Innholdsfortegnelse for January 25, 2016 i The New Yorker

“Remember the eighteenth-century gin epidemic, in London, where mothers were selling their children for gallons of the stuff?” Richard Knapp, the proprietor of this cozy Nolita bar, pleasantly explained when asked about the place’s rather cheerless name. The menu—lit by dim Mason-jar lanterns, and reinvented almost weekly—does not particularly favor the juniper-flavored liquor, and the spirit of provocative, possibly perilous improvisation prevails, especially for those undaunted by generous pours of Cholula into their lime- and salt-laced Tecates. On a recent Wednesday, a pair of patrons—dressed decidedly frumpier than their cashmere-sweatered, silkbloused neighbors—commented, above the snarl of eighties-era Hüsker Dü and Circle Jerks, on the thematic connection between a drink named The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (sherry, grapefruit, cardamom) and one called Lee Marvin (tequila, agave, orange). The energetic barkeep…

The future is at Third Avenue and Fifteenth Street, and moving north. On December 28th, at the intersection’s southeast corner, workers installed a new public telephone called a Link. It is the first of its kind anywhere in the city, the country, or the world. By 2020, more than half of the 8,178 curbside pay phones in the city will be transformed into Links. When the Link went in at Fifteenth Street, a technician tried it out by calling the cell phone of the worker standing next to him. When the cell phone rang, the technician’s first words were not “Mr. Watson, come here. I need you.” On that same day, the crew put in a second Link, at Seventeenth and Third. Since then, the Links have been marching up…

On the night of November 2nd, welldressed Wichita residents formed a line that snaked through the lobby of the city’s convention center. They all held tickets to the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce’s annual gala, which had drawn thirty-five hundred people. The evening’s featured speaker, Charles Koch, had lived in town almost all of his eighty years, but few locals—even prominent ones—had ever laid eyes on him. Charles, along with his brother David, owns virtually all of the energy-and-chemical conglomerate Koch Industries, which is based in Wichita and has annual revenues of a hundred and fifteen billion dollars. Charles’s secretive manner, rightwing views, and concerted campaign to exert political influence by spending his fortune have made him an object of fascination, especially in his home town. “You never see him,”…

Great bronze doors of Trinity Church, hourstold by the sounds of the bells. A redtugboat pushes a red-and-gold bargeinto the Narrows. A bench in the shadowson a pier in the Hudson. The caféon Cornelia Street, the music,now, whose voice might that be? Diffuse,invisible, energy. The flow of datasince the attacks has surged.Technocapital, permanently, digitally,semioticized, virtually unlimitedin freedom and power, takingbillions of bodies on the planetwith it. The future, the past, cosmogonies,the void are in whose vision?Ever-deepening and ravenouscruelty, viciousness, annihilationare defended and worshipped.But is there a more beautiful city—partsof it, anyway? Another path to the harbor,the border between sea and landfluctuating, a line, a curve. Peck Slipto Water Street, to Front Street,to Pine, to Coenties Slip, to Pearl,to Stone Street, to Exchange Place,the light in majestic degrees.This is a fable.…

The world is unpredictable and disorderly. Sometimes your train is late; sometimes it rains when it’s not supposed to; the drugstore doesn’t have the brand of dental floss you like. Boundaries are violated and rules are ignored. The green spinach on your plate touches the white chicken, and someone has bought your boxer shorts from J. C. Penney instead of from Kmart. People are hard to figure out. Sometimes they promise and don’t deliver; it’s not clear whether the expression on a face is a smile or a sneer, or, if it is a smile, what it’s about. People say things that they don’t mean literally: they tell jokes and they use ironic expressions. Other people’s minds are a foreign country in which we’re guests, tourists, or strangers, unsure where…

HOW TO DO GOOD Larissa MacFarquhar’s article about Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation (“What Money Can Buy,” January 4th) highlights the institution’s recent focus on remedying income inequality. Until the advent of the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation was the single largest and most influential private source of philanthropy in the United States, and possibly in the world. As MacFarquhar notes, the foundation has a history of creating change in areas where governments are often ineffectual. One example is in the arts—in particular, the realm of orchestral music. In the early nineteensixties, before the United States had a national- arts bureaucracy, the Ford Foundation’s arts-and-humanities program not only supported bright young composers like Philip Glass and Peter Schickele but also professionalized and developed American symphony orchestras. The foundation’s…

