spring, Irrevocable, irony has made me thinner. Someday, weeks From now, I will wake alone. My fate, I will think, Will be to have no fate. I will feel suddenly hungry. The morning will be bright, & wrong.…

LIVING WITH A WILD GOD, by Barbara Ehrenreich (Twelve). The heart of this unusual memoir is a journal in which, as a teenager, Ehrenreich recorded a series of seemingly transcendental manifestations, which she terms “dissociative episodes.” They culminated, on a walk through Lone Pine, California, in a metaphysical showstopper in which “the world flamed into life.” For decades, as she built a reputation as a left-wing activist and writer, Ehrenreich dismissed the encounter as a mental glitch. This book announces her reluctant willingness to concede that it might have been a “mystical experience.” What can such a thing mean for a staunch atheist? She arrives at no clear conclusions, but her questions, always scrupulously rooted in the scientific tradition in which she was trained, are potent enough to justify…

The greatness of Gatsby is more of a dream than a fact. The fabulousness of the Baker Boys is a tired tagline, based on a distant memory, at least until Michelle Pfeiffer turns up. By what criterion, therefore, should Spider-Man be deemed amazing? How can you stuff an adjective like that into a movie title without a tremor of irony? Yet along comes “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” directed by Marc Webb, and bursting with the belief that we must and will be amazed all over again. The main players are here to help, unchanged from the previous outing: Andrew Garfield is Peter Parker, otherwise known as Spider-Man (just add spandex); Emma Stone is Gwen Stacy, his on-off girlfriend; and Sally Field is Aunt May, a wise and kindly soul, though…

CONSIDERING CESAR CHAVEZ Nathan Heller’s article on Cesar Chavez, which relies heavily on “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez,” by Miriam Pawel, is full of half-truths and distortions (“Hunger Artist,” April 14th). Let me, as Chavez’s eldest son, cite just one example: Heller writes that Chavez was “ambivalent” about the Vietnam War and that “he refused to support his son’s conscientious-objector application.” In fact, it was my dad who encouraged me to apply for conscientiousobjector status, after we met with a priest to discuss my feelings about the war. My father asked if I was prepared to go to jail, and I said I was. “Then your mother and I will support you,” he said. In 1971, my dad attended my trial, and testified in my defense. (I was acquitted…

324 Lafayette St. (212-334-6400) BOBBY FLAY OPENED HIS FIRST restaurant, Mesa Grill, when he was just twenty-six, but it was his Spanish bistro Bolo that earned him serious respect. When Bolo closed, in 2007, it wasn’t owing to flagging attendance but because the old Flatiron-district building that housed it was being demolished for a condo tower. Meanwhile, as a Food Network linchpin, with slick shows like “Throwdown with Bobby Flay,” “Brunch @ Bobby’s,” and the latest, “Beat Bobby Flay,” the New York native has become one of the most recognizable chefs in America. You might presume that with great fame comes cynicism. (See: Guy Fieri’s Times Square theme-park fiasco.) But at Gato, Flay’s eclectic new NoHo restaurant, the chef himself is cooking some amazing food, as though he’s still got…

The economist Paul Krugman burst into an office at the CUNY Graduate Center one recent evening with a pronunciation question. “Is it Pik-etty?” he asked, so that the name rhymed with “rickety.” “Or is it Pikit-tay? And are we going with Tho-mah, or Thom-as?” Three academics stood nearby, clutching wineglasses. They had assembled as part of a welcoming party, but no one knew how to pronounce the name of the guest of honor, the French economist Thomas Piketty. “How about Dr. P.?” Chase Robinson, the interim president of the Graduate Center, suggested. Dr. P. was in town to deliver a talk about his new book, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” which has been credited with providing the hard numbers behind the slogans of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The sevenhundred-page…

There was a time, in the nineteen-sixties, when Sophia Loren, having had two miscarriages, thought that she would never have a child. This was particularly devastating because her father had abandoned her mother, and Sophia, born Sofia Scicolone and raised in Pozzuoli, near Naples, had always dreamed of having a family. So when “Human Voice,” a short film directed by the younger of Loren’s two sons, Edoardo Ponti, and starring Loren, opened at the Tribeca Film Festival, earlier this month, the oc-where she has lived since the birth of her first child. Her husband, the producer Carlo Ponti, died in 2007. Edoardo and his brother, Carlo, a conductor, live with their families in Los Angeles. Loren has made dozens of movies and won a Best Actress Oscar for “Two Women,”…

