Innholdsfortegnelse for May 1, 2017 i The New Yorker

Connie Bruck ( “A Hollywood Story,” p. 34) has been a staff writer since 1989. She is the author of three books, among them “The Predators’ Ball.” Hilton Als (The Theatre, p. 60), The New Yorker’s theatre critic, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is an associate professor at Columbia University. Louis Menand (Books, p. 63) has been a staff writer since 2001. Last year, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. Anne Carson (Poem, p. 50) is the author of several books of poetry, including “Float,” which was published last October. Mark Ulriksen (Cover), an artist and illustrator, has contributed fifty-five covers to the magazine since 1994. Hua Hsu (Pop Music, p. 74), a contributing writer for the magazine since 2015, is the…

1057 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn With all the fuss over artisanal liquors and bespoke ambience, drinking establishments in New York can be inclined toward the overserious. Which is why a new spot from the team behind the Lower East Side’s Attaboy has flouted many of the elements that speakeasy lovers generally cherish— elaborate recipes, elusive reservations, waistcoats. “I just wanted to do something as opposite as possible for this bar,” the co-owner Dan Greenbaum said. Instead of, say, obscure free jazz, there’s dance music in a space that is echoey enough to give a person an excuse to lean in closer. The airy plant-filled bar, which is tucked along a strip of auto-body shops, recalls California—or, at least, a New Yorker’s version of it. (No crystals; no one lurking around a…

1 Tom the stutterer’s brother had the backhand:we were doubles partners deep inside the quarry.Camel’s Hump was frozen on the horizon or snapped mid-undulation.Everyone died climbing it.La Tulip: the feared, the hated, later embezzler of electricity:he smashed a fucking asteroid past my racquet to Quebec.Mike’s Civic bazooka’d Rattto cross-bias La TulipÑparty sled, hedonistic pod, our papersin the glove box, glow-lit, post-match …and so we drift, apparently all the way,to a background of bug zappers,thunder, and GNR. The Strezzles cough hazeand wheezed in the back.Soon the way became time,and we were still drifting,fresh from the worst slaughter,drifting west and west and westto a party in a cattle pasture,the cattle vaguely suspect.Mike’s father, as you know, dealtin prize semen. All of thisturned out to be made of paper.Imagine that: paper and notes…

SVIATOSLAV RICHTER THERE’S THIS old man who walks along the fence next to the hospital, or, say, down near town, wobbling in his loose, flapping shoes, digging around in the garbage can on the corner, smoking a cigarette, clutching it between his battered fingers, or simply walking with his shoulders braced as if he knew he was some kind of fodder for speculation, because it seems to be so consistent, his homeless rooting, keeping to a pattern, moving south on Midland Avenue for a half mile to Franklin Place and then left on Franklin and down Franklin to River Road, along River Road to Front Street, left on Front and up Front back to Midland, and then, presumably, around again. By virtue of his consistency, he has edged his way…

How Emotions Are Made, by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Drawing on neuroscience and experimental psychology to overturn the assumption that emotions are innate and universal, this book describes them as “goal-based concepts” designed to help us categorize experience. Emotions, Barrett writes, are learned and shaped by culture, so “variation is the norm”: “Russian has two distinct concepts for what Americans call ‘Anger.’ German has three distinct ‘Angers’ and Mandarin has five.” Upbringing has the biggest influence, but we can all reshape our mental makeup and learn new concepts. The latter part of the book considers how doing so can affect our health, the law, and our relationship to the natural world. As Barrett frequently repeats, “You are an architect of your experience.” City of Light, City of…

RUNNING THE COURT Jeffrey Toobin does well to expose the enormous influence of Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, a conservative organization that has infiltrated many levels of the U.S. judicial system (“Full-Court Press,” April 17th). Toobin says that Leo, who has been the executive vice- president of the society for many years, in effect chose three of the nine current Supreme Court Justices. This is alarming, particularly because Leo and the society are committed to an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution, which is anything but what the Framers had in mind. ( Justice Antonin Scalia called himself an originalist, as does his admirer and replacement, Neil Gorsuch.) As Toobin explains it, originalists believe that the government “can’t do anything unless it’s specifically authorized in the Constitution.” If that’s…

