Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
99
George Packer on Donald Trumps class appeal; Trump, Jr.,s sport; elevator
man; playing Camus; James Surowiecki on the banks and Dodd-Frank.
ANNALS OF EDUCATION
D. T. Max
40
Jen Spyra
47
Lizzie Widdicombe
48
Adam Gopnik
56
Alexandra Lange
68
Mary Karr
Charlie Brooker
Carrie Brownstein
Lee Child
Alexandra Kleeman
Ted Chiang
45
52
60
67
70
77
Akhil Sharma
78
Happy Together
A startup re-creates dorm life for millennials.
SENSORY STUDIES
Feel Me
Exploring the new science of touch.
PROFILES
Play Ground
Adriaan Geuze reimagines the city park.
UNINVENT THIS
High Maintenance
Dance, Off
Call Me Crazy
Telling Tales
Seeing Double
Bad Character
FICTION
Adelle Waldman
84
Louis Menand
90
95
Hua Hsu
96
Peter Schjeldahl
98
Drakes Views.
THE ART WORLD
Rebecca Hazelton
Kevin Young
43
58
Christoph Niemann
DRAWINGS
On the Go
View this weeks cover in augmented reality. See page 4 for details.
Will McPhail, Brian McLachlan, Jason Patterson, Mick Stevens, Benjamin Schwartz, Pat Byrnes, Danny Shanahan,
John Klossner, David Sipress, Jack Ziegler, Trevor Spaulding SPOTS Hudson Christie
CONTRIBUTORS
Adam Gopnik (Feel Me, p. 56) has been
a staff writer since 1986. His books include Paris to the Moon and The
Table Comes First: Family, France, and
the Meaning of Food.
George Packer (Comment, p. 31) won
a National Book Award for The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New
America.
Mary Karr (High Maintenance, p. 45)
p. 48) is a New Yorker writer and an editor of The Talk of the Town.
p. 60) is a writer, a musician, and an actress. She is the author of the memoir
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.
App Store, Amazon.com, or Google Play. (Access varies by location and device.)
4
CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
THE MAIL
FAMILY MATTERS
1
THINKING BIG
1
WHAT TO FEAR
New York City pigeons get a bad rap. But for every Woody Allen, who dismissed them onscreen as rats with
wings, theres a Nikola Tesla, who fell in love with a female bird that flew into his room at the St. Regis. The
artist Duke Riley sides with ardor in Fly by Night, his new piece for Creative Time. Each weekend until
June 12, Riley will tie little L.E.D. lights to two thousand homing pigeons and release them at sunset from
a Vietnam-era aircraft carrier, docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Somewhere, Tesla is smiling.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORDIE WOOD
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MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Metropolitan Museum
Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of
the Ancient World
Closed for renovations until 2019, Berlins Pergamon Museum has sent the Met its greatest
marbles and effigies from the centuries after Alexander the Great, resulting in this epic study
of how Greek ideas and images were transmitted and transformed in western Asia. The city
of Pergamon (present-day Bergama, Turkey)
was the capital of the Attalid dynasty, whose
power in the third and second centuries B.C.
was expressed through a new style of art, less
idealistic and more baroque than its Athenian
counterpart. A towering, ten-foot-tall statue of
Athena, now armless, shows the scale of Pergamons new artistic ambitions. Even the smaller
works convey the shifts in regional power: a delicate terra-cotta statuette of a victorious athlete has the washboard abs and strong thighs of
the Greek original on which it was based, but
the figure was elongated for Asian tastes. The
transition from Athenian restraint to Hellenistic luxury comes through in a display of opulent
jewelry, including a gold diadem topped by a
figure of Nike. War, too, offered a pretext for
Pergamons artists to Hellenize a dying Gaul,
seen bleeding from his abdomen. More than
a mere blockbuster, this show is a radical and
wholly rewarding rethinking of the art we call
Greek. Through July 17.
Anne Collier
In these elegantly spare pictures of pictures,
women are defined by the camera, whether
behind or in front of the lens. Extending the
Pictures Generation legacy of appropriation,
Collier exhibits images of album covers, book
spreads, and advertisements. A naked woman
strides into the surf in a huge, grainy black-andwhite shot that feels like a sixties flashback. Its
mood of exhilaration and freedom is offset by
closeups of other women, including Ingrid Bergman, crying on record sleeves. The tears, while
Henry Horenstein
The American photographer is best known for
documenting the country-music scene, and
this show of black-and-white work from the
nineteen-seventies includes pictures from the
Grand Ole Opry (notably, a portrait of a dewy
Dolly Parton). But theyre overshadowed by
subtler and more probing images, which recall
Diane Arbus. A boy in glasses, alone in an audience, looks startled by the cameras attention;
by contrast, two women, arm in arm in clashing checks and stripes, beam happily. A masseur stands outside a steam room full of young
jockeys like a sentry. Through May 21. (ClampArt, 531 W. 25th St. 646-230-0020.)
Tom Wesselmann
An entertaining attempt to boost the reputation of the Pop-art paladin, who died in 2004,
soft-pedals his specialty of pneumatic nudes in
favor of the inanimate: foodstuffs, household appliances, cigarettes, a Volkswagen Beetle. Wesselmanns grabby colors beguile, and he had a winning way with shaped canvas, cutout metal, and
vacuum-molded plastic. Nonetheless, all the images and forms still orbit the rejoicing sensuality
of the Great American Nude, as the artist called
his signature thememonumentalized breasts,
lips, and feet, like an explorers happy sightings
of a carnal Xanadu. Through May 28. (MitchellInnes & Nash, 534 W. 26th St. 212-744-7400.)
1
GALLERIESCHELSEA
In her new photographs, at Metro Pictures in Chelsea, the brilliant Cindy Sherman turns a
bittersweet gaze on women in the autumn of life, as ready as theyve ever been for their closeup.
ART
ART
1
GALLERIESDOWNTOWN
Caleb Charland
The title of one work here, Camera Placed
on My Solar Plexus While Laying on the
Ground at Night for Several Hours, says
a lot about the artists dedication to his process. The image merits the effort: stars skitter across a midnight-blue expanse high above
a broken red line, evidence of an airplanes
tail-lights. Other pictures record more discrete phenomena, including what look to be
science experiments with pendulums and a
horseshoe magnet. A series of intricately plotted photogramsgeometric abstractions that
range across a shaded spectrum from black to
whitesuggest a lost Op-art period of M. C.
Escher. Through June 4. (Wolf, 70 Orchard St.
212-925-0025.)
Mangelos
This vital showcase of one of the most important figures of the Yugoslav avant-garde re-creates five witty, metaphysical, and sometimes
clandestine shows mounted in Zagreb between
1972 and 1981. Dimitrije Baievic, who died in
1987, was an art historian who worked in state
institutions by day but on his own time, under
the alias Mangelos, he produced a wide-ranging
uvre, including globes (in which the world
map is obscured by philosophical inscriptions
and black, white, and red paint) and collages
(packed with references to Heidegger, Dostoyevsky, and Gertrude Stein). One piece here reproduces Picassos declaration of allegiance to
the French Communist Partya biting irony
coming, as it did, from the other side of the Iron
Curtain. Through May 27. (Freeman, 140 Grand
St. 212-966-5154.)
Jon Pilkington
The young British painter makes an intriguing
New York dbut with soft-toned abstractions
that at first appear intuitively gestural but turn
out to be more calculated. Hazy backgrounds
of brown, pink, and malachite green subtend
proficiently executed cross-outs, zigzags, and
curlicuesmarkings so tight and agglutinated
that the action of their making seems immaterial. There are some jejune citations of Laura
Owens (flowers), Albert Oehlen (squiggles),
and other -la-mode painters, but the appeal
here is the ease with which such quotes get
emulsified in Pilkingtons cloudy fields of color
and line. One work is even called Typical Pilkington, as if to confirm that the true subject
of his paintings is style itself. Through May 22.
(247365, 57 Stanton St. twentyfourseventhreesixtyfive.biz.)
Pedro Wirz
The organic, often fragile sculptures of this
Swiss-Brazilian artist draw on time spent in
the Paraba Valley, a once lush, now industrialized region in Brazil, north of So Paulo. Irregularly scythed bands of tree bark, which Wirz has
coated with latex, are studded with holes that
contain eyeball-like globules. Spiders and other
creepy-crawlies are suspended in amber-colored silicone; a roughly cast door ornament in
the shape of a dragon plays cats cradle in its little claws. What prevents the show from feeling
like warmed-over Arte Povera is Wirzs evident
love for a disappearing landscape, in which the
supernatural retains a power thats on the brink
of extinction. Through June 5. (Matsumiya, 153
Stanton St. 646-455-3588.)
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DANCE
New York City Ballet
Robbins or Balanchine? Thats the question
this week at N.Y.C.B., which will offer programs devoted to each choreographer. The
all-Balanchine bill combines the bubbly Ballo
della Regina (set to ballet music from Verdis Don Carlo) with the angular and antic
Kammermusik No. 2 and the swooning opulence of Vienna Waltzes. The Robbins program opens with what may be his greatest
work, Dances at a Gathering, followed by
his suite of dances from West Side Story.
If you can catch Tiler Peck in Ballo della Regina and Teresa Reichlen in Tales from the
Vienna Woods, from Vienna Waltzes, you
wont regret it. May 10 at 7:30 and May 12 at
8: Ballo della Regina, Kammermusik No. 2,
and Vienna Waltzes. May 11 at 7:30, May
13 at 8, May 14 at 2 and 8, and May 15 at 3:
Dances at a Gathering and West Side Story
Suite. May 17 at 7:30: Serenade, Hallelujah Junction, Duo Concertant, and Western Symphony. (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-496-0600. Through May 29.)
La MaMa Moves!
The festival continues with the premire of Tiffany Millss After the Feast, which applies her
signature style, heavy on partnering, to a dystopian environment and a struggle to reform
human bonds. In Supper, People on the Move,
Cardell Dance Theatredirected by the Argentine-born, Philadelphia-based choreographer
Silvana Cardellinvestigates the dislocation
caused by migration, with performers clambering across folding tables and climbing up walls.
At the end, the audience joins the dancers for
a meal. The husband-and-wife flamenco team
of the singer Ismael Fernndez and the dancer
Sonia Olla lead a large cast of mixed generations and experience in Al Son Son. (66 E. 4th
St. 646-430-5374. May 12-15. Through May 29.)
Cuba Festival
In opening up cultural exchange between the
United States and Cuba, the Joyce Theatre has
been out ahead of the Obama Administration.
This appearance of Malpaso Dance Company
(May 10-12), one of the only dance troupes in
Cuba that isnt dependent on the government,
is the third in as many years. Along with a piece
by the companys leader, Osnel Delgado, the
program includes a Joyce-commissioned work
by one American choreographer (Ronald K.
Browns Why You Follow) and a gift from another (Trey McIntyres Bad Winter). Following Malpaso in a ten-day festival is DanzAbierta
Juliette Mapp
Though elliptical and open-ended, Mapps intelligent, finely wrought pieces often have an
autobiographical character. Luxury Rentals
is about dancers: Mapp and three of her peers
and old friends, the highly distinctive Kayvon Pourazar, Levi Gonzalez, and Jimena Paz.
Its about dancers lives, inside and outside
the studio, in a city where its ever more difficult to find space to live and work. (Danspace
Project, St. Marks Church In-the-Bowery, Second Ave. at 10th St. 866-811-4111. May 12-14.
Through May 21.)
THE THEATRE
Gross Indecency
Rupert Everett takes the role he was
born to play: Oscar Wilde.
On April 5, 1895, Oscar Wilde was
holed up at the Cadogan Hotel, in
London, torn between fleeing the country and facing a parlous fate. Spurred
by his sometime paramour Lord Alfred
Douglas, known as Bosie, Wilde had
brought a libel suit against the Marquess
of QueensburyBosies fatherwho
had publicly called Wilde a sodomite.
But the plan backfired disastrously.
During the trial, Queensburys lawyer
threatened to produce a number of
young men who could testify to Wildes
degeneracy, and the case fell apart. It
now seemed inevitable that Wilde himself would be arrested for gross indecency if he didnt leave England. Why
did he stay? Thats the question posed
in Act I of David Hares 1998 play, The
Judas Kiss, which comes to BAMs Harvey Theatre May 11June 12, starring
Rupert Everett.
