Kindle Edition, 2013 © The New Yorker

COMMENT
Crossing the Line

by Steve Coll

Early in 1987, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi President, decided to clear out scores of Kurdish villages, in order to undermine separatist rebels. He asked Ali Hassan al-Majid, a general and a first cousin, to lead the project. In tape recordings later produced by Iraqi prosecutors, Majid told Baath Party colleagues that the novelty and the terror of chemical weapons would “threaten” the Kurds and “motivate them to surrender.” On April 16th of that year, Iraq became the first nation ever to drop gas bombs on its own citizens; the gassing campaign lasted two years and killed thousands of people. “I will kill them all with chemical weapons!” Majid told his colleagues. “Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! The international community and those who listen to them!”

Two weeks ago, on August 21st, a poison-gas attack killed more than fourteen hundred civilians in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria’s capital. President Obama, in fashioning a response, has been burdened by the United States’ recent history with Iraq. The Administration of Ronald Reagan stood by as “Chemical Ali” waged his campaign against the Kurds. Fifteen years later, to justify an invasion of Iraq, the Administration of George W. Bush infamously claimed that Saddam Hussein still possessed chemical and biological arms. It soon became apparent that Saddam had abandoned them. That tragic war has rightly raised the standards of proof that Obama must meet to credibly propose military action in the Middle East, particularly if the casus belli concerns unconventional arms.

The Obama Administration, Britain, and France say there is little doubt that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is responsible for the recent slaughter, although they concede that the evidence is not airtight. The video imagery of the aftermath is indelible: unbloodied corpses, including toddlers’, in white shrouds; hospital patients choking and drooling. The chances that rebels were responsible seem slim to nonexistent. Yet last Thursday Britain’s Parliament, citing the West’s failures in Iraq, voted to reject an attack on Syria for now, because a majority did not judge the available evidence of Assad’s guilt to be definitive.

Last year, President Obama said that he would consider the use of chemical arms during Syria’s civil war a “red line” that, if crossed, would require American action. Last week, the President and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, sounded as though they had decided to strike against Assad. The dilemma they confront is a mercifully rare one. Since the First World War, there have been fewer than a dozen wars or acts of terrorism involving chemical arms. Before Syria, the last such attack occurred in 1995, when Aum Shinrikyo, a millenarian cult, released sarin gas into Tokyo’s subway because its leaders believed that mass killing would catalyze the apocalypse.

It is hard to grasp why any rational person would use chemical weapons, even amid the terrible exigencies of war. Gas weapons cannot be aimed in order to spare children or other noncombatants. They cause fear and prolonged suffering in victims, and cripple some survivors. They can contaminate the environment with poisons that last beyond a war’s end. And, because gases travel unpredictably on the wind, the weapons’ utility on a battlefield is limited.

Yet Saddam saw great value in chemical arms during the nineteen-eighties, and his twisted logic bears examination in the light of Syria’s deteriorating conflict. Saddam first used gas bombs to thwart Iran’s zealous swarms of “human wave” infantry. Chemical terror broke the will of young Iranian volunteers, a lesson that informed Majid’s subsequent Kurdish campaign. The Reagan Administration’s decision to tolerate Saddam’s depravities proved to be a colossal moral failure and strategic mistake; it encouraged Saddam’s aggression and internal repression, and it allowed Iraq to demonstrate to future dictators the tactical value of chemical warfare.

The consequences of similar passivity in Syria now are unknowable. After more than two years and a hundred thousand deaths, the war has descended into a miasma of kidnappings, executions, and indiscriminate attacks. It would not be surprising if Assad or his henchmen seized upon selective gassings as a way to break the opposition’s will, or to flush rebels from strategic neighborhoods. Obama has said that his aim in Syria is to prevent more gassings, not to overthrow Assad. Since the costs of even a limited Western military intervention in Syria might be very high, in diplomatic standing and in lives, it is reasonable to ask whether the cause of punishing and deterring the use of chemical weapons is worth the risks.

Assad’s forces have already killed tens of thousands of civilians with conventional weaponry. But chemical warfare is a step beyond. Since the Second World War, governments and armies have gradually forsworn weapons that do not distinguish between soldiers and civilians. These include nuclear, biological, and chemical arms, and also land mines and cluster munitions. The treaties that ban such arms are building blocks in a decades-long campaign by human-rights activists to insist that warfare be subordinated to international law, that soldiers attack only other soldiers, and that generals be held accountable for where they aim their weapons.

International laws and informal warnings of retaliation are designed to dissuade dictators and terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction under any circumstances. A failure to enforce such norms in Syria would likely lower the threshold for chemical use in this and future wars. Obama’s deliberateness about military action in Syria is understandable. The consequences of intervention may be difficult to control; the Syrian opposition is fractured and influenced by jihadi fighters. As Iraq has shown, the public requires transparency, accountability, and democratic deliberation when war crimes become a basis for more war.

In Iraq, starting in 2006, Chemical Ali went on trial for mass murder and other crimes against humanity. The proceedings were undeniably flawed. Yet they put Majid’s murderous arrogance on full display to his countrymen, and guaranteed that the record of his guilt can never be obscured. He was hanged in 2010. The prospect of even such rough justice for Syria’s chemical bombers looks elusive. Yet Obama’s original instincts were sound. There are red lines even in a war as devoid of clarity as Syria’s. The best available evidence is that on August 21st Bashar al-Assad’s forces crossed to the other side. ♦

MADAME SUPERSIZED
Verismo

by Michael Schulman

By the time Vickie Lynn Hogan was twenty-six, she had made a name for herself, having modelled for Guess jeans and appeared on the cover of Playboy. The name was Anna Nicole Smith. A native of Houston, Texas, Smith worked at a fried-chicken restaurant (the cook became her first husband) and a strip club before marrying her second husband, the eighty-nine-year-old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, in 1994. The marriage, and the legal wrangling over Marshall’s estate after his death, earned Smith a quintessentially modern kind of fame: untethered to talent, buoyed by reality television, burnished by tragedy. She died, in 2007, of a prescription-drug overdose. Her idol was Marilyn Monroe.

To Richard Thomas, a native of Birmingham, England, she was closer to Madame Butterfly. Thomas is the librettist of “Anna Nicole,” an opera based on Smith’s life, with music by Mark-Anthony Turnage. It premièred at Covent Garden, in 2011, and opens this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a co-production with New York City Opera. The show, which falls somewhere between cheeky and epic (the BAM production has an ensemble of sixty-five and an orchestra of fifty-nine), recasts its subject as the archetypal fallen woman, in the tradition of “Tosca” and “Lucia di Lammermoor.” (The conductor, Steven Sloane, calls it “an extension of verismo style.”) “If you put her narrative in nineteenth-century Versailles and call her the Baroness de Anna—with the old husband and the love triangle and families feuding over fortunes—it’s a classic tale,” Thomas said the other day, at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House. “It’s just acted out in the Hollywood Hills, where there’s not quite so much French.”

Thomas, who is forty-eight, bespectacled, and tightly wound, came to prominence with “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” which was a hit in the West End and played Carnegie Hall in 2008. “I’ve always been drawn to what you’d call Americana,” he explained. “When I was eleven, I heard ‘Kind of Blue,’ by Miles Davis, and it changed my life.” Thomas picked up his love of opera from his mother, a Wagner enthusiast. For a while, he performed in a musical double act, until his partner had a nervous breakdown. He recalled the moment, in 2000, when he was watching a late-night rerun of “The Jerry Springer Show” in his London flat and became interested in its dramaturgical possibilities. “All these individuals were screaming at each other—it was, like, beep beep beep beep—and I was getting annoyed that I couldn’t hear the vernacular.” (He also considered adapting “Judge Judy.”)

While researching “Anna Nicole,” Thomas flew to Los Angeles to interview Smith’s dress designers, Pol’ Atteu and Patrik Simpson, and visited strip clubs in Las Vegas, where he learned the legalities of topless bars. (“The law expressly says: panties must be kept on.”) He came to sympathize with his subject. “There must have been some kind of shock at the level of fame she achieved,” he said. He was struck by Smith’s devotion to her son, Daniel, who died in the Bahamas, in 2006, and by the back pain she incurred from her breast implants, which probably exacerbated her pill addiction. “I wanted to give her the benefit of every doubt.”

Thomas rode an elevator down to a rehearsal studio, where the cast was finishing up a scene between Smith, played by the soprano Sarah Joy Miller (she recently sang the role of Violetta, in “La Traviata,” at Palm Beach Opera), and her lawyer, Howard K. Stern, played by the baritone Rod Gilfry (Don Giovanni, Aix-en-Provence). Afterward, the singers gathered around a television showing an episode of “The Anna Nicole Show”—Smith’s dog was humping a Teddy bear—while Thomas met with Sloane, the conductor.

“This is bizarre in English: sti-let-tos, on the triplet,” Sloane said, flipping through sheet music.

“It’s like a moment of anger,” Thomas instructed. “Bah-bah-bah!”

The singers moved on to a scene in which Smith, still a struggling exotic dancer, visits a plastic surgeon, sung by the tenor Richard Troxell (Don José, Teatro Petruzzelli).

DOCTOR: This is my mantra, this is my chant: Fight time and nature with a silicone implant.

ANNA: I don’t know, I just don’t know. . . . O.K., I’ll take the tits. But let’s start small.

DOCTOR: If you start small, why bother at all?

ANNA: Oh, whatever—supersize me!

On a break, Miller compared her role to Massenet’s Manon, “who was basically a gold-digger.” Her favorite passage is an aria that Anna Nicole sings after she gets the implants. “I can open up into the higher part of my soprano voice,” Miller said. “She says, ‘This is my time, / my tiiiime!’ ” The note, unlike the protagonist, is a B natural. ♦

CAFFEINE FIENDS
Taste Test

by Ian Parker

When James Murphy, the pop musician, disbanded LCD Soundsystem, in 2011, he made a public remark or two about wanting to spend more time with his coffee. This was shorthand for a happier and more grownup life—Murphy was then forty-one, and a little frayed—but he also meant what he said. A year later, he took a two-day course, in London, with Gwilym Davies, who had recently won the World Barista Championship; he also began to consult with other coffee professionals about creating his own espresso blend. In time, Murphy met James Freeman, the founder of Blue Bottle Coffee, which has coffee shops in California and New York. Freeman is a former classical clarinetist with a priestly air. A few weeks ago, they arranged a formal coffee tasting, or “cupping,” at the back of Blue Bottle’s Brooklyn location, close to Murphy’s home, in Williamsburg. Murphy arrived on a foldup bicycle, looking eager but not all that rested, bringing news about his house renovation. “How does a wine fridge cost two thousand dollars?” he asked Freeman. “It’s a small fridge that doesn’t get that fucking cold. It’s a dorm fridge that’s broken.”

Small bowls of ground coffee were lined up on a countertop. To one side was a coffee grinder, and a row of aluminum spitting mugs. “I feel I would lose myself for a good two years if I went too deep,” Murphy said, of his interest in coffee. “I’m a rabbit-holer.” He and Freeman discussed some coffee shops they had separately visited, in Reykjavík and São Paolo, and then turned to the proposed Murphy blend, which may be sold both by Blue Bottle and by Murphy himself, if he opens the general store that is another part of his midlife project. Freeman said, “My guess is we have very similar desires: to not get too infatuated with the ultrabright school.” He was referring to a current fashion, with Nordic roots, for tart, acidic coffee.

“We’re older than the average person who’s excited about Scandinavian roasting,” Murphy said. “I’m superglad that it’s happening, but I also don’t want to drink it all the time.” He said that he positioned himself, in coffee’s avant-garde, as “more Benjamin Britten . . . than a chainsaw on cement,” which prompted Freeman to describe how much he’d been enjoying Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder” in his car. “That was right before he broke with harmony, and you can hear him pushing, knocking on the door: ‘Let me out!’ But it’s still really, really beautiful and enveloping and huge. So maybe this is a little bit like that.”

They crouched over the dry coffees—two from South America, two from East Africa, one from Indonesia—and sniffed them. “Bring the cup close to your face,” Freeman instructed. “I like to smell with my mouth open. Tap each cup three times.” Murphy, who had done this before, tapped and sniffed. “Wow, that’s crazy!” he said of a Brazilian peaberry.

Hot water was poured into the cups; more smelling. On the third pass, they tasted a spoonful of each. “Oh, that’s nuts. It’s still crazy! Beautiful,” Murphy said, and spat.

One of Freeman’s colleagues then made an espresso that combined three of the five coffees. “The ball’s in your court,” Freeman told Murphy. “If you could wish for something on that, what would you wish?” Murphy, saying that he found its sourness too dominant, suggested a new ratio: “Forty, thirty, thirty.” As this was being prepared, Murphy told Freeman of the times in his life when he lets his coffee standards slip. One is on American Airlines flights—“Because it’s not coffee. It’s this other beverage that means I’m landing.” The other is when he skis: “I want a mug of grocery-store French roast with Land O’Lakes half-and-half.”

Freeman winced. “Don’t go skiing.”

They tasted several more espressos. Murphy was no longer spitting, and the conversation sped up. Over objections, Murphy embraced the word “hipster,” saying, “I’m a d.j., and I live in Williamsburg, and I run an independent record company. Come on. I’ve got a collapsible bike.” He said that his father had given him six pieces of advice. “One was: How you leave a public bathroom is how you know if you’ve got ethics.”

“Whoa!” Freeman said.

“My eyeballs are going,” said Murphy.

He sipped. “There’s a really weird taste that I got at the end. Which is pot.”

After another espresso, Freeman said that he had tasted purple.

Murphy described the synesthesia that he sometimes experiences, as a d.j., when contemplating a sequence of records. “I think, There are too many red ones.”

Freeman said that Olivier Messiaen, the French composer, used to experience something similar. “Just another thing we have in common,” Mur-phy said.

Murphy realized that he could no longer taste. Freeman encouraged him to take the experiment home, and he packed the coffees, and the blends, into three or four small tote bags. Murphy looked at these; then he took off his belt and threaded it through the tote-bag handles, then tied the belt in a loop and threw it all over his shoulder, like a rabbit hunter, and cycled home. ♦

DO-OVER DEPT.
Neck First

by Reeves Wiedeman

“Don’t call it a comeback,” Keith Olbermann said last week, quoting LL Cool J. “I’ve been here for years.” But what else to call it? And how many comebacks does one man get? This was the première of Olbermann’s new sports talk show, on ESPN2, a network he helped launch in the early nineties and did not expect to work for again. “My presumption would be that [ESPN] would not have me back were the building on fire and I the only possessor of a fire bucket in the world,” Olbermann said, after leaving the network. Many in the building thought that he had started the fire himself. (One executive: “He didn’t burn bridges here. He napalmed them.”) Olbermann had since left ashes at MSNBC and Current, and now, somehow, found himself at the scene of his original crime: “As I like to say, ‘Bridge burned, take tunnel.’ ”

Olbermann entered the greenroom of his Times Square studio a few minutes before showtime, wearing a vest, a polka-dot tie, and trapezoidal glasses. The show is ESPN’s only one taped in New York, so the network had rented a set from “Good Morning America.” (A branded pinball machine in the corner offered a bonus for hitting Diane Sawyer.) Several of ESPN’s top executives were present, like prom-night chaperones. “The guys at ESPN have stuck their necks out,” Olbermann said. “But sometimes sticking your neck out is how you win a foot race.”

As the show went live, Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner, who was scheduled to appear, grabbed a bag of popcorn and sat down to watch. Olbermann opened with an impressive thirteen-minute riff about the New York Jets, with references to Miley Cyrus, Chris Christie, the decline of newspapers, Clarence Darrow, “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” and Matlock. “When guys write something that’s a little overcooked, I usually tell them, ‘Who the hell do you think you are, Keith Olbermann?’ ” Jamie Horowitz, ESPN’s vice-president of original programming, said. And what to tell Olbermann if he went too far? “I don’t know,” Horowitz said. “ ‘Who the hell do you think you are, Bill O’Reilly?’ ”

Olbermann had promised that the show would spurn his “grave, angry” MSNBC caricature—after all, it’s just sports. “There’s probably a group that’s just happy I’m not talking about politics,” he said. “They don’t have to hate me anymore—or they get to hate me because I’m saying something about the Milwaukee Brewers.” He had already extended an informal invitation to his old punching bag, George W. Bush, to talk baseball, but had no plans to invite any of the local politicians undergoing rehabilitation campaigns of their own. “He was always on that damn BlackBerry before I introduced him,” Olbermann said, of Anthony Weiner’s appearances on MSNBC. “I’m now wondering what he was doing.”

The show breezed along, with Olbermann talking at a Sorkinian pace, slowing down only for a segment thanking an influential third-grade teacher. Back in the greenroom, after Olbermann had shown a clip of a professional wrestler, Cuban turned to Jeremy Schaap, an ESPN reporter, and said, “Google me, and ‘W.W.E.’ ”

“Come on, that didn’t hurt,” Schaap said, after pulling up on his phone a video of Cuban getting thrown through a table. “That’s balsa wood.”

“Nah, that’s a real table,” Cuban said. “I was sore for two weeks.”

The broadcast ended—“I’ve done all the damage I can do for one night”—and Olbermann returned to applause in the greenroom. John Skipper, ESPN’s president, gave him a pat on the back and thanked Horowitz for a good first show, particularly a segment about performance-enhancing drugs. “Now I can say we’re not getting pushed around by the leagues, ’cause we hit Major League Baseball,” Skipper said, alluding to reports, which ESPN has denied, that pressure from the N.F.L. caused the network to back out of a documentary with PBS about brain injuries in football.

Olbermann skipped a post-show party in his honor, citing lingering bronchitis, but seemed triumphant the next morning: his show had quadrupled the début audience for a similar show on Fox Sports 1, hosted by Regis Philbin, who was attempting a parallel television comeback. Olbermann insisted that ratings were not the main thing. “There’s great meaning to this,” he said. “At some point, I don’t know when it is, you become aware of your mortality”—Olbermann is fifty-four. “I started thinking about what the obituary is gonna look like, and, to the degree I’m remembered at all, that obituary was going to say I left every place I ever worked in a firestorm.

“I’d like to change the ending,” he went on. “Not change it by papering it over, or by rewriting a Wikipedia page, but, literally, by having people react to me like I’m Scrooge on Christmas morning, rather than Scrooge kicking Tiny Tim down the stairs for no reason.” ♦

CONFINEMENT DEPT.
Old Bridge

by Alec Wilkinson

Let’s say it’s a recent afternoon, with the sky as blue as a paint sample. Forget the sky, though. You’re in the Bronx, in a trailer beside the Harlem River, off 173rd Street, with several city officials and consultants who are about to tour the interior of the High Bridge, the steel-and-stone footbridge that connects the Bronx and Manhattan and is the city’s oldest bridge. The High Bridge closed sometime in the early nineteen-seventies. (Nobody is sure exactly when.) Sixty-one million dollars is being spent to restore it, and it opens next year. The restoration is described as a rehabilitation, as if it were a question of the bridge’s character. This may have to do with the High Bridge’s having a shadowy past. A lot of people believe that the bridge was closed after some kids dropped something from it that killed a passenger on the Circle Line. What happened is that, in the fifties, some kids dropped some things from it that struck four passengers on the Circle Line, and two of them needed stitches.

The High Bridge encloses a disused water pipe, which is seven feet tall, part of the original aqueduct. Before you can see it, however, you have to take an hour-long course in Confined Space Entry, which is why you’re in the trailer. The course is taught by Michael Byrnes, a small, cheerful guy with a husky voice, who is a certified industrial hygienist—someone, that is, who’s responsible for the well-being of workers on a site. Byrnes is showing slides, the most arresting of which has a skeleton in a doorway, along with a sentence saying that, of the two hundred and thirty-four people killed in confined spaces between 1993 and 1996, “up to half . . . were rescuers.” Byrnes says that work in such places, which might have “entrapment hazards,” is meant to be done quickly. “You get in and out,” he says. “The organization is not going to set up a desk for you.” What else you learn: I.D.L.H. means “immediately dangerous to life and health,” and usually denotes gases. No gas exists in the High Bridge, though. “For this project, the hazards would be more physical,” Byrnes says. “Striking your head when you go in there. Things lying around you might step on.”

After the class, park by the bridge and join everyone at the entrance, a huge steel gate, painted black, with razor wire around the edges like lace. The manhole leading to the interior is several hundred feet down the walkway. Notice the pleasing herringbone pattern of the bricks. The darker bricks, the ones that are almost black, are from the nineteenth century—the bridge, which is twelve hundred feet long and a hundred and sixteen feet tall, opened in 1848. Some of the bridge’s bricks are stamped “RBC,” for Rockland Brick Company, and were made from clay dug along the Hudson River in Haverstraw, New York.

Beside the manhole, you’ll be issued some P.P.E.—personal-protection equipment, meaning a hard hat and maybe an orange vest—and offered blue plastic gloves, because, Carlos Herrera, the site’s safety manager, will say, “it’s dirty down there.” The cleaning of the interior, using shovels and Hepa vacuums—shop vacuums with special dust filters—started in February and has just been completed. “In the beginning, it was difficult to breathe, because it was wet, humid, no ventilation,” Burhan Zayed, the engineer who oversaw this stage of the project, will say. Afterward, all the steel and brick and rubble were separated and piled against the walls. “For the archeologists,” Zayed will say. “To tell us whether it’s historical or not.”

The interior, which is a long tunnel, is lit by a string of overhead lights, as if at a party. The illumination is murky, and the dampness gives it a pearly quality. Stick with someone who has a flashlight, and stay away from the periodic holes in the floor that have been covered with plywood; they are nearly a hundred feet deep. Follow the rusty aqueduct pipe back to the Bronx end of the bridge, where “760” is written on the wall in blue paint. “That’s seven hundred and sixty feet from the entrance,” Zayed says. “I used to count it every day.”

Return to the manhole, climb the ladder, and hand in your P.P.E. A couple of blocks from the bridge, you’ll encounter a tall guy, with tight jeans, a T-shirt, and tattoos like bruises. He’ll be pacing and waving one of his hands. “I supply everybody with energy,” he’ll say into a phone. “That’s what it is.” Give him a wide berth. ♦

THE MILITARY LIFE
The Return

The traumatized veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

by David Finkel

The way it worked was that they joined the Army because they were starry-eyed or heartbroken or maybe just out of work, and then they were assigned to be in the infantry rather than to something with better odds, like finance or public affairs, and then by chance they were assigned to an infantry division that was about to rotate into the war, and then they were randomly assigned to a combat brigade that included two infantry battalions, one of which was going to a bad place and the other of which was going to a worse place, and then they were assigned to the battalion going to the worse place, and then they were assigned to the company in that battalion which went to the worst place of all. If you listen to the eulogies, so much of war is said to be accidental. Poor Harrelson. Wrong place. Poor Cajimat. Wrong time. But for members of Bravo Company, which in 2007 and 2008 spent fourteen months in combat, in a bomb-filled neighborhood in east Baghdad, the war eventually felt like the wrong everything. Twenty-five-year-old Nic DeNinno was in 3rd Platoon. He thought of himself as a patriot who had enlisted in the Army for the noblest of reasons: to contribute and to make some kind of difference. Then he punched his first Iraqi in the face, and pushed his first Iraqi down the stairs. Now he was back in the United States, crying and telling his wife, Sascha, “I feel like a monster.”

It was November, 2010, and he was in a twenty-three-bed psychiatric facility called Haven Behavioral War Heroes Hospital, in Pueblo, Colorado. It’s on the top floor of a six-story building; the exit doors are bolted and the windows are screwed shut, to keep patients from jumping out. Two and a half years earlier, Nic had come home from the war relatively healthy. Then he began having nightmares and flashbacks. He talked with increasing frequency of killing himself, and made at least one attempt. He was counselled and put on anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications, but when he was found one night in mid-flashback, driving in the wrong direction on a one-way street, the decision was made to send him to a residential treatment program for twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight days to get it fixed, as one of Nic’s sergeants said.

If war is accidental, so is what happens afterward. Two million Americans have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of those who have come back describe themselves as physically and mentally healthy. They move forward. Their war recedes. Some are even stronger for the experience. But studies suggest that between twenty and thirty per cent of returning veterans suffer, to varying degrees, from post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental-health condition triggered by some type of terror, or a traumatic brain injury, which occurs when the brain is jolted so violently that it collides with the inside of the skull, causing psychological damage. Every war has its after-war: depression, anxiety, nightmares, memory problems, personality changes, suicidal thoughts. If the studies prove correct, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have created roughly five hundred thousand mentally wounded American veterans.

For the worst off, there are programs like Haven Behavioral’s, which offers intensive therapeutic services. But the Army has yet to figure out which of its hundreds of programs across the country are most effective. Some are part of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Others, like Haven Behavioral, are private and for-profit. Some last seven weeks; others four weeks. Some mix soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan with Vietnam veterans; others are made up entirely of soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. Some have been around for decades; Haven Behavioral, which opened in 2009, is one of a wave of programs begun when the extent of psychological damage caused by the current wars was becoming apparent and the wait for a vacancy in a V.A.-run program was lengthening. Is one program better than another for a mentally wounded soldier? The answer, in Nic’s case: Haven Behavioral had an open spot.

