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27 Articles

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE (“WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED” P. 42) is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the winner of the 2014 National Magazine Award for feature writing. AMY DAVIDSON (COMMENT, a staff writer, has a column on newyorker.com. JILL LEPORE (“RICHER AND POORER, P. 26) is a professor of American history at Harvard. Her book “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” came out last fall. ADAM GOPNIK (IN THE MEMORY WARD”P. 34) has been a staff writer since 1986. “The Table Comes First” is his most recent book. CLIVE JAMES (POEM, P. 50') will publish two books of literary criticism, “Poetry Notebook” and “Latest Readings,” and “Sentenced to Life,” a collection of poems, later this year. He lives in Cambridge, England. SARAH BRAUNSTEIN (FICTION, P. 63) teaches in the M.F.A. program at…

CUOMO’S WAY Jeffrey Toobin’s Profile of Governor Andrew Cuomo is excellent, but it does not reflect his practice of deceit (“The Albany Chronicles,” February 16th). In 2012, some of the people whom Cuomo had appointed to a commission to review the Long Island Power Authority’s response to a storm did not endorse the recommendation he wanted (that LIPA should be disbanded). His response was to rewrite parts of the commission’s final report. In 2013, he claimed that the Moreland Commission would be independent, and could investigate anyone, but when the commission subpoenaed a firm that had made ads for the Governor’s campaign, Cuomo’s staffdemanded that the subpoenas be recalled; he also intervened when the commission sought to subpoena a trade group that had supported him. He ultimately shut down the commission…

Goings On About Town: This Week

MARCH 2015 WEDNESDAY 11TH THURSDAY 12TH FRIDAY 13TH SATURDAY 14TH SUNDAY 15TH MONDAY 16TH TUESDAY 17TH FOR MORE THAN half a century, the American choral sound has been defined by the great college ensembles of the Upper Midwest, such as the St. Olaf Choir, with its lusciously layered tones. But recently young New Yorkers in groups like Roomful of Teeth (pictured above) have been blazing a new trail, forming intimately scaled ensembles of brave solo singers whose lean timbres resemble those of the early-music and new-music vocal groups of Europe. On March 17, Roomful of Teeth collaborates with the outstanding instrumentalists of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble at the Met Museum’s Temple of Dendur. They will perform “Drone Mass,” a world première by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, whose sleek score for the film “The Theory of Everything”…

Goings On About Town: This Week

Dance: Divine Comedy

AS THE CURTAIN RISES on Paul Taylor’s 1985 piece “Last Look”—it will be part of his company’s current season at the Koch Theatre—you see, under a low, grimy light, a big pile of God knows what in the middle of the stage. It starts to move. It is a pile of human beings. Slowly, they crawl apart. One man stands out from the others. He rises; he falls; he rises and falls again and again, flinging his arms and legs so violently that he seems to be trying to cast them of his body. The dancer here is Robert Kleinendorst. Much of Taylor’s best work depends on the performers looking human and inhuman at the same time, and no one in the company looks more human than Kleinendorst, down to…

Dance: Divine Comedy

The Theatre: Dynamic Duo

FOR FIFTEEN YEARS, THE Jim Fletcher has worked with the important theatre director and writer Richard Maxwell, whose shows require an uncommon degree of silence from the performers. In a Maxwell work—his fourteenth full-length piece, “The Evening,” premières at the Kitchen on March 12, co-presented by Performance Space 122— part of the story is what the characters don’t say as they walk, measuredly, from one side of the stage to the other, often turning away from a fellow-performer and gazing of into the distance, as though dreaming of someplace else. When Fletcher looks out into space, he can communicate longing, certainly, while making sure that we also see his Rodin-like solidity, which refutes the adolescent jumpiness or feyness that most leading men convey on and of Broadway. Born in 1963 in…