April 4th Dear Sirs: I am not interested in buying a walkin bathtub. I can’t imagine what gave you the idea that I was. This morning, I received yet another e-mail asking if I am “ready” for a walk-in bathtub. As I e-mailed the folks who have been e-mailing me about a six-day all-inclusive package vacation in Cancún, one of these days I actually might need a sixday all-inclusive package vacation in Cancún—preferably in a hotel with no Internet hookup—if I keep getting asked if I’m ready for a walk-in bathtub. It might interest you to know, by the way, that just yesterday I received an email that offered to put me in contact with “beautiful women from an exotic land looking for love.” Does that sound like someone who…

The heartland’s pain-pills problem. In 2005, the medical examiner in Wichita, Kansas, noticed a cluster of deaths that were unusually similar in nature: in three years, sixteen men and women, between the ages of twenty two and fifty-two, had died in their sleep. In the hours before they lost consciousness, they had been sluggish and dopey, struggling to stay awake. A few had complained of chest pain. “I can’t catch my breath,” one kept saying. All of them had taken painkillers prescribed by a family practice called the Schneider Medical Clinic. The clinic was in Haysville, a working-class suburb of Wichita. The main industries in the area were aircraft and plastics, neither of which was doing well. A mile south of the clinic, there was little except wheat fields. The…

When it comes to technique, actors know what you might call one another’s family secrets. They know what goes into creating a sustained stage illusion, and how to make a scene partner give and then give some more. They know why a script works and when it doesn’t. Even so, the best actors understand that it’s the accidents, the sudden improvisations and flights of fancy, that can make a performance real, or transcendent—a happening that cannot be fully explained. As the storied Geraldine Page said, in Lillian and Helen Ross’s essential 1962 book, “The Player,” “When the character uses you, that’s when you’re really cooking. You know you’re in complete control, yet you get the feeling that you didn’t do it. . . . You don’t completely understand it, and…

I have never met any of the lucky women who owned a dress by Charles James. A college friend, though, had an aunt who wore a James to her engagement party, in the late nineteen-fifties. It must have been one of his last creations, since he went out of business in 1958. “Imagine that! A James in the family!” my friend said, as if she were speaking of a Vermeer. “I’ve always wondered what happened to it.” I’ve always wondered what happened to James. His name draws a blank outside the fashion world, although Christian Dior called him “the greatest talent of my generation,” and Balenciaga, a miser with his enthusiasms, considered James “the only one in the world who has raised dressmaking from an applied art to a pure…

EVERY ERA HAS its quintessential stars, and Ellen Burstyn was one of the exemplary actors of the rising age of feminism, starting with her supporting role in “The Last Picture Show,” from 1971. After starring in “The Exorcist” two years later, she took greater control of her career, choosing a script about an independent-minded woman and selecting the director, Martin Scorsese, with whom she rewrote it. The resulting film, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” brought her an Oscar for Best Actress and helped to set a style of performance—determined and practical, self-searching and self-deprecating—that remains current today. These three movies are among the offerings in BAM Cinématek’s weeklong tribute to her work, which also includes Alain Resnais’s “Providence” and Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream.” CLASSICAL MUSIC | ART…

IN THE LATE SEVENTIES, as Nigeria slowly recovered from civil war and famine, a six-foot-five, two-hundred-pluspound figure named William Onyeabor installed advanced analog synthesizers in an elaborate studio in the former Biafran capital of Enugu, established his own record-pressing plant, and started single-handedly producing electronic dance music. The country’s music scene was booming, but no one had heard anything like what Onyeabor was creating. “Something You’ll Never Forget,” one of his earliest tracks, is a gently funky, tenminute-long flowering bud of fluttering guitars, shuffling percussion, soulful horns, and playful keyboard glissandos. “Good Name” is an equally epic song, released six years later, which takes listeners on a thrill ride of complicated electronic beats, slaphappy synthesizer passages, and surprising video-game-like effects. Onyeabor’s eighth and final album was released in 1985. He…