“Contraband items,” the instructions Nic was sent before leaving Fort Riley, Kansas, read. “Weapons or any object which could be used as a weapon. Razors. Hangers. Neckties, scarves, belts, shoe laces, strings in sweatpants. Any ropes, strings, or chains. Neck chains longer than 24 inches. Panty hose or long stockings. Glass of any kind. Any electrical appliance using an electrical cord. Any sharp object. Plastic bags—any and all . . .”

He saw the theme here.

When he left for the airport, Sascha watched him go, her heart sinking. They had been married for fourteen months. They had met a week or so after Nic got home, when she heard that some soldiers were back and went online to see who they were. Her father and her grandfather had been soldiers. Most of her uncles had served in the Army. She had a soft spot for the military. She liked that Nic was big and muscled and spoke thoughtfully and had a tattoo on his back that read “Unity and Peace.” He got it when he was a teen-ager, he told her, before he thought of becoming a soldier, and she liked that about him, too. “You do know that something’s wrong with him,” a friend said.

He didn’t like crowds. He had nightmares. He had received a diagnosis of P.T.S.D. and depression from the Army. She was concerned. But there was something about Nic that made her want to stick with him, and so she did, through his flashbacks, and drinking binges, and a suicide attempt by overdosing on drugs, and then she married him. Now she was six months pregnant, and hoping that Haven Behavioral would make him realize that he could tell her about the war, and that she could take it.

“Report to the East Entrance by the flag pole and statue of Mary,” Nic’s instructions continued. “Go to the elevator, 6th floor, left out of elevator and pick up phone dial ‘0.’ ” He dialled “0.” A door swung open and locked behind him, and before long someone was explaining how the program worked. For the first three days, he would be constantly monitored and could have no contact with anyone outside the program. After that, his privileges would be determined by his behavior, up to Level III, which included computer use, cell-phone use, trips under escort to the Loaf ’N Jug convenience store on the far side of the parking lot, unsupervised shaving, wearing shoes with laces, and having visitors. The day would begin with exercise at 6:30 A.M. There would be group sessions with the other twenty-two men in the program, on dealing with anger, setting goals, and, most important, talking about what had happened, over and over. Lights-out would be at 11 P.M. Nic was also expected to keep a journal. Out of profound need, or just the desire to wear shoes with laces again, he started doing that right away.

He wrote:

“My childhood was quite a normal one growing up, no physical abuse, loving parents. My dad traveled a lot but made up for it in family trips we took yearly around the world and all over the country. My mom never let me play with toy guns or any kind of weapons or watch TV during the day, instead she forced me and my brother to play outside rain or shine in the woods behind our house.”

Of his decision to join the Army, he wrote that it was “one of those apifany-like moments.”

He wrote about an early mission in Iraq:

“I don’t remember the exact briefing before we left but we were to show extreme force and to let these people know we owned this city now. The adrenaline began to flow, the thought of having that kind of control was intoxicating in a sick way.”

He wrote about the first soldier he saw killed in action, who had burned to death:

“What was left of his skeleton was hanging out of the driver-side door, his helmet a different color possibly fused to his skull and his IBA and plates which made up his torso, or what was left of it. That image still haunts me, it changed me. . . . I don’t know how many others saw that as we turned our trucks around but all I wanted was death and violence from then on. . . . To me this is where I lost my old self.”

He wrote about being home:

“I try so hard to be polite to everyone but I don’t know how much longer I can do it. I am trying to let this anger out bit by bit but it’s like holding up a dam with my mind, letting bit by bit out to keep it from going over the edge or breaking all together. Is there no medium, have I gone past that point where there is a safe way to get all this out without losing control? I am beginning to feel not. I feel it’s gonna happen soon. It’s just a matter of who says the wrong thing at the right time.”

He wrote about a nightmare:

“The anti-nightmare meds are not working. I was on a patrol last night and we entered a school, same as one from our deployment, but as we were clearing the school I went into an all-girl class and in real life they just screamed but in my dream they screamed and I opened fire, killing the whole class. What that is about I do not know. I am angry I have these dreams, I am angry they don’t stop. I miss my pleasant dreams of my past.”

He started to write about another nightmare, but he didn’t finish. Two weeks had passed, and he had made it past Level I, past Level II, and arrived at Level III. He could wear shoes with laces. He could shave unsupervised, and go to the Loaf ’N Jug.

What he had written so far:

“What the fuck is going on in my mind? Last night I was sitting in bed and looked across the room to a chair in my room and there was a young girl covered in blood. What happened after that I don’t remember. I was told a full-scale panic attack. This is not the first time I have seen dead bodies. For a while I used to find dead Iraqis floating in my bathtub. Why they were in the bathtub I will never know.

“I FEEL SO FUCKING VIOLENT RIGHT NOW.”

It was an eight-hour drive from Fort Riley to Pueblo, not easy for a pregnant woman in a compact car. But Sascha wanted to see if this program she knew nothing about was helping. In Kansas, Nic had been taking forty-three pills a day—for pain, for anxiety, for depression, for nightmares. Were there fewer pills now? Was he still having flashbacks? Thrashing around in his sleep? Sleepwalking into closets, looking for his rifle? Could he start telling her what had happened during the war? And could she tell him about what was happening to her? The other night, she dreamed that she had given birth, and for some reason she took the baby and put it in a pressure cooker. Could she tell Nic that soldiers aren’t the only people who have nightmares? Was he ready to hear that?

She checked into a hotel in Pueblo, and waited for visiting hours to begin. Meanwhile, a nurse gave Nic his anti-depressants and mood stabilizers. Pill, water, swallow. Pill, water, swallow. When he had finished, another soldier took his place—twenty-three P.T.S.D. cases in all, including one who was blinded in an explosion and had a guide dog. Many soldiers with psychological injuries envy those with physical injuries, because those soldiers can see that something is really wrong with them. But what to make of this poor sightless soldier who didn’t get even that benefit? The other soldiers were especially gentle with him.

“Smoke break,” a soldier hollered. “Smoke break.”

“Level III smoke break,” a nurse called out, checking the time. The smokers with Level III privileges were led out by an escort, who unlocked the door; after they returned, all the soldiers went into a conference room for cognitive-processing therapy, an hour-long session whose purpose is to get them to read from their journals and talk with one another until they are no longer avoiding the subject of what has happened to them. Of all the protocols being used to treat P.T.S.D., this one is considered to be among the more effective.

“All right. Everybody pay attention, and don’t talk when others are talking,” a staff member leading the session said. He thought for a moment. “Also, don’t fart,” he pleaded, and, with that out of the way, the first soldier began reading.

He had spent his war in a vehicle that crept ahead of convoys, looking for roadside bombs. “This is just something that’s been on my mind for quite a while,” he said. “It’s entitled ‘Bombs Bombs Everywhere.’ ” He sat at the head of a long table with his journal, reading slowly, and if this were happening anywhere else guys would have laughed at him, or thrown beer bottles, or done whatever it would take to get him to shut the fuck up. But, in this room, when he said, “I still see the bombs, I see bombs all the time,” a few of the other men ducked their heads, because of what they were seeing, too. “Make it stop,” he read. “Make the bombs go away. I don’t want to see them anymore. How do I become normal? How can I stop seeing bombs?”

He looked up from his journal. Heads hung. Feet tapped. Legs twitched. Another guy pressed his hands between his knees and then stood up, too nervous to sit. Nic was standing, too, at the far end of the room, and he asked the guy who had been reading, “What kind of vehicle did you drive?”

“I was the Husky guy.”

“The Husky’s the big one?” Nic asked.

“It’s the vehicle that goes in front of the convoy.”

“You were in Iraq, right?” another Husky driver, an Afghanistan soldier, asked.

“Yes.”

“Were you hit?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s hard being the first one,” the other driver said. “I mean, you have the whole convoy coming behind you, and if someone behind you gets hit you feel bad, because you’re supposed to be the one to find it.”

“Yeah.”

The session leader spoke to the group about a process he called habituation. “Think about when you guys go see a scary movie,” he said. “The first time you see a scary movie, at least for me, it sucks. I get home, and I have nightmares, and I’m frustrated, and I don’t sleep well, and just whatever, because I’m a wuss at scary movies. If I go see the same scary movie the next day, and I go see it a third day, the third day it’s still a little bit scary, but it’s not getting to me as bad. The fourth and fifth day is when I’m starting to sit there and I’m actually starting to get a little bit bored. The tenth time I see that scary movie, I’m, like, O.K., cue Freddy Krueger, here’s the cheerleader who gets her neck cut off, here’s the blood, and now the chainsaw, and I’m getting bored. It’s the same principle with explosions for you guys. If you guys can go to a place and have the experience repeatedly, and stay with it until it starts to dissipate, that’s when the explosion starts to be less and less impactful. It’s called habituation. To habituate. Make sense?”

And it did make sense, until the next soldier started reading. “Here goes,” he began. “I personally never shot a round into somebody, but God damn if I didn’t see my fair share of deaths, charred bodies, and dismembered—”

He paused for a moment, and then described a day in which he discovered some skulls. He had no idea what to do. He didn’t know who they were. Insurgents? Victims? Men? Women? He decided that it was best to take them back to the base, so he picked them up, loaded them into his vehicle, began driving, and then, near the base, pulled over. “What the fuck was I doing?” he read. “I kicked them off. I booted the skulls into the ditch next to the road, and drove through the gate, thinking, Fucking ragheads. ”

“That story right there,” Nic said. “Would you tell your wife that story?”

“The first time I ever told my wife about an Iraq incident was two weeks ago,” the soldier said.

“How’d she take it?” Nic asked.

“She started crying,” he said. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ She didn’t know.”

“I think the fact that she took it like that? That shows right there how much she cares about you,” Nic said.

“If you told her that story and she started crying, be grateful,” someone else said. “I told my wife some of my stories about my experiences, and her response to me was ‘You knew what you were getting into when you signed on the dotted line, and I don’t feel sorry for you.’ And you know what? That fucking killed me. She didn’t give a shit about me. When she said that to me, I turned to the bottle, and I never shared another fucking word with her.”

He started crying. Three soldiers stood up and began moving around the room.

“Anything else for this gentleman?” the session leader asked, and when there wasn’t anything else a third soldier moved to the head of the table and began reading a story about being a medic, his gradual mental disintegration, and what he did one day to an Iraqi as a result. “To make it short, I gave this one guy a needle decompression just for the hell of it,” he said. “I know it hurt. But fuck it. As far as I knew, he had helped emplace a fucking I.E.D. Did I care? No. Do I care now? No. Was that right? Fuck it.”

Silence.

Everyone was twitching now.

“I know what you mean,” another soldier finally said. “We never had any remorse for anybody we saw dead. Because fuck it.”

“I guess I’m trying to learn compassion all over again,” the medic said.

“We used to occupy an Iraqi police station,” Nic said, “and every once in a while the Iraqi police would bring in dead bodies, a couple of dead bodies. They’d throw ’em in the back of a truck, bring ’em in, shit like that, and at the time—this was the beginning of my deployment—we’d all run down there and go take pictures. You know? And one guy—his head was chopped off, his body was all bloated and shit, because it had been sitting in raw sewage, you know? And now I can’t get those images out of my mind. At the time, though, it was ‘Yeah, this is so cool. This is so cool.’ I mean, what were we thinking? Why did we even want to go look at that shit? You know?”

“Yeah, I just remember this one time—I don’t talk about it, I got a picture of it,” another soldier said, describing a day when he found a body, mostly bone, still some skin, and picked up a piece of it. “The femur, or something like that. I got pictures of me looking like I’m taking a bite out of it,” he says. “What the fuck was I thinking?”

“Exactly,” Nic said. “I had a hard drive that I destroyed. Pictures and stuff like that, next to dead bodies, shit like that. Horrible, horrible stuff. Horrible stuff. Us hanging out with dead bodies. At the time, I mean we were rockin’ and rollin’, we were mean, mean killing machines. Now I look back and I’m, like, God, what were we doing? What were we thinking?”

Everyone was talking now except one sweet-faced young soldier, who suddenly started shaking. His eyes fluttered and rolled back in his head before he blinked them back into place. He held up his right hand, watched it tremble, and grabbed it with his left hand until whatever was happening passed through him. He took a sip of soda. But then, as the conversation around the table continued, he teared up, grabbed some tissues, and covered his face.

“And it really hit me when I saw my first baby come in burned,” someone was saying. He wasn’t reading, just talking. “Dipped in boiling water and skin sloughing off,” he said. “I got to the point where I started feeling kind of sorry for them. I started feeling sorry that we’re sitting there fucking beating these people and it’s just like that fucking baby. We’re just using them, like they’re fucking nothing. Like they’re not even human . . .”

And now he was the one shaking and sobbing, until one of the other soldiers came to his rescue.

“I thank you for fucking being there,” the soldier said, putting his arm around him. “Secondly, I would like to applaud you for your usage of ‘fuck.’ ”

Laughter. Tears. Smoke break.

Sascha arrived at the east entrance, by the flag pole and the statue of Mary, took the elevator to the sixth floor, dialled “0,” and waited for the door to be unlocked. Nic was by the nursing station.

“Hi, sweetie,” he said.

He walked over and kissed her.

“How’d you sleep?” he asked her. “Was the baby kicking?”

She had slept terribly, though she didn’t tell him that. He hadn’t slept well, either. The circles under his eyes looked like bruises. He had been up writing, trying to make sense of the hallucination he had about the girl in the chair. “Dark hair with light strips of red flowing down to her shoulders,” he wrote. “She couldn’t be more than seven or eight, sitting in the chair right across from my bed. She was wearing a flower dress ripped and soaked in blood. Her eyes seemed to stare right through my soul.”

It went on for three pages. As he walked down the hall with Sascha, he wondered whether he should show her his journal. He wondered whether she would be the wife who said, “I’m so sorry.”

They sat at a table in a visitation room stocked with some worn books and board games and began a game of Scrabble. At some point, Nic decided that he’d tell her. If she really wanted to know what the war was like, he’d tell her. He slid the journal over to Sascha, opened not to the story about the bloody girl but to what he’d written next, about a search for a high-value target.

“Baby,” it was titled.

“I loved owning the night,” it began.

She started to read, and Nic looked down at the table and rearranged some of the Scrabble pieces.

“I don’t remember what time of the year it was but it had to be cold outside,” he had written. “As we near the house the only light that is on is the one in the courtyard so we need to move quick into this house for this HVT. The mission: secure all military aged males to be able to identify a certain HVT. The first team kicks the gate clean open. I lead the second team straight through the courtyard to the front door. Using my momentum I kick the stained-glass door open, sending broken glass into the room and the door against the wall. As we move through the first room, glass cracking under our boots, we identify only women sleeping in there so we clear the kitchen and bathroom and move upstairs. First team secures the first floor as I lead the second team upstairs. Just as I come around the staircase a man is running down. I slam him against the wall, forcing my rifle into his neck. Just as he starts to scream I push harder, crushing his windpipe and muffling the high-pitched yelp. I yell to one of the soldiers downstairs ‘I got one.’ He replies ‘Send him down.’ I grab the terrified man’s arm, pulling him down off balance over my left foot sending him tumbling down the stairs. We keep moving up. There are three rooms upstairs. One was already empty, another had a man with his wife and child waiting at their bedroom door and there was another door closed. I told one soldier to take them downstairs as me and my buddy prepared to breach this last door. I had my rifle drawn while my buddy kicked it open, and there sitting on the side of the bed was an older couple just waiting like they have been through this before. I sent the woman downstairs and just stared at the man as he stared back at me, waiting for me to do something. After a few seconds I lost my temper, grabbed him by the throat and walked him out toward the stairs. I don’t know if he understood me when I told him you can either walk down or fly down but after about two seconds he started to move.”

Sascha turned the page, but there was no more to the story. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at Nic as he continued to rearrange the Scrabble pieces. He lined up five tiles in a row. He took five more tiles and lined them up in another row. He took the tile holders and lined them up in between.

He kept at it with more tiles and holders, and soon Sascha could see a grid. What Nic saw, though, was Humvees and houses. Then he told Sascha that that house right there—he pointed to one of the tile holders—was where he threw the man down the stairs. He could see it clearly, as clearly as he saw the bloody girl, and apparently he could hear it, too, because what he said next was the part of the story that he had yet to write. That there was a baby crying. That there was a woman screaming. That he got to the bottom of the stairs and saw the screaming woman holding the crying baby, and that the baby was wrapped in a blanket and the blanket was covered with shards of stained glass. And it took him a moment, but then he got it—the baby had been sleeping by the stained-glass door he kicked open, and when he ran in he just missed stepping on it.

His scary movie, then. Here’s the soldier kicking in the door, and cue the sleeping baby, and here’s the squish, and here’s the blood, and now the screams, and even though he had seen it dozens of times, he had yet to get even remotely bored. As for what actually happened, he saw that movie, too: the man he threw down the stairs, the old man he had by the throat, the screaming woman, the crying baby, the blanket covered with shards of glass, the soldiers filing out, and then, once they were outside, the lieutenant who said to them, “This is the wrong fucking house.”

“The wrong fucking house,” Nic said to Sascha. “One of the things I want to remember is how many times we hit the wrong house.” Then he waited for her to say it: “I don’t feel sorry for you.”

“But you did get the right house sometimes,” she said.

He wondered if this was how habituation began.

“So how has this taken a toll on your marriage?” a counsellor asked Nic a few hours later, as Sascha sat next to him.

“I’m afraid to tell her stuff,” Nic said, breaking down. “I don’t want to tell her about the dreams I have. I don’t want to tell her about the nightmares I have. I don’t want her to know that her husband, the person she married, has nightmares about killing people. It just makes me feel like a monster.”

“The nightmares? Or that she’ll look at you like you’re not understood?” the counsellor asked.

“That she’ll hate me,” Nic said. “What kind of person has dreams like that?”

“I don’t hate you,” Sascha said.

“So do you feel like a monster?” the counsellor asked.

“I feel like a monster,” Nic said.

They tried to tell him that it wasn’t his fault.

“I know it’s not my fault,” Nic said. Then, crying harder: “Oh, fuck.”

Two weeks later, released from Haven Behavioral, Nic boarded a plane and made one last entry in his journal.

“Taking off during a sunrise in bad turbulence is one of the most beautiful things in the world,” he wrote. “The fear that something could go wrong, like the wings fly off or the pilot decides to up and quit and jump out compared to the beauty of the sun cresting over the edge of the planet gradually turning the edge of the sky from dark orange to a fading black as night retreats as the chase goes on, and there’s that fucking turbulence, like an eight year old driver at the wheel of a 68 Ford Bronco driving through Walmart, fuck, keep the main sails steady! I’m surprised I can keep my pen straight.”

And then he was home with Sascha, who now knew about one day of the war.

Four hundred more to go. ♦

DEPT. OF WILDLIFE
Cape Fear

Tracking the sharks of New England.

by Alec Wilkinson

When I was a child, growing up summers in Wellfleet, people said that there couldn’t be sharks in the water, because the water was too cold. They had apparently not read Thoreau. In “Cape Cod,” published in 1865, he writes that he saw “the relics of a human body, mangled by sharks.” A wrecker—someone who scavenged shipwrecks—told him that he had caught a “man-eating shark fourteen feet long” where Thoreau had just swum. “Man-eater” is a bygone name for a great white shark; scientists simply call them white sharks. They were also called “white death.” Their undersides are white, and their tops are gray, and a modern name for them is “the men in gray suits.” They are solitary animals, and in the Atlantic they are sufficiently uncommon that no one knows how many there are, although it is assumed that there are not many. Now and then, gillnetters catch them unintentionally, but a fisherman in New England might spend his life on the water and not see one. I saw only one shark as a child, at Newcomb Hollow, in, I think, 1960, washed ashore after a big storm. I don’t know what kind it was, but I recall it as being about ten feet long. The beach was still wet from the rain, and the shark lay at the end of a track its body had made in the sand. Someone my older brothers knew had wrapped a rope around its tail and tried to drag it into Gull Pond, to scare the tourists.

The appeal of white sharks to the imagination is so obvious that it hardly needs stating, but, even so, like all big, fierce creatures, they exemplify the mysterious and ungovernable parts of our lives. White sharks roam the ocean the way unspecified urges and figures roam the psyche—liable to appear abruptly, often destructively, and whenever they decide to, on their terms, not ours. When I think of white sharks, I think of the maps from antiquity that have whirlpools and sea monsters and blank areas where the unknown begins.

Once you enter the ocean deeper than your knees, you become part of the food chain. In July of 2012, a white shark in Truro, the town north of Wellfleet, grabbed a man named Chris Myers by one of his legs. Myers kicked the shark in the face seven or eight times with his other foot. He felt he was kicking something indifferent and immovable, like a refrigerator, he told me. Eventually, the shark let go. Then it rose to the surface, as if, Myers said, to display its bulk. White sharks engage in a reconnaissance tactic called spyhopping, in which they rise from the water for a few seconds, and the shark may simply have been trying to determine what it had mistaken for prey. When white sharks get big, they like to eat big things, meaning seals, which have a lot of fat. Shark scientists regard a bite such as Myers received as exploratory. White sharks have very sensitive noses and mouths, and they like to feel things with them, the way we use our fingers. It is reasonable to assume that the shark bit Myers, felt bones and not fat, and retreated. Myers had damage to his tendons and needed forty-seven stitches. The attack was the first in Massachusetts since 1936, when a white shark bit a sixteen-year-old boy in Mattapoisett, near New Bedford, who died while being operated on. For the rest of last summer, Truro put signs on the beaches warning about sharks, but college kids kept stealing them for their dorm rooms.

When I spoke to Myers, he called the shark “he,” but I wonder if it might have been a large female white shark named Julia. Julia was named after being tagged by Greg Skomal, who works for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and is the most knowledgeable authority on Atlantic white sharks. For at least fifty years, sea creatures around the world have had tags implanted in them or attached to them in order to learn where they go. In 2011, with the help of a tuna harpooner, Skomal embedded a tag in Julia. Since 2009, Skomal and the harpooner, Bill Chaprales, have embedded tags in thirty-one white sharks, mostly off Chatham, the town at the elbow of Cape Cod. A spotter pilot finds a shark and directs them to it. Essentially, they sneak up on it. From a narrow walkway, called a pulpit, extending twenty feet from the bow of his boat, Chaprales, looming over the shark, launches his harpoon. The embedded tag separates from the harpoon, which Chaprales collects. One shark jumped out of the water after being stuck and charged the boat. Some simply turn and look behind them. Most bolt about a hundred feet, then stop. “That’s the baddest fish in the ocean,” Chaprales says. “Nobody messes with them. They just can’t figure out what’s going on.”

Skomal uses two kinds of tags. One is called a PSAT tag, for pop-up satellite archival tag. A PSAT tag records an animal’s itinerary (they are also used on sea turtles and tuna) and the depth and temperature of the water it swims through. The tag is attached by a wire designed to disintegrate after several months; arriving at the surface, the tag transmits to a satellite. Practically nothing is known of white-shark habits in the Atlantic, and where and how far the sharks range. White sharks have been classified by the World Wildlife Fund as Vulnerable, the category below Endangered. If Skomal can discover that they all spend time in one place or another, he may be able to determine where they breed and give birth, so that such areas can be protected.

Julia got an acoustic tag, which broadcasts to receivers in the water with a range of a thousand feet. There are receivers off Chatham and three off Truro which are part of a striped-bass tagging project. A fish that lingers near a receiver might record sixty transmissions in an hour. Or it might be picked up a single time while passing through. In 2012, Julia was detected more than seven hundred and fifty times off Truro, two hundred and fifty times close to shore. This year, she arrived in Chatham on May 28th and has been detected consistently since July 7th.

Earlier in July of 2012, in Orleans, twenty miles south of Truro, a white shark followed a kayaker named Walter Szulc. Szulc had never been in a kayak before. He saw a paddleboarder pointing at something behind him, and he turned around and saw the fin about ten feet away. From photographs of the fin, which had a small, crescent-shaped notch, Skomal and his assistant, John Chisholm, determined that the shark was a female that they had tagged and named Large Marge. Large Marge and Julia appear to avoid each other. Julia prefers Truro and the south end of Chatham, and Large Marge keeps mostly to the north end of Chatham and to Orleans. Large Marge hasn’t appeared in Chatham this year.

Fish scientists describe white sharks as traumatogenic to humans, meaning capable of causing an injury. The largest grow to nearly twenty feet and weigh five thousand pounds, about the same as a Lincoln Navigator. They are among the most modern looking of animals—eight fins on a tapered cylinder, a Bauhaus fish—yet their form is prehistoric. One woman told me that when she saw a white shark for the first time she felt as if she were seeing a dinosaur rising from the depths. They are found around the world, except close to the poles. They were traditionally thought to live about twenty years, but Skomal, by applying carbon-dating to cartilage samples, has discovered that seventy years is a more likely old age and that some sharks may live even longer. No one among the grownups I knew thought there were white sharks off Cape Cod because it wasn’t discovered until the late nineteen-seventies that they can raise their blood temperature as much as fifteen degrees above the water temperature, meaning that they can tolerate much colder water than anyone believed they could.