The Theatre: Dynamic Duo

Classical Music: Dance of Death

THE BRITHSH COMPOSER THOMAS ADES, who will conduct the American première of his vocal-orchestral work “Totentanz” with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall (March 12-14), is still a relatively young man, having just turned forty-four. Yet he is securely established as a modern master, each new piece assuming the trappings of an event. Such a reputation could easily lead to professional caution, to an audiencesavvy recycling of familiar gestures. Fortunately, Adès’s latest creations are anything but circumspect: they are wilder, stranger, and bolder than the intricate, insolent scores with which he first made his name, in the nineteen-nineties. The opening bars of “Totentanz” give us winds shrieking in their upper registers, hectoring brass, whistles and whipcracks from the percussion section, and a splattered G-major chord that lands like…

Classical Music: Dance of Death

Goings On About Town: Above & Beyond

NYC Craft Beer Festival: Spring Seasonal The craft-beer revival is like a happy hour that never ends—this is the tenth edition of the biannual event. Driven by a renewed interest in the fermented beverage, the gathering features seventy-"ive breweries from around the nation. More than a hundred and "ifty brews will be available for tasting, with an emphasis on seasonal and limited releases. Artisanal food, music from the High and Mighty Brass Band, and cocktail-making tips from Jonathan Pogash will also be on tap. (Lexington Avenue Armory, 68 Lexington Ave. handcraftedtasting.com. March 13-14.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The New York auction circuit embarks on a week of Asian art sales, a category encompassing everything from Himalayan mandalas to Ming bowls. Christie’ sales begin on March 15, with a two-day spread of Chinese ceramics, followed…

Tables for Two: Café Clover

IN CITY WHERE YOU could theoretically eat a different preparation of pork belly every night, there are two things that might make Café Clover a tough sell. The first is that the menu was designed with the help of a nutritionist aiming to shave of calories wherever possible. The second is that this temple of wellness is situated at Manhattan’s most vexed spot, at least for restaurants: the corner of Sixth Ave. and Downing St., where a triangular room with the feel of a cruise-ship bow has thwarted the ambition of so many chefs. The oddly shaped space has been made to look as lovely as it can be; Aegean-blue banquettes help. And, sure enough, all the usual health foods are in attendance: flax, chia, sunflower seeds. In fact, these three…

Tables for Two: Café Clover

Bar Tab: Livingston Manor

BAR TAB Livingston manor 42 Hoyt St., Brooklyn (347-987-3292) New York abounds with old things made new—just consider this storefront on Hoyt Street, in downtown Brooklyn. Some sixty years ago, it was the Garfield luncheonette, where bemused detectives once watched a thief crawl over the transom with sixteen eggs in his pockets and a slice of cake jammed in his mouth. More recently, the site belonged to a bodega—narrow, dusty, smelling of cat food—adjacent to a one-stop shop where checks are cashed, shoes repaired, and keys copied. The latter establishment remains (basic needs endure), but recently it was out with the bodega and in with the craft-beer-and-cocktail joint. The bar is named for both nearby Livingston Street and the Catskill trout-fishing hamlet where the Manor’s owner, Matt Roff (also of the…

Bar Tab: Livingston Manor

Comment: Atomic Clocks

In 1950, Bruno Pontecorvo, an Italian physicist who had been working on British and Canadian nuclear projects, vanished while vacationing on the Mediterranean. As Frank Close writes in a new book about him, “Half-Life,” Pontecorvo wasn’t heard from again until 1955, when he resurfaced in Russia. There were many wild rumors about what he was working on for the Soviets, among them an “atomic fog.” But Freeman Dyson, reviewing the biography in The New York Review of Books, asks how much rogue physicists like Pontecorvo really mattered: “Perhaps the spies accelerated the production of the first Soviet bombs by two or three years, but those bombs soon became obsolete and were superseded by new designs invented without the help of spies.” Dyson, as a physicist, must appreciate that the significance of…

Comment: Atomic Clocks

Who Goes There?: Alias

Three Fridays ago at Balthazar, the SoHo brasserie, a large cloudedglass mirror detached from a wall and landed on some people who were having breakfast. One of them was a man— debonair, in a fine scarf and a dark coat—who identified himself to police officers responding to a 911 call as Arnaud Française. He was wheeled out of the restaurant on a gurney and taken to Bellevue. Doctors examined him; he was unharmed. Later, it emerged that he was not M. Française but Arnaud Montebourg, until last August the French Minister of the Economy. One guesses that he tendered the false surname out of embarrassment, not wanting to be known, newly arrived on the East Coast—he was spending the week as the Syngman Rhee 1910 Lecturer at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson…