Reflecting on Wilde, Everett said
recently, Hes a very touching, human
16
character, because hes incredibly brilliant but at the same time he does some
really idiotic things. For the fifty-sixyear-old actor, Wilde has become less
a character than a way of life. Everett
has spent the past eight years developing The Happy Prince, a film about
Wildes disconsolate last days, but the
financing has been slow to materialize.
In 2012, he starred in a revival of The
Judas Kiss, in London, then toured the
U.K. with it. Hes a natural for the role.
Since his breakout performance, in the
1997 film My Best Friends Wedding,
he has proved adept at blithe disdain,
often with an undercurrent of melancholy. As one of the only openly gay
actors working in movies in the nineties, he saw his sexuality, like Wildes,
become a topic for public consumption.
I suppose in that sense hes like a patron saint, he said.
Everetts memories of Wilde
stretch back to his own Norfolk boyhood, when his mother read him
Wildes childrens stories, including
The Happy Prince. As a young stage
actor, he appeared in The Importance
David Hares play The Judas Kiss, at BAMs Harvey Theatre May 11-June 12, imagines Oscar Wilde before and after his downfall.
1
OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS
A Better Place
Evan Bergman directs Wendy Becketts comedy,
presented by the Directors Company, about a
gay New York couple obsessed with their neighbors real estate. (The Duke on 42nd Street, 229
W. 42nd St. 646-223-3010. In previews. Opens May 15.)
Cal in Camo
In William Francis Hoffmans drama, directed
by Colt Coeurs Adrienne Campbell-Holt, a new
mothers neer-do-well brother comes to visit her
and her husband. (Rattlestick, 224 Waverly Pl. 866811-4111. In previews.)
Daphnes Dive
Thomas Kail directs a play by Quiara Alegra
Hudes, featuring Vanessa Aspillaga and Daphne
Rubin-Vega, about the owner of a cheap bar in
North Philly and her adopted daughter. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212244-7529. In previews. Opens May 15.)
Do I Hear a Waltz?
Encores! stages the 1965 musical, with music
by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, in which a middle-class woman (Melissa Errico) saves up for a trip to Venice. (City Center, 131
W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. May 11-15.)
A Dolls House
At Theatre for a New Audience, Arin Arbus directs John Douglas Thompson and Maggie Lacey in
Thornton Wilders adaptation of the Ibsen drama,
in repertory with Strindbergs The Father. (Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn.
866-811-4111. In previews.)
Hadestown
Anas Mitchells folk opera, developed with and
directed by Rachel Chavkin, is a retelling of the
Orpheus and Eurydice myth. (New York Theatre
Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. 212-460-5475. In previews.)
Himself and Nora
A new musical by Jonathan Brielle explores the
romance between James Joyce and his wife and
muse, Nora Barnacle. Directed by Michael Bush.
(Minetta Lane Theatre, 18 Minetta Lane. 800-7453000. Previews begin May 14.)
Indian Summer
In Gregory S. Mosss comedy, directed by Carolyn
Cantor, a city kid spends the summer at a Rhode
Island beach town, where he meets a feisty local
girl. (Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212279-4200. Previews begin May 13.)
Peer Gynt
Gabriel Ebert plays the Norwegian adventurer
in the Ibsen drama, adapted and directed by John
Doyle and featuring Becky Ann Baker and Dylan
Baker. (Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St. 866811-4111. In previews.)
The Ruins of Civilization
In a new play by Penelope Skinner (The Village
Bike), directed by Leah C. Gardiner for Manhattan Theatre Club, a married couple living in a ravaged future open their doors to a stranger. (City Center Stage II, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. In previews.)
Shining City
The Irish Rep returns to its renovated home with
Conor McPhersons drama, directed by Ciarn
OReilly and starring Matthew Broderick as a
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THE THEATRE
widower who seeks counselling after he sees his
wifes ghost. (132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737. Previews begin May 17.)
Signature Plays
Lila Neugebauer directs a trio of one-acts: Edward Albees The Sandbox, Mara Irene Fornss
Drowning, and Adrienne Kennedys Funnyhouse of a Negro. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. In previews.)
Skeleton Crew
A return engagement of Dominique Morisseaus
play, part of her Detroit trilogy, in which the
workers at an auto plant face the threat of foreclosure. Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs. (Atlantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St. 866-8114111. Previews begin May 13.)
Spermhood
Mike Albo (The Junket) recounts his experiences trying to make a baby with a lesbian couple, in his new one-man show, directed by David
Schweizer. (Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie St. 866-8114111. Opens May 13.)
The Total Bent
This new musical by Stew and Heidi Rodewald
(Passing Strange), directed by Joanna Settle,
follows a black musical prodigy in midcentury
Alabama, whose father is a famous gospel healer.
(Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. In previews.)
1
NOW PLAYING
THE THEATRE
factorys comfortable rhythms are thrown off by a
dough error. Tragedy is narrowly averted, but its
clear that the crew is working on borrowed time:
mechanization looms on the horizon. Leavened
with pungent slang and bawdy humorthe ensemble works together as smoothly as the best assembly
linethe play conjures a bygone world of industrial work, as doomed to obsolescence as the bakers
themselves. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Tuck Everlasting
Natalie Babbitt hit on something elemental with
her 1975 childrens novel, about a family that
drinks from an enchanted spring and receives
eternal life. What child doesnt wonder at the
idea of immortalityits possibilities and its terror? In this bighearted musical adaptation, the
talented eleven-year-old Sarah Charles Lewis
plays Winnie, the young girl who discovers the
clan in her familys woods and befriends Jesse
Tuck (Andrew Keenan-Bolger), forever seventeen. Casey Nicholaws production matches the
storys sweet simplicity with visual dazzle: translucent storybook sets by Walt Spangler and fanciful costumes by Gregg Barnes. The score, by
Chris Miller (music) and Nathan Tysen (lyrics), is mostly schmaltzy and generic, held up by
Claudia Shear and Tim Federles snappy script.
But the shows trump cardits only real innovationis the balletic finale, choreographed by
Nicholaw: wordless, time-hopping, and lovely.
(Broadhurst, 235 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200.)
1
ALSO NOTABLE
Musicians will play in several spaces within the Cloisters, an increasingly popular tourist attraction.
Romanesque Riffs
Audible Cloisters brings a gaggle of
guitarists to Fort Tryon Park.
When the Metropolitan Museum decided to lease the Whitney Museums
old building, on the Upper East Side
(now reopened as the Met Breuer), it
re-purposed a structure that many New
Yorkers have admired for its unrepentant
Brutalist ugliness. But just about everyone loves the Cloisters, the Mets branch
in Fort Tryon Parkincluding the residents of Hudson Heights, who marvel
at how their unshowy neighborhood has
begun to feel just a little bit touristy. The
beautiful building, assembled from fragments of Romanesque and Gothic architecture that were shipped over from
Europe in the mid-twentieth century,
draws crowds as much for its own recumbent glory as for its exceptional collection of medieval art, tapestries, and
manuscripts. Now the Met, collaborating
with the New York Guitar Festival for
the first time, will show off its prize like
never before, with Audible Cloisters
(May 14), a six-hour marathon of fourteen free concerts spread throughout the
hallowed spaces and gardens.
Previous editions of the Festival have
Waitress
Jenna (the astounding Jessie Mueller), the heroine of this winning new musical, based on
Adrienne Shellys 2007 film, is a server at a
small-town diner, caught between her genius
for making pies and a redneck husband (Nick
Cordero) who doesnt want her to have any independence. When she finds out shes pregnant, she
starts an affair with her bumbling gynecologist
(Drew Gehling)its less creepy than it sounds
and leans on the sisterhood of her gal pals at the
restaurant (Kimiko Glenn and Keala Settle). The
celebrated singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles wrote
the music and lyricsethereal, gorgeously harmonic, and even funnyand Mueller (Beautiful) is just the performer to put them over,
with equal parts warmth and grit. Diane Pauluss production boasts an all-female creative
team, and the show is mindful of the obstacles
that working women face, even as it dusts them
with show-business cinnamon. (Brooks Atkinson,
256 W. 47th St. 877-250-2929.)
CLASSICAL MUSIC
1
OPERA
Vertical Player Repertory
Though he wrote more than eighty operas in his
lifetime, the bel-canto master Giovanni Pacini
has been effectively blocked from entering the
canon by his more stylistically distinctive contemporaries Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. The
adventurous Brooklyn-based company, however,
is giving his late-career work Malvina di Scozia
its first airing in more than a hundred and fifty
years, using a new performing edition of the
piano-vocal score created by Hans Schellevis.
Judith Barnes directs. (Christ and Saint Stephens
Church, 120 W. 69th St. malvina.brownpapertickets.com. May 11 and May 13 at 7:30.)
Center for Contemporary Opera
The librettist Royce Vavrek has been much in demand for daring, often high-concept works by
David T. Little, Ricky Ian Gordon, and Missy
Mazzoli, and he now joins the composer Rachel Peters for The Wild Beast of the Bungalow, which has a concert reading with piano at
the Center for Contemporary Opera. (National
Opera Center, 330 Seventh Ave. centerforcontemporaryopera.org. May 12 at 8.)
1
ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES
CLASSICAL MUSIC
grand, offering the Argentinean masters vivid
Cello Concerto No. 1 (with a distinctive soloist, Matt Haimovitz) and the Viennese titans
major sacred work, the Missa Solemnis. Julian Wachner conducts Downtown Voices, the
Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and the NOVUS
NY ensemble. (Broadway at Wall St. May 15 at 5.
No tickets required.)
1
RECITALS
NIGHT LIFE
1
ROCK AND POP
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; its advisable to check
in advance to confirm engagements.
Freestyle!!!
One urban legend that has persisted for decades
suggests that New York Citys 1977 blackout
helped to spur a musical movement, after teenagers ransacked audio and electronics stores for
d.j. equipment and production gadgets. Whether
the tale is true or tall, the proliferation of audio
technology during the late seventies and early
eighties fuelled countless innovations and subgenres that kept kids dancing in the street. Uptown, the densely Puerto Rican enclaves of the
Bronx offered freestyle music, which laid R. & B.
over hard-bopping electronic dance beats built for
boxy subwoofers and sweaty nightclubs. Freestyle
spread to Miami, L.A., and Chicago, with each
city adding its own twist. As part of this years
excellently programmed Red Bull Music Academy Festival, two of the eras fixtures, Jellybean
Benitez and Louis Vega, help revive the scene for
an evening of freestyle, with live performances by
the hit vocalists Shannon and Lisa Lisa. (Capitale,
130 Bowery. nyc.redbullmusicacademy.com. May 13.)
Gallant
Its nice that R. & B. has become broader, darker,
and more eclectic in recent years, with many
breathless hat tips to Frank Ocean for leading
a new generation of songwriters. Chris Gallant
has a sinister falsetto and writes ambling ballads
that flaunt it well, but his most interesting move
Sadie Dupuis, Mike Falcone, Darl Ferm, and Devin McKnight punch out clever, laggard noise punk as
Speedy Ortiz. Theyll stop by Greenpoints Warsaw before touring through the heartland.
Yuja Wang
Lang Lang is not the only Chinese piano superstar
at Carnegie Hall this week. Wang, a consistently
charismatic artist, offers a solo recital, performing
repertory nuggets by Brahms, Schumann (Kreisleriana), and Beethoven (the Hammerklavier
Sonata). (212-247-7800. May 14 at 8.)
NIGHT LIFE
might have been skipping past R. & B.s new it
kids. At this years Coachella Music Festival, he
was joined by Seal during a cover of the Brit stars
Crazy, before they dove into Gallants slow-snapping Weight in Gold. Gallant is on tour, offsetting the headlining electronic producer ZHU with
a softer sound that hits just as hard. (Terminal 5,
610 W. 56th St. 212-582-6600. May 11-12.)
1
JAZZ AND STANDARDS
Michael Feinstein
No, he wont address the repertoire of Muddy
Waters or Charley Patton, but, in a program declaring his Right to Sing the Blues, Feinstein
and his vocalizing guests will take on bluesinflected songs that have become popular standards, including Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercers Blues in the Night and Good Morning
Heartache, made famous by Billie Holiday.