In 1990, a white shark was seen off Cape Cod. Five years passed before another was sighted. Lobster divers in Provincetown said that they sometimes came face to face with them in the murky water off Race Point. In 1999, two were seen; one was seen in 2001, and four in 2004. Twenty-one were seen in 2012. No one knows how many white sharks there are off Cape Cod, especially over the course of a season, or how many white sharks the area can sustain. Nothing suggests a resident population that overwinters, but there may be white sharks that spend more time there than others, and there may be white sharks that visit more than once on their way somewhere else. The Cape may be a destination for some sharks, or “an exit off the highway for others,” Skomal says. It may be as far north as some white sharks swim. One reason a white shark might be transient is that it arrives and finds bigger ones already established. Most white sharks arrive around Cape Cod in July and August, and the last seem to depart by December.

I am by nature prone to obsessions, and one that I have entertained lately has been tracking the whereabouts of two white sharks, Genie and Mary Lee, that were tagged off Cape Cod, in September of 2012, by an ocean explorer named Chris Fischer. Fischer may well be the world’s most prominent white-shark conservationist. Since 2007, he has led fifteen shark-tagging expeditions, mostly off Mexico, California, and South Africa, on which he has tagged sixty-seven white sharks, far more than anyone else. He is forty-four and, when he’s not fishing, lives in Park City, Utah. He was raised in a prosperous family in Louisville, Kentucky, and has one older sister and three older brothers, one of whom is the mayor of Louisville. As a child, he fished for smallmouth and largemouth bass and read the novels of the writer and adventurer Zane Grey. He is about six feet tall, with light-brown hair and a round, handsome face. When he’s tired, his expression has a preoccupied and melancholy cast. He feels a restless need to perfect himself, the result of what his father told me were frank “table-talk discussions” in which he asked his children whether there weren’t things about themselves that needed improvement. Before Fischer pursued sharks, he had a reputation as an accomplished blue-water fisherman, especially adept at catching marlin and sailfish—“anything with a stick for a nose,” a professional fisherman told me. Taking his three children out on the water, Fischer says, made him decide “to pour the ocean into other people’s homes.”

The stage for his work is his ship, the Ocearch, a retired Bering Sea crabber, which was built in 1992 and is a hundred and twenty-six feet long. On its deck is a platform called a cradle, which by means of a hydraulic lift can be lowered to the water and submerged. Once a shark is hooked, it is led to the cradle, then the cradle is raised just above the water so that skin and blood and samples of parasites can be taken. Out of the water, the shark is restrained by its bulk. Before the Ocearch, scientists could only examine sharks in slings in the water beside their boats or while they were still on the line. A shark in a sling has leverage and bangs itself against the side of the boat in trying to swim away. Until Fischer made the cradle available, there was no simple means of drawing blood from a big, live shark.

Keeping the Ocearch on the water costs a few million dollars a year, which Fischer initially paid for by making television shows, something he says he never much liked doing. In 2012, he struck a sponsorship deal with the heavy-equipment manufacturer Caterpillar and several other sponsors, and now, he says, “I’m a totally funded explorer, which allows me to be on mission a hundred per cent of the time.” He invites renowned fish scientists aboard the Ocearch “to do the science of their dreams,” and estimates that forty papers are under way from studies performed on sharks he has collected and tagged. Data from the tags, they hope, will describe the sharks’ range and the boundaries of their wanderings, and so may the skin parasites, since different parasites live in different parts of the ocean. Scientists are also interested to know how many types of parasites live on white sharks, whether any specialize in the species, and what densities of them the sharks can tolerate. Drawn blood is examined for pollutants, nutrients, and reproductive hormones, and for signs of stress in captured sharks. Skomal is collecting DNA in order to determine the lineage of specific sharks and their relation to populations in the North Atlantic. Fischer’s part has been to provide large live sharks to researchers in numbers they couldn’t possibly manage otherwise. “In two or three years, when these papers start to appear, you’ll see the extent of his contribution,” Skomal says.

Last September, Fischer brought the Ocearch to Cape Cod, where he caught Genie, named by Skomal for the shark scientist Eugenie Clark, and Mary Lee, named by Fischer for his mother. Fischer fitted them with tags called SPOT tags, for spot positioning or temperature transmitting, which are mounted with nylon bolts to the top of the dorsal fin. No one knows what this feels like for the shark, but the fin has very few nerves. The tag has a wet/dry switch, so that when the fin breaks the surface the tag pings a satellite. On the Ocearch Web site, I could look on a digital map for Genie and Mary Lee. The placement is accurate to a thousand feet. Sometimes the transmission had been made at two or three in the morning, and I would picture a shark fin moving languidly at sea in the pitch-black darkness. Mary Lee is a finner, meaning her fin breaks the surface frequently. Genie almost never surfaces; she is the Greta Garbo of white sharks. Last week, on August 28th, she turned up off Nantucket, having not been heard from for seven months; she was last detected off Savannah, Georgia.

Before Mary Lee was tagged last year, white-shark scientists assumed that Atlantic white sharks went south in the winter and north in the summer, like birds. Within a few days of being captured, on September 17th, Mary Lee began swimming south. By the beginning of October, she had reached North Carolina, and from October to January she moved between there and Florida, often within a few miles of shore. Toward the end of January, though, she began “to light up the East Coast,” Fischer says. By the end of January, she was in the newspapers for having been spotted off Long Island.

“Then she goes up to the northeast peak of Georges Bank, off Massachusetts, past the edge of the continental shelf,” Skomal told me. A few hundred miles east of the border of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, “she bolts for Bermuda. Her track is so straight it looks like a flight path, which tells us she has great navigational techniques, although we don’t know what they are. She wraps herself around Bermuda for a day, then she goes down into the Sargasso Sea, hundreds of miles offshore, which by many accounts is barren and brutal, and what kind of big, charismatic shark goes to a place like that? Whales move through there, and there’s tuna seasonally, and eels breed there, but something has to be happening there—it’s a destination, but a strange one.” After several weeks, Mary Lee moved toward the coast and turned north once again. By the third week of April, she was east of Delaware, at which point she turned south.

I was hoping that over the summer Genie and Mary Lee would return to Cape Cod, and that I might, by following their tracks, get near them, either on the beach or with a friend who has a lobster boat. If they returned to Chatham, where the water is shallow, I might even see them.

When Fischer came to Cape Cod in 2012, he had permits to tag only in federal waters. Brett McBride, the Ocearch’s co-captain, told me that this “was like being on another planet” from the sharks, who were close to shore. Spotter pilots saw plenty of sharks. Skomal and Chaprales, working near the beach, tagged fifteen. Three miles offshore, Fischer and McBride and their crew chummed for nine days before Genie wandered by.

This year, Massachusetts gave Fischer permits to tag Monday to Friday in August. The weekends, it was thought, would have too much traffic on the water for white-shark fishing. Fischer invited Skomal along to oversee the science projects, and Skomal invited scientists from nine institutions, including the Mote Marine Laboratory, in Florida, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the University of North Florida. Fischer said that he hoped to catch ten white sharks, but that he was bringing tags for twenty.

My first day on the Ocearch, Monday, August 5th, was their fourth day fishing. With a small crew, Fischer and McBride had been leaving the ship on a twenty-eight-foot tender shortly after first light. They anchored about half a mile from the Ocearch, in about twenty feet of water, off Monomoy Island, which is uninhabited, and about six miles south of Chatham harbor. They called this area Shark Cove, because Skomal’s acoustic receivers had detected more white sharks there than anywhere else. From the stern of the tender they trailed a decoy, made from a piece of carpet cut to the outline of a seal, and they mashed pieces of herring and tuna in a cylinder mounted on the side of the boat and dispensed the mixture into the water. The slick they created looked like a trail they had travelled to arrive where they were.

On the stern of the Ocearch, the boat’s co-captain, an older man from New Jersey named Bob Yates, cut up dolphin and barracuda and tuna and herring and flung them into the water. About fifty yards off the stern was a white float like a child’s hop ball with a bluefish hanging from it. There were also two seal decoys. Depending from another rope were the heads of several big tuna. Sometimes one of the crew would lift the tuna heads and douse them, the way you steep a tea bag. The chum slick Yates made was perhaps twenty-five feet across. If you drove through it, you could smell it. A shark intersecting a slick cuts back and forth across it until it locates the slick’s path, then it follows the path to the boat. If one came to the Ocearch, Fischer would hotfoot it over from Shark Cove.

In the first three days, seven white sharks approached either the tender or the ship. None broke the surface. They were dark shapes beneath the water, sneaking up the slick, John Chisholm, Skomal’s assistant, told me. “They’re not at all like tuna, which go flying by,” he said. “These guys are slow and deliberate, like it’s their world, and they know it.” No sharks appeared that day, though, and in the afternoon Fischer broke off fishing and came aboard the Ocearch to conduct some business. “Now’s our window,” he said, preparing to return to the tender. “I feel very good about the next hour and a half.”

The only shark seen that day was off a beach in Wellfleet. Over the winter, the towns on the Cape had decided that if a shark was sighted everyone would have to get out of the water and stay out for an hour. If a shark was seen during the shutdown, the clock would start again. Most likely, Skomal said, the beach-closer in Wellfleet was a plankton feeder called a basking shark.

Wednesday morning, the glare made the water look like paint. People kept saying something was about to happen. Fischer says that fishing for white sharks is “not like regular fishing at all.” In regular fishing, you determine where the bait is and fish among it. “With white sharks, you can see where the bait is. It’s sitting right there on the beach.” On the shore of Monomoy, about a mile away, was a long black line, like thread. Maybe five hundred seals, Chisholm said. They might only have wanted to lie in the sun, but they might also have been on the beach because there were sharks in the water.

Around the world, the most reliable place to find a white shark is someplace where there are seals. The places where sharks aggregate are called hot spots. The sharks attract cage divers, who throw fish in the water to draw the sharks to the cages. The white sharks grow accustomed to being fed. The sound of a shark cage going in the water, Fischer says, is like a white-shark dinner bell ringing. There is no cage diving for white sharks in New England, because until recently there was no white-shark hot spot in the northwestern Atlantic. Seals are another thing I didn’t see growing up on the Cape, and now you see them all the time. The seals on Cape Cod in the summer are gray seals, which grow to nearly eleven feet and weigh as much as six hundred and fifty pounds. They have long noses, and on Nantucket they are called horsehead seals.

Fishermen loathe seals. For parts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Massachusetts and Maine paid a bounty for a seal nose. In 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act made it illegal to kill them, and now, according to Lisa Sette, a biologist at the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, the seals “are in the midst of a recolonization process.” A survey in 1999 estimated that there were fifty-six hundred seals in southern New England. In 2011, there were nearly sixteen thousand in Massachusetts. Skomal describes the seal aggregations as a café, and he says that now that the café is open “the men in gray suits are showing up.”

I asked Skomal if he still swims in the ocean. “I’ve developed some hesitation to my personal water use,” he said. “I used to be fearless, but when you see these sharks constantly. . . .” He added, though, that, as far as he could tell, white sharks don’t appear to like being in waves close to shore. The shark attacks that take place in shallow water are typically the work of other, smaller species. The shallowest water in which Skomal has seen a white shark was six feet.

Late in the afternoon, Fischer returned to the ship, looking tired. “We just exited a super-favorable window,” he said. I asked how he had started fishing for white sharks, and he said off Baja California, in collaboration with a scientist who wanted to employ SPOT tags. “No one had ever tried to capture a large live white shark before,” he said. “I remember the fear. What is it going to do? The big ones are the most dominant, and they come in first, and when you’re learning you’d rather not have that. All these things were conjured up in my brain from the movie—is he going to charge the boat? One shark broke our two-thousand-pound cable like it was string. Once we caught one, though, I realized it was just another fish trying to get away.”

The movie reference, of course, was to “Jaws,” in which the shark is a psychotic white shark. In the minds of many shark researchers, the movie was a setback to white-shark science. Fischer likes to call the white shark the lion of the ocean, and he thinks that his work has done something to change how people think of sharks. “Before, if you saw footage of a shark, you’d hear the music from ‘Jaws’ in the background and get scared,” he said. “Now I think there’s a tone of curiosity and respect.”

Thursday morning on the deck, Fischer said, “Every shark we have caught on the East Coast has been difficult.” He was greeting some guests. “Compared to other places, this is a very wild fish. Super-nervous, super-shy. Very hard to tempt,” he said. “We’re dealing with a virgin body of fish. After seeing them in South Africa, where there’s cage diving, and they come up and play with the bait like dogs, it’s interesting to see how timid these fish are.”

Throughout the morning, chunks of fish drifted from the stern in little bursts, like bits of code. At ten-thirty, a white helicopter appeared over Monomoy and came in low and made a tight circle around the Ocearch. Aboard was Dawson Farber, the Orleans harbormaster, who texted Skomal that he had seen a shark near the tender. “We had him relatively close to the boat, but he didn’t stick around very long,” Farber said later. “It was about twelve to fourteen feet, swimming southeast, away from the boat. We lost it in deeper water, then found it again heading offshore before we lost it for good.” Fischer said that they never saw the shark from the tender.

Friday the wind came up and by noon it was too rough to fish. Sunday morning, I went flying with a spotter pilot named George Breen. Outside Chatham harbor, a seal like a little grain of black rice was nosing along the beach, among waves that broke in the shape of white fans. The water close to shore was light green, and you could see the bottom, and where it was deeper the rippled surface looked like a piece of gnarled hide. Our shadow followed us on the water. We came across a group of seals in the water and when they looked up at us the light turned their faces from dark brown to the color of copper.

Monday morning, I encountered Fischer drinking coffee on the deck of the Ocearch. He was about to return to the tender. “I’m trying to figure out when it’s fishy,” he said. He thought the water might have become too warm. He thrust his chin toward the south end of Monomoy. “Somewhere down there, they’re stacked up where the warm and cold water meet. I’m just guessing, right? You have a lot of time to think.”

The sky was overcast. “Forty years since ‘Jaws,’ ” Fischer said. “Every shark since has been shot, hooked, or whacked, so now what we have is a very cautious fish. Why wouldn’t they be afraid of boats? That’s my theory. I can just throw that out. I’m not a brainiac. I’m a fisherman.” That afternoon, they saw two sharks, one of which struck the decoy. The same shark, or the other, swam off with the bait, but the hook came out of its mouth.

Around seven-thirty, Fischer came back to the Ocearch. “They grip the bait, and they swim away with it,” he said, clenching his teeth to demonstrate the fish with the hook. “If they feel any tension—thwoo!—they spit it out. They don’t have any tension like that in the wild.” He looked out at the water. “The dexterity, the fineness, it’s hard to believe,” he went on. “You think of these huge animals, and you think they’re going to come in and hit the bait, and they swim up and extend their teeth and delicately touch it. We’re dealing with the most nervous of the most nervous of the species that survived two hundred years of whaling and long-lining, and now we have their offspring. They’re very wary. That fish today never got pronged or poked, though. All it got was a couple of treats, so I think it will be back.”

Tuesday morning, when I asked Fischer how he was feeling, he said, “Super fishy. It’s going to happen today or tomorrow.” It didn’t. “Today’s the day,” I heard. Or, “It’s white-shark weather.” Or the tide was right, or the slick looked fine. As the morning wore on, no one seemed hopeful anymore. “We’re kidding ourselves,” Skomal said. “There’s no fish out there.”

McBride was on deck, which was unusual; he spent nearly all his time on the tender. He told me that white sharks have blue eyes. “People think they’re black, but every one of them has got a pretty blue color to it,” McBride said. “I wanted to name one of them Sinatra.” He had noticed the eyes while in the Ocearch’s cradle, observing the shark closely for his own protection. “They look at you,” he said. “They can’t lunge at you, but I know from mako sharks that they’ll wait for the opportunity. The comfort zone comes from the knowledge of what the animal’s likely to do, what he’s capable of doing. You don’t want to be matching your reflexes against his. You plan for one second from now, the way fighters do. Just don’t be there.”

On the eighth day, Fischer’s mother and father, his wife and children, his sister, and two of his brothers came aboard, and he spent most of the day with them. For a time he sat, incongruously, on a deck chair, as if on a cruise. Late in the afternoon, I stood beside him on the stern, watching the slick. “I just don’t think there’s any fish in here now,” he said. “I don’t think we drove in here on any fish.” A big gull dove on a chunk of tuna. “You have to be hopeful, right? Last year, Skomal tagged fifteen. They will be here.” As if to himself, he said, “It just doesn’t feel like they’re here right now.”

The two hours before the tide and the two hours after, when the current slackens, are the best time to fish. From the slow passage of the fish chunks in the water, we could see that the current had turned listless. “It’s bite time,” Fischer said. “It’s bite-thirty.”

On the ninth day, I was sitting in the galley of the Ocearch, watching two crew members play cards, when the cradle was raised from the deck. I assumed that it was a repeat of a drill I had seen before. A scientist named Nick Whitney was on deck, though, working on tags, and usually he was in the cabin. “They saw one twenty minutes ago, about ten feet away,” he said. Heather Marshall, another scientist, was standing nearby. She got a text, and when she read it she said, “It’s come twice.”

“It’s not around anymore?” Whitney asked.

“Apparently not, but it’s early,” she said. “They thought it was headed this way. It chewed up one of the decoys.”

About an hour later, another white shark crossed the slick behind the tender, then a fisherman saw one at the southern end of Monomoy, less than a mile away. I was standing on the second deck, watching the slick, when I heard a voice on a radio say, “Hooked up! Hooked up! Hooked up!,” and everyone began running to the deck. The crew unrolled hoses, which they would insert in the shark’s mouth so that water would run over its gills and it could breathe. The scientists gathered near the bow to rehearse their procedures. It was three-twenty. Skomal stood in the center saying things such as “I’m going in and doing surgery and stepping back. You’re doing blood. Heather is parasites. Who’s doing notes?”

When a fish is hooked, it bolts. The first run with a white shark is blistering, McBride says. He has had great whites rise out of the water and tail-walk like marlins, but most of them dive or head for the horizon. If you fight it, McBride says, “eventually you’re going to break tackle or wear him down and hurt him.” Any fish, pulled too hard or in the wrong way, fights harder, he says. Once the sprint concludes, McBride starts putting pressure on the shark. “You find the speed where you’re not pulling them, you’re coaxing them about which direction to go,” he says. In deep water, the sharks can dive, but Shark Cove is shallow. Fischer maneuvers the tender in front of the shark. A shark has no brakes, so it has to turn and struggle, which is fatiguing. Each time it turns, Fischer puts the boat in front of it. “We’re not going to fight him, we’re going to do this little dance that we do,” McBride says. He calls this “coming to an understanding. If you’re not in a hurry and you take it inch by inch, and you find exactly the right speed, so you’re not pulling them, they grow comfortable and don’t feel in any danger. It becomes like walking them to the ship on a leash.” They arrive at the boat neither “too worn out or too green.”

Fifteen minutes later, the tender was off the starboard bow, trailing the dorsal fin and the tail fin of a white shark. The fins moved slowly side to side as the shark swam. A silver cable connected the shark to the tender, which ran alongside the middle of the Ocearch, about thirty yards off, then turned slowly to swing past the cradle. The shark was a female, and as she came close to the cradle she turned nearly onto her back and I briefly saw her white underside, then she veered away.

It took five minutes for the tender to circle and approach the cradle again. This time, as the shark came alongside the ship, she swam straight away from it, avoiding the cradle again. On the third pass, McBride, barefoot and in his jeans and a T-shirt, jumped into the water and climbed onto the submerged platform. Pulling hard on the cable, he steered the shark to the cradle. As she arrived, he leaped over a railing like a rodeo clown. When she passed him, he jumped back in and grabbed her tail and turned her slowly on her side so that her glistening white belly appeared again. It was a milky white, the color of the moon, with the water rippling off it. McBride yelled for the cradle to be raised. When it was out of the water, someone threw him a towel, and he placed it over the shark’s eyes. She grew still. Others jumped on the cradle with the hoses. Someone lifted her snout, and McBride removed the hook, which was lodged in her jaw, while the hoses were put in her mouth. Water began pouring from her gills. Twice, her tail flipped up ponderously in an arc, and McBride stepped back.

“Watch out, the shark’s not done yet!” Fischer yelled. “Let her be, let her be for a second.” On the deck, an associate of Fischer’s named Chris Berger held a stopwatch. The plan was to return the shark to the water in as close to fifteen minutes as possible. After perhaps half a minute, several people stepped in and knelt around the shark. McBride looped a rope around her tail, and Nick El-Hajj, the boat’s engineer, held it. A scientist named Michael McCallister examined the shark with an ultrasound device to see if she was pregnant. (She wasn’t.) With scissors, Nick Whitney cut a small piece from one of her fins and put it in a bottle. “DNA’s done,” he said. Skomal made an incision in her side to insert an acoustic tag into the abdominal cavity.

Someone called, “Time?”

“Six minutes, twenty seconds.”

Three blood samples were taken. On the shark’s side, Skomal had left a handprint, in her blood, while stitching the incision. The wind began to dry her skin.

“We’re at nine minutes,” Berger said. Then Fischer said, “Everybody off the cradle except Brett and Rich”—referring to Rich Christensen, who was filming the operation for Ocearch.

The cradle was lowered. Water rose up the sides of the shark until she was nearly covered. Turning her tail, McBride shifted her onto her stomach. Then the cradle was raised, the towel and the hoses were replaced, and a crew jumped on to install the tags. Fischer held the SPOT tag to her fin while four holes were drilled for the screws.

“Time is thirteen-thirty,” Berger called out. One of the crew members poured a bucket of water on the shark’s back. With tweezers, several scientists collected parasites that were lodged like barnacles on her flanks, and then more blood. “Time is fourteen minutes!” Berger yelled. The shark flipped her tail, as if trying to swim. On the edge of her dorsal fin I could see small notches, making the fin look feathered.

“Sixteen-thirty. Everybody finish up what you’re doing,” Berger said. They held a measuring tape along the shark’s back and someone called out, “Twelve feet, seven inches.” Fischer shouted that the SPOT was almost done, then he stood and held his hands in the air and said, “I’m clear.” As the scientists withdrew, he stood beside the shark and said, “The first diesel Caterpiller ever built was called Betsy, so this is Betsy.” McBride stood beside her snout. As the cradle was lowered, he lifted the towel from the shark’s eyes and flung it toward the ship’s deck. Water began flooding the cradle.

The shark lay still as the water enclosed her. In a moment, her tail stirred and she moved slowly forward, off the cradle. Briefly, she was a dark shape swimming alongside the ship. The people looking down from the bow said that she passed beneath them.

Fischer stood on the deck. Someone asked him if he was going to fish any more that day. “Of course,” he said. “There’s two more out there, maybe three. There’s a great big one, with four times as big a fin. It’s out there right now. We were playing with it. A real black one. It’s massive.”

One of the crew needed his attention, and he left. A few minutes later, he was standing by himself in the middle of the deck, looking relieved. Shortly afterward, he and McBride rode back to the tender.

Sharks often leave the area after they’re tagged, Skomal says, sometimes immediately, perhaps because of the tagging. Betsy left Chatham at once and swam southeast. By the next day she was east of Nantucket, and then they lost track of her. Initially, however, and unlike Mary Lee, she does not appear to be a finner. ♦

PROFILES
Varieties of Disturbance

Where do Claire Danes’s volcanic performances come from?

by John Lahr

On a muggy June morning, in a sprawling, unnamed, and unnumbered red brick building near downtown Charlotte, North Carolina—which serves as the headquarters for Showtime’s political-thriller series “Homeland”—tornado warnings were being broadcast on TV. Outside, torrential rain brought traffic to a standstill on the highway. Inside, the cast and crew of “Homeland” were hard at work by 8 A.M., calmly building their own storm for the first episode of the much awaited third season (which will première on September 29th). In the finale of Season 2, the characters had survived “the worst terrorist disaster since 9/11”: a car bombing at C.I.A. headquarters that killed more than two hundred people. The emotional weather buffeting them now was contained within a behemoth enclosed wooden set, where the homes of the show’s two central figures—the bipolar, transgressive C.I.A. operative Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and her suspect, Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a captured Marine sniper turned Al Qaeda sleeper—had been meticulously designed, right down to the CDs on Carrie’s bureau (the Temptations and John Coltrane’s “Newport ’63”).

In the vastness of the studio, the only sure way to know that acting was taking place was to huddle near the twin monitors behind the set. On the screens, Carrie sat on her living-room sofa, her eyes fixed on her television, where her longtime mentor, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), now the head of the C.I.A., was being strategically sandbagged at a congressional hearing on the bombing. Danes had no lines in the scene, but as Berenson’s testimony shifted from showboating to scapegoating—he referred to a “case officer” who was “unstable”—her face was a barometer of Carrie’s interior. Incredulity, sorrow, and humiliation swept over her. The director Lesli Linka Glatter, a noisy dynamo in a T-shirt, vest, and cargo pants, stood so close to a monitor screen that her nose almost touched it, her head rolling with each shift in Danes’s expression, as if urging her into every unsettling transition. When Carrie finally sat back on the sofa, with a gesture of abject disbelief, Glatter’s arms shot high above her head, as if Danes had scored a goal, which, in a way, she had. “Cut! That’s great!” Glatter called, while Danes quietly dried her eyes.