Who Goes There?: Alias

All-Nighter Dept.: Om Sweet Om

A legend: In ancient India, a noblewoman named Parvati had a crush on the god Shiva. But he wasn’t open to dating. His previous wife had died, and he was an ascetic; he meditated all day on a mountaintop, wearing only a tiger skin. Rebuffed, Parvati tried to woo him on his own terms. She took up an austerity regime—fasting, meditating for years in the wilderness. It worked. Shiva was impressed, and he came out of seclusion. The Hindu ceremony of Shivaratri honors their marriage. Devotees fast and stay up all night to celebrate it with chanting. “It’s a long haul,” the yoga teacher Eddie Stern said the other day, at the Broome Street Temple, in SoHo. “But, once you get late into the night— 2, 3, 4 A.M.—the whole atmosphere’s…

All-Nighter Dept.: Om Sweet Om

Up Life’s Ladder: Sidekick

Reggie Watts is weird, but weird works for Reggie Watts. Example: his 2012 TED talk. He starts out speaking gibberish, which morphs into a British accent (“there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories”), and is followed by a gru" “Ya know what I’m sayin’?” Ya don’t, but that’s the point. Watts, the soon-to-be house bandleader of “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” on CBS, could be called a comedian or a musician. In his signature act, he improvises monologues and songs over beats that he records onstage and loops using an e"ects pedal. The result is like watching a “Saturday Night Live” audition on acid. The other day, Watts was due at the Tiger Lounge, a secret rehearsal space beneath…

Up Life’s Ladder: Sidekick

The Boards: Super

Let’s review the gentrification of Brooklyn: ten years ago, the Gowanus Asteroid landed in Prospect Park, imbuing a group of passersby with awesome superpowers. This band of heroes, calling themselves the League of Victory, now spend their days putting out subway fires, stopping muggers, and generally keeping Brooklyn safe for vegan bakeries and bicycle collectives. That, anyway, is the version put forward by the new musical “Brooklynite,” which recently opened of Broadway. The show is the rare musical based on a store. (“Walmartopia,” a Fringe Festival hit in 2006, is another.) Its inspiration is the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, which opened in Park Slope eleven years ago and specializes in capes, masks, ray guns, invisibility coating, and other crime-fighting accoutrements. Behind a secret moving wall—designed to elicit “whoa”s—is a spacious after-school…

The Boards: Super

Annals of Society: Richer and Poorer

For about a century, economic inequality has been measured on a scale, from zero to one, known as the Gini index and named after an Italian statistician, Corrado Gini, who devised it in 1912, when he was twenty-eight and the chair of statistics at the University of Cagliari. If all the income in the world were earned by one person and everyone else earned nothing, the world would have a Gini index of one. If everyone in the world earned exactly the same income, the world would have a Gini index of zero. The United States Census Bureau has been using Gini’s measurement to calculate income inequality in America since 1947. Between 1947 and 1968, the U.S. Gini index dropped to .386, the lowest ever recorded. Then it began to…

Annals of Society: Richer and Poorer

Shouts & Murmurs: Of Younger Days

When I was sixty-three, a cheeseburger at a diner on Fiftyseventh Street cost $24.95, you could ride the Staten Island Ferry for free, and a kid could get a pretty decent college education for a quarter of a million dollars. Life was slower then, partly because of my newly acquired hip problem, but I did not know enough to appreciate the leisurely pace. I was always wanting to hurry up, to go faster and farther, to cross the street before the “Walk” signal ended. Now I wonder—why in the world was I in such a rush, back when I was sixty -three? Obviously, I did not want to get hit by a car, and there never seemed to be enough time to get across all twelve lanes of Queens Boulevard,…

