Innholdsfortegnelse for Apr-20-15 i The New Yorker

“Live Ideas” This annual festival casts a wide net in bringing cultural leaders and artists together around a theme. The first gathering, in 2013, focussed on the influence of the neurologist Oliver Sacks. In 2014, the symposium was devoted to the writer and social critic James Baldwin. This year, the honor goes to Laurie Anderson, with a twist. “Rather than construct a week of events about her,” Bill T. Jones, the artistic director of the presenting organization, New York Live Arts, said, “we asked her to step into the role of curator.” A performance-art pioneer, as well as an instrument inventor, writer, director, and frequent collaborator with her late husband, Lou Reed, Anderson is well suited to the task. More than two dozen events are planned, over five days,…

One recent afternoon, a Laura Marling song was playing at the Uncommons, a coffee-and-board-game parlor in Greenwich Village. That’s not surprising: the Uncommons is the kind of laid-back, N.Y.U.-student-heavy place where you’d expect to hear a song by the twenty-five-year-old British singer-songwriter, a folkie who, with her new album, “Short Movie,” has turned her hand to rock. But it was unusual to have Laura Marling walk into the café a few minutes later. “Wicked!” she said, when she heard that her song had just been on. The night before, backed by her band, she’d performed some tracks from the new record, along with favorites like “Take the Night Off,” at a sold-out show in Greenpoint. She was staying with friends in Park Slope for a few days before returning to…

PREMIER PLATINUM LULULEMON SNOOT PASS For exceptionally toned women and unreasonably tanned gay men, this pass provides access to all of the exercise equipment that one can use while still looking attractive: Arc Trainers, Swiss Balls, and that machine which is supposed to simulate the action of skiing, or maybe of speed skating. It’s over by the elliptical machines. Your membership also includes access to the elliptical machines, but they are already full. Members with this pass are required to purchase six pairs of yoga pants and a steady supply of Fiji water, even though the bottles don’t fit in any of the cup holders. SILVER ÉLITE GUILT PASS For new moms trying to lose the baby weight and fat guys who have somehow only just realized that they’re fat,…

In 1993, seven years before his death, at the age of eighty-two, Jacob Lawrence recast the title and most of the captions of a stunning suite of sixty small paintings that he had made in 1941. The pictures, in milk-based casein tempera on hardboard, detailed the exodus that began during the First World War of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The original title, “The Migration of the Negro,” became “The Migration Series.” The prolix captions were condensed and clarified, with only five of them left unedited, including the last, a swelling coda to the sequence’s rhythmic montage: “And the migrants kept coming.” Art historians quail at alterations of canonical works, even by their creators. But Lawrence wasn’t working for art history, even if he was making…

THE BIRDS AND THE GREENS I was disappointed by Jonathan Franzen’s recent article, which pits conservation work against efforts to counter climate change (“Carbon Capture,” April 6th). Climate change is not, as Franzen writes, an abstract idea. Each of us experiences global warming as a local, and visceral, phenomenon— as drought, typhoons, snow, melting ice, or rising tides. Furthermore, efforts to combat climate change are not at the cost of conservation work being done in the immediate present. There are thousands of remarkable stories of conservation success worldwide, not unlike the two in Peru and Costa Rica that Franzen cites. People are not sitting on their hands on Lake Chilwa, in Malawi; at Mt. Nabukelevu, in Fiji; or on the Audubon Society’s Western Rivers Action Network, a project in…

When the news broke that Hillary Clinton had leased space in Brooklyn, likely for her Presidential campaign headquarters, the predictable jokes rolled in. “Hip Hillary,” the American Spectator wrote, is “embracing the organic, handcrafted vegan latte and handlebar mustache lifestyle of trendy Brooklyn.” In fact, Clinton is setting up shop not in “cool Brooklyn” but on two floors of an office building at One Pierrepont Plaza, in Brooklyn Heights. That’s kind of a no man’s land, on the border of the domain of thousand-dollar Bugaboo strollers and where you go for jury duty. Locals refer to Brooklyn Heights (with pride) as “America’s first suburb”— it’s the Chappaqua of Kings County. “I think she’s not likely to furnish it with a host of bearded men, vintage chesterfield sofas, and fridges full…