(Appel Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at
60th St. 212-721-6500. May 11-12.)
Jose James
The singer James has more of a signature style
than a singularly identifiable musical identity,
but that may be just fine in an era that rewards
open-eared eclecticism. While his most recent
album, Yesterday I Had the Blues, was a highly
personalized tribute to Billie Holiday, dont assume that jazz is the path James is sticking to
hes surprised us before. (Blue Note, 131 W. 3rd
St. 212-475-8592. May 10-15.)
Joe Lovano
John Coltrane, like his onetime employer and
mentor Miles Davis, would have turned ninety
this year. Lovano, a contemporary Coltrane
acolyte of the highest rank, assembles a glittering ensemble to honor the master, which includes the pianists Geri Allen and Steve Kuhn and
the drummers Andrew Cyrille and Brian Blade,
as well as two players closely connected to Coltrane: his former bassist Reggie Workman and
his son, the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. Among
the spiritually inspired Coltrane work to be addressed is the half-century-old masterpiece A
Love Supreme. (Appel Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th St. 212-721-6500. May 13-14.)
Miles Davis: Sorcerer at 90
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will also
dive in deep for a celebration of what would have
been the ninetieth birthday of Miles Davis, presenting a panoply of refashioned Davis work
drawn from recordings stretching from Birth
of the Cool (1949-50) to the 1968 proto-fusion
album Miles in the Sky. The musical directors
will be the trumpeter Marcus Printup and the
drummer Ali Jackson. (Rose Theatre, Broadway
at 60th St. 212-721-6500. May 12-14.)
Jenny Scheinmans Mischief & Mayhem
A look at the audacious collaborators that the
violinist and singer Scheinman surrounds herself with in her Mischief & Mayhem outfitthe
guitarist Nels Cline, the drummer Jim Black,
and the bassist Todd Sickafoosespeaks volumes about her multifarious musical inclinations and the genre-morphing tangents (new
jazz, rock, Americana) that shes all too willing
to follow. (Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St. 212505-3474. May 12.)
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
23
MOVIES
Rebel in Disguise
Otto Preminger turned Hollywood
genres into social criticism.
Ineffectual or wounded men unfit
for military service, a tough cop in love with
the image of a dead woman he has never
met, the miraculous return of a person
marked missing in action: Otto Premingers
first hit film, Laura, from 1944, is steeped
in grief and mourning. A crime drama set
in New Yorks glossy stretches, it shows
an ambient violence that, without a word
about the Second World War, conjures
the jangled mood and the social turmoil
of the home front at the time. Preminger,
an Austrian-Jewish luminary of Vienna
theatre who emigrated to the United States
in 1935, had hypersensitive antennae for
societal breakdowns. As seen in the fifteen-film retrospective running at MOMA
through June 30, he perched his dramas
and his style on the leading edge of vast
cultural and political shifts.
Premingers romantically agonized
1947 drama, Daisy Kenyon, also set in
New York, is steeped in postwar trauma.
The title character (played by Joan Craw24
Alexandra Hay, Carol Channing, and John Philip Law unite the brass-knuckle underworld and the hang-loose counterculture in the 1968 comedy Skidoo.
1
OPENING
High-Rise An adaptation of a novel by J. G.
Ballard, about residents of an apartment building that enforces rigid class distinctions. Directed by Ben Wheatley; starring Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons, and
Elisabeth Moss. Opening May 13. (In limited
release.) The Lobster Reviewed this week
in The Current Cinema. Opening May 13. (In
limited release.) Love & Friendship Whit Stillman directed this adaptation of Jane Austens novel Lady Susan, about a widow (Kate
Beckinsale) who competes with her daughter (Morfydd Clark) for an eligible bachelor (Xavier Samuel). Opening May 13. (In limited release.) Money Monster Jodie Foster
directed this drama, about a TV financial adviser (George Clooney) whos held hostage by
a viewer (Jack OConnell) who lost money on
his advice. Co-starring Julia Roberts. Opening May 13. (In wide release.) Sunset Song Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening May 13. (In
limited release.)
1
NOW PLAYING
A Bigger Splash
Tilda Swinton teams up again with Luca Guadagnino, who directed her in I Am Love
(2009), for a more scorched and southerly affair. This time, she strikes the eye as gilded and
semi-divine; appropriately so, for her character is a rock goddess named Marianne. As with
almost everything in the film, though, hers is
a perilous condition: she is a singer who has
lost her voice. Accompanied and shielded by
her boyfriend, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts),
she goes to ground on a volcanic island between Italy and Africa. Their sequestered calm
is soon invaded by the arrival of Harry (Ralph
Fiennes), Mariannes raucous ex, and his daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson). These two
constitute a breach of the peace, not to mention a threat, and the movie, written by David
Kajganich, feels both as sly as a snake and brazenly open to carnal possibilities. (Fans of I
Am Love will be relieved to learn that food
is once more the object of worship.) The plot
takes a cruel turn, and the principal figures are
as likely to repel as they are to attract; yet they
fit the landscape in which they disport and disgrace themselves, and the whole film swelters
with a sense of mystery, never quite solved,
that reflects the beating sun. Also, when did
you last see Fiennes, in shorts and an unbuttoned shirt, gyrate to the Rolling Stones?Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 5/9/16.) (In
limited release.)
Elvis & Nixon
This comic fictionalization, directed by Liza
Johnson, of the events behind the famous 1970
Oval Office photo of the King and the President is a giddy historical delight. The premise
is rooted in pathos: Elvis Presley, no longer
at the crest of popularity, inveighing against
the Beatles in particular and the Age of Aquarius over all, wants to volunteer for the war on
drugs and wants Nixon to swear him in as a
federal agent. The main drama is whether the
meeting will ever take place; the story pivots on Elviss friendship with the film editor Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer), whose devotion hits its limit. Michael Shannon plays
Elvis with understated cool and sly swagger,
MOVIES
turning a skillful impersonation into a performance thats filled with empathetic energy.
The script, by Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal, and
Cary Elwes, shows Presley in a startling range
of ordinary contexts that highlight all the
more his extraordinary character. As for Kevin
Spaceys incarnation of Nixon, it, too, passes
quickly from mannerisms into a thoughtful
effort to capture a singular world view. Johnson stages the action with delicate attention
to gestures as well as to visual and tonal balance. The dialogue sparkles with gems of historical allusion and perceptive asides, and
the actors virtually sing it; the film plays like
a whirling sociopolitical operetta.Richard
Brody (In wide release.)
Green Room
Things go wrong for the Aint Rights as soon as
the Virginia-based indie-punk quartet reaches
the Pacific Northwest town where theyve been
booked for a concert. The student organizer
has messed up, but compensates by getting
them a gig at a remote white-supremacist compound: What could go wrong? The writer and
director, Jeremy Saulnier, answers this question with an hour or so of bloody horror. Stumbling upon a murder scene, the band members
are held hostage by the brutal security forces
of a neo-Nazi cult headed by the coolly charismatic Darcy (Patrick Stewart), who plans
to pin the crime on the musicians. When they
resist, his idea is to kill them, and the movie
devolves into a tale of the raw will, strategic
calculation, and macabre happenstance of a
primal struggle to survive. A viewer may well
share the feeling of captivity, whether arising
from an interest in the amiable band members fate or from the narrow limits of the plot.
One screenplay riff, on the taking of good advice, is piquantly memorable, but Saulniers
clever methods are insubstantial and the movies stakes, though mortal, seem slight. With
Alia Shawkat, Imogen Poots, and Callum
Turner.R.B. (In limited release.)
A Hologram for the King
There may be no opening sequence this year
more exhilarating than the Talking Headsinspired musical number that the director Tom
Tykwer dreams up to introduce his gleaming
take on Dave Eggerss novel. Tom Hanks gives
a terrific performance as Alan, a struggling,
desperate American salesman of holographic
software who travels to Saudi Arabia to broker
a deal with the King, who wishes to expand his
rapidly growing tech sector. While waiting for
the King to appear, Alan and his team chat in
often comical I.T. jargon and meet a few local
charactersnotably, his wisecracking Saudi
driver (Alexander Black) and his doctor and
love interest (Sarita Choudhury)who keep
the Godot-like proceedings buoyant. The
story, about Alans impending midlife crisis
while he awaits the deal, offers a shaky, America-in-decline vibe as well as a technophobic
undercurrent that never really takes hold. In
one of Tykwers neatest visual tricks, Alan visits a sweltering world of empty skyscrapersa
desert illusion of a soulless future that looks
too fabulous to fear. The film plays like a science-fiction parable in which humor and pathos jostle for attention. Although it falters
in flashback sequences (which present a superfluous backstory), the unusual tone and
arresting visuals hold interest.Bruce Diones
(In wide release.)
25
MOVIES
miraculous powers. (Jesus must learn to accept human suffering as an aspect of his own
burden.) The story turns the Messiah into a
family therapist who reveals his own neuroses in snippy exchanges with the Devil about
their Father. To top it off, sunlight starbursts
sparkling in the lens and the honeyed tones
of late-afternoon magic hours turn the story
into postcard-ready religious kitsch.R.B.
(In limited release.)
Lothringen!
This short film, from 1994, has a vast historical purview and painful personal import. The
title is the German name for the French province of Lorraine, the subject is Germanys conquest of the region in the Franco-Prussian War
of 1870-71, and the setting is the city of Metz,
the home town of the filmmaker Jean-Marie
Straub (who co-directed with his wife, Danile
Huillet). The movies twenty-two-minute span
condenses Maurice Barrss 1909 novel, Colette Baudoche, into a handful of sharp-edged
and searingly declaimed recollections and a
tale of intimate protest. In 1872, after the Prussian conquest of the city, tens of thousands
of panic-stricken French residents, refusing
to become German citizens, abandon homes,
businesses, and families to flee to unoccupied
France. When Colette (Emmanuelle Straub),
a young woman who stays in the city, is befriended by a wise and benevolent German
professor, she exerts her own form of political
resistance. Filming the costumed performer
enacting the nineteenth-century story on location in current-day Metz, Straub and Huillet make the modern cityscape and countryside
resound silently with the bloody clashes of the
past. The blood may have dried, but the wounds
remain: the story recalls the Nazi occupation
of Metz in 1940, which Straub experienced as a
child.R.B. (MOMA; May 12.)
The Man Who Knew Infinity
Matt Browns film tells a remarkable tale thats
familiar to mathematicians, but less so to the
wider world. Dev Patel plays Srinivasa Ramanujan, a young Brahmin clerk from Madras who was invited to England in 1913 on
the strength of his mathematical powers. His
summoner was G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons),
himself a figure of repute in the field, who
forged with Ramanujan not just a professional
partnership, whose fruits are still being evaluated even now, but alsoinsofar as Hardy allowed himself such thingsa private friendship. Irons, though decades too old for the
role, gives it his all, providing a portrait of a
heavily defended yet far from dispassionate
soul. Regrettably, the rest of the movie cannot
match him; the scenes in Ramanujans homeland are notably thin (one dreams of what
Satyajit Ray might have made of the story),
and Patel doesnt plumb the unfathomable character of a hero whose scholarly exploits defy all dramatization. In theory, this
could have been absorbingbut where, as
Hardy would insist, is the proof? With Toby
Jones.A.L. (5/9/16) (In limited release.)
Ninotchka
Despite the bubbly erotic wit of Ernst Lubitschs 1939 comedy, the movies political satire is chillingly serious. Greta Garbo stars as
Nina Ivanovna Yakushova, a stone-faced Soviet agent who arrives in Paris to sell jewelry
confiscated from an exiled noblewoman, Grand
26
Private Lives
An early talkie attempt at glittering theatrical
sophisticationand, somehow, in its own terms,
it works. This M-G-M version of the Nol Coward play was made soon after the play came out,
and perhaps the plays style and excitement carries the cast along. Norma Shearer isnt so bad,
and Robert Montgomery is very, very good. It
was a dazzling success. A performance of the
play was filmed so that the stars, the director,
Sidney Franklin, and a raft of adaptors would
get the idea; that may explain Franklins showing a little zip, for a change, and Shearers acting halfway human. With Reginald Denny, Una
Merkel, and, in a role added in the film, Jean
Hersholt. Released in 1931.Pauline Kael (Film
Forum; May 17.)