Shouts & Murmurs: Of Younger Days

Dept. of Culture: In the Memory Ward

At first, the library of the Warburg Institute, in London, seems and smells like any other university library: four floors of fluorescent lights and steel shelves, with the damp, weedy aroma of aging books everywhere, and sudden apparitions of graduate students wearing that look, at once brightly keen and infinitely discouraged, eternally shared by graduate students, whether the old kind, with suède elbow patches, or the new kind, with many piercings. Only as the visitor begins to study the collections does the oddity of the place appear. In the range-finder plates mounted on the shelves, where in a normal library one would expect to see “Spanish Literature, Sixteenth Century” or “Biography, American: E663-664,” there are, instead, signs pointing toward “Magic Mirrors” and “Amulets” and “The Evil Eye.” Long shelves of original…

Dept. of Culture: In the Memory Ward

Tonight outside the plate glasseach insect is made of a long tube of wood,as if the insect had become a treeto give the tree a voice.And these pink spatters,these crumbled parlor doilies,these milkweed blossomsfade as if antique,and the milkweed does not report on the condition of its leaves,the height of its flowers,its life without bureaucracy,nor does the lilac filtering the mentholated air,or the bee drowsing on the sillafter straining through the broken window screenlike Rilke wheedling his way into a palace.Or the brook that runs by the cabintalking nonsense.Or the willow that slouches as if it were in a classroomwhere the teacher bores it.So forgive me please already.I am sorry for speaking for nature.But it was asking for it.…

Letter from Belfast: Where the Bodies Are Buried

Jean McConville had just taken a bath when the intruders knocked on the door. A small woman with a guarded smile, she was, at thirty-seven, a mother of ten. She was also a widow: her husband, Arthur, had died eleven months earlier, of cancer. The family continued to live in Divis Flats—a housing complex just of the Falls Road, in the heart of Catholic West Belfast—but had recently moved to a slightly larger apartment. The stove was not connected yet, so Jean’s daughter Helen, who was fifteen, had gone to a nearby chip shop to bring back dinner. “Don’t be stopping for a sneaky smoke,” Jean told her. It was December, 1972, and already dark at 6:30 P.M. When the children heard the knock, they assumed that it was Helen…

Letter from Belfast: Where the Bodies Are Buried

The stars in their magnificent arrayLook down upon the Earth, their cynosure,Or so it seems. They are too far away,In fact, to see a thing; hence they look pureTo us. They lack the textures of our globe,So only we, from cameras carried high,Enjoy the beauty of the swirling robeThat wraps us up, the interplay of skyAnd cloud, as if a Wedgwood plate of blueAnd white should melt, and then, its surface stirredWith spoons, a treasure too good to be true,Be placed, and hover like a hummingbird,Drawing all eyes, though ours alone, to feastOn splendor as it turns west from the East. There was a time when some of our young menWalked plumply on the moon and saw Earth rise,As stunning as the sun. The years since thenHave aged them. Now and…

Fiction: All You Have to Do

It was 1972 and Sid Baumwell was hungry. For the salt at the bottom of the pretzel dish, for frozen Mars bars, for appreciation from someone who wasn’t a blood relation—preferably a girl with pink cheeks and big sleepy eyes, like the one in “The Graduate,” his second-favorite movie of all time. He could do two dozen pull-ups. No acne. He wasn’t truly handsome but not bad-looking— handsome enough, he felt, to deserve his hunger. Freckles across the bridge of his nose, slightly splayed feet, respectable height. Smart. He knew this. His teachers told him so when they pulled him aside to say that he wasn’t working up to his potential. He had potential, and this mattered more than grades, comforted him more than any A. He held a secret…

Fiction: All You Have to Do

A Critic at Large: Girl, Interrupted

One day not long after New Year’s, 2012, an antiquities collector approached an eminent Oxford scholar for his opinion about some brownish, tattered scraps of writing. The collector’s identity has never been revealed, but the scholar was Dirk Obbink, a MacArthur-winning classicist whose specialty is the study of texts written on papyrus—the material, made of plant fibres, that was the paper of the ancient world. When pieced together, the scraps that the collector showed Obbink formed a fragment about seven inches long and four inches wide: a little larger than a woman’s hand. Densely covered with lines of black Greek characters, they had been extracted from a piece of desiccated cartonnage, a papiermâché-like plaster that the Egyptians and Greeks used for everything from mummy cases to bookbindings. After acquiring the…