C. C. Sabathia, the Yankees’ Opening Day starter for the past six seasons, is something of a shrunken giant: six feet seven inches, but, lately, without the spectacular paunch for which he may be best known. “Everybody keeps talking about how much weight I lost,” Sabathia said the other day, while sitting on a sofa in the M.L.B. Fan Cave, on the corner of Fourth and Broadway. “I mean, I’m two hundred eighty pounds. That’s still pretty big for a pitcher.” Sabathia, who once weighed three hundred and twenty, had just finished taping a segment for “Off the Bat,” a new variety show on MTV2, blending baseball and pop culture. The segment was called “Name That C. C.” In it, the show’s four co-hosts—the rapper Fat Joe, the radio host…

In 2001, a kind of miracle happened to me—a miracle so silly it befit the larger comedy I had set in motion by returning to Concord, Massachusetts, where I grew up and where my parents still lived. After all the shenanigans I’d put them through in my life, trying constantly to win their approval but never doing one actual thing that might earn it, I finally succeeded far beyond their expectations. In the spring of that year I was elected to the Ladies Four O’Clock Club, an ancient Concord institution (whose very name I must disguise). How can I explain to the real world about the Ladies Four O’Clock Club, with its five-dollar annual dues, for which you were dunned mercilessly at the year’s first meeting; the Ladies Four O’Clock…

One afternoon last December, an assassin on board a K.L.M. flight from Mexico City arrived at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. This was not a business trip: the killer, who was thirtythree, liked to travel, and often documented his journeys around Europe on Instagram. He wore designer clothes and a heavy silver ring in the shape of a grimacing skull. His passport was an expensive fake, and he had used it successfully many times. But, moments after he presented his documents to Dutch customs, he was arrested. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had filed a Red Notice with Interpol—an international arrest warrant—and knew that he was coming. Only after the Dutch authorities had the man in custody did they learn his real identity: José Rodrigo Arechiga, the chief enforcer for the biggest…

Caperton’s stepmother, Stell, called. “Your father,” Stell said. “Larry?” Caperton said. “He’s dying. You can say Dad.” “He’s done deathbed before.” “It’s different,” Stell said. “The doctors agree now. And your father, well, no grand speeches about not going gentle, for one thing. For another, he looks out of it, pushed down. He shops online. He watches TV. I think you should be here.” "Command performance?” “Don’t be a crumbum.” Caperton took the short flight from O’Hare to Newark on one of the new boutique lines. Shortbread, cappuccinos, and sea-salted nuts in great jars sated travellers, gratis, at the gate. The in-flight magazine resembled an avant-garde culture journal Caperton once read with fervor. The cover depicted the airline’s female pilots as cockpit kittens with tapered blazers and tilted caps. It…

Historians generally agree that the single figure bridging America’s creation and near-dissolution is John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), who before his eighth birthday heard cannon fire from Bunker Hill and, seven decades later, as the only former President to serve in the House of Representatives, suffered a fatal stroke in the presence of Congressman Abraham Lincoln. But Adams was a stony, unlovable bridge. More of a democrat than his father, he was also more of a stick. His latest biographer, Fred Kaplan, whose previous subjects have ranged from Charles Dickens to Gore Vidal, argues that Adams doesn’t fully deserve his reputation for coldness, but, for all its diligence, “John Quincy Adams: American Visionary” (Harper) never really succeeds in raising the sixth President’s temperature. One of his own sons had trouble seeing…

Sharon Van Etten is a bright-eyed, compact, outgoing woman. But the songs on her astonishing new album, “Are We There,” are hardly sparkly—they are slow-moving, efficient vehicles that carry the listener through stages of a long-running and complex romance, which Van Etten seems both to live on and to be trapped in. They tend toward emotional distillation, and are often too intense to admit anything beyond her expansive voice and a single instrument. Van Etten describes intimate scenarios, yet she sings without a hint of either theatrics or excessive restraint. You are instantly her emotional partner, torn between learning from her and wanting to help her out of the maelstrom that she seems to be wandering through. Her vocal range begins slightly lower than that of most female singers, and…