After four takes, four huddles, four different versions of Carrie’s chagrin, Glatter declared herself satisfied. She was excited by the spectrum of feelings that Danes had laid out for her to choose from in the final edit. “We talked about how it could land,” she explained. “One was anger. The other was a kind of betrayal. To me, the one with the tear—my heart hurt. But I don’t know where that’s gonna take us.” Glatter, who is also a co-executive producer of the show, added, “I always come with a clear plan, but then you have an actress like this who is fearless, and you really want to see what she’s bringing to the party.”

Eleven director’s chairs were arranged in a semicircle around the monitor screens. On some of them, emblazoned in white, were the names of staff grandees. The chair meant for the Emmy Award-winning Danes, however, was marked simply “Carrie”—a sign, if more were needed, that the agitated, wayward espionage agent was more real to those present than the thirty-four-year-old actress who had given life to her in twenty-four previous episodes. Danes, still dressed in Carrie’s unassuming mufti of black slacks and white shirt, strode resolutely off the soundstage and settled into her chair. “I didn’t think the scene would be very emotional,” she said. “But, in the actual playing of it, hurt is sort of unavoidable. I don’t really edit as I go along. I leave them to decide.”

Although there is nothing domineering in Danes’s demeanor on the set—she creates no commotion around herself—onscreen she is capable of what David Harewood, who played the stonewalling deputy director of the C.I.A. in the first two seasons, calls a “tsunami of emotion.” In extremis or out of it, her body semaphores feeling. As one “Saturday Night Live” cast member commented during a recent lampoon by Anne Hathaway, “It’s like she makes her mouth turn fully upside down. Her eyes seem to be looking five directions at once. It’s like her whole face is chewing gum.” Danes, speaking of her portrayal of Carrie’s manic moments in Season 3, told me, “I don’t even know how it happens, but I start shaking. My body expresses it. It’s really fun when it starts becoming physicalized. It’s not necessarily a conscious decision. It’s a little mysterious to me.” That kind of porous physicalization comes, in large part, from Danes’s early training in dance, which she began at the age of six. “Dancing is a kind of drawing,” she said. “I’m interpreting what I’m hearing with my body. Acting is like that, too.” She added, “I use my body to generate feelings a lot. If I have a very emotional scene, I’ll often walk in circles before. It gets you out of your head. I’m not afraid to use it.”

Danes is frequently accused of being over the top. “ ‘Homeland’ is actually TV’s best post-9/11 metaphor yet, where Carrie is America and America is a mad, paranoid, overacting blonde,” one TV critic wrote of “Homeland” ’s first season. But, then, people suffering from psychological disorders often are melodramatic. “We are so much bigger in life than we realize,” Danes said. “We’re betraying so much more than we think.” Over the decades, in her performances, she has explored a full spectrum of disturbance, from spousal abuse, autism, and paralysis to Carrie’s bipolar disorder and the paranoia of adolescence. At Harvard last year, to accept the Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ Woman of the Year Award, she joked about her penchant for roles that turn acting into an extreme sport. “I’m just working my way through the DSM-V”—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—she said. “So whatever mental condition you have for me . . .” But, in its silliness, the Hasty Pudding roast—which required Danes to parade down Massachusetts Avenue wedged between two burly drag queens, to read a faux-Shakespearean speech sending up her brief appearance in “The Vagina Monologues” (“To be or not to be an angry lesbian”), and to challenge-dance with a gangly, moonwalking “Virus”—revealed more of her personality than her acting roles do.

In her work, Danes flirts with the darker forces; in her life, she exhibits a wacky charm and a swift, playful mind. She has a particular affection for puns. When she first went to dinner at the home of her friend Jenette Kahn, who was a producer of “The Flock” (2007), in which Danes co-starred with Richard Gere, she arrived with a gift of bespoke lingerie: a camisole with an image of Sigmund Freud printed on it—a Freudian slip. When Patinkin recently sent out an S.O.S. for Danes’s roast-chicken recipe, he received a forensic two-page e-mail on how to cook the bird, which ended, “I hope this arrives in time (thyme?).” In June, on a visit to an antique store in Charlotte, Danes couldn’t resist buying a hamburger timer in the shape of a hand, with a clock embedded in the palm—a hand burger timer. “I’ve never seen in any other actor such a divide between the performance and the person in the room,” the novelist Michael Cunningham, who became friends with Danes in 2004, during the filming of his screenplay “Evening,” said. (In 2009, he officiated at her wedding, in the South of France, to the British actor Hugh Dancy, whom she met on the set of “Evening.”) “Claire’s buoyancy is real. She’s not impersonating a buoyant person.” One of the lessons of her adulthood, Danes has said, was “that there is real honor in being a total goofball.”

“The central mystery of Claire is, where does she come from?” Cunningham said. “She doesn’t match her family. If you gathered into a room two dozen parent-aged people and said, ‘O.K., spot the Daneses,’ you couldn’t do it.”

Danes’s parents, Chris and Carla, met at the Rhode Island School of Design, in the early sixties. Chris was scrawny, bespectacled, funny, and analytical; he studied engineering and biology at Brown, before transferring to RISD’s photography department. Carla was earnest, intuitive, eccentric, and prolix. (One of Danes’s friends refers to her as the Queen of Too Much Information.) Both were liberal, former VISTA volunteers, and adventurous, and both had been marked by problematic childhoods. Chris’s mother died when he was ten; his father, Gibson Danes, a former dean of the Yale School of Art and Architecture, was distinguished but distant. He committed suicide in 1992, along with his third wife, the artist Ilse Getz. Chris “just kind of grew himself up,” Carla told me. Carla was the eldest of five children; she spent her childhood helping her mother wrangle her siblings.

The Daneses moved to New York in 1969, and a few years later bought a seven-story building on Crosby Street, in SoHo, with another RISD couple. In order to pay the bills, they had to put their artistic ambitions on hold. Chris became a building contractor. Carla, a textile designer and painter, started a day care that she called the Crosby Street Toddlers Group. “For me, a lot’s been about survival,” Chris said. “I’ve been clinging to the edge of the boat and only fairly recently do I realize that I’m inside the boat and I can relax.”

Still, Danes’s parents retained a playful side. The two-thousand-square-foot loft on Crosby Street, where Danes, who was born in 1979, and her older brother, Asa, grew up, featured a trampoline, a trapeze near the long kitchen table, and a swing suspended from the living-room ceiling in front of high windows. “It felt like you could just fly out onto Lafayette Street,” Danes recalled. For the day care, Carla installed a large box of rice, which served as an indoor sand pit, and containers of dress-up clothes. “A huge emphasis was placed on art and creativity,” Danes said. At the same time, Danes found herself re-creating Carla’s childhood—sharing her mother and her home with a gaggle of younger children. “You get a little lost in the shuffle,” she said.

Below the antic surface of family life was an indigestible anxiety. Chris and Carla were lumbered with a sense of not having lived up to their own potential; “both of us were smarter and more imaginative,” Carla said. The Daneses felt that they should treat their own children as “unfinished equals,” and Danes picked up the message of autonomy early on. “I played grownup—a child’s idea of grownup. A little too strict, a little too arch,” she said. At the age of three, Danes demanded and was granted the power position at the head of the dinner table. When she was four, and a rogue haircut left her with bangs that she didn’t want, she turned furiously to her mother. “Why did you let them do that? It’s my body!” she said. “Claire seemed always ready to play the adult,” Carla said. “She always seemed to want to be on to the next stage.” As a child, Danes became, as she put it, “parentified”—a kind of parent to her own parents, a role that was infuriating, impossible, and irresistible. She described her mother as “very childlike,” adding, “She needs mothering herself.” Her father, she said, had “lost every parent he ever had. Everybody kind of held vigil over him. I wanted to rescue him from those awful feelings.” Danes carried another burden: the name of her father’s late mother, of whom he has no memories. Calling his daughter Claire, Chris admitted, was “big” for him. “ ‘Repair’ would be too strong a word, but it had a satisfaction to reach out to this memory I didn’t have,” he said.

Danes, however, who was “riding the subway alone at the age of eleven,” sometimes felt unprotected. “I think they realize that they did ask too much of my brother and me. They regret that,” she said. A couple of times in her childhood, Danes had a “dalliance with madness.” Terrifying visions of ghosts and gargoyles emerged out of the showerhead and from shapes in the woodwork. “Very O.C.D.,” she said. “They were gonna suck me into some horrible place.” She briefly saw a psychiatrist. Later, when she was nineteen, famous, living in her own SoHo loft (with a ceiling swing), and coming down from her first and last hit of Ecstasy, Danes was again visited by these emissaries of her unconscious aggression. “They were the same, except smaller,” she said. “I was, like, ‘Really, guys? You’re still here? I’m a grownup. I’m done.’ ”

Danes discovered the joy of dissimulation at the age of three, when, a chronically bad napper, she passed herself off as asleep. “I’d observed my mother sleeping, and she twitched,” she said. “So I kind of did that. It was a pretty refined imitation. I really loved the experience of pretending.” When she was five, dancing and singing on her parents’ bed while watching Madonna on TV, she first “registered that performing could be a job” and decided that that was what she wanted to do. The next year, she signed up for a class with Ellen Robbins at Dance Theatre Workshop, starting a weekly ninety-minute regimen, which she kept up for a decade. Even then, Danes was drawn to theatrical extremes: she danced a shipwreck, a moth drawn to a flame, a “lazybones” hauling an enormous sack. “She was a risk-taker and improvised full blast,” Robbins said.

Around the age of eight, Danes, exasperated by a boy in her class, was spooked by the pleasure she got from her revenge fantasies about him. “Can people read your thoughts?” she asked her mother. “Your imagination is your own. You can do whatever you like with it,” Carla answered. The knowledge that “you could be a good person and host lavishly violent acts in your imagination” was, Danes said, a kind of liberation. “I was so happy,” she added.

A year or so later, after her best friend, Ariel Flavin, appeared in a film made by a graduate student at New York University, Danes, “burning to have the experience,” put herself forward for the student’s next project, “Dreams of Love,” a film about child abuse. (She auditioned for one of the movie’s executive producers, Milos Forman.) Danes thought it “interesting to think about” the rage, loss, and bewilderment a girl would feel at being molested by her father. Onscreen, she found an outlet for her own forbidden feelings. “I loved discovering the camera. It was like a confidant,” she said. “To be seen is a crucial part of my attraction to acting.” She began to imagine a life as an actress. “Someone told me that actors don’t typically make much money,” she said. So when people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up she’d say, “I’m going to be a therapist and act on the side.” At ten, however, she formally announced her vocation at the dinner table. “I said, ‘You know what? Money or no money, I have to be true to my art. I’m gonna take the risk. There is no plan B. I’m going to act.’ ”

At twelve, after two years at the Lee Strasberg Institute, Danes was offered a part in the soap opera “One Life to Live.” She turned it down. “I was a malleable, unformed actor. I didn’t want to develop bad habits,” she explained. Then, in December, 1992, on the basis of an appearance on an episode of “Law & Order,” the thirteen-year-old Danes was one of two young actresses—Alicia Silverstone was the other—who were called to audition in Los Angeles for a show about American adolescents. The show was being developed by Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, who had previously hit the mother lode with their exploration of another age group, “Thirtysomething,” along with Winnie Holzman, who had been a member of the “Thirtysomething” writing team. “In our heads was some notion of trying to write a more accurate representation of the teen-age experience,” Zwick said. Holzman was enlisted to write the pilot, which she began by keeping a journal in a teen-ager’s voice, the funny, thoughtful, naïve palaver of fifteen-year-old Angela Chase:

—My mom’s a slob. She’ll go for like weeks without making her bed, then all of a sudden it’ll become like her religion. Make your bed! Make your bed.

—This summer I began to feel really terrible about being white. It just seems like black people have this really hard time. And yet everybody wants to be like them.

Silverstone auditioned first. Zwick, impressed, told Herskovitz, “It’s done. Just cast her.” But Herskovitz thought she was too pretty for Holzman’s messy high-school universe, which included subplots about drug addiction, bullying, binge drinking, promiscuity, and homosexuality. “Alicia is so beautiful that that would have affected her experience of the world. People would have been telling her she was beautiful since she was six years old. You can’t put that face in what’s been written for this girl,” he argued. Linda Lowy, the casting director, suggested that they see Danes before deciding. “From the minute she walked in the room, Claire was chilling, astounding, and silent,” Lowy said. “There was so much power coming out of her without her doing much.” One of the scenes that Danes read—which involved a nervy bathroom breakup with Angela’s best friend, Sharon—required her to cry. “Tell me what I did, Angela. I mean, I would really like to know,” Sharon says. “We get to that line and Claire’s face turns entirely red,” Herskovitz said. “Her body starts to vibrate and tears come into her eyes. You realize that she’s having a physical experience that is beyond acting.” Even then, Danes’s defining quality as an actress—a combination of thoughtfulness and impulsiveness—was on display. “She seemed to have been born fully grown, you know, out of a seashell,” Herskovitz said. Zwick claimed that Danes was his first sighting of a “wise child,” a rare species that show business occasionally tosses up. As he put it later, “What she knows cannot be taught.” Danes also satisfied another quality that Holzman’s script called for: her face could transform in an instant from beautiful to ordinary.

Holzman’s pilot for “My So-Called Life” (then titled “Someone Like Me”) was meant to trap “a naked quality, not a person but a feeling of freedom and bondage, shyness and fearlessness,” she said. Holzman found herself staring at this protean paradox in the flesh. Danes “was sexy and not sexy, free and bound up, open and closed, funny and frighteningly serious,” Holzman recalled. Her performance freed Holzman’s imagination. “We gave birth to each other,” she said. “I was looking at someone who literally could do anything, and so I could, too.” The novelist and television writer Richard Kramer, who worked on “My So-Called Life,” places Holzman’s writing for the show on a continuum of original television voices that leads from her to Mike White, Larry David, and Lena Dunham. “Winnie wouldn’t be Winnie without Claire,” he said. “And Claire wouldn’t be Claire without Winnie. There was something mythological about their meeting.”

After Danes left the audition room, Lowy recalled, “no one could really speak.” In the excitement of the moment, the production team found themselves faced with a conundrum. Silverstone was sixteen and “emancipated,” meaning, in Hollywood’s piquant terminology, that she could work very long days. Danes was thirteen and, by law, had to go to school. If they cast Silverstone, they could move ahead with the show they’d written; if they opted for Danes, they’d have to adapt later scripts to accommodate her schedule. “We turned to Winnie,” Herskovitz recalled. “Winnie said, ‘Let’s change the nature of the show.’ ” He added, “In that moment, we decided to include the lives of the parents more.”

Danes arrived in Los Angeles on January 18, 1994—the day after the Northridge earthquake. The relocation was thrilling for her, but harder for her parents, who had to cope with suburban isolation. “The power and attention that come with a successful Hollywood thing are like a big wave,” Chris Danes said. “For me, a level of success was not letting any one of us get pummelled by it.” Carla closed down her day-care business to become her daughter’s full-time manager and on-set “supervisor,” a role she characterized as “a dog and a shadow.” “She’d experienced terrible frustration as an artist and she didn’t want me to go through that,” Danes said. “She wanted me to have as much creative freedom and opportunity as I could have. I’m so grateful that she did that. I don’t know if I would have been able to do it for my child.”

“My So-Called Life,” which débuted on ABC that August and won Danes the first of her four Golden Globe awards the next year, more or less mirrored her own stressful experience of junior high in New York, where she had difficulty “navigating the social seas.” She changed schools twice, “fleeing one mean girl only to find another incarnation of that same girl in the next school.” She was targeted for her looks, her nerdy curiosity, her refusal to conform. “I thought it was a crock of shit, all these social games. I couldn’t deal,” she said. “She was not cool,” Flavin recalled. “She just always said what she thought. She raised her hand every time she knew the answer, and she knew the answer every time. So people didn’t like her.” At school, Danes could also be mouthy and a bit of a hothead. “I went through this vigilante period,” she said. “I would see somebody being bullied, and I would get really righteous and intercept.” Once, seeing a boy berating a girl after class, she slapped him. “He slapped me back, and we went to the principal’s office,” she said. When she got the role in “My So-Called Life,” Danes said, “I remember being so relieved that I had an opportunity to voice my complaints about my time at school so perfectly and so eloquently, with the right amount of rage and humor.”

She continued, “Angela and I were the same age, so we could dance around each other. Sometimes I would have an experience and then it would be articulated in the show. Other times, I would play it out, then experience it personally later.” When the script called for Angela, who was besotted with the granite-chinned Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto), “to kiss his face,” Danes said, “I was, like, ‘kiss his face’? What is that? I had no idea what it meant. Jared had to coach me.” In the first Angela-Jordan onscreen meeting, Angela slips and falls in mud at a party and, to get away from everyone, rushes into a room where she comes face to face with her heartthrob, who is watching television. She panics and tries to leave, but the door is stuck. She lets her body go limp, as if she were going to fall to the floor, then pulls herself back up, smiling, and sits down awkwardly beside him. “The whole thing takes a second and a half,” Herskovitz said. “It’s full of a lifetime of irony and ruefulness and embarrassment. She was fully equipped as a master craftsman.” Danes’s resourcefulness intimidated the creative team. “I went five days before I gave her a direction,” he added.

In 1995, despite an online campaign (the first in the history of television) to save the cult hit, ABC cancelled “My So-Called Life.” The show had put Danes into the dream life of the nation; it had also brought her to the attention of film directors. Gillian Armstrong had cast her as the terminally ill Beth in “Little Women” (1994); Francis Ford Coppola hired Danes to play the brutalized wife Matt Damon rescues in “The Rainmaker” (1997); and Baz Luhrmann gave her the chance to play opposite her teen-age crush, Leonardo DiCaprio, in a modern reimagining of Shakespeare’s tale of first love, “Romeo+Juliet” (1996). “She was the only girl that looked me in the eye in auditions,” DiCaprio said. Danes’s performance as Juliet is the most luminous of her early years, an effortless exhibition of her modesty, exuberance, and sensuality.

In 1999, after making thirteen films in five years, Danes enrolled at Yale. She was twenty, celebrated and rich, but she “didn’t feel finished as a person.” “I didn’t have a sensibility, a value system, an aesthetic. I needed that time in school to be clear on who I was and what kind of career I wanted to have,” she said. But by the time she left Yale, in 2001, without completing a degree, she felt, she said, removed from acting and from the film industry. “I just felt outside it,” she said. “I started to think, How do these actors do it? It seemed alien and incredible. I became self-conscious.” Danes found it hard to get roles that tested her range and her resources. She had a couple of solid outings: as a female Shakespearean wannabe in the all-male world of Elizabethan theatre, in Richard Eyre’s “Stage Beauty,” and as a vulnerable aspiring artist behind the glove counter at Saks, in Steve Martin’s “Shopgirl”—both strong performances in weak scripts. But, increasingly, she was cast around the edges of the story (in “Me and Orson Welles,” “Evening,” “The Hours,” “The Family Stone”). Between decent roles, she did business chores, appearing in such movies as “The Mod Squad” and “Terminator 3.”

Despondent over the roles she was and was not being offered, she resumed her dance training, after a decade’s hiatus, working now with the choreographer Tamar Rogoff, who was the mother of her friend Ariel Flavin, “to learn her body” as a grownup. The two developed an exercise in which one of them danced as the other watched and wrote down free associations; then, after a few minutes, they’d reverse roles. Rogoff challenged Danes to trust her body to communicate for her. “You don’t have to tell us what you think,” she said. “Just feel it. Your whole body’s dramatic.” Referring to Danes’s long neck and spine, Rogoff told me, “She has a very unusual body. Her spine really bends. She can bow, and then she can be like a warrior. She’s willing to abandon style for the essence of something.”

Over time, they devised “Christina Olson: American Model,” an hour-long solo piece about the paralyzed woman memorialized in Andrew Wyeth’s painting “Christina’s World,” who refused her wheelchair and insisted on crawling everywhere. “I wouldn’t let her use her face,” Rogoff said. “I said, ‘You’re gonna be acting with your body.’ ” Danes performed the piece at P.S. 122, in New York’s East Village, in 2005. In footage intercut with a video of the performance, Danes, as Olson, slithers along First Avenue on her belly. Pulling herself up the stairs of P.S. 122, step by step, on her elbows, she crawls into the theatre. “Nobody noticed,” Danes said. “Some scrawny white chick dragging herself on the floor in basically no clothing. I thought, Wow! You can get away with a lot more in this town than you realize.” (“Make no mistake: She’s a dancer,” Deborah Jowitt, the dance critic of the Village Voice, wrote.)

A couple of years later, while in London, Danes, then twenty-eight, took a call from the British director Mick Jackson, who told her about an HBO movie that he wanted her to star in, a bio-pic of the autistic professor and animal-welfare activist Temple Grandin. In an interview with the Directors Guild of America, Jackson recalled telling Danes that, in order to play a person with such a limited emotional range, she would have to deny herself “all the things which you use as an actress, the ability to make the audience empathize with you, because this is a character who doesn’t empathize with anybody, even her own mother. She cannot bear to be hugged by her own mother.” He went on, “You’re going to look very unattractive, because it’s a person who’s loud in conversation, can’t modulate her voice, is very awkward in society . . . because she can’t think of how other people are looking at her. You’re going to have to work without a safety net.” Danes, who was speaking to Jackson from a seventeenth-floor apartment, told him that she was looking down to the street below. “I realize that what you’re asking me to do is to jump that distance,” she said.

Temple Grandin was in her early sixties at the time. “When I heard that Claire Danes was gonna be playing me in the movies, I went to the Internet and looked her up. I saw the long blond hair, and I thought, You gotta be kidding!” she said. Danes invited Grandin to lunch in her New York loft. As Grandin explained what it felt like to be autistic, Danes filmed her and recorded her voice to study. “Temple was so candid, so guileless,” Danes said. Grandin could not hear consonants well; she overcompensated by hitting them hard, something Danes picked up on in her voice work. Danes enlisted Rogoff to help teach her Grandin’s rigid movements, undergoing a regimen of physical realignment that went on for weeks. “Claire is totally the opposite of Temple. She projects out,” Rogoff said. “We had to change the way she held her head. I had to pull her chin all the way back, because if you’re autistic you’re not communicating with the world—you’re communicating within.” Together, Danes and Rogoff developed a “panic lock”: a hunched, fearful posture, in which Danes’s pelvis and rib cage were yoked together so that she moved “like a cow bent heavy under you.” To this, they added gestures: hand wringing, leg shaking, hair stroking, downward-searching eyes, hyperventilation. To test Grandin’s body language, Danes took walks through Wall Street traffic and into the subway. Being caged inside this unstable physical frame brought her new insights. “Your internal world becomes really vast when you’re that disengaged,” she said. “I thought that it would be lonely playing Temple, because she’s socially isolated. But she’s so turned on by her ideas that she has the company of the ideas. She didn’t have the same needs that I had. That was an interesting lesson. What I perceive as a loss isn’t necessarily a loss for her.”

As the first day of shooting approached, Jackson repeatedly asked Danes if she’d like to show him anything. “She said, ‘I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, but I’m not ready to show you yet,’ ” Jackson recalled. For the first scene of the film, Danes looked at the camera and announced, “My name is Temple Grandin.” At that moment, Jackson said, “the hair stood up on the backs of our heads. Not only had she got the booming voice, but when she walked from one corner of the room to the other she strode leading with the shoulders, and I thought, Oh, my God, that’s Temple Grandin.” Danes didn’t imitate Grandin; she channelled her. She found delightful moments of humor in Grandin’s gaucheness, and her protean face worked its weird magic. “There are scenes where she looks like a young Grace Kelly and scenes where she looks like an old horse-faced English duchess,” Jackson said. Danes refused to watch the rushes. “I think she very much wanted to be in the moment and not to have that moment broken by thinking, How do I look? Is my right profile showing to my best advantage?” Jackson said. “She wants that moment to be sacrosanct—the moment when you’re in the character and nothing else in the world matters.”

Of the many accolades Danes received for the performance—an Emmy and a Golden Globe among them—the ultimate one was bestowed offstage. When Danes’s name was called at the Golden Globes and she rose slowly from her seat in a backless salmon-pink gown, Grandin, seated next to her in Western regalia, stood and embraced her. Grandin keeps a framed note from Danes in her house. “Through you I think I have become a better person,” it says.

The day after “Temple Grandin” aired, in early 2010, the television writer-producers Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, who had worked on “24,” sat down to discuss their idea for a new psychological thriller based on the Israeli series “Prisoners of War,” by Gideon Raff. “24,” a series about the male intelligence officer Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), a go-it-alone hero who spent as much time fighting red tape as he did fighting terrorism, had premièred two months after 9/11. But eight seasons later, in the world of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and drone strikes, the political landscape was murkier, and it had become increasingly difficult to tell the cowboys from the Indians. “There was this wonderful irony,” Gordon said. “The thing that we had to be most afraid of was a monster of our own creation.” When he and Gansa conceived their show, which became “Homeland,” their primary concern was America’s fear fatigue. “The law of unintended consequences had created all this collateral damage,” Gordon said. “There were no good answers. We just wanted to dramatize the complexity.” Their story, embroidered from the headlines of the day, gave shape to the country’s growing skepticism and fear of blowback.