Sing Street
This insipid comic drama, about the fifteenyear-old Connor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a student in a tough boys school in Dublin in 1985
who starts a band and improves his life, feels
like a forced march to good cheer. Connors parents fight bitterly and loudly while his older
brother, Brendan (Jack Reynor), a reclusive
stoner, gives the diffident guitar-strummer
stern lessons in musical taste. Connor falls
for Raphina (Lucy Boynton), a much worldlier sixteen-year-old girl, and starts a band (the
movies title is the groups name) solely to include her in its music videos (which are shot
on VHS). Confronting a bully in the courtyard
and a brutal headmaster in the corridors, and
facing his parents impending divorce, Connor
seeks refuge in his music and finds friendships,
a social identity, self-confidence, and even the
spirit of revolt. Its all too sweet and easy, and
the bands musicwhich is composed by John
Carney, the movies writer and director, and
Gary Clarkis bland and overproduced. The
songs sound like the work of prematurely old
teen-agers.R.B. (In limited release.)
Sunset Song
This mighty drama of emotional archeology,
adapted from a novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, deepens the director Terence Daviess career-long obsession with memory and its blend
of the intimate with the historical. The movie
traces the fortunes of a young woman, Chris
Guthrie (Agyness Deyn), who lives in an isolated farm village in Scotland, from around
1910 until the end of the First World War. Brutalized by her tyrannical father (Peter Mullan)
and unprotected by her long-suffering mother
Tale of Tales
The Italian director Matteo Garrone is best
known for Gomorrah (2008), a plunge into
the criminal clans of Naples. At first glance,
his new movie, set in imaginary lands, deep
in the myth-riddled past, seems like quite a
swerve. But his source is also Neapolitan, Giambattista Basile, whose collection of fairy storiesearthy, bracing, and unsentimentalwas
printed in the sixteen-thirties. Three of the fables, with monarchs at their heart, have been
plundered for the film. The first king (Toby
Jones) rears a giant flea and sees his daughter
(Bebe Cave) carried away by an ogre, the second (John C. Reilly) battles a sea beast for the
sake of his childless wife (Salma Hayek), and
the third (Vincent Cassel) is an inexhaustible
satyr, tricked by a pair of wizened sisters (Shirley Henderson and Hayley Carmichael). Garrone makes only a paltry attempt to interlock
the narratives, and the final convocation is an
awkward affair; yet the movie nonetheless holds
firm, bound by its miraculous mood. Wonders
are everywhere (if you slice into a tree, it will
bleed water, like a spring), as is a casual carnality. Luxury entwines with filth. Following Basile, Garrone grasps a basic rule of folklore: nobody must flinch at prodigious events, for they
are part of the mortal deal.A.L. (4/25/16) (In
limited release.)
Viktoria
The Bulgarian director Maya Vitkovas epoch-spanning family drama about Communism, motherhood, and freedom ingeniously
blends personal life and grand history, earnest
passion and tragic absurdity in a mighty outpouring of imagination. The action starts in
1979, when a young librarian, Boryana (Irmena
Chichikova), refuses to have a child with her
husband (Dimo Dimov), a doctor, unless they
emigrate to the United States. But when an attempted self-induced abortion fails, the baby,
Viktoria, bears the mark: shes born without a
belly button. This odd distinction is given a political slant. Viktoria is publicly celebrated by
the countrys real-life dictator, Todor Zhivkov
(played by Georgi Spasov), who envisions a
workforce of women freed from pregnancy.
Nine years later, the child, granted a chauffeur and a hot line to Zhivkov, is a Communist spoiled brat and the terror of her classmates. Meanwhile, Boryana refuses to let her
mother (Mariana Krumova), a lifelong Party
member, see Viktoria. Then, the Iron Curtain
falls and the balance of family power shifts.
Vitkovas spare, precise yet richly textured
MOVIES
images sing with restrained emotion and natural metaphors and catch the characters in
self-revealing gestures of an overwhelming intimacy. Womens bodies are the center of the
film, with milk, blood, and even intrauterine
images joining political pageantry and protest in a quietly fierce yet compassionate vision.R.B. (In limited release.)
Zootopia
Disneys new animated film is about a rabbit cop, eager and optimistic: Thumper with a
badge. Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), raised on a peaceful farm, comes to the
city to fight crime, undismayed by being the
smallest mammal on the force. As in The Lion
King, the world presented by the movie is entirely human-free, although, in this case, no
friction exists between predators and the lesser
beasts. In Zootopia, everybody lives pretty
much in harmonya mushy conceit, yet the directors, Byron Howard and Rich Moore, take
care to suggest how vulnerable such peace can
be. Only by a whisker is it preserved, thanks
to Judy and her sidekick, a hustling fox (Jason
Bateman), who have two days to crack a difficult case; their comradeship, unlikely as it
sounds, is a furry sequel to that of Nick Nolte
and Eddie Murphy, in 48 Hrs. There are no
songs, apart from those performed by a superstar gazelle (Shakira), but the beat of the movie
barely dips, sustained by a steady profusion
of gags. With the voice of Idris Elba.A.L.
(3/14/16) (In wide release.)
1
REVIVALS AND FESTIVALS
Titles with a dagger are reviewed.
1
AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES
The spring extravaganza of high-priced Impressionist, postwar, and contemporary art is in full
swing at the big auction houses. Hoping to repeat
its success from last year, Sothebys leads its auction of contemporary art on the evening of May
11 with two canvases by Cy Twombly, Untitled
(New York City) and Untitled [Bacchus 1st Version V]. Francis Bacon, another top performer, is
represented by a pair of studies for a self-portrait,
from 1970. The less overheated sale the following
day includes works by Dubuffet, Calder, Lee Ufan,
and Richard Prince. (York Ave. at 72nd St. 212-6067000.) After two additional sessions of postwar
and contemporary art, on May 11, Christies moves
on to the Impressionists and modernists, on May
12. The evening sale is filled with familiar images:
Monet waterlilies, a melancholy young woman by
Modigliani (Jeune Femme la Rose), a French
village by Czanne (Village Derrire des Arbres). And, for the first time since 2006, a Frida
Kahlo painting: two women in a dreamlike landscape (Dos Desnudos en el Bosque). Earlier in
the day, the house holds a single session of African and Oceanic art, containing eleven sculptures from the Ivory Coast, Mali, Cameroon,
1
READINGS AND TALKS
27
FD & DRINK
El Atoradero
708 Washington Ave., Brooklyn
(718-399-8226)
As the chef Denisse Lina Chavez
pushes out of the kitchen of her new Mexican restaurant, in Prospect Heights, people on bar stools tower over her. Shes tiny,
but as electric as her hot-pink bandana:
Chavez has famously gone on spice pilgrimages through drug-cartel-controlled
stretches of the Mexican desert to collect
chilis and anise-flavored avocado leaves
for her Poblano cuisine. She surveys the
room. Micheladas slosh to cheers of Mexicans in a Mexican restaurant!; a couple
whispers, Huevo, thats Spanish for egg.
Chavez is a long way from the South Bronx
bodega where her reign as the Queen of
Carnitas began, in 2002.
The stringy carnitas available elsewhere
in New York had nothing on Chavezs bodega offerings, corn tortillas stuffed with
juicy cubes of pork and melting strips of
fat. Demand was so great that she opened
a restaurant next door. The craze continued. When her landlord made noise about
raising the rent, she shuttered the restaurant
(the bodegas still there, but carnitas production ceased last month) and moved the
operation to Brooklyn.
The new place bumps with hip-hop
and Mexican pop; a bar TV plays Yankees
games on mute; hand-painted pineapples
on the walls brighten the candle-lit room.
28
1
BAR TAB
The Ship
158 Lafayette St. (212-219-8496)
Some evenings ago, a pair of drinkers moored
themselves at the bar of this cocktail lounge, at
the bottom of a long staircase, reached through
an unassuming black door on Lafayette Street,
near Grand. There are no prizes for guessing
the decorative theme of the Ship, but, thankfully,
its not so excessively nautical as to present a
drowning risk: benches and booths are subtly
upholstered with off-white sails, and large ships
vents hang from the two-story-high ceiling, like
Cyclopean worms poking their heads in to check
out the space. Its where Captain Haddock would
meet Tintin, if he trimmed his beard and had a
loft in SoHo. The conditions outside were cold
and windy, so the Where Theres Smoke ($14),
a steamed mix of mezcal, pear liqueur, lemon
juice, and agave syrup, was a pleasant way to
warm up. It makes me want to take a bubble
bath, someone said. In a drinking scene in
which overwrought cocktails can sometimes
have the bitter taste of competitive machismo,
the Ships crew do a good job of not throwing
their expertise in your face; theyll happily serve
you a drink that will delight the palate without
going on about muddling techniques or stirring
directions. Instead, the bartender plays an insouciant magician, conjuring a drink from a
customers suggestion of flavors. One wore a
single black latex glove and smashed a large ice
cube with a wand-like spoon to make the ginbased Gloria, with Campari, dry vermouth, and
triple sec, from a recipe hed found in a book
not too long ago. A patron was enchanted. Do
you find its like a rabbit hole? she asked.
Cocktails? Kind of.Colin Stokes
PHOTOGRAPH BY LAUREN LANCASTER FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
31
SCION DEPT.
TARGET PRACTICE
32
1
AT THE MUSEUM
LOVE OF THE ELEVATOR
sex, he said the other day. Carr, who recently changed his name from Carrajat,
is seventy-two, stocky and cantankerous,
with white hair and a beard. When he
says hes a cousin of Ian McShane, the
English actor who played Swearengen
in Deadwood, you believe him.
Five years ago, Carr opened the Elevator Historical Society, the worlds only
museum devoted to elevators, escalators,
dumbwaiters, and outside hoists. It consisted mainly of artifacts from his personal collection, which he has been assembling since he started working, at the
age of eleven, as an apprentice to his father, an elevator mechanic. Carr tried to
get people in the industry to help him
fund the museum. He raised three hundred and fty dollarsnot even enough
to pay my lighting bill, he said. The publisher of the magazine Elevator World
donated a grand, and some press, but
apart from that Carr carried the weight.
Last month, Carr announced that he
was closing the museum. Its a sad day,
he told a visitor. The museum, which
did not charge admission, was on the
second oor of the so-called Taxi Building, in Long Island City. It was cluttered with several thousand pieces of
vintage bric-a-brac, among them an
array of analog oor-indicator dials (both
half-moon and full moon), which
summoned memories of old-movie elevator scenes. Above the entrance, altarlike, there was an airbrushed painting of a topless elevator girl. On a wall
nearby was a photograph labelled Elevator to Hitlers Summer Retreat.
Helping to move the tour along was
Carrs associate director, Daniel Levinson Wilk, who, as an associate professor
of American history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, often gets to indulge his inner elevator evangelist. The
elevator industrys lack of support for the
Elevator Historical Society is typical of
a lack of vision that goes back more than
a hundred and fty years, he said. The
elevator industry could help save the
world, but it hasnt tried hard enough.
Carr opened an Otis Elevator Company order book from the eighteen-seventies, with purchases entered in the medieval-seeming script of one of the sons
of Elisha Otis, the companys founder.
He and Wilk advanced the hot take that
it was another Otis, a Massachusetts inventor named Otis Tufts, who deserved
1
DO-OVER DEPT.
CAMUS AGAIN
through the campus of Columbia University the other day, freshly arrived from
Lourmarin, a small town the color of a
sunset, concealed in the hills above the
Cte dAzur, where Albert Camus is
buried, and where Alajbegovic helps manage the writers estate. Camus made a
similar voyage to New York when he was
36
Viggo Mortensen
department, said. Camus had initially
declined the universitys invitation to
speakIm not old enough to give lectures, he wrotebut had nonetheless
delivered a sprawling treatise on his generation, which came of age in a world
of terror, ruled by a political machine
that had erased the individual.
What he was saying is that politics
as we know it needs to take a secondary position, Mortensen said. He added
that he admired the writers independence in standing up to both the left
and the right: He was fearless. Camus
felt that an absence of values had led
Europe to disaster, that societies had decided that a leader was right merely because hed succeeded. Mortensen said,
All of these things Camus is saying
about politicians, buffooneryits like
this respect for Trump. Hes winning,
hes the strongest, so that makes it good.