A Critic at Large: Girl, Interrupted

Books: Restless Realism

In the course of Mario Vargas Llosa’s seventy-nine years, Peru has alternated between dictatorship and democracy with the sort of regularity that other countries experience through mere shiftings from one political party to another. During his nation’s most violent and despairing periods, Vargas Llosa must keenly have felt the truth of his own repeated assertion that the writer of fiction wishes to replace the world as it is with another one entirely. His novels, the latest of which, “The Discreet Hero” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), appears this month in the United States, have arisen from what Vargas Llosa calls Peru’s “effervescent structure of prejudices and sentiments,” the racebased obsession with social hierarchy which has helped produce the country’s calamitous political history. His books ignore none of Peru’s clashing, kaleidoscopic elements, but…

Books: Restless Realism

Books: Briefly Noted

SATIN ISLAND, by Tom McCarthy (Knopf). This experimental novel takes the form of a brilliant series of numbered digressions on parachute accidents, Lévi-Strauss, hub airports, and many other things. The narrator, who calls himself U., is an anthropologist working for the “Company” on something called the Koob-Sassen Project. The project’s goals are oblique, but its influence, we are told, is all-pervasive. U.’s job is to draw connections, and he does so with frenzied panache; an imagined presentation on oil spills concludes, “Is not the flow of oil the flow of time itself: slowly but inevitably crawling, in a series of identical, repeating pulses, to some final shoreline?” If the novel ultimately feels like a bravura display of empty rhetoric, who’s to say that’s not precisely the point? ALL DAYS ARE NIGHT,…

Books: Briefly Noted

The Theatre: Lady and the Tramp

To watch Larry David make his Broadway début, in his self-penned “Fish in the Dark” (at the Cort), in the same week that Helen Mirren stars as Queen Elizabeth II, in Peter Morgan’s “The Audience” (at the Gerald Schoenfeld), is to learn something about the benefits and the limitations of shtick. Derived from the Yiddish word shtik, meaning “an act” or “a gimmick” (from the German Stück, for “piece”), it can also refer to an adopted persona that is consistently maintained. David’s shtick is familiar to legions of fans of his HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” in which he played a thin, sour-voiced TV writer and producer. Mirren’s shtick, on the other hand, is to transform herself into what she is not: in this case, Elizabeth II, a role she…

The Theatre: Lady and the Tramp

The Art World: Moving Pictures

It began with horses and ended in massacre. The zenith of the cultures that are celebrated in “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky,” a wondrous show at the Metropolitan Museum, lasted barely two hundred years. It started in 1680, when Pueblo Indians seized the steeds of Spanish settlers whom they had driven out of what is now New Mexico. The horse turned the scores of Plains tribes—river-valley farmers and hunter-gatherers who had used dogs as their beasts of burden— into a vast aggregate of mounted nomads, who ranged from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Rio Grande into Canada, hunting buffalo, trading, and warring with one another. The era ended with the killing of more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children by…

The Art World: Moving Pictures

The Current Cinema: Young Love

The tone of the new “Cinderella” is set in an early scene, when the heroine’s mother declares, “I believe in everything.” O.K., here it is. For the next hundred minutes or more, we get the story straight, with no strings or second thoughts attached. Cinderella (Lily James) is the child of a loving mother (Hayley Atwell) and an equally doting father (Ben Chaplin). They dwell in a meadow-girt house—a small and cloudless kingdom of their own—inside a larger kingdom that is smilingly ruled by an elderly monarch (Derek Jacobi), soon to be succeeded by his merry yet thoughtful son, Kit (Richard Madden). Cinderella’s mother dies, very gently, and her place is taken by a stepmother (Cate Blanchett) and her querulous daughters (Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera). Cinderella’s father dies, on…

The Current Cinema: Young Love

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