The designer LaQuan Smith checked the setting on his iron before he started pressing a black pleated wafflemesh dress the other day, in his showroom, in Long Island City. The dress was made of neoprene, and too much heat might melt it. Behind him, on three racks, hung his Spring 2016 collection. He flicked through neon neoprene sweaters and tweed bustiers and pulled out a slinky dress of golden fishnet, which he had also made in emerald green, for Rihanna, who wore it on tour in South America. “Because of the ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ track, I was, like, This would be perfect for her,” he said. He sent the dress to her with a note saying so, and she thanked him on Instagram. Smith, twenty-seven, is tall and…

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s centennial came around, in 1970, the yearlong festivities opened with an exhibition called “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970.” Organized and installed by a young curator named Henry Geldzahler, it struck me and many others as an almost unimaginable storming of the gates. Thirty-five galleries of European paintings on the second floor were cleared to make way for the works of forty-three contemporary artists, from Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler (the only woman in the show), Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. At long last, we thought, America’s greatest museum had come to terms with the art of its time, which it had formerly either marginalized or ignored. Our cheers were premature. The museum bought…

Road diva, divine mixologist, cancan dancerof the mandible wars, show me the way of mindover what’s-the-matter-with-you, girl, swirling from mouthsof righteous dudes. O goddess of attitudes, yes, ma’am,Madame of the owl tiara, bird woman enthroned,big cog of the cosmos, born from the noggin of Zeus,hear my prayer, because I’m adrift in a sea of words, my boatis cardboard pinned together with newspaper headlinesof the latest war, springing leaks that generals plugwith their double-talk, duckwalk to the edge of the cliff,and we’re holding the bill, still due after ten thousand years,while women wail in shanty shacks, stack cordwoodfor the winter, open cans of baked beans, bust the seamsof polyester pants made by the Chinese. O please,show us the way to put some spring in our spring. Bringus a bunch of lilacs…

Truth be told, I’ve always been afraid of it, since childhood. It’s prepared not casually, or whenever the fancy strikes you, but most often for New Year’s Eve, in the heart of winter, in the shortest and most brutal days of December. Darkness comes early. There is a damp frost; you can see spiky halos around the street lamps. You have to breathe through your mittens. Your forehead aches from the cold, and your cheeks are numb. But, wouldn’t you know it, you still have to boil and chill the aspic—the name of the dish itself makes the temperature of your soul drop, and no thick gray goathair shawl will save you. It’s a special kind of religion, making the aspic. It’s a yearly sacrifice, though we don’t know to…

YOUR HEART IS A MUSCLE THE SIZE OF A FIST, by Sunil Yapa (Lee Boudreaux). Fast-paced and unflinching, this novel takes place in 1999, during Seattle’s chaotic protests against the World Trade Organization. The point of view shifts between a young homeless boy; his estranged father, who is the chief of police; a protester haunted by the choices of her past; her lover, doing all he can to remain nonviolent; two officers struggling to keep control; and a desperate Sri Lankan delegate. As these characters encounter one another in a fog of tear gas and pepper spray, Yapa vividly evokes rage and compassion. Underlying the novel, and at once reinforced and rejected, is the chief’s mantra: “Care too much and the world will kill you cold.” DINNER, by César…

The premise of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” might make Sheryl Sandberg cringe: The day that Rebecca Bunch makes partner at a corporate law firm, she bumps into her old boyfriend Josh Chan. He’s an aimless So-Cal bro, while she’s a Manhattan workaholic, and the two dated for about two minutes at summer camp, but so what. The minute that Josh mentions West Covina—an unremarkable California suburb that people keep faint-praising as “only two hours from the beach”—she’s hooked. She quits, moves west, becomes the only Harvard-educated lawyer at a strip-mall law firm, and schemes to get her man. But first she bursts into song. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” on the CW, has at least two original songs per episode, complete with dance numbers. It stars its little-known co-creator, Rachel Bloom. And it’s a romantic…

