Innholdsfortegnelse for January 4, 2016 i The New Yorker

In 1805, when Madame Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin’s husband, François, died, she found herself, at age twentyseven, the Veuve (“widow”) Clicquot. She threw herself into winemaking, and developed a method (which came to be called riddling) for removing the dead yeast that long clouded champagne: she cut holes in her kitchen table and stored bottles cork down, twisting them so the sediment collected in their necks. Fast-forward to present-day Greenwich Village, where a cellar bar (beneath the Bourgeois Pig) with a focus on bubbly stuff features a decorative riddling rack, studded with bottles. The snug boîte conjures Harlequin novels about Victorian vampires (red velvet chaise, black marble counter, palais black velvet wallpaper). Recently, the beverage director, Tanner Walle, sang along to eighties hip-hop and offered generous pours of a sparkling Styrian…

This winter’s heat wave has created problems for a lot of ventures: furcoat sales, ski weekends, pond-hockey games. But it did not affect ticket sales to the Dead Men’s Steam School, a threehour lecture on such topics as “steamheating loads” and “boiler ratings,” which will take place at Riccardo’s by the Bridge, in Astoria, on January 6th. Tickets to the event, which cost a hundred and twenty-nine dollars, sold out in November. In case you forgot to book, here are some notes from the previous session: A catering hall that often hosts weddings, Riccardo’s, on this night, was flanked by white vans, parked bumper to bumper. Inside, beneath chandeliers, burly men in union jackets stood at a buffet, scooping baked ziti onto plates. A screen at the front of the…

On the afternoon of December 11, 2000, Jeb Bush, the forty-third governor of Florida and a member of the most dominant American political family since the Kennedys, stood in the Oval Office with President Bill Clinton to mark the signing of a landmark law intended to restore the Everglades, the majestic swamp that spans the interior of southern Florida. The legislation, overwhelmingly approved by both parties, envisioned spending eight billion dollars to revive the wetland, which, thanks in large part to heedless development, had been shrunk, chopped, polluted, and drained to the point of terminal decline. That same afternoon, the Supreme Court was hearing Bush v. Gore, the case that ended the vote-counting dispute in Florida between Clinton’s Vice-President and Jeb’s brother. But, if the occasion was awkward for Bush…

The friends met for dinner, as they did the second Sunday of every month, at a small Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. There were three couples: Marty and Barbara, Jerry and Maureen, and John and Marcia, who had recently returned from a weeklong island getaway to celebrate their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. “Were the beaches beautiful? How was the hotel? Was it safe? Was it memorable? Was it worth the money?” the friends asked. Marcia said, “You had to see it to believe it. The ocean was like bathwater. The sunsets? Better than any painting. But the political situation, don’t get me started. All the beggars!” She put a hand over her heart and sipped her wine. “Who knows who’s in charge? It’s utter chaos. Meanwhile, the people all…

UNDER THE UDALA TREES, by Chinelo Okparanta (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). At the height of the Biafran war, two Nigerian girls fall in love. The romance is brief, but for Ijeoma, the narrator of this début novel, it is the beginning of years of pain. Her mother sees the relationship as an abomination against God; Ijeoma feels choked by tradition. Okparanta is less interested in the war’s trauma than in its aftermath and the meanings that characters assign to their experiences. The love story has hypnotic power, but the novel tries too hard to find in it a universal lesson in tolerance. Details of disco-era Nigeria—jerricans filled with palm wine, a suitor in bell-bottom trousers— suggest Okparanta’s skill and promise. FINALE, by Thomas Mallon (Pantheon). This populous novel of the…

Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals. This is not surprising. American musicals are, for the most part, about boys, or boyish pursuits and aspirations—the fantasy of freedom and resolve—and those dreams have little to do with the reality of most black women’s lives. Still, some politically committed theatre artists have fought to bring different kinds of stories to the musical form, and to liberate black female stars from the bondage of playing “black,” rather than embodying a complete character. Diahann Carroll gave it her all as Barbara Woodruff, a model whose race was not…

MEMENTO MORI A part of the death industry that was skirted in Rebecca Mead’s article about the artisanal funeral director Caitlin Doughty is the cemetery (“Our Bodies, Ourselves,” November 30th). At a cemetery, there are concrete vaults, coffins made from exotic materials, and headstones that have been transported from across the country; perpetual mowing, irrigation, and leaking toxins become one’s environmental legacy. Contrast that with a natural burial: the unembalmed body is wrapped in a simple shroud and laid to rest in a three-to-four-foot-deep hand-dug hole, marked only with materials found on site and a small metal surveyor’s disk, and decorated with native wildflowers. When a natural burial site is overseen by a nonprofit land trust or a public-park system where the proceeds purchase more conservation land and restore…

Video Games Live Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall both compose music for video games, and they have conceived a new type of performance with this riveting combination of music and machine. An orchestra and choir conducted by their fellow-composer Emmanuel Fratianni perform arrangements of iconic video-game music, flanked by synchronized gaming sequences, lighting, and effects. For ten years, the immersive experience has reworked themes from best-selling franchises like Final Fantasy, Zelda, Tetris, and Metal Gear Solid, including interactive elements and costumed performers. The elaborate format asks skeptics to consider that there may be more to the pricey electronic boxes gathered under Christmas trees than their title screens suggest: V.G.L. played to a hundred thousand people in Taiwan, and the Brazilian government has helped to subsidize the event to encourage…

Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, who co-directed the new stopmotion-animation film “Anomalisa,” were exploring the Whitney Museum in semi-tandem. Kaufman, a short, mordant fifty-seven-year-old who also wrote the script, as well as such films as “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” hugged the walls, studying the art. Johnson, a rangy, diffident thirty-six-yearold animator, roved to and fro, a large pale moon orbiting a small fiery sun. “Oh, look,” Kaufman said, pointing to “Puppets,” a group of ten ceramic puppets propped in a corner. Johnson narrated: “Charlie stopped and made his way over to the puppets.” Kaufman took up the voice-over: “And said, ‘Oh, look!,’ continuing his obsession with puppets.” Unlike their film’s flexible silicone dolls, these puppets seemed incapable of drinking, smoking, or having R-rated sex. “They’re not functional,” Johnson…

What you did wasn’t so bad.You stood in a small room, waiting for the sun.At least you told yourself that.I know it was small,but there was something, a kind of pulped lemon,at the low edge of the sky.No, you’re right, it was terrible.Terrible to live without lovein small rooms with vinyl blindslistening to music secretly,the secret music of one’s headwhich can’t be shared.A dream is the only way to breathe.But you mustfind a more useful way to live.I suppose you’re rightthis was a failure: to stand thereso still, waiting for—what?When I think about this life,the life you led, I think of England,of secret gardens that never open,and novels sliding off the bedat night where the small handkerchiefof darkness settles overone’s face.…

The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination, failure of courage, bad governments, bad planning, incompetence, corruption, fecklessness, the laws of nations, the laws of physics, the weight of history, inertia of all sorts, psychological unsuitability on the part of the would-be changer, the resistance of people who would lose from the change, the resistance of people who would benefit from it, the seduction of activities other than world-changing, lack of practical knowledge, lack of political skill, and lack of money. Lack of money is a stubborn obstacle, but not as hopelessly unyielding as some of the others, and so would-be world-changers often set out to overcome it. Some try to raise money, but that can be depressing and futile.…

I do not ride as well as Dmitry. Still, I alwaysmanage to saddle the skittish pinto.He doesn’t know that I bribe herwith peppermints and lemon cakes.We hunt by letting our tight pack of houndsunravel into the grasses.They frame the night with their howls.I close my eyes to listen; Dmitry chewson his prayers as he rides.We are after nothing, really.We’ve learned to come trundlingin our cracked-horn saddlesto be out of the range of men,of the things men do.Each ride is longer and longerand we spoil in the safety of solitude.At first, we’d lose the lead dog to the smellof home if we rode too long.Now he comes back.He gets a little piece of cake, too.…

GEORGES BIZET’S OPERA “Les Pêcheurs de Perles” (1863) is a classic example of nineteenth-century French exoticism: it paints a rosy picture of humble pearl fishers in the faraway land of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) with a perfumed, Gallic-sounding score whose sweeping melodies delight the ear. But Penny Woolcock, who directs the Metropolitan Opera’s first staging of the work in a century, strips away some of the fantasy, transporting the action to an impoverished present-day coastal village in the Far East, where fragile tin-and-cardboard homes abut the sea. The production gives a cast that excels in the art of lyric singing—including the soprano Diana Damrau (above), who portrays the Hindu priestess Leïla—the chance to render Bizet’s characters in three dimensions. ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Guggenheim Museum “Photo-Poetics: An Anthology” Ten…

Sir Tom Jones, the singer, who was born in Wales and now lives in Los Angeles, was recently driven through the Bronx, in the company of Mark and Donna Woodward, his son and his daughter-in-law, who are also his managers. The three of them had a half-plan to eat an Italian lunch on Arthur Avenue. Jones (born Woodward) was trying to remember the details of a restaurant, perhaps in that neighborhood, perhaps worth revisiting, to which he had once been taken by Rod Stewart. “A little slope, the road goes down,” Jones said. “I’ll know it when I see it.” “Exactly,” Woodward said, skeptically. Jones is seventy-five; his son is sixteen years younger. They have been on the road together for more than forty years. As they looked for lunch,…

Fabiano Caruana appeared in a photograph in this magazine in 2001, when he was eight. It was raining, and he was wearing an oversized slicker and standing on a park bench. He held an umbrella with one hand and, with the other, reached across a chessboard to make a move in a game against his teacher, Bruce Pandolfini, who was the subject of the article that the photograph accompanied. “He was totally unaware of anything but the chess,” Pandolfini said recently. (In the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” which came out the year after Caruana was born, Pandolfini was portrayed by Ben Kingsley.) Caruana became a grand master in 2007, when he was fourteen, and is currently the third-highest-rated chess player in history, a few points behind Garry Kasparov. In…

In the Mazandaran province of northern Iran, where the Elburz Mountains careen toward the Caspian Sea, Asieh Amini grew up on a farm surrounded by kiwi and tangerine orchards. Born in 1974, Amini was the third of four sisters. When she was very young, her family, which came from the gentry of feudal times, owned animals and employed gardeners and housekeepers. Amini understood that her great-grandmother was an important person because everyone, including Amini’s father, had to sit up straight when she entered a room. In the north of Iran, women could own property, wield social power, and work on farms with their sleeves and their pants rolled up. But it was still common for men to have multiple wives, and because of this Amini’s extended family sprawled. Amini’s father…

“Not my style—it’s in English,” an operagoer said at the Lyric Opera of Chicago the other night. The company had just performed the first act of Jimmy López’s “Bel Canto,” in its world première, and the dissatisfied customer was headed for the exit. It was a curious thing to say, since the libretto of “Bel Canto”—an adaptation, by Nilo Cruz, of Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel about a hostage standoff—is not only in English but also in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and Quechua. The imprecision of the complaint made the underlying prejudice all the clearer. For a good portion of the domestic opera audience, the idea of American opera is a contradiction in terms. This bias has persisted for the better part of two centuries. The musicologist Douglas Shadle,…