Over the next few weeks, American companies will engage in a quaint ritual: the shareholder meeting. Investors will have a chance to vent about performance and to offer resolutions on corporate policy. Many will also get to do something relatively novel: cast an advisory vote on the pay packages of C.E.O.s and other top executives. This power, known as “sayon-pay,” became law in 2010, as part of the Dodd-Frank bill. In the wake of the financial crisis, which amplified anger about exorbitant C.E.O. salaries, reformers looking for ways to rein in the practice seized on say-on-pay, which the United Kingdom adopted in 2002. The hope was that the practice would, as Barack Obama once put it, help in “restoring common sense to executive pay.” Say-on-pay is the latest in a…

On a clear, cold day in March, 1898, a converted sealhunting ship named the Belgica gave up struggling against the pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea and resigned itself to the impending Antarctic winter. The ship was carrying a scientific expedition with an international crew, rare in that phase of polar exploration: nine Belgians, six Norwegians, two Poles, a Romanian, and an American, the ship’s doctor. The expedition’s organizer, a Belgian naval lieutenant named Adrien de Gerlache, had handpicked officers and scientists for their expertise; the mariners who slept in the forecastle had been signed up more casually. None had been selected for character, resilience, or survival instinct. The crew had expected the Belgica to winter over in warmer latitudes. No ship had ever spent a winter locked in the…

Aman Kumar, a seaman on the M.V. Albedo, was asleep when an announcement came over the loudspeaker: “Pirates are approaching.” The Albedo was in the Indian Ocean, a thousand miles from the eastern coast of Africa. Kumar rushed up a narrow stairwell to the bridge, where most of the ship’s twenty-three-man crew had already gathered. His bunkmate, Rajoo Rajbhar, pointed to port. They could make out a distant silhouette on top of the waves: an open-bow skiff. The Albedo’s captain, Jawaid Khan, had stored prewritten distress messages in his e-mail drafts folder. He entered the ship’s coördinates and sent messages to the European Union Naval Force, a regional maritime-security office,and a piracy-reporting center. Then he directed the steersman to maneuver the ship in a zigzag pattern. He called the engine…

The reign of King John was in all ways unlikely and, in most, dreadful. He was born in 1166 or 1167, the youngest of Henry II’s five sons, his ascension to the throne being, by the fingers on one hand, so implausible that he was not named after a king and, as a matter of history, suffers both the indignity of the possibility that he may have been named after his sister Joan and the certain fate of having proved so unredeemable a ruler that no king of England has ever taken his name. He was spiteful and he was weak, although, frankly, so were the medieval historians who chronicled his reign, which can make it hard to know quite how horrible it really was. In any case, the worst…

Because “Skylight” (in revival at the Golden, directed by Stephen Daldry), was written by David Hare, the romance—or old romance— at its center is indivisible from money, class, and politics. It’s a vaguely sour piece, and a periodically platitudinous one, too, marked by Hare’s residual Thatcher-era indignation. (It premièred in 1995.) Kyra Hollis (Carey Mulligan) is a young woman living in a down-atheel flat in Kensal Rise, in North London. The time is the early nineteen-nineties, and the world is sharply divided between haves and have-nots. Kyra has dark hair and wears dark clothing, rather like a nun committed to her own marginalization. She lives in a world of malfunctioning heaters and low ceilings. In other flats and outside in the courtyard, babies cry and children play. Sometimes snow falls,…

APRIL 2015 WEDNESDAY 15TH THURSDAY 16TH FRIDAY 17TH SATURDAY 18TH SUNDAY 19TH MONDAY 20TH TUESDAY 21ST IN METROPOLITAN OPERA PRODUCTIONS of “Die Walküre” and “Francesca da Rimini,” the Dutch singer Eva-Maria Westbroek turned in firmly respectable performances of the dramatic-soprano repertory. But it was last fall’s revival of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” that made her a house star. Westbroek is a woman of abundant beauty, and Graham Vick’s borderline-outrageous production (in which she portrayed an oversexed nineteen-sixties housewife) let her show off a sensual side of her artistic personality that was no surprise to those who had seen her at Covent Garden in the title role of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Anna Nicole.” Now she’s Santuzza in David McVicar’s new production of “Cavalleria Rusticana”; the violent clash between passion and…

162 Orchard St. (646-918-6835) It’s always apple season at this new restaurant and cider bar on Orchard Street, which, despite having a powerful sense of itself, “isn’t as la-di-da as you’d think,” as a man observed on a recent Monday. You can relax under Tudor-style beams and pink cherry blossoms, listen to some Pretenders, and let the friendly staff guide you around the mill. A bartender presented a naïf with a tasting: a British cider, he said, was “wellrounded” and “a bit burlier” than some of its French and Spanish peers; a New Hampshire offering was “very green appley, very fresh, very slate”; and a Spanish cider was “acidic, funky, and barnyardy.” All tasted tart and earthy, nothing like the cloying fizzy stuff you might fear, if perhaps not barnyardy…