After the talk, which he delivered before an enchanted crowd, Mortensen
suddenly realized he had to get going.
As part of his attire for the evening, hed
left off an article of clothing that he holds
dearhis Bernie Sanders watch.
Elisabeth Zerofsky
sion that, eight years after the nancial crisis, Wall Street reform has been a bust. Every Republican candidate called
Dodd-Frank, the centerpiece of the Obama Administrations
reform effort, a dismal failure. Donald Trump called it terrible; Ted Cruz said that it had only helped the big banks
get bigger and bigger and bigger. Hillary Clinton has been
tepid in her defense of Dodd-Frank, and Bernie Sanders
called it a very modest piece of legislation that changed little about the way the Street does business.
Tell that to the bankers. Banks performed dismally last
year, and their 2016 rst-quarter-earnings reports show that this one is off to
an even worse start. Returns on equity
have fallen. Bonuses and salaries are being
slashed; in the past quarter, Goldman
Sachs cut the amount it set aside for
compensation by forty per cent. Payroll
is down, too: banks have eliminated tens
of thousands of jobs in the past couple
of years and are now embarking on a
new round of severe job cuts. Some of
these struggles can be attributed to shortterm factors, such as low interest rates
and unusually volatile markets. But theres
no avoiding the deeper conclusion: regulations have simply made banking less
protable than it once was. Before the
nancial crisis, nancial companies (not
including the Federal Reserve banks) accounted for nearly thirty per cent of U.S. corporate prots. By
2015, that number had fallen to just seventeen per cent.
Dodd-Frank was supposed to curb certain kinds of risky
behavior on Wall Street, Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who studies nancial reform and inequality,
told me. And by that standard its gone very well. Big banks
now have to carry almost twice as much capital as they did
before the crisis, and new Fed rules will require them to set
aside another two hundred billion dollars on top of that. Those
capital requirements should be even higher, but the current
ones have already made the system safer. And, since the bigger the bank, the bigger the capital requirements, there has
been a welcome move toward downsizing. Citigroup has shed
seven hundred billion dollars in assets over the past seven
years, while Goldman and Morgan Stanley have shed a quarter of their assets. JPMorgan cut assets last year to avoid a
capital surcharge. And G.E. effectively got out of the nancial business altogether by selling off most of G.E. Capital.
Prot-making opportunities for banks have also shrunk.
Thanks in part to the new capital requirements and to new
38
CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
ANNALS OF EDUCATION
Denver, in Longmont, the old Colorado is giving way to the new. A stuffed
grizzly that once stood at the entrance
has been banished to a dusky back hallway, and many of the students are the
children of tech workers. On a recent
weekday morning, Anna Mills, a sixthgrade science teacher, shouted from the
front of the classroom, Grab your iPads
and your Spheros! When her command didnt work, she clapped twice,
and this code was successful: her two
dozen students clapped back, roughly
in unison, and began getting up from
Children can program Sphero, a white plastic orb, to traverse land and water.
40
41
43
UNINVENT THIS
MARY KARR
high maintenance
his spring, I donated to Dress for Success a box
JOON MO KANG
My toes tapered evenly, and my high arch was ballerinaworthy. I even copped a job as a foot model for an exercise sandal. Yes, I am bragging.
By sixty, those feet had gnarled up like gingerroot.
I dont grieve my less than pert tatas. When my ass lies
down on the back of my leg, I think, Oh, rest, you poor
thing. Given new bra technology and some spandex, I
can squish stuff in andspray a little PAM on mestill
slither into a size 4. But standing for an hour in heels
sets red lightning bolts blazing off my feet.
And no one warned me about this! In the healthand-booty-obsessed age I came up in, every woman
enjoined me to take care of my teeth and skin, heart
and bones. But no one detailed how those stilettos
named for a daggerwould irreversibly cripple me.
(Yes, there is a surgery sometimes involving metal and
screws which no one I know had any luck with.)
Only one loafer-wearing detractor, in long-ago Puritan Boston, scolded my spikes: If God wanted you
in those, hed have made your feet different. Yet, I said,
He made my legs look like this in them.
For I was a slave to the desire that rules our libidinal
culture. And an elongated foot and leg just announces,
Hey, yall, theres pussy at the other end of this. Yet every pair
of excruciating heels also telegraphs a subtle masochism:
i.e., I am a woman who can not only take an ass-whipping;
to draw your gaze, Ill inict one on myself.
Hope came from a lunch with the style prophet
Andr Leon Talley. He predicted that ats were rushing into fashion. As smoking is to human breath, so
the stiletto is to a womans stride. Soon, I spied a fashionable writer I know at a gala in wingtips, then Michelle Obama in kitten heelsboth women plenty
tall. I just wasnt ready to scuttle around at belt level in
clodhoppers.
Then, this past Fashion Week, Victoria Beckham was
snapped on the runway in sneakers, claiming that she
cant do heels anymore. Weensy Beckham, once photographed on a treadmill desk in a needle heel, had come
to my rescue.
Thanks to her, a womans comfort nally meant more
than her signicance as a brood sow. I hobbled out to buy
slides, then shipped off my old tormentors. Parties no
longer meant popping anti-inammatories and slipping
heels off under a tablecloth. My feet rejoiced. I snagged
every taxi I loped after, took subway stairs at a sprint.
But recently I spotted Beckham jammed into spikes
again. Traitor! Then, at a soire, a concerned friend
asked, Whats with the shoes? Looking down, I suddenly saw myself shod in large loaves of rye bread.
Oh, womenfolk, as we once burned our bras could
we not torch the footwear crucifying us? How about
this Independence Day? Our feet and spines will unknot, and high heels will fade from consciousness along
with foot-binding and rib removal to shrink your waist.
The species may stop reproducing, but who the hell
cares. Come back, Victoria. Your sisters await you.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
45
Spheros and other robotic toys, the debate over stem seemed obsolete. The
question of whether to integrate the
digital more fully into childrens lives
has already been decided, and not just
because so much time outside school
is spent in front of screens. For many
kids, the boundary between analog and
digital no longer exists. Adults like to
make distinctions; childhood is lived
as a continuum.
In April, I visited the Academy of Our
Lady of Peace, a small Catholic school
in New Providence, New Jersey.The archdiocese had bought a dozen Spheros to
circulate among its schools, but Our Lady
of Peace got the funds to pay for its own
from a private donor. The balls are locked
up in the computer lab, like children in
a Grimms fairy tale, but one of the days
I visited, four students had the opportunity to fool around with them in a long
hallway by the art classroom. The children were trying to get their Spheros to
go thirty feet down a hallway, loop under
a track hurdle that had been borrowed
from the gym, then return to the starting point. There was a cheat: they could
just drive them with their ngers, using
the preinstalled software. Sometimes the
children did this, sometimes they coded.
They itted in and out of the two without particular concern. Meghan, a fth
grader, smoothly pulled down commands
and got her Sphero to roll, execute a
nice circlet, and come back. She also programmed it to light up in different colors to make it pretty.
Kieran, a sixth grader, boasted, Coding is my second language. At home, he
uses Scratch, a drag-and-drop programming language, and does animation with
judo, a simplied version of Java. His
regulation white button-down shirt was
untucked, and it hung below his regulation navy-blue sweater vest. Kierans face
glowed as he added commands with easy
swipes; he clearly had the gift. He set
his Sphero to go, but it stopped well
short of the hurdle. I will get this,
he said. I think I got it. I think I got it.
Nope? O.K. He began furiously editing his program. The route could be navigated with just three commands, and,
looking over his shoulder, I saw that he
had put in a bunch of extraneous steps.
He explained that this was deliberate.
He was trying to fashion a more winding path through the courseanother
46
WALTER GREEN
say, Hi, I can use the theories of Derrida and Lacan to deconstruct your
companys use of language? Fat chance.
Plus, like many survivors, I no longer
had skin on my face or my hands.
Luckily, it didnt take me long to
learn that theres only one thing you
have to worry about. And thats following your passion. If you do what
you love, youll never work a day in
your life. So let your heart sing. Maybe
47
HAPPY TOGETHER
Why give up dorm life?
BY LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE
had recently graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in English.
He applied for copywriting jobs all over,
and assumed that hed end up in the Midwest. Moving to New York seemed cool,
but it was, like, a thing that happens to
other people, he told me. Then his lottery ticket arrived: a paid internship at
Foursquare, the search-and-discovery app,
which is based in Manhattan.
First stop: Craigslist, for a place to
live. Kennedy was unfamiliar with the
citys neighborhoods, but hed seen
HBOs Girls, and, he said, I pretty
much knew I was going to be in Brooklyn. He checked out one-bedroom apartments in Williamsburg, where the average monthly rent is around three thousand
dollars. Nope. He eventually landed in
Bedford-Stuyvesant, where a guy named
Patrick was subletting a room in his
two-bedroom apartment for a thousand
and fty dollars a month.
The annals of Craigslist are lled with
roommate horror stories: the scammer,
the party animal, the creep. But Patrick
turned out to be an easygoing twentynine-year-old photographer from South
Carolina. Kennedy liked him immediately, even though the two-bedroom
Co-living startups promise to wait for the cable guy and replace the toilet paper.
48
broker Citi Habitats, told me can be obtained for fteen hundred dollars and up.
But Kennedy did a little math. Eighteen hundredif you want to pay that
little for a studio or one-bedroom, youre
going to get a really junky place, he said.
With a discount for promising to stay
at Common for at least a year, he now
pays a little less than fteen hundred
dollars a month.
Co-living businesses are still in the
startup phase. Some people are incredulous. Under an article about the phenomenon on Curbed, a commenter wrote,
Why the fuck would anyone want that?
But Common, which is based in midtown and has twenty employees, recently
raised more than seven million dollars
from investors, including Maveron, a
venture-capital rm started by Dan Levitan and Howard Schultz, the chairman
of Starbucks. Jason Stoffer, a partner at
Maveron, anticipates that companies like
Common will transform residential housing by creating a brand that is emotionally and culturally resonant with millennials who arent served by some aspects
of apartment living. (Instead of landlord-ese, Common uses startup argot,
advertising its core values. In his application, Kennedy wrote that he most appreciated the value Be Present.) Stoffer
brought up AirBnb, the vacation-rental
business valued at twenty-ve billion
dollars: People sleeping on couches in
someone elses apartment for thirty dollars a night felt absolutely crazy ten years
ago! But now its normal.
Common encourages its members to
organize group activities. I thought they
were going to force me to do these events
I dont want to do, Kennedy said. Like,
lets sit in a drum circle and do basket
weaving. But the events turned out to
be things like movie nights and bowling. He decided to organize a book club.
The night of its rst meeting, the
brownstones basement was clean and
warm. At the back of the room was a
screening area, where four members
lounged on modern couches and adultsize beanbags. Kennedy, who has chinlength, sandy-colored hair, was wearing
jeans and a annel shirt. Most of his
housemates were in their twenties, recent transplants to New York. Kennedys selection was The Art of Fielding,
by Chad Harbach, and he led the discussion. He mentioned the ctional base-
49
CHARLIE BROOKER
dance, off
ancing. Ban dancing. Break its legs and bury it.
52
JOON MO KANG
UNINVENT THIS
think of retirement homes, rehab centers, and communes and kibbutzes. But
co-living isnt just about a living situation. Its about a specic stage in the
modern bourgeois life cycle: the period
that sociologists call extended adolescence. This phase of experimentation
and transition is generally associated
with people in their twenties, but its
boundaries are uid. It has appeared in
endless TV incarnations, where its
mocked and worshipped in equal measure: The Real World, Melrose Place,
Friends, and Girls. The comedian
Aziz Ansari has described it as the dicking around and having brunch stage.
Paul Groth, a professor of urban geography at the University of California,
Berkeley, told me, In the nineteenth
century, the single person was sort of a
social problem. What do you do with a
single person? In cities, the solution was
the boarding house, often run by a matron, who served meals family style and
might scold you if you got home too late.
In 1842, one resident, Walt Whitman,
declared that Americans, or at least New
Yorkers, were a boarding people: Married men and single men, old women
and pretty girls, mariners and masons,
cobblers, colonels, and counter-jumpers,
tailors and teachers; lieutenants, loafers,
ladies, lackbrains, and lawyers; printers
and parsons . . . all go out to board.