One of the nation’s greatest losses on 9/11 was its illusion of invincibility. Carrie Mathison, poised between breakthrough and breakdown, personified the country’s deracinating confusion. Both Carrie and Sergeant Brody, who was held hostage by Al Qaeda for eight years, see themselves as patriots; both, in different ways, risk their credibility. “We knew we wanted to create an unreliable narrator, or, at least, someone whom most other people looked at as being unreliable, in part because of her youth, in part because of her record, and in part because of her gender,” Gordon said of Carrie. “Unlike Jack Bauer, she is a woman who was marginalized. We reverse-engineered her. We pathologized her to account for her gift.”

Gordon and Gansa’s early screenplay drafts made no mention of bipolar disorder. “We created Carrie’s behavior, then stumbled on the diagnosis,” Gordon said. Although the illness elevated Carrie into the realm of the extraordinary—“They fly closer to the sun than the rest of us,” Gansa said of bipolar-disorder sufferers—it also gave her a defining obstacle to negotiate, a double time bomb, which threatens at every moment to blow up her mission and her life. “It’s her kryptonite,” Gordon said, a natural weakness that maximizes her loneliness, her secrecy, and her fear of intimacy.

Gansa and Gordon had seen how in “Temple Grandin” Danes walked the razor’s edge between competence and unbalance. “There’s something in her that feels a little bit broken,” Gordon said. Their new heroine was, similarly, “an extremely intelligent woman freighted with a real emotional problem.” The writing team envisaged Danes in the role from the beginning—for the first six drafts of their pilot they called their character Claire. The network argued for an older woman to play Carrie. At the time, TV series such as “Weeds,” “Nurse Jackie,” and “The United States of Tara” were finding success with actresses in their late thirties and forties. But Gansa and Gordon were adamant. “We wanted Carrie to have this flaw, this illness, but to give her the opportunity to maybe rise above it, to fashion her life in a way that opened up the possibility that she would have another chapter,” Gansa said. “If you’re forty-five or forty-six, and you’ve been living with bipolar illness all this time, the story is already written. The audience cannot root for the character in the same way.”

Gansa and Gordon finally met with Danes on November 1, 2010, over drinks at the London, in West Hollywood. “We were prepared to have our hearts broken when she said no,” Gansa recalled. For her part, Danes was beginning to believe that she’d never again be offered a challenging film role. In the nearly two years since she shot “Temple Grandin,” her career had languished. “It was getting painful. I was starting to kind of cry a lot. Sort of uncontrollably,” she said. “I’d had such a deeply fulfilling experience that I just was not gonna settle.” At the time of her meeting with Gansa and Gordon, she was up for a supporting role as J. Edgar Hoover’s secretary, in Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar.” “Here was this F.B.I. story and I was thinking about it in the same weekend as this C.I.A. story,” she said. “I was thinking, you know—I could be the secretary or I could be Hoover.”

The show’s first season opened, in 2011, with an establishing shot of an agitated Carrie Mathison beseeching her controllers to protect her source while impatiently negotiating Baghdad traffic. Viewers were thrust directly into the center of “Homeland” ’s two dramas: the one outside Carrie’s mind and the one inside it. Danes’s job on the show, Gansa said, “was to be an open wound.” In the postmodern TV crime thriller—“The Killing,” “The Bridge,” “Monk”—it’s not enough for the detective to solve the problem; the detective also has to have a problem, to struggle both with society and with the self. “It’s micro and macro,” Danes said. “I thought about it in those terms.”

To prepare for the role, Danes read medical texts, consulted with therapists and bipolar patients, and followed the blogs of people in hypomanic states. (Her own bipolar acquaintances, she complained, were all “annoyingly medicated.”) “I have always been curious about people who are wired in a fundamentally different way from most of us and was eager to integrate the bipolar condition into the character, without turning it into a gimmick,” she told me in an e-mail, adding, of Carrie, “I also appreciated the dichotomy between her obvious flaws and transgressions and her strong moral core. For all her recklessness, she is surprisingly earnest and honest. Another fun paradox: she dedicates herself entirely to the noble cause of protecting her country, but she doesn’t do it simply for noble reasons. She is terrified of forging intimate relationships with others—which is, basically, what constitutes a life—because she knows the kind of damage that her condition can wreak. Because she has such an anemic life, it is easier for her to risk losing it on behalf of her cause. While this is an advantage of sorts, she must live with the pain of her loneliness. She is, basically, a classic superhero. Who wouldn’t want to play that?”

In Season 3, Carrie blames the C.I.A. car bombing in the Season 2 finale on a lack of vigilance caused by her medicated “normality” and goes off her meds. Danes welcomes the narrative volte-face. “I want to see more of the boring work involved in just maintaining a healthy plateau,” she said. “I think we have to see her slog through the daily grind. I think we owe it to audiences.”

It is Carrie’s fear of intimacy, paired with promiscuity, that shapes the show’s steamy romantic subplot—a mystifying game of cat and mouse between Carrie and Brody. “It’s a way of getting out of their heads,” Danes said of the sexual compulsiveness of some bipolar sufferers. “It’s another kind of self-medication.” Danes refers to Carrie’s exhilarating rounds of slap-and-tickle with Brody as a “slalom.” Part of the characters’ sparky charisma is due to the transparent opaqueness of Lewis, an Old Etonian playing an American marine. “He has a slightly cheeky, naughty on-set demeanor, which I’m missing now that our characters are so physically estranged in the third season,” Danes said. “I can throw hard and fast and he’ll always catch the ball and return it in surprising ways.” Gordon recalled, “The chemistry between them we saw the first day they were together, but they were adversarial. It really wasn’t until Episode 4 in the car park, when Claire puts herself in front of him and plays him, and he scrutinizes her and doesn’t quite know what to believe about her—that was where we thought that this was going to be special. It was dangerous; it was electric; it was alive.”

The pilot of “Homeland” aired on October 2, 2011, and drew more than a million viewers—the highest-rated début of a Showtime drama in eight years. More than 1.7 million people tuned in for the première of the second season; by the finale, that number had grown to 2.3 million. Danes, who had become an icon for a generation as a teen-ager, reclaimed that stature as an adult. Fans began to approach her “with a rabid look in their eyes.” The admiration reached as far as the White House. According to Danes, President Obama, who was given an autographed boxed set of the series, told her when they met, “You’re a finer actress than I am President.” Danes has a seven-year contract for “Homeland,” but she has learned to take nothing for granted. “Who knows if it will last that long,” she said. “No character is safe.”

On the last day of shooting for the Season 3 première, Danes sat working her iPhone outside a liquor store in the Plaza Midwood area of Charlotte. She had just taped a scene in which Carrie panic-buys tequila, her current self-medication of choice, and is approached by a hunky shopper. Glatter darted out of the store’s crepuscular gloom. “I’m gonna miss you,” she said to Danes.

“You’re around, right?” Danes said, glancing up at her director.

“Oh, yes. Forever. You’re stuck with me till November.”

Danes was leaving the next day for a trip to her farmhouse, in the Hudson Valley, where she would spend time with her parents and Dancy and their son, Cyrus, who was born last December. (Danes had to use a “belly double” for the final episodes of Season 2, when she was eight months pregnant.) In addition to a newly purchased town house in the West Village, Danes also keeps an apartment on the forty-second floor of a Charlotte skyscraper, and a place with Dancy in Toronto, where he films the NBC series “Hannibal.”

“That’s perfect,” Glatter said. “It’ll be nice to have that break before all the emotional stuff to come.”

“Yeah, I know,” Danes said, fixing her with a look.

Glatter disappeared back into the liquor store, which was also a treasure trove of novelty items: stickers (“Unattended Children Will Be Given Espresso and a Free Puppy”); exotic coffees (Booty Call, Bad Hair Day, and Sexy Power, the blend that Danes bought for Dancy); and specialty wine labels, some of which Glatter broadcast from the air-conditioned store to the sweltering world outside (Naked on Roller Skates, Yard Dog, Broke Ass). After filming her last scene, Danes had lingered in the store to snap a shot of a sticker, which she planned to post to Instagram: “If Women Ruled the World There Would Be No Wars Just a Bunch of Jealous Countries Not Talking to Each Other.”

“I’m away from everybody in my life,” she said, to explain her attachment to her phone. “Wherever I am, I’m estranged.” She elaborated later, “You just have to accept that you’re always going to be missing someone. But, as you’re missing one set of people, you’re getting reacquainted with others. I have dear friends in L.A., in New York, upstate, friends now in Toronto. I had to create a community there when I became a mom.”

At her New York town house, Danes keeps drawers full of glitter, pipe cleaners, and fabric paint, and frequently has craft days with friends. Dancy won her heart a few years ago when he helped her throw a Christmas-ornament-decoration party and cut out an intricate pattern of cowboy paper dolls with “Holiday” written on them. “I thought, You can craft? That was it. I was done. I concede myself to you totally and forevermore,” she said.

Danes is also an enthusiast of the costume party. “In New York, people tend to party-hop,” she said. “If they’re in a costume, they’re stuck there. It loosens them up.” For her thirtieth-birthday party, which was Easter-themed, she dressed up as thirty pieces of silver; Dancy was a severed ear; her father wore an Easter basket on his head; and Michael Cunningham, in a suit, sunglasses, and stigmata, walked around saying, “No, don’t thank me. It was nothing. I was glad to do it.”

Danes holds an annual Eggathon, in which about a dozen friends come to her place to create exotic Easter eggs. The best of them are photographed for albums curated by Dancy. “It’s very competitive who makes the cover, sort of like the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated,” Danes said. On an April visit to her town house, she took me to the second-floor living room to show off her contribution to the most recent volume, “Oh-Very”—an egg wedged inside a russet Twinings English Breakfast tea-bag wrapper, a bit of Pop Art irony. By general agreement, Dancy’s tribute to Marcel Duchamp—an egg in the form of a urinal, signed “R. Butt”—is the high-water mark of the competition so far. But the album had some strong contenders: an Obama egg, an I. M. Pei egg, with large circular spectacles, and a Donald Trump egg, with a shock of big hair.

At some point in the conversation, as the willow tree in her small courtyard played tricks with the afternoon light and Cyrus woke up from his afternoon nap, Danes leaned back on her upholstered sofa and reflected on the career she had chosen as a child. “I think the more whole you are as a person—the more integrated—the deeper you can go into scary territory,” she said. “It’s just amazing that we have a means of doing that safely. What better thing is there? It’s so cool to get that much more of an understanding of what it is to be a person.” ♦

ANNALS OF EDUCATION
The Imperial Presidency

John Sexton has a vision for N.Y.U.’s future. His faculty aren’t buying it.

by Rachel Aviv

Last May, during final exams, John Sexton, the president of New York University, approached a pale, thin freshman leaning against the wall of Bobst Library, smoking. “What can I do to make you stop?” he asked.

The student, Fletcher Nightwine, quickly took out his earbuds.

“Your hands are shaking!” Sexton said. “Come on—don’t be nervous!”

Sexton, who is seventy years old, asked Nightwine how he had enjoyed his first year of college, and then urged him to smoke less, a plea that he frequently makes to students. If Nightwine cut down, Sexton said, he would take him to a Yankees game: “Does that sound fair? Is that a pact?”

Nightwine agreed.

“Can I give you a hug?” Sexton asked. They embraced, and then Sexton began walking toward a public-safety van, which takes him to meetings in university buildings scattered between Wall Street and Union Square. “You can find my e-mail online,” he called back. “Take care of yourself!”

Nightwine went into the library to study for a microeconomics exam, but he kept thinking about all the things he wished he’d told the president. Sexton had become the “face of everyone’s problems here,” he later said. Between March and May, the faculty of four schools at N.Y.U., one of the nation’s largest private universities, had voted that they had lost confidence in Sexton’s leadership. Since he started the job, in 2002, the school had developed campuses in thirteen cities around the world. Now it was planning to add two million square feet to the school’s central campus, in Greenwich Village, and was considering four million more in other parts of New York City. The faculty argued that Sexton had failed to provide an academic rationale for the scope and the pace of the university’s growth.

Half an hour after his encounter, Nightwine began composing an e-mail to Sexton. “Please, don’t close this email now,” he wrote. “Outside you demonstrated something: intention. You very intentionally approached me, gave me very real advice, and did so without shaky hands. I gathered that you value honesty and deliberateness.” He wrote, “You noticed outside that my hands were shaking, which above all was embarrassing, but was also indicative of more than you realize.” He was the first person in his family to go to college, but he’d come to realize that he couldn’t afford it: “I am transferring, begrudgingly.” He asked Sexton to meet with him before he left New York.

A week later, Sexton, a bear-shaped man with white hair and bright-blue eyes, welcomed Nightwine into his office, which resembles a living room that has been in the family for generations. It is cluttered with photographs of his wife, two children, and grandchildren; university relics; a decorative plate featuring the word “HUGGER”—hugging is essential to his managerial style, and he estimates that he hugs about fifty people a day—and a framed passage, by Eugene O’Neill, that reads, “The People who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle-classers.”

“I was very moved by your letter,” Sexton told Nightwine, as he led him to a set of armchairs surrounding a coffee table shaped like a pile of books. “So tell me about Fletcher,” he said. “You’ve just finished your freshman year. How did you finance that?”

Nightwine said that he had taken out a fourteen-thousand-dollar loan and paid six thousand dollars from his savings, and had received a five-thousand-dollar Pell Grant and nearly thirty thousand dollars from the university. He thought he was getting a good deal—a two-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar degree for eighty thousand dollars. Then he started working as a receptionist at a hair salon, making only a couple of thousand dollars a semester, and he began to grasp how long it would take to pay for his education.

“Did you talk to Mom?” Sexton asked. “Did you have any sense of the financial challenge in front of you?”

“I thought I did,” Nightwine said, adding that his mother didn’t want to interfere, since Nightwine had dreamed of going to N.Y.U. since he was eleven.

Sexton acknowledged that every week he read half a dozen e-mails from students who could no longer afford N.Y.U., one of the most expensive universities in the country. N.Y.U. has a small endowment compared with schools in its tier, and the university is largely financed through student tuition. Fifty-four per cent of students graduate with debt, borrowing an average of thirty-six thousand dollars. Sexton told Nightwine that he would introduce him to an administrator who runs an emergency fund for students facing financial distress, only a portion of whom are able to receive the aid. “I also want to entertain the possibility that N.Y.U. might not be the right place for you,” he said gently.

“I know,” Nightwine said, nodding.

“You’re a smart young man,” Sexton went on. “You were a little . . . agitated the other day, but now your aura is strong. I want to make it clear, though, that if you end up staying here I want you reporting to me. I’m going to talk to you about books you should read.”

“What would you recommend?” Nightwine asked.

“Are you religious?”

“No.”

Sexton said that he was Catholic (“ecumenical,” “not triumphalist”), and told him that if he didn’t mind a Catholic book he recommended “Mr. Blue,” by Myles Connolly. The book tells the story of an urban saint, a “gallant monk without an order,” who gives away all his money, sleeps on the roof of a skyscraper, shares the Gospel with anyone who will listen, and is considered the happiest man in the world. Sexton recommends the book to nearly all his students, as well as to teen-agers he happens to sit next to on the train. “The goal for all of us,” he likes to say, “is to be like Mr. Blue.”

For Sexton, the ideal professor, like Mr. Blue, is magnanimous, self-sacrificing, and in thrall to the idea of transformation. Sexton’s vision of the university is both religious—it is a “fragile sanctuary,” a “sacred space”—and optimistic about the values of a competitive marketplace. In his first speech as president, in 2002, he warned that higher education was in a “period of hyperchange.” More students were attending college; technology had altered their access to knowledge; government funding was increasingly unpredictable; and tuition was rising much faster than inflation. He announced that, to contend with other universities, N.Y.U. would seek a “category change,” becoming “one of the first exemplars of what universities will be in this new century.”

Sexton called the school the Global Network University. Instead of waiting for the best international students to apply, N.Y.U. will go to them. Students enter the university through three “portal campuses”: N.Y.U. New York; N.Y.U. Shanghai, which opens this fall; and N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, which began accepting students in 2010 and is temporarily operating out of a building in central Abu Dhabi, adjacent to a large mosque. They leave the portals to spend up to three semesters circulating through the school’s thirteen study-away sites, situated in “idea capitals” like Berlin, Accra, Buenos Aires, and Sydney. Sexton has described the Global Network University as an extrapolation of the theories of the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who predicted that people around the world would become increasingly interconnected: a membrane called the “noösphere,” self-aware and godlike, would envelop the earth. “We—humankind—find ourselves at an inflection point, a critical threshold,” Sexton has written.

More rapidly and grandly than other schools, N.Y.U. embodies the manner in which higher education is changing: research universities seem to exist in a state of perpetual expansion, much like businesses, with increasing inequalities among those who work for them. N.Y.U. has a long history of financial instability, but under Sexton’s leadership the school completed, in 2008, what was then the most successful fund-raising campaign in higher education, raising more than three billion dollars in seven years. (In 2009, Time named Sexton one of the Ten Best College Presidents in the country.) Compared with universities with long traditions of wealth, N.Y.U. personifies the nouveau riche, spending its money quickly to compete for prestige. Between 2004 and 2010, Sexton hired an additional hundred and twenty-five professors on the tenure track, increasing the size of the Faculty of Arts and Science by twenty per cent. He has aggressively recruited star scholars, like the economists Paul Romer and Tom Sargent and the physicist Paul Chaikin, from higher-ranked schools, paying what he called “meritocratic rates,” which compensate them more generously than professors who have been tenured longer. In the past thirteen years, the university has spent nearly seventy million dollars on home loans for two hundred and fourteen professors and administrators. At the same time, the lowest ranks of the academic hierarchy have swelled. Sexton doubled the number of full-time instructors ineligible for tenure, which is consistent with shifts on campuses nationwide: more than three-quarters of college faculty are adjuncts.

In an essay on teaching responsibilities, on the university’s Web site, Sexton encouraged his faculty to accept the “mutual obligations of the social compact.” Given the school’s limited endowment and lofty aspirations, resources could not be distributed evenly. For the students, financial aid increased, but tuition did, too—a fact that did little to deter interest. Under Sexton, undergraduate applications to N.Y.U. have increased by nearly forty-five per cent, and, since 2010, the school has risen nineteen places in the Times Higher Education Supplement’s World University Rankings, to No. 41.

The school’s fortunes have always been closely tied to the health of New York. In the seventies, when the city nearly went bankrupt, N.Y.U. was a commuter school for local students who couldn’t get in anyplace better. To avoid insolvency, the university sold some of its best real estate. N.Y.U. now has half as many square feet per student as Columbia. In the transition year before Sexton took office, a university committee determined that N.Y.U. needed more space, a finding that was reviewed by faculty senators in 2008. Later, with minimal input from faculty, N.Y.U.’s administration decided that the university could save money by building on property that it already owned. An early version of the plan proposed construction in Brooklyn, on the east side of Manhattan, and on two large blocks in the Village where forty per cent of the faculty live. On one block, two crescent-shaped buildings would be wedged in the green space between faculty apartment buildings. On the other block, two new buildings, totalling more than a million square feet, would encroach on the open layout of a city landmark, the Silver Towers, a complex of three buildings designed, in the early nineteen-sixties, by I. M. Pei and James Ingo Freed. The project, which initially included space for shops and a hotel, was estimated to cost six billion dollars.

After decades of relative apathy, professors began demanding a larger role in university governance. In an Op-Ed in the Times, three professors expressed concern that the construction would be paid for by increasing enrollment or raising tuition, pushing students deeper in debt. They wrote, “We’d rather see such misery ended than prolonged,” and warned that Sexton’s ambitions would “eventually degrade our student body,” because “applicants with money will be favored over those without.” Thirty-nine departments passed resolutions challenging the plan. The economics department and the business school argued that faculty recruitment would be impeded, since professors wouldn’t want to move to a “live construction zone.” The French department wrote, “ ‘Construisez vite, construisez grand’ (‘Build fast, build big’), a watchword of Louis XIV’s administration, comes back to haunt us.”

Rebecca Karl, a faculty senator and a professor of modern Chinese history, said that until recently senate meetings were populated by “soon-to-be-retired people who had found a nice social club and spent their time there knitting scarves.” She began writing weekly e-mails to her colleagues, titled “Reports from the Senate.” Chatty and sarcastic—and widely circulated—her reports summarize the week at the university, returning to the same themes: Sexton’s “imperial” mission, the bloating of the administration, the disenfranchisement of faculty, and the creation of campuses in countries with limited commitments to freedom of expression. The administration was connecting “not idea capitals but capitals of capital,” she wrote. “The question I want to pose here is the following: For whom does this University work?”

Karl thought that the administration should be focussing its resources on students in New York, who were exhausted from working part-time jobs to finance their educations. “If being educated at a top-ranked university doesn’t give you the right to follow curiosities that aren’t immediately functional to your career, that’s a tragedy,” she said. “My students don’t have the luxury to discover who and what they are.” The traditional mission of the university had been undermined, she said, because Sexton had gone “slightly wild in his desire to shake the world.”

She and other professors complained that Sexton wasn’t hearing their concerns. Sexton grew up listening to the radio personality Jean Shepherd, and his primary method of relating to people is to tell long, folksy stories. At times, his impulse to break into narrative seems beyond his control; homilies and anecdotes come tumbling out of him. A conversation with alumni about overseas campuses turns into a tale about a puppy his children gave him, his decision to invest in his only suit (“I’m not what you call elegant”), and a story about meeting the Israeli Ambassador, which becomes an account of how his brother-in-law told him, “You reek of goyosity.” His long-windedness can resemble obstructionism. On a Web site that coördinates faculty opposition to N.Y.U.’s expansion, a group of professors wrote, “Sexton, whether at the keyboard or the lectern, prohibits conversation, paradoxically, by going on at length about the need for it, his own devotion to it.”

In long screeds on faculty Listservs, professors accused him of hiding some secret master plan for the university. Katherine Fleming, the deputy provost and a professor of modern Greek history, told me, “Some of my friends are in the conspiracy-theory mosh pit, and I think, Wow! How organized do you think this administration is?” She believes that some of the distrust comes from a misreading of Sexton’s personality, which they dismiss as “shtick.” “They think it is slick packaging,” she said. “Now, the good news is it isn’t. And the bad news is it isn’t. There is not an alternative John in there.”

N.Y.U.’s neighbors also were suspicious of Sexton’s plans. On its Web site, the university advertises Greenwich Village as a “historic neighborhood that has attracted generations of writers, musicians, artists, and intellectuals.” But residents argue that the university has ruined the community’s character by turning it into a kind of company town, homogeneous and unaffordable. N.Y.U.’s buildings, which are loosely clustered around Washington Square Park, lack a coherent architectural style and are surrounded by the generic bars that accessorize any college campus. Sexton was the dean of the law school for thirteen years before he became president, and during that time he did little to endear himself to the neighborhood. The law school built a nine-story tower by dismantling a town house, erected in 1838, where Edgar Allan Poe once lived. (Sexton maintains that the house was remodelled so many times during the past century that its significance was only symbolic.)

In public forums and lectures, Sexton presented the university, one of Manhattan’s largest landowners, as the factory of a new era. He proposed that an economy stimulated by young professionals working in a sector that he dubbed ICE (intellectual, cultural, and educational) would “magnetize the talent class” and generate more revenue for the city. Other university presidents have also made this argument, but, because their campuses are encroaching on working-class communities (West Philadelphia, the South Side of Chicago, East Baltimore), they haven’t attracted as much negative publicity as N.Y.U., which is impinging on one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city.

To appeal to government and business leaders, Sexton has tried to repackage a liberal-arts education as something that has measurable value. At a panel that he moderated for a conference called Creative New York, in 2006, he opened the event by boasting about the concentration of college and graduate students in the city. “We have tremendous assets in place,” he said. Then he turned to the dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, who had been asked to share his thoughts on the city’s “ICE sector.”

“Start spreading the news!” Jones sang. “I’m leaving today!”

“No, you’re not leaving,” Sexton said.

“I’m asked to sit on this panel and talk about being part of the new economic engine of New York City: are we serious? Are we serious?” Jones said. “Does the culture, talking all this highfalutin talk today about creativity, truly value something that does not have a product?”

Sexton likes to joke that he will turn any institution he leads into a version of his Jesuit high school, Brooklyn Prep. As a student there, in the late fifties, he was enraptured by a teacher named Charlie Winans, whom students called Mr. Blue. Sexton and his classmates often spent their afternoons at Charlie’s home, in Crown Heights, listening to classical music and discussing books that he had recommended. At N.Y.U., where Sexton teaches four undergraduate classes a year on religion and the Constitution, all his students have heard stories about Charlie, whom Sexton describes as a “combination of Rabelais and St. Francis of Assisi.” One former student, Peter Schwartz, told me that everything Sexton does is “an extrapolation of Charlie. He lives and breathes this Charlie ethos. He’s a Charlie knockoff.”