Sakura Matsuri Cherry Blossom Festival Today, only those vulnerable to pollen’s seasonal assault dread the impending bloom of New York’s cherry blossoms. But, as depicted in the 1975 horror film “Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees,” the flowers were feared by some in ancient Japan, who avoided passing beneath their petals as stories spread of the trees driving travellers mad. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is home to more than two hundred cherry trees across at least twenty-six species; this two-day festival, celebrating the blossoms’ arrival, is packed with performances reflecting both traditional and modern Japan, including taiko drumming, martial arts, and a cosplay fashion show. The biggest threat might be an ill-placed photobomb interrupting your well-framed shot, flush with pink. (990 Washington Ave., Brooklyn. bbg.org. April 29-30 at 10 A.M.)…

LAST SEPTEMBER, Carlos Antonio Lozada, a commander of Colombia’s FARC guerrillas, returned home to a jungle encampment in the vast wetland region called Yarí. He had spent the past two years in Havana, staying in a villa near Fidel Castro’s home, while working with other guerrilla leaders and Colombian diplomats on a peace agreement to end the FARC’s fifty-two-year insurgency—the longest in the Western Hemisphere. His time there had been gruelling: an endless succession of arguments, proposals, and counterproposals, with painful testimony from victims of both sides. “It was non-stop,” Lozada told me. At last, though, on August 24th, the two sides reached an agreement. When Lozada’s plane touched down, los camaradas—his fifty-odd personal bodyguards, young men and women who had been with him since they were little more than…

ROD DREHER WAS forty-four when his little sister died. At the time, he was living in Philadelphia with his wife and children. His sister, Ruthie, lived in their Louisiana home town, outside St. Francisville (pop. 1,712). Dreher’s family had been there for generations, but he had never fit in. As a teen-ager, when his father and sister went hunting he stayed in his room and listened to the Talking Heads; he read “A Moveable Feast” and dreamed of Paris. He left as soon as he could, becoming a television critic for the Washington Times and then a film critic for the New York Post. He was living in Cobble Hill on 9/11, and watched the South Tower fall. He walked with his wife in Central Park. He wrote a book,…

Bette Midler is such an incredible self-creation—an artist like no other—that finding roles that can harness her enormous energy while allowing room for her wit and her extraordinary skill as a balladeer must have long been a nightmare for her agents. Early in her now more than fifty-year career, Midler did happen upon a part that tapped into her many talents. In 1979, she starred in “The Rose,” a fictional film portrait of a Janis Joplin-like singer, which moved a lot of people, not least because the script reflected aspects of Midler’s own life: her camaraderie with her gay fans and the distance she may have felt from her parents. (Her father wasn’t supportive of her aspirations and saw her perform only once.) Although “The Rose” was a milestone in…

THIS IS HOW you should attend the forthcoming retrospective of Jean- Pierre Melville movies at Film Forum: Tell nobody what you are doing. Even your loved ones—especially your loved ones—must be kept in the dark. If it comes to a choice between smoking and talking, smoke. Dress well but without ostentation. Wear a raincoat, buttoned and belted, regardless of whether there is rain. Any revolver should be kept, until you need it, in the pocket of the coat. Finally, before you leave home, put your hat on. If you don’t have a hat, you can’t go. Melville was born almost a hundred years ago, on October 20, 1917. The centennial jamboree starts on April 28th and ends on May 11th, followed by a weeklong run of “Léon Morin, Priest” (1961),…

CAN A HUMORLESS show be great? My bias has long been that truly ambitious dramas are also funny, however submerged or black their jokes. And yet John Ridley’s “American Crime,” on ABC, which is currently ending its third season (and likely its last, given the ratings), breaks that rule and is still a keeper. An astringent outlier in a dizzy age, it has none of the ironic pop songs and retro homages that dominate so many modern cable dramas. It’s serious in an old-fashioned sense: sincere, thoughtful, and heartbreaking. Like several other recent series, “American Crime” uses an anthology structure: each season tells a separate story, with the cast members in fresh roles. Season 3 is set in North Carolina, in our era of stagnant wages and opiate addiction, starved…

CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera With its surging orchestral colors and brief flights of melody, Franco Alfano’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” is a fluent example of Italian opera after Puccini, but it really owes its twenty-first-century revival to a few star tenors who have been unable to resist the chance to play the immortal title character, with his silver tongue and unsightly nose. (The opera first came to the Met, in 2005, as a vehicle for Plácido Domingo.) The French tenor Roberto Alagna headlines the current revival, opposite Jennifer Rowley and Atalla Ayan; Marco Armiliato conducts. May 2 at 7:30. • Also playing: It would be hard to top Simon Keenlyside’s blistering portrayal of Mozart’s lecherous aristocrat from the fall performances of “Don Giovanni,” but the Met has stacked the…

JUST OUTSIDE the town of Brunswick, Maine, the Harpswell Road runs along a finger of land poking into the ocean. It passes clapboard houses and mobile homes, stands of red-tipped sumac and pine, a few farms, a white Congregational church, and the Harpswell Historical Society, which used to be Bailey’s country store, when the writer Elizabeth Strout worked there as a teen-ager. “I remember sitting on the front porch eating a lollipop,” Strout, who is sixty-one, said one damp day in March, as she drove past. “And this woman came by, and she goes, ‘Oh, you’re so cute! Can I take a picture?’ My mother was furious. I think my mother felt like the person was . . . a summer person.” Strout longed to be one of them— these…

STEPHEN K. BANNON, who maintains a precarious hold over the nativist wing of the Trump White House, honed his skills in the art of conservative persuasion in the most liberal precinct of the American imagination, Hollywood. He became himself in the byways of the movie business. These days, Bannon is a dishevelled presence in the Oval Office, but he cut a different figure in Beverly Hills, where he looked the part of a Hollywood executive— fast-talking, smartly dressed, aggressively fit, carrying himself with what one former colleague described as an “alpha swagger.” He worked out of an impressive office on Canon Drive. He was passionate and knowledgeable about film, and boasted about his connections, his production credits, and his background in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs. He was a…

We really want them to like us. We want it to go well. We overdress. They are narrow people, art people, offhand, linens. It is early summer, first hot weekend. We meet on the street, jumble about with kisses and are we late? They had been late, we’d half-decided to leave, now oh well. That place across the street, ever tried it? Think we went there once, looks closed, says open, well. People coming out. O.K. Inside is dark, cool, oaken. Turns out they know the owner. He beams, ushers, we sit. And realize at once two things, first, the noise is unbearable, two, neither of us knows the other well enough to say bag it. Our hearts crumble. We order food by pointing and break into two yell factions,…

HE SHOULD HAVE known the book was loaded. Norman Podhoretz started writing “Making It” in 1964. He was thirty-four years old and the editor of Commentary. His idea was to write a book about how people in his world, literary intellectuals, were secretly motivated by a desire for success— money, power, and fame—and were also secretly ashamed of it. He offered himself as Exhibit A. By confessing to his own ambition, he would make it safe for others to confess to theirs, and thereby enjoy without guilt the worldly goods their strivings had brought them. As he put it, he would do for ambition what D. H. Lawrence had done for sex. He would make the case for Mammon. Podhoretz was a young man, but he had been in the…

AT SOME POINT during 2015, Kendrick Lamar came to seem like much more than a rapper. One of his best songs, “Alright,” was adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement as an informal anthem; sing-alongs erupted at rallies and protests across the country. “Alright” somehow manages to sound carefree yet urgent, like a radio jingle perforated by drum fills. “We been hurt, been down before,” Lamar raps, preaching about the glory inherent in struggle. “We gon’ be alright.” He sounded like a prophet, capable of articulating what people in the streets desired but couldn’t put into words. Lamar appeared to embrace the role. In the video for “Alright,” he soars over Los Angeles and the Bay Area, astonishing all who see him, until a cop brings him down. At the…

SON FOR SON, dóttir for dóttir, Iceland may be the most musical nation on earth. It has a population of three hundred and thirty-two thousand—about the same as that of Corpus Christi, Texas—and an international musical presence that is out of all proportion to its size. In April, the Los Angeles Philharmonic hosted the Reykjavík Festival, which sprawled across eight days of programming. There were around fifty musical compositions, six nonclassical groups, and nearly a hundred and fifty Icelandic participants. The corridors of Disney Hall were blonder than usual. Local hotel receptionists contended with names containing þ and ð. A huge installation by the Icelandic artist Shoplifter, consisting of a hovering mass of multicolored hair extensions, occupied one of Disney’s lobby spaces, setting a characteristic Icelandic tone of epic whimsy.…