As a new, mobile workforce ooded
into cities, demanding more freedom,
boarding houses were largely replaced by
cheap hotels designed for long-term stays.
Groth said, As late as 1930, maybe one
housing unit in ten was some variation
of a residential hotel. The Barbizon, a
womens-only establishment at Lexington Avenue and Sixty-third Street, opened
in 1927, when large numbers of women
were beginning to work outside the home.
To its guests, the Barbizon offered closet-
53
the amount of turnover they experienced.
The fourth oor was the most transient.
The third oor, which included Kennedy and Thorne, the college student,
was more of a party oor. (Thorne was
becoming a kind of house pet. We all
make fun of him for being young, a
member told me.)
The second oor, whose residents
were all women, was known for its domestic rituals. People are always cooking and making tea, Chavez said. On
Monday nights, the women watched
The Bachelor together. Lauren, a thirtyone-year-old lawyer, had left a onebedroom apartment on the Upper East
Side. (Rent: twenty-four hundred dollars.) I wanted to know what it would
be like to have people be there when I
get home, she told me.
The gender ratio at Common tilts
male. Lauren offered a few theories about
why women might be reluctant to move
in: concerns about safety in Crown
Heights (which she hadnt found to be
a problem), and the fact that they tend
to move in groups. I think often with
girls its hard to do things on their own.
On the rst oor, Schrage and Pirajan, the city-shopping designer, liked to
go out to bars. Walsh, the former mascot, was more business-oriented. We go
to startup events together, like tech stuff,
Schrage told me. The fourth suitemate,
Steven She, was a thirty-one-year-old
software engineer from Toronto. Schrage
said, He got a girlfriend after, like, a
month. She met his girlfriend on the
dating app Coffee Meets Bagel. He liked
54
55
SENSORY STUDIES
FEEL ME
What the new science of touch says about ourselves.
BY ADAM GOPNIK
n a bitter, soul-shivering,
damp, biting gray February day
in Clevelandthat is to say,
on a February day in Clevelanda
handless man is handling a nonexistent ball. Igor Spetic lost his right hand
when his forearm was pulped in an industrial accident six years ago and had
to be amputated. In an operation four
years ago, a team of surgeons implanted
a set of small translucent interfaces
into the neural circuits of his upper
arm. This afternoon, in a basement lab
at a Veterans Administration hospital,
the wires are hooked up directly to a
prosthetic handplastic, esh-colored,
ve-ngered, and articulatedthat is
affixed to what remains of his arm. The
hand has more than a dozen pressure
sensors within it, and their signals can
be transformed by a computer into
electric waves like those natural to the
nervous system. The sensors in the
prosthetic hand feed information from
the world into the wires in Spetics arm.
Since, from the brains point of view,
his hand is still there, it needs only to
be recalled to life.
Now it is. With the stimulation
turned onthe electronic feed coursing from the sensorsSpetic feels
nineteen distinct sensations in his
articial hand. Above all, he can feel
pressure as he would with a living hand.
We dont appreciate how much of our
behavior is governed by our intense
sensitivity to pressure, Dustin Tyler,
the fresh-faced principal investigator
on the Cleveland project, says, observing Spetic closely. We think of hot
and cold, or of textures, silk and cotton. But some of the most important
sensing we do with our ngers is to
register incredibly minute differences
in pressure, of the kinds that are necessary to perform tasks, which we grasp
in a microsecond from the feel of the
outer shell of the thing. We know instantly, just by touching, whether to
56
Our skin is no neutral envelope; it is a busily sensing organ that situates us in relation to others and the world.
ILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER JAN
57
and change. Tighten the wave, and tingle becomes touch. It may be coincidence, but that wave, the one that communicates touch, is just around the
rhythm of a heartbeat, a sort of essential bodily beat.
The day wears on; Igor Spetic gets
a little sad. I hate to go, he says, pausing in the doorway and looking back.
When I leave this room, I leave my
hand behind.
started thinking about how touch
happens when something buzzed in
my pocket that wasnt there. Sometimes we think were going crazy when
were actually in tune with our time
and in synch with our fellows. We go
to watch a high-delity, high-framerate movie, think it looks eerily like a
local television news show from our
childhood, and discover that this is a
well-noted phenomenon, called the
soap-opera effect. We feel a strange
compulsion to leap off a high cliff, and
discover that its the high-place phenomenon, and that, far from a death
wish, it may be a backward phenomenon of self-recording: we come to the
edge, instantly retreat, and then our
brain explains our actions to us and
retrospectively reorders our memory to
believe that we must have actually been
thinking of jumping. And we see a
blue-and-black dress and think its
white and gold, and everybody else in
the country has the same problem.
Or we begin to get the jumps at
feeling a cell phone vibrate that isnt
there. Id feel a distinct, small buzzing,
would reach down andnothing. I
thought maybe some nerve ending in
my thigh had become so habituated
to the vibration that it had gone into
permanent iPhone spasm. In fact, as
the neuroscientist David Linden explained to me, it involves a predictable
misread by something called a Pacinian corpuscle.
The phantom cell phone is such a
widespread thing, Linden says. We
were speaking in his office at Johns
Hopkins University, in Baltimore. I
think something like ninety per cent
of college students report it at one time
or another. Something else stimulates
the Pacinianone of the sense receptors in your thighand the skin says,
Oh, it must be that damn cell phone
58
Housequake
What was sleep even for?
The year before, a freshman, I threw
a Prince party, re-screwed
the lights red & blue
the room all purple, people
dancing everywhereclicked
PLAY on the cassette till
we slow-sweated to Erotic
City or Do Me Baby. Im going down
to Alphabet Street. Did anyone
sleep alone that night? I Feel
For You. Shut up already, damn
cabbage patch, reverse running man
get some life wherever you can.
Kevin Young
powerful. He goes on to explain how
mouse genes allow us to explain human
touch: We can turn an itch system off
or turn it on. Were interested in the
sensory neurons that innervate the skin.
And we try to make sense of the complexity: Why are there so many kinds
of sensory neurons? What do they do?
How are they integrated to give rise to
the perception of a touch?
The world of tactile research is divided into a bewildering variety of
names and specialtieshaptics, prosthetics, somatosensory studies, haptic
feedback prosthetics, and on and on
but they all have in common the relations between our skin and our sense
of ourselves. Linden believes that,
among all the new discoveries about
touch and haptic sensation, the most
important are the least generalized.
Startlingly specic touch systems, or
labelled lines, as they are called, have
been identied. Each time we study
the touch system more deeply, we realize that it is more specialized than
wed known, Linden says. These systems arent usefully understood just as
different cognitive responses to the
same stimulitheyre completely
different integrated systems. There are
separate labelled lines for so many
seemingly intermingled systems. The
difference between affective toucha
bustly. And the ones without the receptors become insensitive. So that
showed the receptor we found was the
right one. For itch we have very dedicated behavior. Its really cool. We inject a chemical into a face. If its painful, the animals use a front paw to
gently rub it. If you inject an itchy substance, they use a hind leg to scratch.
Almost always animals use their hind
paw to scratch. So we can tell if they
are itchy or painful.
In videos, you see the difference:
mice delicately pawing their faces in
mild pain; mice scratching ercely at
an itchtwo separate systems, turned
on and off like porch lights. Even more,
the experiments suggest an odd asymmetry between the two systems. You
can trade pain for itch, Dong points
out: thats why mice and men both
scratch. But it wont work the other
way around: you can pain your itch,
but you cant itch your pain. A signature of itch is that its specic to the
skin. Your bones can ache, but they
cant itch. In still one more experiment,
Dong made his itch-specic bres uorescent. They appeared, as expected,
only in the skin.
Why should itch be so catchy? Why
should itch be, as it were, pre-installed
and so neatly differentiated from pain?
Several theories present themselves.
The most probable is that it arises from
the paramount adaptive need for animals to guard against parasites, which
are more likely to produce itch than
pain. If we put insect bites on a dimension measured in pain, they would not
register sufficiently or at all. There could
be survival value in being able, so to
speak, to tell a bug up the ass from a
pain in the rear.
ne strange thing about the un-
59
CARRIE BROWNSTEIN
call me crazy
hereby uninvent the conference call. Thats right,
God forbida hundred people can all meet and discuss a topic over the phone. Personally, I feel like that
brief sentence alone should be enough for anyone to
pause and think, Multiple people trying to speak at
once? That sounds unwieldy and inefficient. It is. But,
for those of you who need further convincing that we
can do away with conference calling, allow me to
explain.
Imagine this:
You are collaborating on a project with a group of
people who live in different cities or work in separate
spaces. In an e-mail, someone blithely suggests, Lets
set up a call. Thirty to a thousand e-mails later, a day
and a time are established. We agree on Thursday at
9 A.M. P.S.T., noon E.S.T. Count on at least one person
to think that the meeting is at noon P.S.T. Get ready to
ll that person in later via a lengthy e-mail.
The conference-call details include a dial-in number followed by a PIN. The PIN is too long to memorize. (Wait, I just got a text message from the organizer: that pin isnt working, heres a new one.) Once
you enter your pin, you are prompted to state your
name, and then to press the pound key. This is the audio
version of your passport photo. Your name will never
60
JOON MO KANG
UNINVENT THIS
61
its own, as though there were a hundred things to hear and one that must
be listened to. Yet while we tend, experientially, to separate sexuality from
other forms of touchingor at least
men do, seeing sex not as a blossom
from the world of the tactile but as a
thing unto itselfsexual touch seems,
in the realm of neurophysiology, curiously unspecied.
Youd think this would be a real
obvious thing, with conferences about
it, David Linden says. But there
seems to be nothing special about the
sexual skin. Weve got this nerve ending weve looked at and we dont know
if its involved in sexual sensation.
There are a lot of them in the clitoris and a lot in the glans penis, at the
highest density where most men report the strongest sexual sensations.
But thats not proof. It has long been
established that on the somatosensory cortexthe map that exists in
the brain, relating specic areas of the
cortex to specic places on the skin
the genitalia are represented both in
their expected place (around the lower
trunk and upper leg) and then again
below the leg, around the feet and
toes. This may help explain why, as
one student of sexual fetishism reports, in search data there were 93,885
sexual searches for feet and only 5,831
sexual searches for hands.
And then there are small meaningful oddities, Linden goes on. There
are people who have orgasm syndrome.
Theyre like what we call pain asymbolicspeople who lose the emotional
content of pain. You hit them with a
hammer, and they know theyve been
hit, but it doesnt trouble them. The
same thing is true of pleasurewe
think of orgasm as intrinsically pleasurable. But you can have an orgasm
that is more convulsive than compelling. All the same things happen on
the peripheryrhythmic contractions
of the rectum and so on. But it doesnt
feel like much more than a sneeze.
What are they missing? A favorite
case in the literature is that of a woman
who would get a seizure every time
she brushed her teeththe seizures
are probably triggered by the repetitive physical activityand then the
seizure would provoke an orgasm. The
steady regimen of tooth-brushing orgasms was exhausting, rather than exalting, and led to an unusual morning
dilemma: to brush or not to brush.
Among ordinary people, though,
the two touch systems that seem most
65
UNINVENT THIS
LEE CHILD
telling tales
he other day I saw my father, who is ninety-two
JOON MO KANG
67
PROFILES
PLAY GROUND
How a Dutch landscape architect is reinventing the park.
BY ALEXANDRA LANGE
he landscape architect
Adriaan Geuze hopped onto
the grass, cupping his hands to
his ears. You can hear a million insects, he said, in his vowelly Dutch
accent. You think, Wow, you are in the
jungle. I heard crickets, birds, a passing jet. Purple and yellow wildowers
crowded the edges of the asphalt path
where I was standing, which was dramatically lined with snow-white concrete. Not quite a jungle, but it was
hard to believe that we were seven minutes from lower Manhattan, deposited
by ferry on Governors Island.
The island has shimmered with architectural possibility since being sold
back to the people of New York for a
dollar, in 2003. Now, because of Geuze,
when you pass from the islands historic district through a vaulted archway in Liggett Hall, a former Army
barracks designed by McKim, Mead &
White, you shift more than a century
in sensibility. On one side, there are
gracious officers homes with porches.