Sexton grew up in Belle Harbor, Queens, in a family well versed in the spiritually motivating language of Alcoholics Anonymous. His father, an underemployed lawyer, was sober for only brief periods of his son’s childhood, and died during Sexton’s freshman year at Fordham. A few months later, Sexton decided to “do Charlie.” He had won the national Catholic debating championship in high school, and he persuaded the nuns at his younger sister’s school, St. Brendan’s, to let him create a debate team and coach it for free. His sister, Adrienne Beck, recalls sitting in the front row of a school assembly when she saw her brother make his announcement. “Oh, boy,” she said. “I was in shock.”

The team was called the Society. On Monday nights, Sexton played classical music and showed the girls slides of sculptures and paintings; on Tuesday nights, they discussed literature. “It was a total education,” Patricia O’Brien, who was on the first team, said. “He’d be all over the blackboard, running from side to side, drawing arrows between ideas, talking so quickly.”

In 1963, Sexton enrolled in Fordham’s graduate program in religion, but his primary focus continued to be the Society, one of the few female debate teams. He spent fifteen years as coach, and the team won the national championship five times. During this period, he married one of his former students (after a few years, the marriage was annulled) and held a number of teaching jobs: he worked at Brooklyn Prep and St. Francis College, tutored students for the Regents Scholarship exam, and started John Sexton’s L.S.A.T. Preparation Center, a multicity franchise. During long drives to debate tournaments, Rosemary Lawlor Genberg, a former debater, recalled, “he would talk about the nature of time, the progression of life. He made us feel that what we were doing was very deep and important.”

After writing his dissertation, on Charles Eliot, a leader in the Unitarian movement and the longest-serving president of Harvard, Sexton enrolled at Harvard Law School. At thirty-three, he was the oldest student in the class and resembled Paul Bunyan, sporting a bushy beard and a red flannel shirt that he wore nearly every day. He dated Lisa Ellen Goldberg, a student who was passionate about women’s rights, for two months, and then they eloped. Sexton refused to spend a night apart from her, a rule he followed for the first eight years of their marriage. “ ‘Fanatic’ is too strong a word, but there was always a level of devotion that exceeded pure rationality,” his friend Kelly Welsh said. In 1980, Sexton began a clerkship for Warren Burger on the Supreme Court, where he took care, when writing opinions, to include a number of footnotes that was divisible by four, the number of letters in Lisa’s name.

Sexton joined the faculty of New York University School of Law the next year, at a time when the institution placed little emphasis on scholarship. Many tenured professors worked at law firms downtown, leaving their school offices empty. The boundary between Sexton’s personal and professional life had always been porous, and he was frustrated by the lack of a communal culture. He was often in his office until eleven at night, and he invited his students to visit him on the weekends at his mother’s home, in Rockaway Beach. Former students showed up, too. One of them, Kenny Charles, who played professional basketball after graduating from Brooklyn Prep, said that he acted as Sexton’s gatekeeper, since some of their old friends were struggling with substance abuse. “I told the guys, ‘If you want to see the big fella badly enough—because he can help you—first you have to pass my test.’ ”

After Sexton was appointed dean of the law school, in 1988, he called some of the best legal scholars in the country and invited them to move into eight spacious dorm rooms. “Congratulations!” he told them. “You’ve just been made a penumbral member of N.Y.U. law school.” During visits to New York, they stayed in the rooms for free. In exchange, they participated in forums, and helped to create an intellectual community. Sexton began recruiting permanent faculty from this élite group, and rewarded them with a level of benefits, including mortgage-loan assistance for vacation homes, that were unavailable to what he called the “gray team”: faculty with minimal records of scholarship. The “blue team” were the professors who could have taught anywhere in the country. (When he interviewed these candidates, he sometimes lowered his knee to the ground in genuflection.) N.Y.U. gave some of them personal loans every year, on top of their salaries; if they stayed for a decade or more, the loans would be forgiven.

Sexton thought that the law-school curriculum was a “closed and self-referential system,” so he introduced classes that were more interdisciplinary and theoretical. He created what he called the first Global Law School, comprising a group of twenty scholars visiting from other countries. Linda Silberman, a law professor on the committee that reviewed the global program, was skeptical about the scope of the transformation. “I would say, ‘Why don’t you start smaller? First wait and see how it works.’ ” She said that Sexton, whose grandfather was the city’s tax commissioner, ran the school like “the Brooklyn pol he was”: he was good at placating different factions of faculty, and was loyal and generous, counselling distressed colleagues and doing them favors.

In 1999, the chair of N.Y.U.’s board of trustees, Martin Lipton, a founder of one of the country’s most successful corporate law firms, began considering Sexton as the next president of the university. Sexton had distinguished himself as a fund-raiser, increasing the law school’s endowment by more than a hundred million dollars. His attention to faculty recruitment helped the law school rise as high as fourth place in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, and to first place for international law. Sexton initially dismissed Lipton’s proposal, explaining that his talent was his “relational skills, which aren’t transportable.” He told me, “Moving from retail to wholesale is a very different way of being in the world, and it’s not natural for me.”

The following year, Lipton convinced Sexton that he was the right person to lead the university. Because of N.Y.U.’s brushes with bankruptcy, its trustees have been more active than other boards in their oversight of the administration. Before appointing Sexton, they didn’t interview any other candidates, provoking the anger of many professors. The president of N.Y.U.’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote in the Times that the decision exemplified the way that universities were “doing their best to reduce faculty power.”

Sexton was never entirely forgiven for what some saw as his illegitimacy, but it wasn’t until the campus got embroiled in a debate about unionization that a significant group of faculty became alienated. In 2002, N.Y.U. had become the first and only private university to recognize a graduate-student union. After a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board, Sexton and the labor leader John Sweeney, whom he knew socially, helped negotiate the terms of the deal. “If you’re a working-class Irish Catholic from Brooklyn, this is your tradition, the charter you grew up with,” Sexton told me.

Two years later, students at Brown tried to unionize, prompting the N.L.R.B., then under Republican control, to reverse its decision. More than twenty-five university presidents privately urged Sexton not to renew N.Y.U.’s union contract, now that it was no longer legally obligated. The N.L.R.B. wrote that collective bargaining was incompatible with the mission of a university, which has “primarily an educational, not economic, relationship” with its students. Dissenting members on the N.L.R.B. complained that the decision was “woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality.” To cut costs, universities were hiring fewer tenured professors and shifting teaching duties to graduate students, who received stipends that barely covered living expenses. “A big corporation has replaced the once self-centered company of scholars,” they wrote, quoting the historian Jacques Barzun. Given the perilous academic job market, the traditional justification for refusing the union—the idea that graduate students were apprentices, preparing for a lifelong vocation—no longer resonated. For many Ph.D. candidates, the receipt of their degree will mark the end, not the beginning, of their teaching careers.

The union had succeeded in winning a nearly forty-per-cent increase in compensation for graduate students and significant gains in health-care benefits, but, after nearly a year of deliberation, Sexton decided that it had been a failed experiment. At a university meeting, with two open microphones, Sexton told an audience of three hundred that the rules of industry corroded the trust between professors and graduate students. As students and professors booed—“Get serious, stop smiling!” one shouted—Sexton became more assertive, offering rebuttals to their arguments, as if he were defending himself at a debate tournament. The union had filed grievances that consumed “huge amounts of time, resources, and potentially principal,” he said. He reiterated the concerns of the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, the feminist scholar Catharine Stimpson, who had warned that the process of collective bargaining could impose excessive standardization on teaching, and blur the line between setting work conditions and making academic decisions.

At the meeting, students and faculty members complained that Sexton had discounted their opinions and rejected their requests for transparency. “There’s a double standard,” Lisa Duggan, a professor of social and cultural analysis, said. “The university moves in this corporate direction and then somehow expects the students to believe that they exist in this utopian, non-economic world of education.” Another professor, Mary Nolan, told Sexton, “As a historian of labor and management, I find this rhetoric all too familiar.” She urged her colleagues to be skeptical of the university’s claim that its teaching assistants were not workers but “members of a company family, part of an enterprise community, under the benevolent leadership of a wise father figure.”

The following fall, more than a hundred graduate students went on strike. They formed a picket line outside Bobst Library and held signs that read “The nerds are pissed.” In solidarity, professors held classes off campus, using space in union halls, bars, and churches. Fifty-seven protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct, and several graduate students lost their teaching positions and stipends.

Sexton describes the period of the strike (which petered out over the school year) as the first “hellacious” one of his presidency. He encountered sidewalk etchings of himself with horns, and received a flood of hate mail. Perhaps to justify his discomfort, he told himself that he was making a personal sacrifice for the good of the university. He recalled, “At one meeting, this woman stood up and said, ‘When will we inflict enough pain on you that you will capitulate?’ I said, ‘You got a bad break here. You have a president who was taught to think that crucifixion is a good thing.’ ”

The only time Sexton contemplated resigning was in the winter of 2007. On a Saturday evening in late January, he was in his den writing a critique of Richard Dawkins’s and Sam Harris’s denunciations of divinity. When he walked into the bedroom to ask his wife, Lisa, if she was ready for dinner, she said that she wanted to finish what she was reading, an essay by an astrophysicist about parallel universes. He returned thirty minutes later to find her unconscious. She’d had an aneurysm, and was pronounced dead the next day.

Lisa’s voice is still on Sexton’s answering machine, and her stacks of paperbacks remain on her nightstand. Two years after Lisa’s death, Sexton’s daughter tattooed Lisa’s Hebrew name on her foot; the next day, he had his assistant schedule an appointment at East Side Inks, a tattoo parlor in the Village, so that he could get a matching one. His Catholicism, which has been diluted over the years, seems most vivid when he speaks of Lisa’s presence in his life. She is “my hyper-conscience,” he told me. “I am representing both of us now.”

The first time I visited Sexton’s apartment, he pointed out Lisa’s decorative flourishes—the bookshelves she had built, the Chinese pewter tea sets, the framed portraits of their children—so that I could understand “the way Lisa warmed places.” He also gave me a video of her memorial service, explaining that I would never understand him without knowing her. In his eulogy, Sexton said that he subscribed to C. S. Lewis’s belief that the death of a spouse marked a new phase of love: “not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure.” At the end of his speech, he quoted a passage from “Mr. Blue,” replacing the name Blue with Lisa. “It can’t be so,” he said. “No. Say what you will. Do what you will. You can’t make me believe that Lisa is dead.”

Arthur R. Miller, who taught Sexton and Lisa at Harvard Law School, told me, “For the longest time, there was no conversation in which John didn’t bring up Lisa. She is alive as far as John is concerned.” Miller worries that Sexton will never date another woman, and wonders if after his presidency Sexton will “follow Charlie and turn to religion.” He said, “It’s not inconceivable that he would become a Jesuit and lead an ascetic, contemplative life.”

Sexton is constantly rehearsing and revising his story of himself, folding each episode of his life into a larger narrative, taking care to connect the themes. After Lisa’s death, he abandoned a plan to create a modern version of Brooklyn Prep—he had already recruited a headmaster—because it no longer felt relevant. “That was going to be an homage to Charlie, to my life before Lisa,” he said. Instead, he focussed on opening a new campus in Abu Dhabi, a project that had excited Lisa, who ran a foundation devoted to education and urban affairs. She thought that the university couldn’t be complete without a campus in the Arab world.

Shortly before her death, Sexton was invited to a meeting at the palace of Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. He was served tea and a large plate of dates. The scene has assumed a central place in the Sexton canon of stories. “The Crown Prince took a date, and it disappeared into his mouth,” Sexton told me. “I put the date into my mouth, and it had a pit! If you’re from Brooklyn, you know how to push a pit up into the side of your mouth. But I’m a demonstrative person. I’m scared I’m going to gesture and it will fly out! So I swallowed the pit. Where was I going to put it? In my pocket?”

Sexton described the meeting as a “fortunate accident of two deeply relational personalities coming together.” The conversation, scheduled for fifteen minutes, lasted nearly an hour, encroaching on the call for prayer. At the end of the meeting, the Crown Prince asked Sexton to keep the details of their negotiations private—a decision that later inflamed the faculty, who suspected that the university’s global expansion was conceived, at least partly, as a solution to a real-estate problem. On a campus pressed for space, a global network of study-abroad sites—visited by almost forty per cent of undergraduates—creates room for more students in less costly environments.

Professors resented that one person seemed to be determining the university’s pedagogical vision. Stephen Duncombe, a professor of media studies, said that faculty members were unable to make a “rational judgment” about the new campus. “We weren’t given the materials, the data,” he said, explaining that Sexton “failed to honor a basic principle of the university, which is built on the idea of free and open debate. He locked us out of the greater discussion.” Another professor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that, “until a few years ago, the faculty had the sense that we and John were all in this together—we liked being a part of this scrappy overachieving school, and there was a sense that John really cared about the faculty and their input. Then, sort of overnight—some people speculate it was in the wake of Lisa’s death—he became this top-down guy who was obsessed with his vision and his legacy to the exclusion of attention to faculty concerns.”

N.Y.U.’s new campus in Abu Dhabi, which will open in 2014, is surrounded by several acres of sand. Its twenty-seven buildings have been constructed in the past three years by seven thousand guest workers, mostly from South Asia. Four hundred palm trees will be planted on the grounds, which will also have two soccer fields, an Olympic-size pool, and a larger performance center than the ones for students in Greenwich Village.

The three-and-a-half-million-square-foot campus is being paid for by its owner, the government of Abu Dhabi, which has one of the largest oil reserves in the world. Citizens of the Emirates can receive a free public education through graduate school, and the government has extended this luxury to students at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, which accepts about two hundred students a year. Students who can’t afford the school, which is most of them, receive scholarships for tuition, housing, meals, textbooks, and travel to and from their homes, in a hundred different countries. Sexton told me that N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi exists “in the tradition of the best state universities twenty-five years ago, before they began privatizing.”

During the school year, Sexton travels to the Emirates every two weeks to teach two classes on the relationship between church and state. He has brought so much revenue to the Emirates airline—the government pays for his travel—that he’s been elevated to Invitation Only status, which means that he is the first person on the plane and may choose any seat he wants. When I travelled with him in June, the airline sent an S.U.V. to pick him up at his apartment, on Washington Square, and a flight attendant escorted us from the car, through security, to the Emirates Lounge. On our way, he persuaded the flight attendant to take classes in N.Y.U.’s hospitality program. “We have this locational endowment, because we’re in New York City,” he told her.

The next morning, we visited the new campus, on Saadiyat Island. A decade ago, the island, which juts into the Persian Gulf, was a large expanse of mangroves and sand. It’s now being developed as a cultural district, and branches of several museums, including the Guggenheim and the Louvre, are being built. Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director of Human Rights Watch, said that, compared with the two arts organizations, N.Y.U. has been “much more forthright and upstanding in terms of addressing labor values.” The university reimburses recruitment fees, enforces eight-hour workdays, and provides medical insurance, paid vacation, and severance pay. Whitson added that working conditions will never be ideal, since the country’s employment-sponsorship laws limit the rights of foreign workers, and forming unions and striking is illegal.

We went on a Friday, the first day of the weekend in the Emirates, and less than a third of the workers were at the campus. In an improvised parking lot, there were three white buses that shuttled workers to barracks, ten minutes away, after they finished their shifts. It was windy and nearly a hundred degrees, and our view of the St. Regis hotel, the closest structure to campus, was partly obscured by gusts of sand. Sexton, who wore slacks and a Fire Island T-shirt, stood outside the entrance of the school, which was covered in scaffolding, and said that sixty years ago Abu Dhabi had only a few buildings, most of them Bedouin forts. He repeated a quote attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “If you want to build a world-class city, build a great university and wait two hundred years.” As we walked down a sandy trail to the parking lot, he told me, “The Crown Prince completely gets that idea.”

After leaving the campus, we had dim sum at Shang Palace, a Chinese restaurant in a luxury hotel. Ali Al Mansoori, the director of the Higher Colleges of Technology, the largest institution of higher education in the Emirates, was waiting for us at the table. He was the only person in the room in traditional dress, in a white dishdasha and, on his head, a ghutra. Sexton, who drank two Diet Cokes and a coffee in quick succession, began sharing statistics about N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi’s incoming class, which was larger than planned—eighty-six per cent of admitted students have decided to enroll—and would include twenty-four students from the Emirates, more than from the United States.

Al Mansoori, who, like many leaders in the country, is younger than forty, complimented Sexton for attracting students who are “top of the cream” and observed that other satellite campuses in the Emirates, like Michigan State and George Mason University, shut down after only a few years. The schools were dependent on tuition, and failed to attract enough students. For similar reasons, N.Y.U.’s first degree-granting satellite campus, a graduate school in Singapore, created in 2007 by the School of the Arts, announced its closure last year; it now owes Singapore nine million dollars. Sexton told Al Mansoori, “I must get two offers a week from India. They say, ‘We’ll build you a campus. We’ll give you free land. We’ll fund you.’ But they almost always leave financial aid out of it.” He reached for a small plate of dumplings. “That kind of higher education will lock kids into a certain strata more than any caste system.”

Sexton continued, “There’s an argument going on in the United States, and all these fancy opinion-makers want to reduce the cost of an education.” Given cuts in government funding, there was no way to achieve this without “hollowing out the degrees.” “I feel like Don Quixote,” he went on. “I tell people that in a healthy economy the cost of higher education should be going up. The question is, what is the price for the student? What subsidy is provided?” In free moments on the trip, Sexton was drafting an essay in which he proposed a new method for financing higher education: students would take out low-interest government loans, and, after graduation, pay the federal government a small percentage of their annual salary for twenty years, at which point the loan would be forgiven. (The process would take half that time for those in “socially desirable occupations,” like nursing or teaching.)

His work on the essay had been interrupted by calls from administrators in Greenwich Village, who were trying to limit fallout from a report about professors and administrators at N.Y.U. receiving low-interest loans to buy million-dollar homes. After the votes of no confidence in New York, the London study-away site was preparing to take a vote on his leadership, too. In the car after lunch, Sexton listened on the phone to the concerns of the administrators, calmly reassuring them. His buoyancy was only slightly tempered after the phone call; it usually takes about twenty minutes for the wave of dejection to pass. At times, he seemed to temporarily convince himself that what he called the faculty “churn” or “Sturm und Drang” would benefit the university, because it could lead to new mechanisms for shared governance—N.Y.U. could be a model for other schools, he said—before dismissing his wishful thinking. In conversations with people in Abu Dhabi, where he was still treated as a visionary, he avoided discussing faculty unrest except to say, vaguely, twice, that he hoped to turn lemons into lemonade.

The collegial community whose loss professors are mourning in Washington Square appears to be in full flower in the Emirates. The faculty and the administration at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi have an open, congenial relationship, and the professors have built the curriculum from scratch. Nationality is no longer the organizing rubric for disciplines in the humanities; literature, for instance, is divided into classes focussed on particular genres (with texts translated from multiple languages). N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi has freed itself of N.Y.U.’s inheritance: the lumbering bureaucracy, the stratified faculty, the overpacked classes, and the students burdened by debt. But the school has little viability as a model for higher education, since it depends on the extraordinary largesse of a government patron.

The associate dean of arts and humanities, Shamoon Zamir, who used to chair the faculty council at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, was surprised to discover that the New York faculty saw the Abu Dhabi professors as sellouts, even traitors, for profiting, indirectly, from the project of an autocrat. When Zamir sat in on a university-senate meeting in New York, he was alarmed by the way professors talked about the Emirates. He said that he had heard professors refer to the “sultan” of Abu Dhabi (a non-existent position), and that they seemed to believe that all women visiting the country would be oppressed. “It is quite galling to hear a classically Orientalist view coming from your liberal college,” he told me.

The critiques of N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi reached a peak after the Arab Spring, when the Emirates government detained several democracy activists, including a lecturer at the Abu Dhabi branch of the Sorbonne. A hundred and thirty N.Y.U. professors signed a petition urging the university to issue a public statement condemning the arrests. Human Rights Watch criticized Sexton after learning that he had told the university senate that the Emirates had a “right to defend itself against security threats” and that N.Y.U. should be less “ethnocentric.”

Sexton insisted that he was adhering to the same principles that the university had always followed: N.Y.U. has never issued institution-wide political statements to the American government, so he didn’t intend to do so with foreign ones. Cyrus Patell, an English professor at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, said that “lefty liberals are having a conservative knee-jerk reaction. They somehow assume we should be in the Arab world to export democracy, as the Bush Administration did.”

The degree to which universities can or should address the politics of their host countries has pitted several university faculties against their administrations. More than forty American universities have expanded overseas; some, like Yale, with its new college in Singapore, explicitly studied N.Y.U.’s model. Unlike traditional study-abroad sites, these campuses are generally initiated by administrators rather than by professors. They are focussed less on local language and culture than on creating “global citizens,” an ideal that runs the risk of absolving students from responsibility to their surroundings.

N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi operates according to the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which states that “teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results.” None of the professors or students I talked to said that they felt restrictions on what they could study. (Political freedom is a different matter; no one seemed sure what would happen if a student criticized the government.) As with any liberal college, there were many gay and Jewish faculty and students, annual performances of “The Vagina Monologues,” and student activists working on behalf of the laborers. For a theatre project, four female students created a short documentary, in which thirty of their classmates, as a parody, repeat what their friends at home continually say to them: “Aren’t you going to be, like, uncomfortable over there?” “So is it O.K. to be there as, like, a woman?” “You are so brave.”

The Emirati students, some of whom are visiting from the country’s national universities, found themselves fielding similar concerns from their own friends and families. One female student, who now works for the government and asked that she not be named, told me that when she applied to N.Y.U. a teacher warned her, “You should be careful, because I don’t know what their agenda is.” Another student, Mohamed Al Mahmoud, said that his father asked him, “Aren’t they going to try to teach you secularism?”

Sexton’s class is particularly popular among the Emirati students. In New York, he tends to hover over his students, gripping their shoulders as they respond to his questions. In Abu Dhabi, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to resist the impulse to make physical contact, so he taught his first class while standing in a hole in the middle of the table—an open circle for computer plugs.

He wanders around the campus like a benevolent headmaster. In this intimate atmosphere, where many administrative decisions are left to the vice-chancellor, formerly the president of Swarthmore, Sexton is free to busy himself with student gossip rather than with finances. He is exquisitely sensitive to the emotional needs of lovelorn nineteen-year-olds. Twice, he approached female students who looked dejected and asked, “Are you O.K.?” With some gentle persistence, they broke into tears.

During his office hours, students who had scheduled appointments ended up overlapping with one another. “We’re collectivizing, because I talk so much,” he told newcomers. He referred to one student as the “mother hen,” and another as the class’s “big daddy.” To a student from Ethiopia, who admitted that he had no internship for the summer, Sexton said, “You’ve got to manage that, big fella. You’re going to run Ethiopia someday, right? Is that the goal? If you are going to run the world, it sounds like you need to get more organized.” To a freshman from Rwanda, who was frustrated that no one was sponsoring the nonprofit organization he intended to found, Sexton said, “God, we’re so much alike!” He paused. “I take that back. I cannot compare. I admire you so much. We’re similar in personality, O.K.? You’re letting your passion overwhelm your foundation.”

In the past two years, faculties at more than a dozen universities have held votes of no confidence, a method of desperation that was once rarely employed. Molly Corbett Broad, a former president of the University of North Carolina and the president of the American Council on Education, told me, “All too frequently now, I’ve been receiving calls from presidents who are afraid they are about to be fired.” Some worry that they’ve lost the trust of their faculty, while others fear that they’ve disappointed their boards. She said, “Board members come out of the private sector, where their corporations have gone through dramatic change as a result of new technologies and globalization. They don’t want their institutions to be left behind.”

The principles that make academia a unique American workplace—the fact that workers have tenure and share the responsibility of governance—often conflict with the ambitions of the trustees, who want more flexibility to stake out their corner of the market as quickly as possible. Last year, the board at the University of Virginia was so impatient with its president, Teresa Sullivan, for not innovating enough—she had failed to understand the merits of “strategic dynamism” and the benefits of online education—that it fired her without consulting the faculty. (The faculty senate voted no confidence in the board, and Sullivan was reinstated.)

Craig Calhoun, the director of the London School of Economics and a sociologist who studies higher education, said that faculty members, too, have accepted the logic of the corporate world; rather than spending their careers at one university and devoting themselves to its improvement, they are often on the market, looking for a better deal. He said he wished that tenured professors would be more proactive in responding to the changing conditions of their work. “They are extremely conservative and tend to look at things in a narrow, self-interested way,” he said. “It would be a tremendous resource if they were the ones coming up with ideas about how the university can change to meet future challenges. But all they have is a defense of the status quo.” Calhoun taught at N.Y.U. for sixteen years, and he said that Sexton “came in with a strong, communitarian message—he was serious about his commitment to that ideal—but it played to the university as a corporate message, because it was filtered through a big, hierarchical leadership structure.” He thinks that the Sexton administration blundered by assuming that faculty criticism was just a matter of “sour grapes,” from chronic whiners whose careers had gone stagnant.