“Caring” might not be the first word that comes to mind in association with multinational luxury conglomerates, but Kering—the twenty-four-billion-dollar company that owns Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and others—would like to change that. François-Henri Pinault, the company’s C.E.O., was in town from Paris the other day, to help explain. Until 2013, Kering was called P.P.R. (short for Pinault-Printemps-Redoute). That year, in a Web post announcing its new name, the company noted that the homophony was deliberate: “Kering can be pronounced and understood as ‘caring,’ ” an aspect of the company’s attitude “toward our brands, people, customers, stakeholders, and the environment.” It also got a new logo: a semi-abstract owl. Pinault said at the time that the owl is a “discreet and protective animal.” Pinault stopped by Kering’s midtown offices,…

The predominant natives of southeastern Alaska are the Tlingit— the People of the Tides. They are believed to have settled the Panhandle and the Alexander Archipelago more than ten thousand years ago. The Tlingit (pronounced klink-kit) were hunter-gatherers and traders who typically lived on the coastline, moving between permanent winter villages and summer encampments, where they fished, foraged, and stockpiled food. They cremated their dead and marked milestones with lavish ceremonies, until missionaries, in the late nineteenth century, persuaded them to stop. The Tlingit, at the height of their culture, had about eighty clans, who represented themselves with heraldic crests that almost always featured animals. A crest was considered a clan’s property: the Raven Dog Salmon people could not tell the stories or display the crest of the Wolf Killer…

O plywood, second best to the real stuff,believe me, one day I will say “Enough”to my stooping shoulders, my slouched spine;my sloped shape and your stiff boards will align,and you’ll see how my backbone will unbend,and I’ll be standing straight until the endof my makeshift but rectilinearprayer, one stiff-backed as a chest of drawerswhen we shove heavy furniture around;I will rise from the dead, though on what groundand which I, I don’t know; I’ll stand erect,though my vertebrae’s hierarchic sectwon’t outlive plywood, no, it just can’t winagainst that vertical eternity, so thinand yet so sturdy in its ersatz pride;as if the moon had shown me its dark side,I lean, my ear glued to a cupboard’s back,and I can hear its hollow and exacthymn to its own cheap immortality;no, wait, I…

The red-haired homeless lady was arrested after she fell in the street and a taxi almost ran over her. Just before her mad dash into traffic (who could account for her actions?), she’d accused a black dog on a leash of being the Devil, an assertion that had been strenuously objected to by the dog’s owner. The dog’s name was Major Maybe, and his story was better known in our neighborhood than the red-haired lady’s. The breeder had named the dog Major, and the family that adopted him—our next-door neighbors, the Leavells—tried to call him something similar in order to avoid confusing him. They’d tried Mark and Mason, but the dog would not respond to any name beginning with “M” until the family’s four-year-old daughter, who talked to her dolls…

THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS, by Eugene Rogan (Basic). This engrossing history unfolds in the Middle Eastern theatre of the First World War, capturing the complex array of battles, brutalities, and alliances that brought down the six-hundred-yearold Ottoman Empire. At the start of the conflict, the empire faced threats both from foreign powers who coveted its territories and from rebellious ethnic groups within its borders. The war gave new boldness to these interests, and the Ottomans, fighting on multiple fronts, responded with mass expulsions, massacres, and, most infamously, the Armenian genocide. Rogan argues that the empire’s ultimate demise was the result not of losing the war but of a clumsily negotiated peace. His balanced narrative unearths many seeds of current conflicts. BLOOD RUNS GREEN, by Gillian O’Brien (Chicago). The…

“An American in Paris,” the musical that just opened at the Palace Theatre, is very different from the 1951 Vincente Minnelli movie on which it is based. The film was a star vehicle for Gene Kelly, and it shows him in his most cock-of-the-walk mode, tap-dancing over the cobblestones of Paris (or an M-G-M set designer’s idea thereof) and smiling at us with what appears to be fifty teeth. To the film’s first audiences, still getting over the Second World War, he must have seemed like America personified, and, indeed, his character is an ex-G.I. The new musical, by contrast, is directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, who is English and was trained in classical ballet. He was a bright light of New York City Ballet in the nineteen-nineties, but…