On the other, a curved, man-made landscape rolls out in front of you, like a
living map. Ten years ago, the view
would have looked very different: as
at as a pancake, and dotted with derelict Coast Guard buildings, including
a salty Burger King. A visitor in 2016
nds four paths outlined in thick white
concrete curbs that rise and fall from
ground level to seating height, like a
topographic doodle. Signs point to a
lawn, hammocks, and what you are really here to see: the Hills, New Yorks
newest peaks, crowning a forty-acre
park.
The curbs are brilliant in the sun,
as smooth as marble. An aqueous pattern has been lightly pressed into them,
suggesting the wash of tide, frozen in
place. They are irresistible in the manner of the yellow brick road, a red carpet, a lighted runway: your eye leaps
ahead, and your body has to follow.
68
When Adriaan Geuze rst learned of Governors Island, the site of his new design, he thought it the coolest spot on the planet.
ILLUSTRATION BY EDA AKALTUN
69
ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN
seeing double
familiar Victorian superstition claims that a mir-
JOON MO KANG
UNINVENT THIS
believing that the landscape had always been that way (the British tradition) or to overwhelm you with the intricacy of plantings, sculpture, and
fountains (the French tradition). In either case, until the nineteenth century
such gardens were strictly an upperclass diversion. As industrialized cities
grew in density, some leaders set aside
land, often at the edge of town, as pleasure grounds intended as a public-health
benet. When real-estate values around
those parcels rose, they became central
rather than peripheral.
In the past decade, the thinking
about the location of parks has changed.
A major occupation of landscape architecture is the reuse and remediation
of industrial and infrastructural sites.
Theres not much virgin territory left
in cities, so to create open space is to
begin again on the ruins of the past.
In 2004, Chicagos Millennium Park
converted acres of industrial lakefront
into a linear landscape with wildower
gardens, sculpture, and a Frank Gehry
concert pavilion. In Seattles Olympic
Sculpture Park, broad green concrete
bridges zigzag over the roads and rails
that once cut off the citys art museum
from the water. West 8s most ambitious completed landscape, Madrid Ro,
is a park covering a riverfront highway
that used to divide the city.
Landscape today often abandons
the fantasy of playing Mother Nature
to achieve spectacular designs that
aunt their manufactured underpinnings, enticing architects to cross over
from buildings to the spaces around
them. The half-mile-long Superkilen
park, in Copenhagen, designed by big
Architects, Topotek 1, and Superex,
places miniature rolling green hills, a
pink patchwork market square, and
star-shaped Moroccan-tile fountains
into one of the citys most diverse
neighborhoods. Singapores Gardens
by the Bay, designed by Grant Associates, Wilkinson Eyre, and Atelier
Ten, is landscape as entertainment,
with a grove of steel Supertrees, overgrown with plants, that provide shade
during the day and light up at night.
In the Cloud Forest, under a glass
dome that resembles Santiago Calatravas recently opened Oculus, in lower
Manhattan, a thirty-ve-metre waterfall crashes down the side of a cone-
71
72
Dutch politics regarding land use, arguing that municipal governments are
letting too many buildings encroach
on the green edge that he once traversed by bike and by pole. He admires
gures like New Yorks former Mayor
Michael Bloomberg and Madrids former Mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardn,
who provided political shortcuts for
the extended and often tedious process of making landscape.
Since the founding of West 8, the
office has hopscotched around the Rotterdam docklands in search of wideopen spaces for its sixty-ve employees. (There are twenty more in New
York.) One early office had room for
football matches and roller-skatingThat brought a lightness and
freedom to the work, Geuze said. The
current one is housed in a nineteen-sixties steel-framed building raised on
stilts, which used to contain a customs
GEOGRAPHY PHOTOS/UIG/GETTY
office. The top oor is the usual openplan array of desks and pinup boards,
but, instead of an architects racks of
carpet or countertop samples, there are
chunks of stone, in every shade of gray,
lined up by the long windows.
The employees are a multinational
group, with English as a common language. In the office one day, Geuze
stopped to discuss a design for a boulevard in Moscow with a small team
of designers, sketching the proper spacing of trees on the plans. He was then
JEROEN MUSCH
73
has made a simpler set of design decisions than those in the European parks
I saw. The Hills are the big gesture,
and everything elsefrom the curbs
drawing you across the ground toward
the grove of trees that will one day
stand between Liggett Hall and the
Statue of Liberty, to the subtle, cutout
steel signs, designed by Pentagram
serves that gesture and the superlative
views beyond. Olmsted manipulated
the perspective in a way that Americans have the illusion of the wilderness, Geuze said.Park history is related to illusions, and is not far from
the realm of poetry and painting. We
work from a certain narrative anecdote or feeling. There are other componentsfunctionality, durability, a
timeless componentbut illusion is
where it starts.
One of West 8s rst recommendations after winning the competition
was that the southern part of the island be raised at least fteen feet. Terms
(It took twenty seconds.) This landll forms the Hills core, the workhorse base beneath the showstopper
elements. To lighten the load on the
man-made island, West 8 also called
for parts of the tallest hill to be made
from pumice, a pale-gray, porous volcanic rock that looks like the surface
of a Hollywood moon, drains well,
and weighs half as much as regular
ll. The ll was covered with horticultural soil, made from ve different
recipes, engineered to support specic
types of turf, plants, and trees. To create steeper inclines, some of the ll
was wrapped in geotechnical matting,
creating rounded edges that resemble
a giant stack of pancakes of diminishing diameter. The steepest, almost
vertical slopes were made with wire
baskets, stuffed with horticultural soil.
Jute mesh, coir logs, and forty-two
thousand shrubs help to keep the horticultural soil in placethe belt and
suspenders of the operation, according to Ellen Cavanagh, the director
of planning for the trust.
The nal design of the Hills creates a sort of mental push-pull for the
visitor: their extreme slopes say unnatural, while their soft curves, stone
scrambles, and brushy forests tell the
body to approach, climb, explore. They
dont look fake, like the Astroturf-covered slopes one sees at new playgrounds, but like an exaggerated version of reality. Geuze built very long
slides on Slide Hill, though he was
careful to make them blend with the
rest of the park, so as not to become
a segregated place for families. There
is also the Stone Scramble, an assortment of giant blocks that act as a shortcut for the many children who will be
too impatient to climb Outlook Hill
on the path.
Hidden around the back side of Discovery Hill is a surprise for the adults:
the sculpture by Rachel Whiteread. I
was thinking about Walden Pond and
that cabin therea cabin just the right
size for one person, Whiteread said.
The sculpture is a concrete cast of the
interior of a wooden shack, a modernday hermitage around which the artist has placed bronze casts of actual
trash found on the island, which she
made in her studio, in London. After
Whiteread was done with the trash
75
have reached for a mountain-goat metaphor; today, these kids had probably
all taken a class in parkour. Before most
of the adults had reached the foot of
the hill, the big kids were up top, standing on the rocks that mark the hardwon height of seventy feet, looking
across the harbor at Lady Libertys face.
They could barely be persuaded to pose
for a photo before they were down, up,
down again. An older child ran up,
panting: Vera found a wobbly rock!
The adults were more inclined to
linger up top, looking not just west but
north and east and south, mentally
checking off all the landmarks: the panoramic sweep takes in One World Trade
Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Verrazano; closer in are the slides, the picnic grounds with gatherings of more
rock seats, and the Whiteread concrete
cabin. No one wanted to call the kids
attention to Slide Hill, which was
off-limits until the matting required
for a soft landing was installed, but the
slides did look fun, stainless-steel beds
angling across the lower slope, interspersed with Jenga-like constructions
of climbable wooden logs.
When the toddlers started digging
in the dirt of what will soon be a grassy
apron in front of the Hills high spot,
it was time to leave. We walked down
the hill with regret, back to the ats.
Koch noted with satisfaction the kids
running along the curbs. She wished
that she could nd the woman who
had come up to her after one of the
rst planning workshops, in 2008, and
whispered, Dont tell anyone, but I let
my kids run free here.
It isnt just children who need opportunities to run free. New York Harbor
offered Geuze a grand borrowed landscape, and a ferry ride that sets this park
off from all the others in the city. Theres
no doubt that mass culture has a hundred-per-cent success in making the
world programmed, he told me. Everything is branded, everything has a
name, has a function that you have paid
for. That makes a very relevant question
for our generation of designers. If we
are interfering in public space, should
we be part of that, or should we offer a
sort of antidote? His answer, in this
spot, is clear: Maybe we should make
an environment where everyone can
enjoy the lightness, and you can play.
UNINVENT THIS
TED CHIANG
bad character
ts not personal. I never learned anything in the
JOON MO KANG
ful; the only reform ever implemented was to invent simplied versions of the more complex characters, which
solved none of the problems Ive mentioned and created
new ones besides.
So lets imagine a world in which Chinese characters
were never invented in the rst place. Given such a void,
the alphabet might have spread east from India in a way
that it couldnt in our history, but, to keep this from being
an Indo-Eurocentric thought experiment, lets suppose
that the ancient Chinese invented their own phonetic
system of writing, something like the modern Bopomofo, some thirty-two hundred years ago. What might
the consequences be? Increased literacy is the most obvious one, and easier adoption of modern technologies
is another. But allow me to speculate about one other
possible effect.
One of the virtues claimed for Chinese characters is
that they make it easy to read works written thousands of
years ago. The ease of reading classical Chinese has been
signicantly overstated, but, to the extent that ancient texts
remain understandable, I suspect its due to the fact that
Chinese characters arent phonetic. Pronunciation changes
over the centuries, and when you write with an alphabet
spellings eventually adapt to follow suit. (Consider the
differences between Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales,
and Hamlet.) Classical Chinese remains readable precisely because the characters are immune to the vagaries
of sound. So if ancient Chinese manuscripts had been
written with phonetic symbols, theyd become harder to
decipher over time.
Chinese culture is notorious for the value it places on
tradition. It would be reductive to claim that this is entirely a result of the readability of classical Chinese, but I
think its reasonable to propose that there is some inuence.
Imagine a world in which written English had changed
so little that works of Beowulf s era remained continuously readable for the past twelve hundred years. I could
easily believe that, in such a world, contemporary English
culture would retain more Anglo-Saxon values than it does
now. So it seems plausible that in this counterfactual history Im positing, a world in which the intelligibility of
Chinese texts erodes under the currents of phonological
change, Chinese culture might not be so rooted in the past.
Perhaps China would have evolved more throughout the
millennia and exhibited less resistance to new ideas. Perhaps it would have been better equipped to deal with modernity in ways completely unrelated to an improved ability to use telegraphy or computers.
I have no idea if I would personally be better off in such
a world, assuming that its even meaningful to talk about
my existing there at all. But there is one thing Im certain
of: in a world where Chinese was written with phonetic
symbols, I would never have to read or hear any more popular misconceptions about Chinese charactersthat theyre
like little pictures, that they represent ideas directly, that the
Chinese word for crisis is danger plus opportunity.That,
at least, would be a relief.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
77
FICTION
78
79
kling of the foil sounded loud to Gautama. At rst, they ate in silence, like
people travelling together on a bus. Gautama had been imagining what kind
of marriage he wanted, and he felt he
needed to be as honest as possible in
order to have the sort of relationship he
was envisioning. He told Nirmala the
thing that felt most precious to him.
My sister has epilepsy.
Gautamas parents had not told his
sister, his only sibling, what condition
she had. They had told him, instead,
because he was a boy. His sister was
four years older than he was, and his
relationship with her had always involved his feeling that hed had good
luck while shed had bad. He was haunted by the image of his sister swallowing pills whose purpose she didnt understand, standing beside the kitchen
sink, taking one pill from their mothers outstretched palm and then a second and then opening her mouth to
show their mother that it was empty.
In India, public knowledge of his sisters epilepsy would have marked the
whole family as defective. Telling someone about her for the rst time, Gautama
felt careless, immature, selsh. When we
began looking for a boy for her, my parents had to tell whoever was considering her about the epilepsy, he said. Several of the families his parents negotiated
with declined to pursue a marriage. One
nally agreed to it after his parents promised a house in the city, a farm, and a
foreign car. After the dowry had been
agreed upon, the grooms grandfather,
feeling that he had not been adequately
consulted, forbade the marriage.
Gautama was seventeen then. He
went with his father to the electronics
shop that the grooms family owned.