Initially, the Faculty of Arts and Science was divided about holding a vote of no confidence. But faculty sentiment shifted last February, when President Obama appointed Jacob Lew, the university’s former executive vice-president, to be Treasury Secretary. Lew had been tasked with making the university more efficient, and he had cut seventy million dollars from its operating budget. But, in the confirmation process, it emerged that N.Y.U. had paid him a salary of nearly eight hundred thousand dollars, as well as a six-hundred-and-eighty-five-thousand-dollar exit bonus, and $1.4 million in loans (which were partially forgiven) for a home in Riverdale. Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, has asked Sexton for financial documents going back to 2000, so that he can investigate whether the university misused its nonprofit status by bestowing on its top employees benefits more fitting for a corporation.

A month after Lew’s confirmation hearing, every professor at the university received a memo titled “Where the Money Goes at N.Y.U.” The letter was composed by the steering committee of Faculty Against the Sexton Plan, a group of twenty professors who send daily e-mails to some four hundred professors on their Listserv. The group had analyzed the university’s I.R.S. filings and discovered that Lew was not the only administrator who had received special perks. Sixteen administrators, collectively, had salaries that totalled more than twelve million dollars. Sexton received a salary of $1.5 million and a loan from the university for a home on Fire Island, and soon he will receive a “length of service” bonus of $2.6 million. The memo noted that the “inflated compensation for N.Y.U.’s top administrative caste” was in sharp contrast to its growing body of adjunct professors, who have no job security and can earn less then four thousand dollars a class. The letter described N.Y.U. as an “empty, bright world brand that profits no one but its managers.”

Three days later, the Faculty of Arts and Science voted that it had lost confidence in Sexton. Five more schools held votes, three voting against Sexton and two in support, including the law school, which composed a report that criticized the “political style of the leaders of the dump Sexton movement.” (The faculty councils of the medical, nursing, and dentistry schools also expressed their support.) Martin Lipton, the chair of the board, told me that the votes took him “completely by surprise.” “I was flabbergasted, frankly,” he said. At a black-tie dinner for trustees last May, Lipton asked, “What would our nineteenth-century forefathers think about the unwarranted calumnies thrown at him? What would they think about the attempts to derail the most important innovation in university education in the last two centuries?”

Lipton held meetings with fourteen groups of faculty last spring to discuss ways of developing more democratic methods of governing. The process convinced him that the construction plan had motivated professors to voice all their frustrations, many of which were personal, involving their own compensation, and went back many years. He said that the board hadn’t paid much attention to the debate about unionization until it was too late. “Sometimes, later on, you wish you would have made an opposite decision,” he told me. “It would have avoided a real schism.”

In the fall of 2012, to mollify critics of the Greenwich Village expansion, Sexton had set up a committee to evaluate the plan, and to review and to publicly disclose all relevant legal and financial documents. But some professors, appointed by their deans, refused to serve. They saw it as a mockery of democracy: a committee of professors who had been appointed, not elected, to rubber-stamp a set of decisions that had already been made. (Faculty Against the Sexton Plan and neighborhood groups are now suing the city for allowing the destruction of parkland by approving the buildings N.Y.U. has designed.) Eventually, twenty professors, half of whom lived on the blocks flagged for construction, agreed to be on the committee. After a year of research, they found that N.Y.U. has an urgent shortage of academic space, and proposed that the school build on one of the faculty blocks, on a lot now occupied by a gym, which the university had been planning to do, and put off everything else for nine years (at which point, another committee will decide how the rest of the plan should be executed). The committee also concluded that the university had adopted prudent assumptions in its three-billion-dollar plan for capital spending, roughly a quarter of which will be devoted to construction on the block. In the next decade, the university intends to raise a hundred and seventy-four million dollars and borrow $1.8 billion.

This summer, Faculty Against the Sexton Plan called on Lipton to resign as chairman, saying that the board had been too supportive of Sexton’s “ ‘growth’ obsession.” A month later, the board announced that the university would establish a committee that would include professors and students to search for the next president. Sexton intends to step down as soon as his contract expires, in 2016. He told me that the next three years will be “a time for breathing.” “You can’t have people running at full throttle the whole time,” he said. “The analogy isn’t to exhaustion so much as it is to: enough already.”

Like few other university administrators, Sexton has become synonymous with the institution he leads. Many of his initiatives are anchored in personal relationships. (Fletcher Nightwine’s encounter with Sexton resulted, a month later, in a significant increase in his financial aid, and he has chosen to remain at the school.) When I asked Sexton if he had ever considered leading another university—years before, he had been approached about the presidency of Johns Hopkins—he told me, “I am in a monogamous relationship.” It’s hard to imagine all the institutional arrangements he has brokered continuing in his absence. In addition to N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, the university is navigating a recent merger with Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, an engineering school. This fall, N.Y.U. Shanghai, which is modelled on N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, is welcoming its first three hundred students, fifty-one per cent from China and the rest from other parts of the world. The governments of Shanghai City and the Pudong District have underwritten construction, and, with the federal Ministry of Education, will provide funding for the school and partial scholarships to all the students from China.

The Shanghai campus, which is working together with East China Normal University, has already come under scrutiny. In June, Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese dissident who was a fellow last year at N.Y.U. School of Law, suggested that he was being forced to leave the university because of pressure from China, a claim that the university vigorously denied. Harold Koh, a former legal adviser to the Department of State, told me that he called Sexton in the middle of the night in 2012 after Chen had fled to the American Embassy in Beijing. Although Sexton was deep into negotiations with the Chinese government, he immediately offered Chen a fellowship. “He said, ‘Absolutely,’ without hesitation,” Koh said. “I don’t know if there is a single other university president who would have done that.” Koh said that the stories in the media about Chen’s departure were “totally preposterous and inconceivable,” explaining that there was no expectation that the fellowship would be open-ended. Koh added that since he first got to know Sexton, at Harvard Law School, there have always been people who are suspicious of his uncanny optimism, his commitment to serving some larger social mission. He said, “Somehow, they want to suggest that he is not for real.”

Last spring, Sexton attended his fifty-year reunion at Fordham. More than fifty white men in their early seventies, wearing string necklaces with crimson nametags, mingled in a banquet room. Sexton introduced me to his friends with compliments that they immediately rejected; one had “started the Peace Corps.” Another had “invented adolescent medicine.” When he ran into a former suite mate who had been the general counsel for the United Steel Workers, Sexton, unprompted, explained that N.Y.U.’s student union hadn’t worked. “We tried hard,” he assured him. He and his former suite mates spent the night exchanging memories, many featuring Sexton behaving as some sort of daredevil or buffoon: the time he streaked across campus; his commitment to wearing pimple cream both night and day; the phone calls to his girlfriend that he paid for by selling pints of his blood.

Two weeks later, Sexton returned to Fordham to attend Mass and to visit the priests in Murray-Weigel Hall, a home for ailing Jesuits. Charlie Winans had spent the final years of his life there, and Sexton had visited him every few weeks. Now Sexton came to the nursing home only about once a year, but everyone still remembered him as Charlie’s protégé and caretaker. Pale, stooped men, clutching the bannister, or rolling along in wheelchairs, called out his name (“That sounds a hell of a lot like John Sexton!” or “Oh, my goodness, John, how lovely!”) as he walked down the hall. The Mass was held in a small chapel, a short walk from the men’s bedrooms. The priests sat in two rows, one for those in wheelchairs and another for those who could walk. The sermon, which was given by one of the healthier residents, was about finding common ground with those who hate us. (“A pretty interesting message, given what I’m going through,” Sexton said later.) He seemed like the perfect schoolboy: he dutifully sang along with the hymns, waited in line to receive the wafer, and, at the end of the service, found a man half-asleep in his wheelchair and pushed him out of the room.

After Mass, he visited James DiGiacomo, his former debate coach at Brooklyn Prep, who lives on the third floor of the home, in a small room with a reclining bed, a tray for meals, and an unused desk. A recreational therapist knocked on his door and announced, “John Sexton! President of N.Y.U.!”

DiGiacomo, who was lying in bed, seemed to have lost most of his capacity to speak. He let go of his television remote control and smiled.

Sexton pulled up a chair and talked aimlessly about TV and baseball. Then he reminded DiGiacomo how his class had translated “Meet the Mets” into Latin. “Occurrite Mettibus, occurrite Mettibus,” Sexton sang.

“Come on,” he said, encouraging DiGiacomo to join in. “You did this! You were the Latin teacher, I was the student.”

DiGiacomo quietly sang a few syllables. “Veniamus, occurramus Mettibus.”

“I’m at N.Y.U. now,” Sexton said, stroking DiGiacomo’s hand. “We have our graduation at the Yankees’ stadium.”

“Oh, really?” DiGiacomo said, faintly.

“We fill the whole place.”

“Wow.”

On our ride back to Greenwich Village, Sexton remarked that the visits to Fordham had been “very reinforcing.” Surrounded by his former teachers, he was seen the way he wanted to be: the striving student, following their example. In this realm, there was no clash between the spirit of inquiry and worldly concerns, a conflict that he seldom acknowledges as such. His most controversial decisions—the ones that appear most antithetical to the core values of a university—seem to come from a place of deep idealism. In the car, he told me that he had been particularly inspired to realize, at his fifty-year reunion, that his class had graduated during the Second Vatican Council, a coincidence that he hadn’t previously considered. “You realize these things are in you,” he told me. “I’ve been consistently searching, I would say, for a dogma-less religion.”

At the end of the car ride, he handed me a folder of documents that would be my “homework.” He often gave me e-mails that he’d printed out, articles that he’d annotated, or scraps of paper with notes that he’d scribbled in the middle of the night. This batch included a newsletter about interdisciplinary education in medicine, a report on the internationalization of higher education, and an outline he had written titled “A Framing.” The document listed significant periods in his life, in chronological order and organized into subcategories, and a synthesis of his life’s major theme. “Widening and deepening of experience and understanding as the constant,” he had written. “Every encounter, every day.” ♦

SHOUTS & MURMURS
Walking Normally: The Facts

by Ian Frazier

CLAIM: When we are at the mall you say that you have walked so much that you need to be carried, because your legs are “all stretched out.”

FACT: While hyperextension of muscles, tendons, and joints is a real and serious problem among certain demographics (manual laborers, professional athletes), it is rarely seen in anyone four and a half years old.

CLAIM: Walking backward is better than walking forward.

FACT: Traditionally, human beings have walked forward rather than backward because their eyes are on the front of them and therefore can look ahead and help them see where they are going. Walking backward, as you are doing now, increases the likelihood that you will—O.K., maybe now you understand what I am trying to tell you, because you have walked backward into that lady.

CLAIM: Holding your wrists and hands up inside the sleeves of your jacket and flapping the sleeve ends back and forth when you walk somehow improves your walking, and makes you look like an elephant.

FACT: Flapping your sleeves does nothing for your walking and makes it harder for me to grab your hand when you are about to veer into a video-game store where we are not going. An elephant does not flap its trunk when it walks, and, in any case, it has only one of them.

CLAIM: Skipping is faster than running.

FACT: I hate to break this to you, but skipping is actually not faster than running. It is slower. Scientists have done tests to prove this. The problem involves the added friction of the soles of the feet in the characteristic skipping motion. I know your own skipping is “special” skipping, with that extra hop that you have added in, but otherwise it is physically the same as conventional, ordinary skipping, and subject to the same laws.

CLAIM: Pressing yourself flat against the counter by the cash register, extending your arms full length, and sliding along the counter and then along the wall and then along the door until someone opens the door from the outside and you tumble out onto the sidewalk is a good way to leave a restaurant.

FACT: Look at your mother. Look at me. Look at every other human being in the world. Do we plaster ourselves against the wall and slide along it when we leave a restaurant? Why do you think nobody else does that? I don’t care if Billy Nolan does it. Nobody in his right mind does it because it is not a good way to leave a restaurant. There is a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and sliding along flat surfaces in restaurants is generally not the right way to do anything.

CLAIM: Running very fast in circles around my legs while we are waiting for your mother by the baggage claim will hurry her arrival.

FACT: That is incorrect. There is no connection between your running and the plane that will make the plane land faster. Did you hear what I just said?

CLAIM: With the new pogo stick that your aunt gave you, you will jump over trees and houses.

FACT: No, you will not. What pogo sticks are actually good for is this: bouncing two inches off the ground once or maybe twice, and then falling over. That is it. Pogo sticks are a swindle. In the history of the world, no one has ever jumped over a house on a pogo stick. Or a tree. Or a car. Even a small car. O.K., yes—maybe a toy car. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. You are saying that you will go out on the driveway with your pogo stick and jump over the house, and I am saying that you will go out, get on the pogo stick, bounce once or twice, and end up still on the driveway, only with a skinned knee and screaming your head off. In this you will exactly resemble every other human who has ever attempted such a feat since the invention of the pogo stick. Your aunt gives you these things to torture me, like that life-size Earth First stuffed toy polar bear that now takes up half the living room.

CLAIM: If you’re not supposed to walk backward, what about walking sideways?

FACT: No. And watch where you’re going. You walked into my foot.

CLAIM: How about walking like this?

FACT: Just walk normally.

CLAIM: This is walking normally, for a primate.

FACT: Walk normally for a human.

CLAIM: Mrs. Varma said a human is a primate.

FACT: Yes, that is true, and just please walk normally, all right?

CLAIM: The stroller with your little sister in it will be easier for me to push if you help by pulling it from the front while singing, “Yo-ee-o, yoe, hup!”

FACT: No. Please. Stop that. ♦

A CRITIC AT LARGE
Man and Superman

In athletic competitions, what qualifies as a sporting chance?

by Malcolm Gladwell

Toward the end of “The Sports Gene” (Penguin/Current), David Epstein makes his way to a remote corner of Finland to visit a man named Eero Mäntyranta. Mäntyranta lives in a small house next to a lake, among the pine and spruce trees north of the Arctic Circle. He is in his seventies. There is a statue of him in the nearby village. “Everything about him has a certain width to it,” Epstein writes. “The bulbous nose in the middle of a softly rounded face. His thick fingers, broad jaw, and a barrel chest covered by a red knit sweater with a stern-faced reindeer across the middle. He is a remarkable-looking man.” What’s most remarkable is the color of his face. It is a “shade of cardinal, mottled in places with purple,” and evocative of “the hue of the red paint that comes from this region’s iron-rich soil.”

Mäntyranta carries a rare genetic mutation. His DNA has an anomaly that causes his bone marrow to overproduce red blood cells. That accounts for the color of his skin, and also for his extraordinary career as a competitive cross-country skier. In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles—a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles. Mäntyranta, by virtue of his unique physiology, had something like sixty-five per cent more red blood cells than the normal adult male. In the 1960, 1964, and 1968 Winter Olympic Games, he won a total of seven medals—three golds, two silvers, and two bronzes—and in the same period he also won two world-championship victories in the thirty-kilometre race. In the 1964 Olympics, he beat his closest competitor in the fifteen-kilometre race by forty seconds, a margin of victory, Epstein says, “never equaled in that event at the Olympics before or since.”

In “The Sports Gene,” there are countless tales like this, examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different from the rest of us. They respond more effectively to training. The shape of their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They carry genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes.

Epstein tells the story of Donald Thomas, who on the seventh high jump of his life cleared 7' 3.25"—practically a world-class height. The next year, after a grand total of eight months of training, Thomas won the world championships. How did he do it? He was blessed, among other things, with unusually long legs and a strikingly long Achilles tendon—ten and a quarter inches in length—which acted as a kind of spring, catapulting him high into the air when he planted his foot for a jump. (Kangaroos have long tendons as well, Epstein tell us, which is what gives them their special hop.)

Why do so many of the world’s best distance runners come from Kenya and Ethiopia? The answer, Epstein explains, begins with weight. A runner needs not just to be skinny but—more specifically—to have skinny calves and ankles, because every extra pound carried on your extremities costs more than a pound carried on your torso. That’s why shaving even a few ounces off a pair of running shoes can have a significant effect. Runners from the Kalenjin tribe, in Kenya—where the majority of the country’s best runners come from—turn out to be skinny in exactly this way. Epstein cites a study comparing Kalenjins with Danes; the Kalenjins were shorter and had longer legs, and their lower legs were nearly a pound lighter. That translates to eight per cent less energy consumed per kilometre. (For evidence of the peculiar Kalenjin lower leg, look up pictures of the great Kenyan miler Asbel Kiprop, a tall and elegant man who runs on what appear to be two ebony-colored pencils.) According to Epstein, there’s an evolutionary explanation for all this: hot and dry environments favor very thin, long-limbed frames, which are easy to cool, just as cold climates favor thick, squat bodies, which are better at conserving heat.

Distance runners also get a big advantage from living at high altitudes, where the body is typically forced to compensate for the lack of oxygen by producing extra red blood cells. Not too high up, mind you. In the Andes, for example, the air is too rarefied for the kind of workouts necessary to be a world-class runner. The optimal range is six to nine thousand feet. The best runners in Ethiopia and Kenya come from the ridges of the Rift Valley, which, Epstein writes, are “plumb in the sweet spot.” When Kenyans compete against Europeans or North Americans, the Kenyans come to the track with an enormous head start.

What we are watching when we watch élite sports, then, is a contest among wildly disparate groups of people, who approach the starting line with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages. There will be Donald Thomases who barely have to train, and there will be Eero Mäntyrantas, who carry around in their blood, by dumb genetic luck, the ability to finish forty seconds ahead of their competitors. Élite sports supply, as Epstein puts it, a “splendid stage for the fantastic menagerie that is human biological diversity.” The menagerie is what makes sports fascinating. But it has also burdened high-level competition with a contradiction. We want sports to be fair and we take elaborate measures to make sure that no one competitor has an advantage over any other. But how can a fantastic menagerie ever be a contest among equals?

During the First World War, the U.S. Army noticed a puzzling pattern among the young men drafted into military service. Soldiers from some parts of the country had a high incidence of goitre—a lump on their neck caused by the swelling of the thyroid gland. Thousands of recruits could not button the collar of their uniform. The average I.Q. of draftees, we now suspect, also varied according to the same pattern. Soldiers from coastal regions seemed more “normal” than soldiers from other parts of the country.

The culprit turned out to be a lack of iodine. Iodine is an essential micronutrient. Without it, the human brain does not develop normally and the thyroid begins to enlarge. And in certain parts of the United States in those years there wasn’t enough iodine in the local diet. As the economists James Feyrer, Dimitra Politi, and David Weil write, in a recent paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research:

Ocean water is rich in iodine, which is why endemic goiter is not observed in coastal areas. From the ocean, iodine is transferred to the soil by rain. This process, however, only reaches the upper layers of soil, and it can take thousands of years to complete. Heavy rainfall can cause soil erosion, in which case the iodine-rich upper layers of soil are washed away. The last glacial period had the same effect: iodine-rich soil was substituted by iodine-poor soil from crystalline rocks. This explains the prevalence of endemic goiter in regions that were marked by intense glaciation, such as Switzerland and the Great Lakes region.

After the First World War, the U.S. War Department published a report called “Defects Found in Drafted Men,” which detailed how the incidence of goitre varied from state to state, with rates forty to fifty times as high in places like Idaho, Michigan, and Montana as in coastal areas.

The story is not dissimilar from Epstein’s account of Kenyan distance runners, in whom accidents of climate and geography combine to create dramatic differences in abilities. In the early years of the twentieth century, the physiological development of American children was an example of the “fantastic menagerie that is human biological diversity.”

In this case, of course, we didn’t like the fantastic menagerie. In 1924, the Morton Salt Company, at the urging of public-health officials, began adding iodine to its salt, and initiated an advertising campaign touting its benefits. That practice has been applied successfully in many developing countries in the world: iodine supplementation has raised I.Q. scores by as much as thirteen points—an extraordinary increase. The iodized salt in your cupboard is an intervention in the natural order of things. When a student from the iodine-poor mountains of Idaho was called upon to compete against a student from iodine-rich coastal Maine, we thought of it as our moral obligation to redress their natural inequality. The reason debates over élite performance have become so contentious in recent years, however, is that in the world of sport there is little of that clarity. What if those two students were competing in a race? Should we still be able to give the naturally disadvantaged one the equivalent of iodine? We can’t decide.

Epstein tells us that baseball players have, as a group, remarkable eyesight. The ophthalmologist Louis Rosenbaum tested close to four hundred major- and minor-league baseball players over four years and found an average visual acuity of about 20/13; that is, the typical professional baseball player can see at twenty feet what the rest of us can see at thirteen feet. When Rosenbaum looked at the Los Angeles Dodgers, he found that half had 20/10 vision and a small number fell below 20/9, “flirting with the theoretical limit of the human eye,” as Epstein points out. The ability to consistently hit a baseball thrown at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour, with a baffling array of spins and curves, requires the kind of eyesight commonly found in only a tiny fraction of the general population.

Eyesight can be improved—in some cases dramatically—through laser surgery or implantable lenses. Should a promising young baseball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, Major League Baseball says yes. Major League Baseball also permits pitchers to replace the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow of their throwing arm with a tendon taken from a cadaver or elsewhere in the athlete’s body. Tendon-replacement surgery is similar to laser surgery: it turns the athlete into an improved version of his natural self.

But when it comes to drugs Major League Baseball—like most sports—draws the line. An athlete cannot use a drug to become an improved version of his natural self, even if the drug is used in doses that are not harmful, and is something that—like testosterone—is no more than a copy of a naturally occurring hormone, available by prescription to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world.

Baseball is in the middle of one of its periodic doping scandals, centering on one of the game’s best players, Alex Rodriguez. Rodriguez is among the most disliked players of his generation. He tried to recover from injury and extend his career through illicit means. (He has appealed his recent suspension, which was based on these allegations.) It is hard to think about Rodriguez, however, and not think about Tommy John, who, in 1974, was the first player to trade in his ulnar collateral ligament for an improved version. John used modern medicine to recover from injury and extend his career. He won a hundred and sixty-four games after his transformation, far more than he did before science intervened. He had one of the longest careers in baseball history, retiring at the age of forty-six. His bionic arm enabled him to win at least twenty games a season, the benchmark of pitching excellence. People loved Tommy John. Maybe Alex Rodriguez looks at Tommy John—and at the fact that at least a third of current major-league pitchers have had the same surgery—and is genuinely baffled about why baseball has drawn a bright moral line between the performance-enhancing products of modern endocrinology and those offered by orthopedics.

The other great doping pariah is Lance Armstrong. He apparently removed large quantities of his own blood and then re-infused himself before competition, in order to boost the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in his system. Armstrong wanted to be like Eero Mäntyranta. He wanted to match, through his own efforts, what some very lucky people already do naturally and legally. Before we condemn him, though, shouldn’t we have to come up with a good reason that one man is allowed to have lots of red blood cells and another man is not?

“I’ve always said you could have hooked us up to the best lie detectors on the planet and asked us if we were cheating, and we’d have passed,” Lance Armstrong’s former teammate Tyler Hamilton writes in his autobiography, “The Secret Race” (co-written with Daniel Coyle; Bantam). “Not because we were delusional—we knew we were breaking the rules—but because we didn’t think of it as cheating. It felt fair to break the rules.”

“The Secret Race” deserves to be read alongside “The Sports Gene,” because it describes the flip side of the question that Epstein explores. What if you aren’t Eero Mäntyranta?

Hamilton was a skier who came late to cycling, and he paints himself as an underdog. When he first met Armstrong—at the Tour DuPont, in Delaware—he looked around at the other professional riders and became acutely conscious that he didn’t look the part. “You can tell a rider’s fitness by the shape of his ass and the veins in his legs, and these asses were bionic, smaller and more powerful than any I’d ever seen,” he writes. The riders’ “leg veins looked like highway maps. Their arms were toothpicks. . . . They were like racehorses.” Hamilton’s trunk was oversized. His leg veins did not pop. He had a skier’s thighs. His arms were too muscled, and he pedalled with an ungainly “potato-masher stroke.”

When Hamilton joined Armstrong on the U.S. Postal Service racing team, he was forced to relearn the sport, to leave behind, as he puts it, the romantic world “where I used to climb on my bike and simply hope I had a good day.” The makeover began with his weight. When Michele Ferrari, the key Postal Service adviser, first saw Hamilton, he told him he was too fat, and in cycling terms he was. Riding a bicycle quickly is a function of the power you apply to the pedals divided by the weight you are carrying, and it’s easier to reduce the weight than to increase the power. Hamilton says he would come home from a workout, after burning thousands of calories, drink a large bottle of seltzer water, take two or three sleeping pills—and hope to sleep through dinner and, ideally, breakfast the following morning. At dinner with friends, Hamilton would take a large bite, fake a sneeze, spit the food into a napkin, and then run off to the bathroom to dispose of it. He knew that he was getting into shape, he says, when his skin got thin and papery, when it hurt to sit down on a wooden chair because his buttocks had disappeared, and when his jersey sleeve was so loose around his biceps that it flapped in the wind. At the most basic level, cycling was about physical transformation: it was about taking the body that nature had given you and forcibly changing it.

“Lance and Ferrari showed me there were more variables than I’d ever imagined, and they all mattered: wattages, cadence, intervals, zones, joules, lactic acid, and, of course, hematocrit,” Hamilton writes. “Each ride was a math problem: a precisely mapped set of numbers for us to hit. . . . It’s one thing to go ride for six hours. It’s another to ride for six hours following a program of wattages and cadences, especially when those wattages and cadences are set to push you to the ragged edge of your abilities.”