WHEN RITA HAYWORTH PUT the blame on Mame, in the 1946 film noir “Gilda,” it was Jack Cole who lent her the moves. Cole’s choreography for movies—the subject of a retrospective at MOMA (Jan. 20-Feb. 4)—was a crucial part of Hollywood’s postwar rejuvenation. He designed angular thrusts suggesting the polyrhythms of bebop and jagged poses resembling the graphic slashes of modern art. Above all, he infused musicals with a boisterous eroticism, as seen in the gleefully brazen numbers for Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and in Monroe’s supreme musical moment, a romp through “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” in “Let’s Make Love.” The series also includes “Les Girls” (above), starring Gene Kelly as the choreographer for the trio of Mitzi Gaynor, Kay Kendall, and Taina…

Eugene Mirman, the comedian, is forty-one; he has a round face and looks a little bruised around the eyes. He is known for his standup, and for playing television characters named Eugene (“Flight of the Conchords”), Gene (“Bob’s Burgers”), and Yvgeny (“Delocated”). He has lived in Park Slope for fifteen years, but, until one afternoon the other week, he had never been to the Prospect Park Zoo. On his visit, he bought a soda, and—watching a sea lion sitting up on its tail, in expectation of fish—he recalled how he’d recently tried, and failed, to come up with thirty or forty minutes of material that could be described as jokes for animals. “Jokes in the language of each animal,” he explained. “Doing something that would elicit laughter from them— whether…

Ammon Bundy, the leader of the armed militia that stormed the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Oregon, has a simple solution for fixing the economy of the West: get the federal government out of the way. His group’s chief demand is that the federal government hand over all of Malheur to local control. The ultimate goal, he says, is “to get the logger back to logging, to get the rancher back to ranching, to get the miner back to mining.” Bundy’s tactics make him easy to dismiss as a kook, but his ideology is squarely in the mainstream of Western conservatism, with its hostility to government ownership, skepticism about environmental rules, and conviction that individual enterprise is being strangled by government regulations. Such thinking has a long history in the…

When a spinal cord is damaged, location is destiny: the higher the injury, the more severe the effects. The spine has thirty-three vertebrae, which are divided into five regions— the coccygeal, the sacral, the lumbar, the thoracic, and the cervical. The nerverich cord traverses nearly the entire length of the spine. The nerves at the bottom of the cord are well buried, and sometimes you can walk away from damage to these areas. In between are insults to the long middle region of the spine, which begins at the shoulders and ends at the midriff. These are the thoracic injuries. Although they don’t affect the upper body, they can still take away the ability to walk or feel below the waist, including autonomic function (bowel, bladder, and sexual control). Injuries…

A rgosy began in 1882 as a magazine for children and ceased publication ninety-six years later as soft-core porn for men, but for ten years in between it was the home of a true-crime column by Erle Stanley Gardner, the man who gave the world Perry Mason. In eightytwo novels, six films, and nearly three hundred television episodes, Mason, a criminal-defense lawyer, took on seemingly guilty clients and proved their innocence. In the magazine, Gardner, who had practiced law before turning to writing, attempted to do something similar— except that there his “clients” were real people, already convicted and behind bars. All of them met the same criteria: they were impoverished, they insisted that they were blameless, they were serving life sentences for serious crimes, and they had exhausted their…

When we call a thing “unbelievable,” we’re expressing a belief that it’s true. Similarly, we employ “incredible” to confer credibility, and “fantastic” to admit facts. We thereby put happy faces on mortifications of our common sense. The umbrella term is “wonder,” which applies as both subject and effect to “Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger’s Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay,” a historical show of prints, drawings, books, and manuscripts, involving words and letters, by numerous artists and artisans, at the Metropolitan Museum. I refer to the show’s central complement of works by and about Buchinger (1674-1739), a German artist and performer who was born without hands and feet and stood just twenty-nine inches tall. Buchinger barnstormed fairs, inns, and courts in Germany, France, England, and Ireland in the early eighteenth century,…

In the wake of the Second World War, a phalanx of young composers took hold of European music, determined to discard a compromised past and remake their art. Chief among them were Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, and Pierre Boulez. They were in their late teens or early twenties when the inferno ended, and they bore scars—some physical, some psychological— from what Europe had endured. Boulez, who died on January 5th, at the age of ninety, never reached the front lines, but he exemplified the ethos of his generation. Cool, brutal, elegant, fiery, he established a kind of International Style in music, and propagated it in polemical writings and through institutional networks. As a conductor, he was an exacting, absorbing interpreter of the advanced styles…