They stood in the parking lot outside
the shop, surrounded by scooters. The
sun was hot, and the diesel in the air
hurt Gautamas eyes and throat.
His father pleaded with the grandfather, who was wearing a white kurta
pajama. What is the matter? his father said, touching the old mans elbow.
She is a good girl. We have ordered
the food for the engagement.
You tried to be smart, didnt you?
the old man scolded. Trying to hide
your shame with such a large dowry.
Because of her epilepsy, his sister,
who had a bachelors degree, was now
81
arm in arm. One couple walked in circles, laughing at how cold it was. As
Gautama and Nirmala walked down the
crowded sidewalk, Nirmala bumped into
him. Sorry, Gautama said, not looking at her. After a few steps, she bumped
into him again. He glanced at her.
Its over, she said and laughed.
Gautama felt relieved that he
had not embarrassed himself before
Nirmala.
s he got to know her better, Nir-
cated to him. She told him that her fathers younger brother had bothered
her. She didnt say what he had done to
bother her, but she said that, when her
uncle was living with her family, she had
begun pulling out her hair. I get white
hair where I used to pull it out, she said.
The fact that this had happened to
her made Gautama see her as being like
any other person, someone with her own
past, someone who needed love, who was
scared and embarrassed, who had pulled
out her own hair and was convinced that
it turned white because of this.
The two started going on walks in
the evening in the West Village, near
Nirmalas dorm. One day, they held
hands for the rst time. It was midMarch. The air was cold and heavy with
moisture. They were walking past a
pizza parlor, and Nirmala put her hand
in his. The rst thing Gautama noticed
was the calluses on her palms. But, as
soon as he had closed his hand around
hers, he had the feeling that he would
never need anything else. All the other
things he worried abouthis research,
what job he would get, what might happen to his family in Indianone of this
mattered, because this thing was O.K.
He looked on YouTube for guidance on kissing. He watched a video
in which an old white-haired couple
kissed and then told each other what
they had liked about the kiss.
French kissing seemed disrespectful.
Kissing with closed lips had the bravery of
kissinga declaration of not caring what
society thoughtbut was also not vulgar.
Every new thing that he and Nirmala
did, such as standing on a street corner,
each with a hand in the others back
pocket, gave him a sense of freedom.
They began lying together on her bed
in her dorm room, kissing until he stop82
83
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
BY ADELLE WALDMAN
Richardson was an accidental novelist, and an accidentally great one; his powers of empathy clashed with his pinched piety.
ILLUSTRATION BY LEIGH GULDIG
85
than we might expect. The story is robust enough that readers neednt accept
Pamelas belief that shell be ruined if
she has sex (consensual or otherwise)
in order to sympathize with her situation; its enough that she doesnt want
sex on the terms offered. It helps, too,
that her narration is engaging and tartly
comic. If Mr. B, her employer, had his
way, she writes to her parents, he would
keep me till I was undone, and till his
mind changed; for even wicked men, I
have read, soon grow weary of wickedness with the same person. Meanwhile,
Mr. Bthe nest young gentleman in
ve countiesassumed that what he
wanted from Pamela would not be so
very unwelcome, especially since, like
any decent gentleman of pleasure, he
was prepared to reward her for her favors. He is baffled by her reaction to his
overturessomewhat understandably,
given that Pamela says things like How
happy am I, to be turned out of door,
with that sweet companion my innocence! (In spite of being on Pamelas
side, we cant help feeling some sympathy with Mr. B when he calls her a romantic idiot.) Even as his actions become increasingly desperate, he has a
coherent rationale for his behavior. He
thinks Pamela is overreacting. I am sure
you . . . frightened me, by your hideous
squalling, as much as I could frighten
you, he says after he tries to kiss her.
87
marry her for the sake of her reputation. I behold him with fear now, as
conscious of the power my indiscretion
has given him over me, she confesses
to Anna. If she knew as much as the
reader, shed be even more afraid. Clarissa is one of ctions most terrifying
he said, she said dramas because the
facts are seldom whats at issue: the characters private thoughts are. Clarissa
would be both furious and humiliated
if she knew to what extent Lovelace is
torn between his real tenderness for her
and his baser impulses.
Heaven give me the heart to be honest to my Clarissa! he writes, and means
itat that moment. But even in a position of dependence Clarissa is too
truthful, or proud, to cater to Lovelaces
ego or to cease regretting that she left
home with him: he is not, she tells him,
a man . . . who improved upon acquaintance. Whether because his vanity is
wounded by this treatment (she is like
a haughty and imperious sovereign, he
complains) or simply because its his nature, once Clarissa is in his power he
cant help but pursue the ultimate coup
making this young woman of unusually
high repute into his mistress. He now
cunningly sidesteps the issue of marriage, concealing his ambivalence in a
sea of lip-deep promises. He isnt entirely sure he wont behave honorably
by hereventually. I resolve not any
way, he says. I will see how her will
works; and how my will leads me on.
89
BOOKS
This Is Your Brain on Sports explores what studies tell us, and dont tell us, about the way we behave around sports.
lieve that quarterbacks are good-looking
(theyre not, apparently, or not especially)
to why international sporting events like
the Olympics and the World Cup dont
make Earth a more peaceful planet. (On
the contrary, they often seem to iname
tensions.)
Wertheim and Sommerss basic conceit is that although people seem to
behave irrationally when it comes to
sports, theyre acting no differently from
the way they do in the rest of their
lives. If cheering on the underdog, loving perennial losers, and risking life
and limb to snag a cheesy T-shirt red
out of a cannon are, objectively, absurd
things to do, then its natural to be irrational. Your brain on sports, they
conclude, is really just your regular
90
team has just lost the Super Bowl is indistinguishable from the brain of someone who is grieving for the death of a
loved one. No one would say that those
experiences are equivalent.
Anxiety is a classic case. I can be made
equally anxious by the thought of missing my bus and the thought of being
struck by a meteor. The rst is (usually)
rational and the second irrational. But
the brute chemistry is the same. This is
why its not that hard to nd non-sports
situations in which the brain seems to
act like a brain on sports. The more interesting question has to be whether we
really treat the two situations as the same,
or have a sports mode that we switch
on and off. And, if we do, what that mode
cognitively is. What do we think were
doing when were on sports?
To their credit, Wertheim and Sommers are on to this. They are enthusiasts,
but they are not fanatics, and they frequently concede that, whatever the suitability of a given behavioral pattern with
regard to sports, it is often inappropriate,
and hence overridden, in lifes other arenas. They frequently pull the rug out from
under their own arguments. In sports, for
example, we like to root for the underdogthe team or the player who, by denition, is more likely to losepartly because the marginal psychic payoff for being
right is so much greater than the potential pain on the downside. But were playing with house money. When its our own
money, we tend to back the favorite.
Similarly with fan-centric hypocrisy.
If you are a Boston sports fan, you are
condent that Tom Brady never ordered
anyone to deate his footballs, and you
are equally certain that Peyton Manning
is a big fat liar. Would you be surprised
if someone pointed out that you might
be suffering from a bias blind spot? I
dont think you would. The whole basis
for being a sports fan is that there are no
consequences for hypocrisy. In fact, if
you are not a hypocrite in this sense, if
you cannot favor one side for no decent
reason over the other, then you cannot
enjoy sports at all.
There is another fallacy lurking here.
That is the assumption that the baser
impulsein this case, the impulse to
prefer your cheater to their cheateris
more hard-wired than the nobler impulse, which would be to put favoritism
aside, ignore the fact that one quarterback
92
93
BRIEFLY NOTED
Guapa, by Saleem Haddad (Other Press). Rasa, the narrator of
this vibrant, wrenching dbut novel, is a young gay man living in an unnamed Arab city. During the Arab Spring, he
joined protests, but now an autocratic regime rules while zealots seethe in the slums. Worse, Rasas ercely traditional
grandmother has just seen him with his lover, and his lover
is growing distant. In the course of a day, as Rasa hunts for
a missing friend, who has likely been hauled in by the vice
squad, his city and his memories roil, sensuous and caustic,
full of smoke and blood. A lavish political wedding that forms
the books nal set piece brings revelations and epiphanies,
but they dont feel forced.
Hard Red Spring, by Kelly Kerney (Viking). This century-span-
ning novel examines the violent relationship between Guatemala and the United States through the connected stories of
four American women. In 1902, the young daughter of cochineal farmers witnesses the violent disintegration of her family;
in 1954, the wife of an ambassador has an affair with her husbands best friend; in 1983, a missionary experiences misgivings;
and, in 1999, an adoptive mother takes her Mayan daughter on
a trip to explore her roots. The books ambitious scope entails
some creaky coincidences, but Kerneys insights are rewarding.
Of happiness, one character concludes, How unexpected, how
encompassing, how close to disappointment it felt.
Landscapes of Communism, by Owen Hatherley (New Press).
POP MUSIC
On Views, the rapper bleeds onto the page and then admires the pattern.
96
1
Pyrrhic Victory Department
From the Londonderry (N.H.) Times.
97
SERIOUSLY FUNNY
A Nicole Eisenman retrospective.
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL
feeling. They must be judged in person; in reproduction they lose the masterly touch that is Eisenmans signature. The MacArthur Foundation cited
her for restoring to the representation of the human form a cultural
signicance that had waned during
the ascendancy of abstraction in the
20th century. Id like it to be true.
Eisenmans resourceful Expressionism hints at the power of narrative
painting to re-situate the art world in
the world at large.
Eisenman is an artist of overlapping sincerities. One of them suggests
that of a bohemian community organizer. In Biergarten at Night (2007),
dozens of characterssome realist, including a self-portrait; others fanciful,
such as an androgynous gure passionately kissing a deaths-headhoist
brews in velvety shadow and glimmering light. Each face is painted a bit
differently, in a range from lmy to
impastoed, and each feels individually
99
TRANSFORMERS
The Lobster and Captain America: Civil War.
BY ANTHONY LANE
Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz play forbidden lovers in Yorgos Lanthimoss film.
imorous, paunchy, and pale, with
tor Yorgos Lanthimos, ts the bill. Tranquil in manner yet brisk in momentum,
it lays out the foreground of the story
without pausing to ll in the backdrop;
clue by clue, we have to work it out for
ourselves. The underlying tenet of society, we come to understand, is that
people are forbidden to be single. Parts
of the lm are set in a city, where we
see that principle in action. A woman
on her own in a mall is stopped by security guards, who demand, politely
but rmly, to know the whereabouts
of her husband; she explains that he is
away on a business trip. Another solo
shopper is asked to produce his certicate, in order to prove that he has a
spouse.
David is a wretched case. (The casting of Farrell, who played Alexander
the Great for Oliver Stone, is a subtle
joke in itself.) His wife has recently left
him, and so he is sent to the hotel; no
one must be alone for long. With him
he takes a Border colliea loyal pal,
and no wonder, for it is in fact his
brother, who presumably tried and failed
to nd a partner of his own. (Most such
failures, according to the manager, elect
Iron Man likes the idea, whereas Captain America hates it. You could parse
their clash as a grownup debate on
the politics of governance, but its really not. Its an excuse for the two of
them to duke it out on a German
aireld, each with a bunch of friends
at his behest. Even Spider-Man (Tom
Holland) and Ant-Man (Paul Rudd)
get roped in, with mixed results. Both
are nicely played, and they leaven the
mood (a tiny Rudd gets to hop inside
Downeys metal costume, like a ea),
yet their very presence smacks of desperation. The motto of the directors,
Anthony and Joe Russo, appears to be:
If you can make it happen, do it. Dont
hold back.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes
had a word for this method: exorbitancy. Three hundred and sixty-six years
ago, in an uncanny trailer for Marvel,
he wrote, There are some that are not
pleased with ction, unless it be bold,
not onely to exceed the work, but also
the possibility of nature: they would have
impenetrable Armors, Inchanted Castles, invulnerable bodies, Iron Men,
ying Horses, and a thousand other such
things, which are easily feigned by them
that dare. As the feigning wears off,
and Captain America: Civil War crawls
to a close, you sense that the possibilities of nature have been not just exceeded but exhausted. Even the dialogue
seems like a special effect: Youre being
uncharacteristically non-hyperverbal,
Black Widow remarks to Iron Man.
Translation: Say something.
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