Hematocrit, the last of those variables, was the number they cared about most. It refers to the percentage of the body’s blood that is made up of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. The higher the hematocrit, the more endurance you have. (Mäntyranta had a very high hematocrit.) The paradox of endurance sports is that an athlete can never work as hard as he wants, because if he pushes himself too far his hematocrit will fall. Hamilton had a natural hematocrit of forty-two per cent—which is on the low end of normal. By the third week of the Tour de France, he would be at thirty-six per cent, which meant a six-per-cent decrease in his power—in the force he could apply to his pedals. In a sport where power differentials of a tenth of a per cent can be decisive, this “qualifies as a deal breaker.”

For the members of the Postal Service squad, the solution was to use the hormone EPO and blood transfusions to boost their hematocrits as high as they could without raising suspicion. (Before 2000, there was no test for EPO itself, so riders were not allowed to exceed a hematocrit of fifty per cent.) Then they would add maintenance doses over time, to counteract the deterioration in their hematocrit caused by races and workouts. The procedures were precise and sophisticated. Testosterone capsules were added to the mix to aid recovery. They were referred to as “red eggs.” EPO (a.k.a. erythropoietin), a naturally occurring hormone that increases the production of red blood cells, was Edgar—short for Edgar Allan Poe. During the Tour de France, and other races, bags of each rider’s blood were collected in secret locations at predetermined intervals, then surreptitiously ferried from stage to stage in refrigerated containers for strategic transfusions. The window of vulnerability after taking a drug—the interval during which doping could be detected—was called “glowtime.” Most riders who doped (and in the Armstrong era, it now appears, nearly all the top riders did) would take two thousand units of Edgar subcutaneously every couple of days, which meant they “glowed” for a dangerously long time. Armstrong and his crew practiced microdosing, taking five hundred units of Edgar nightly and injecting the drug directly into the vein, where it was dispersed much more quickly.

“The Secret Race” is full of paragraphs like this:

The trick with getting Edgar in your vein, of course, is that you have to get it in the vein. Miss the vein—inject it in the surrounding tissue—and Edgar stays in your body far longer; you might test positive. Thus, microdosing requires a steady hand and a good sense of feel, and a lot of practice; you have to sense the tip of the needle piercing the wall of the vein, and draw back the plunger to get a little bit of blood so you know you’re in. In this, as in other things, Lance was blessed: he had veins like water mains. Mine were small, which was a recurring headache.

Hamilton was eventually caught and was suspended from professional cycling. He became one of the first in his circle to implicate Lance Armstrong, testifying before federal investigators and appearing on “60 Minutes.” He says that he regrets his years of using performance-enhancing drugs. The lies and duplicity became an unbearable burden. His marriage fell apart. He sank into a depression. His book is supposed to serve as his apology. At that task, it fails. Try as he might—and sometimes he doesn’t seem to be trying very hard—Hamilton cannot explain why a sport that has no problem with the voluntary induction of anorexia as a performance-enhancing measure is so upset about athletes infusing themselves with their own blood.

“Dope is not really a magical boost as much as it is a way to control against declines,” Hamilton writes. Doping meant that cyclists finally could train as hard as they wanted. It was the means by which pudgy underdogs could compete with natural wonders. “People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work,” Hamilton writes. For many riders, the opposite was true:

EPO granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you’d ever imagined, in both training and racing. It rewarded precisely what I was good at: having a great work ethic, pushing myself to the limit and past it. I felt almost giddy: this was a new landscape. I began to see races differently. They weren’t rolls of the genetic dice, or who happened to be on form that day. They didn’t depend on who you were. They depended on what you did—how hard you worked, how attentive and professional you were in your preparation.

This is a long way from the exploits of genial old men living among the pristine pines of northern Finland. It is a vision of sports in which the object of competition is to use science, intelligence, and sheer will to conquer natural difference. Hamilton and Armstrong may simply be athletes who regard this kind of achievement as worthier than the gold medals of a man with the dumb luck to be born with a random genetic mutation. ♦

BOOKS
The Tug of War

Woodrow Wilson and the power of the Presidency.

by Jill Lepore

“Mr. President, I hope you’ll be happy here,” William Taft said to Woodrow Wilson as he left the White House on the day of Wilson’s Inauguration, in 1913.

“Happy?” Wilson asked. He had hardly thought of happiness.

Taft had been miserable, his Presidency soured by grudges and squabbles and a rift caused early on by his having fired most of Theodore Roosevelt’s Cabinet. (T.R., for his part, said that Taft was “one of the best haters he had ever known.”)

“I’m glad to be going,” the twenty-seventh President of the United States told the twenty-eighth. “This is the loneliest place in the world.”

Few American Presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson. During his eight years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—years darkened by the death of his wife—he had hoped, even more fervently than most Presidents hope, to bring justice to the United States and peace to the world. He fell short. He also nearly died, a fact that he conspired to hide. His foundering was read as the failure of progressivism.

“The President is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as big a man as he can,” Wilson once wrote. “His capacity will set the limit.” Because the President, unlike members of Congress, stands for a vote in a nationwide election, Wilson believed that Congress ought to hearken to his authority as the nation’s one true voice. Wilson spoke to the people directly (he was the first President to deliver an address by radio), and he spoke to them through reporters (he was the first President to hold formal press conferences). He is the only President to have earned a Ph.D. and one of the last to write all of his own speeches. He preferred to present his arguments in person: he was the first President since John Adams to deliver his messages on the floor of Congress, rather than in writing. He loved to lecture. Before he became President, he was a professor of history and politics.

Wilson was narrowly reëlected in 1916, with most of Europe at war. At his Inauguration, he delivered an essay on the impossibility of isolation: “We are provincials no longer.” The next month, he told Congress, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” In 1919, at the end of the most devastating war in the history of the world, Wilson helped negotiate the peace, only to discover that neither Congress nor the American people, no matter how earnestly he lectured them, would accept what he considered to be the “only hope for mankind”: a League of Nations. In the 1920 Presidential election, Warren G. Harding, the Republican candidate, defeated the Democrat, James Cox, by the widest margin of the popular vote in American history. It was taken as a repudiation of everything Wilson stood for.

“War has always been the nemesis of the liberal tradition in America,” Richard Hofstadter once wrote. Another nemesis of the liberal tradition is an overabundance of faith in the Presidency.

In 1921, on the day of Harding’s Inauguration, Wilson rode with the President-elect from the White House to the Capitol. In the car, Harding was horrified to see that the President was weeping. When the motorcade halted, Harding leaped out and bounded up the Capitol steps, waving his hat at the crowd. Wilson stayed in the car as it inched ahead to a seldom-used freight door. There, concealed from the crowd by mounted police, guards lifted the President out of his seat and took him inside.

He had earlier suffered a massive stroke. As A. Scott Berg details in “Wilson” (Putnam), he had spent the last seventeen months of his Presidency almost entirely confined to his bed, the state of his health unknown to the public and little known even to his own Cabinet. He could see only out of a tiny corner of his right eye. His thoughts no longer came in trains but in torrents. He could not use his left arm. He could barely walk. By no means could he manage the Capitol steps. He could not possibly attend the Inauguration. “It cannot be done,” he said quietly.

Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American President. Its narrative logic is that the world, or at least American politics, turns on the actions of one man. This logic, while hard to square with the American political system, happens to be what most Presidents wish were true, and generally makes for a happy match between Presidents and their biographers.

Wilson was himself a Presidential biographer; he once wrote a potboiler about George Washington, of whom he said, “No man doubted him the first character of his age.” Berg, an elegant, prize-winning biographer whose fluent prose and honest sense of majesty have much in common with Wilson’s own writing, is especially well suited to his subject. “Dawn broke that day on a new epoch, one that would carry the name of a man whose ideas and ideals would extend well into the next century” is how he begins “Wilson.” (No man doubted him the first character of his age.) A liability here, or a boon, depending on what you’re looking for in a Presidential biography, is that Berg, whose earlier subjects have included Maxwell Perkins, Charles Lindbergh, and Katharine Hepburn, is less interested in history and politics—Wilson’s ambit—than in characters and tragedy.

A sharp, subtle, and more squarely political biography is “Woodrow Wilson” (2009), by the American historian John Milton Cooper, Jr. But all Wilson biographers face an analytical hazard. Winston Churchill considered Wilson the great man of the Great War: “It seems no exaggeration to pronounce that the action of the United States with its repercussions on the history of the world depended, during the awful period of Armageddon, on the workings of this man’s mind and spirit to the exclusion of every other factor.” Wilson would have agreed; as one of the United States’ most distinguished historians, he had crafted an immensely influential interpretation of determinative political clout and might. That doesn’t mean he was right. A pitfall gapes open: no small danger, in writing about Wilson, is using Professor Wilson’s theory of the Presidency to take the measure of Wilson as President.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister and a minister’s daughter, was born in Virginia in 1856. He grew up there and in South Carolina. He didn’t learn to read until he was eleven. His father taught him how to write. “When you frame a sentence,” he told him, “shoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone.” He read history and he read Sir Walter Scott; he was a little Ivanhoe-y. He made a paper navy and appointed himself its admiral. He wrote his fleet a constitution. He invented an imaginary regiment headed by “Thomas W. Wilson, Lieutenant-General, Duke of Eagleton, Commander-in-chief Royal Lance Guards.” He granted to himself first a knighthood and then a seat in Parliament.

The first real office the Duke of Eagleton ever ran for was president of the Princeton baseball team, when he was an undergraduate. He launched his campaign by writing an editorial for the student newspaper about the qualifications necessary to lead the team: “The president must, above all things else, be a man of unbiased judgment, energy, determination, intelligence, moral courage, conscience.” Wilson won. When he graduated, in 1879, he was named the class’s “model statesman.” One day, doodling, he made a fake business card for himself. It read, “Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Senator from Virginia.”

At the University of Virginia, he studied law and dropped his first name. He joined the debating society and proved a stirring speaker. “Politics is a war of causes,” he said. A generation earlier, he’d have become a preacher. He withdrew at the end of a year, citing his health—breathing and stomach troubles, which, along with headaches and eyestrain, plagued him his whole life. He passed the bar without finishing his degree; he considered the practice of law “dreadful drudgery” and abandoned it. “I want to make myself an outside force in politics,” he decided. He fell in love with Ellen Axson, a minister’s daughter, got engaged, and enrolled in a Ph.D. program in history and political science at Johns Hopkins.

Wilson, though an excellent teacher, was not a very good student, in the sense that he had no real knack for learning from other people. “Everything of progress comes from one’s private reading,” he said. He stopped attending class and instead arranged to complete his degree by studying on his own. In 1885, he published his first book, a study of American politics.

In “Congressional Government,” Wilson argued that Congress holds too much power and uses it unwisely. Congress discusses bills, not policy, and, because it passes legislation pell-mell and rarely repeals it, the body of federal legislation is a shambles: “No two measures consciously join in purpose or agree in character.” Also, Congress fails to promote public debate and keeps far too many secrets. He urged one particular reform: Congress ought to ask the President questions the way Parliament interrogates the Prime Minister.

Wilson’s theory of politics was parliamentary, his theory of history providential. His advisers at Johns Hopkins granted him a Ph.D. in 1886, after deciding to allow “Congressional Government” to serve as his dissertation. He planned to write a “history of government in all the civilized States in the world,” to be called “The Philosophy of Politics.” He published a preliminary study of government, titled “The State” (1888). From its earliest origins to the present, the history of government, he argued, is the story of the adaptation of “old means to accomplish new ends”—a history of progress.

In 1890, after teaching jobs at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan, he was named chair of jurisprudence and political economy at Princeton. There he wrote the five-volume “History of the American People,” half Sir Walter Scott, half Frederick Jackson Turner. A popular author, a widely admired lecturer, and a liberal Christian, Wilson was named president of Princeton in 1902 (every president before him had been a minister), after his predecessor was forced out for dragging the school into decline. Wilson’s charge was to raise academic standards. He also used his office as a pulpit, speaking in public, often and ardently, about education and national service—rousing, crowd-pleasing speeches that earned him the attention of New Jersey’s Democratic Party.

In 1908, Wilson published “Constitutional Government in the United States,” in which he argued that the Founders’ theory of checks and balances was outdated. “The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing,” he asserted. “It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” The Presidency, like any living thing, had been evolving: “We have grown more and more inclined from generation to generation to look to the President as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and of the nation. To do so is not inconsistent with the actual provisions of the Constitution; it is only inconsistent with a very mechanical theory of its meaning and intention.” Wilson’s own political theory had been evolving, too. In “Congressional Government,” he had argued that Congress wields the preponderance of power. In “Constitutional Government,” he argued that a President’s power is virtually limitless. “His office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it,” he wrote.

Wilson’s authority as an intellectual gained him a national audience. It also carried him into politics. In 1910, he resigned his position as president of Princeton and ran for governor of New Jersey. (He liked to say that New Jersey politics was nothing compared with academic politics.) After six consecutive Republican governors, Democratic Party organizers were looking for a progressive with unimpeachable principles; they also thought that Wilson would make a good puppet, which, as it turned out, he did not. Once in office, he crusaded against the party machine that had got him elected. “This is what I was meant for,” he said. He had barely settled his family into the governor’s mansion when—with the crucial support of William Jennings Bryan—he was nominated by his party to run for President in 1912.

He ran as the people’s candidate, against Taft, the Republican incumbent; Theodore Roosevelt, who campaigned on a third-party ticket; and Eugene Debs, the Socialist. He was really running, though, only against Roosevelt. He knew that voters liked Roosevelt. “He is a real, vivid person, whom they have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for, millions strong,” he admitted. “I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.” But Wilson understood, too, that voters like ideas: he’d become a compelling spokesman for the reforms he’d begun implementing in New Jersey, where he battled with monopolies and trusts.

No other American has ever gone from private life to the White House in so short a time, and, as Berg and Cooper have pointed out, with so unlikely a résumé. He had never fought in a war. He had never served in any legislature. He had never had success as a businessman. Aside from his academic appointments, his offices were imaginary.

“Wilson is merely a less virile me,” T.R. said. F.D.R. put it differently: “Theodore Roosevelt lacked Woodrow Wilson’s appeal to the fundamental and failed to stir, as Wilson did, the truly profound moral and social convictions.” A problem with a President who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.

He got to work putting his ideas about the power of the Presidency into practice. The day after he was elected, Wilson admitted to a reporter that he was toying with the notion of delivering his addresses to Congress in person. “That would set them by the ears,” he said. A congressional Republican warned, “If Mr.Wilson comes to the Capitol to influence legislation, he will be more foolish than the donkey that swam the river to get a drink of water.” On April 8, 1913, Woodrow Wilson swam that river. He spoke for nine minutes. He said he’d come because he wanted to explain to Congress that the President “is a human being trying to cooperate with other human beings.” It was a very good nine minutes. It has been a very long century since.

On one day during his first month in office, Wilson invited more than a hundred reporters to the White House, fielded questions, and announced, to everyone’s astonishment, that he intended to do this regularly. In his first ten months as President, he held sixty press conferences. Wilson worked like a fiend and collapsed just as hard. He first fell ill and took to his bed five days into his first term. He appointed as his personal physician Dr. Cary Grayson, a naval officer who became one of his closest advisers. Grayson prescribed the President leisure reading. Wilson ordered detective stories from the librarian of Congress.

But the twenty-eighth President had little time for novels. He arrived with a plan—a package of interlocking reforms—and, to get it through, he kept the Sixty-third Congress in session, with a brief recess, for eighteen months straight; as Cooper points out, Congress had never before met for so long. The result was a stunning legislative achievement. During Wilson’s Administration, Congress lowered the tariff, reformed banking and currency laws, passed a new antitrust act, instituted a graduated income tax and the first federal inheritance tax, passed the first private-sector eight-hour-workday legislation and the first federal aid to farmers, abolished child labor, and established the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Wilson believed that it was the obligation of the federal government to regulate the economy to protect ordinary Americans “from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.” He fought, hard, to get Louis Brandeis onto the Supreme Court—an appointment that made all the difference to the spirit, endurance, and learnedness of progressive reform.

At the same time, Wilson, the first Southerner to be elected President since the Civil War and the first Democrat in two decades, sent troops to Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; pursued U.S. sway over Latin America; and established a policy of segregation within the federal government. (James Weldon Johnson wrote that Wilson “bears the discreditable distinction of being the first President of the United States, since Emancipation, who openly condoned and vindicated prejudice against the Negro.”) He also resisted the efforts of women to gain the right to vote, until the arguments of suffragists, his daughters among them, finally persuaded him. The signal and soaring democratic achievement in the United States during Wilson’s time in the White House—affirming the constitutionality of laws doubling the size of the electorate—is little studied by Wilson scholars; in seventeen books about Wilson (not including Berg’s, which is more expansive), the historian Victoria Bissell Brown counted an average of six sentences about woman suffrage. This is among the drawbacks of Presidential biography: if the President didn’t do it, it’s almost as if it didn’t happen.

The overriding crisis of Wilson’s Presidency was the Great War. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, 1914, and on France two days later. “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action,” Wilson announced on August 19th. Days earlier, he had attended his wife on her deathbed. “I sometimes feel that the Presidency has had to be paid for with Ellen’s life,” he once told Grayson. Ellen Wilson died, of kidney disease, on August 6, 1914. She was fifty-four.

Wilson was incapacitated by grief. But he rallied after Grayson introduced him to a forty-two-year-old widow named Edith Bolling Galt. By April of 1915, they were going to ballgames together, watching the Senators trounce the Yankees. “She’s a looker,” the President’s doorkeeper said. “He’s a goner,” the President’s valet said. She was undoubtedly a distraction. On May 7, 1915, the day a German U-boat sank the Lusitania, killing more than a thousand civilians, a hundred and twenty-three of whom were Americans, Wilson wrote to Galt, “My happiness absolutely depends upon your giving me your entire love.” For months, hawks from Roosevelt to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, urged Wilson to declare war; Wilson advocated neutrality. Meanwhile, he was writing Galt as many as three love letters a day. (During their brief courtship, they exchanged some two hundred and fifty letters.) Their engagement was announced on October 6, 1915; three days later, they attended the second game of the World Series. They married that December.

In the election of 1916, Wilson ran against Charles Evans Hughes, a former governor of New York and a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. “A vote for Hughes is a vote for war,” a senator from Oklahoma declared. “A vote for Wilson is a vote for peace.” It was women voters who, by rallying behind the peace movement, gained him a narrow victory. (He won ten of the twelve states where women were enfranchised.)

He was inaugurated on March 5, 1917. Days later, German U-boats sank three American ships. Wilson concluded that there was no longer any way to stay out of it. On April 2nd, he went to the Capitol and asked Congress to declare war. Then he went back to the White House and wept.

More than twenty million people died in the war that H. G. Wells called “the war that will end war.” Wilson’s providential theory of history extended to his understanding of the peace. “The hand of God is laid upon the nations,” he said. “He will show them favour, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to the clear heights of His own justice and mercy.” In 1918, he drafted a speech outlining the terms of peace. The last of its fourteen points called for “a general association of nations . . . for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

On the evening of Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, Wilson, in his wife’s bedroom, read from the Bible. He decided to head the United States’ delegation to the peace conference in Paris, sailing the Atlantic on board the George Washington, to bring peace on earth. Heading this delegation fell within Wilson’s view of the scope of the Presidency; not everyone agreed. Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution states that a President may negotiate a treaty but ratification requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Notably—fatally—Wilson did not take with him to the peace conference a single Republican senator.

He was at first met with outpourings of affection and hope. Crowds lined the streets to greet him as “the God of Peace.” This welcome did nothing to diminish his sense of mission. He was especially eagerly received by delegates from stateless and colonized societies: Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Koreans, Arabs, Jews, Armenians, and Kurds. In “The Wilsonian Moment” (2007), Erez Manela argues that Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination contributed to a wave of popular protests in the Middle East and Asia, including a revolution in Egypt in 1919; made the nation-state the goal of stateless societies; and lies behind the emergence and force of anticolonial nationalism during the past century.

As the negotiations wore on, Wilson’s presence in Paris came to be much resented. “Nearly every experienced critic seems to be of the opinion that he should have remained in America,” H. G. Wells wrote in his “The Outline of History,” a chronicle of the world published in 1920. Nearly as deeply resented was the presence of Wilson’s wife, who appeared, to a devastated Europe, to be visiting in the role of tourist. “This may seem a trivial matter to note in a History of Mankind,” Wells allowed, “but it was such small human things as this that threw a miasma of futility over the Peace Conference of 1919.”

Wilson also fell ill in Paris. Grayson said that he had a cold. Berg suggests that he was already suffering from dementia, the result of a series of small strokes. He returned to the United States on July 8, 1919. Two days later, he delivered the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate and explained its provisions, including the League of Nations: “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”

Wilson believed that the Senate was behind him, but the only support for the unamended treaty came from fellow-Democrats. Wilson’s theory of the Presidency crashed into his theory of the Congress. Lodge, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had the treaty printed, announced that he would convene hearings on the subject, and then all but tabled the matter. At one point, he had the two-hundred-and-sixty-four-page treaty read aloud, word by word; that alone took two weeks.

Wilson, ignoring his doctor’s advice, decided to set off across the country and present his argument to the American people. He left Washington on September 3, 1919, by train, on a seventeen-state tour. “I have come out to fight for a cause,” he said. “That cause is greater than the Senate. It is greater than the government. It is as great as the cause of mankind.” Wilson took the stage in Missouri. “Here is the Covenant of the League of Nations,” he shouted. “I am a Covenantor!” On the way to Reno, his face began to twitch. In Utah, he spoke for more than ninety minutes, sweating through his suit. In Wyoming, he became incoherent. He refused to rest. “I have caught the imagination of the people,” he insisted. In Colorado, on September 25, 1919, he stumbled while mounting the stage. Back in the train, he collapsed. “I seem to have gone to pieces,” he said. Grayson and Edith Wilson decided that the best thing to do was not to tell anyone, not even the President, how debilitated he had become.

Brought back to Washington, Wilson was hidden in the West Wing, unseen by a single government official for a month. He had lost the use of his left side. His wife conducted a great deal of his business. She entertained the idea that he should resign from the Presidency, but decided against it. She issued a decree banning the public from the grounds. For five long months, he did not pass through the White House gates.

In the Senate, opposition to the treaty only grew. Wilson, unresponsive to pleas for compromise, appeared uncompromising. In March of 1920, the Treaty of Versailles was defeated in the United States Senate by seven votes. There are costs to staking too great a faith in one branch of government. Wilson’s political theory left him, his enemies and supporters alike, and even his biographers, with no one to blame but him. “If only I could have remained well long enough to have convinced the people that the League of Nations was their real hope, their last chance, perhaps to save civilization!” he told his private secretary.

No doubt it was far too great a price for anyone to pay for having believed devoutly in the power of the American Presidency. He spent much of the remainder of his time in office watching silent movies in the East Room, dreaming of a third term. ♦

BOOKS
Briefly Noted

Carnival
by Rawi Hage (Norton)

Brought up in the circus, by “the loving nature of freaks,” the protagonist of this dreamlike tale is a voracious reader by day and a taxi-driver by night. He goes by the name of Fly, and cruises the crime-ridden streets of a nameless city at carnival time. He encounters a sequence of strangers, some of whom make several appearances, while others pay their fare and vanish into the night. “I am a wanderer,” he informs the reader early on. Fly is a kind of flâneur, and his story is a meditation on a drifting life. Sights are insignificant to Hage; what matters are people and their stories. “I and the likes of me are the carriers of this world, the movers and the linkers,” Fly says. Despite the dreariness of a world from which daylight is shut out, the reader wants to buckle up and join him for the ride.

The First Rule of Swimming
by Courtney Angela Brkic (Little, Brown)

In this suspenseful début, the romantic simplicity of Rosmarina, a small island modelled on those off the coast of Croatia, belies the region’s violent political history. When Magdalena’s younger sister disappears in New York, she leaves the island to find her. In nonlinear vignettes, Brkic traces three generations of family history, revealing the wounds of war, exile, and betrayal. The revelations are well paced, and Brkic deftly walks the line between the sentimental and the intimate. The novel draws its narrative force from the characters’ desire to protect family and to survive at all costs, even if doing so means letting secrets “belong only to the people who lived them.”

Wyatt Earp
by Andrew C. Isenberg (Hill & Wang)

This careful account intends to separate fact from the many fictions surrounding the “Frontier Marshall.” Many of these fictions originated with Earp himself, in two authorized biographies that became fodder for numerous Hollywood fables. Isenberg’s Earp is not a hero but a scalawag, flitting from one cow town to the next, and surviving by gambling, horse-thieving, pimping, embezzling, and policing. That law enforcement was open to a man who’d been arrested several times demonstrates the moral fluidity of a time when a burgeoning middle class needed the protection of whatever policemen it could get. As Isenberg shows, the two skills for which Earp was renowned—fisticuffs and gunslinging—were equally valuable when breaking and when upholding the law. To the dismay of his fellow-citizens, Earp the lawman frequently turned vigilante killer. But this became a main source of his appeal to audiences in the nineteen-twenties, who delighted in “the righteousness of the justice he administered at the muzzle of a gun.”

The Wet and the Dry
by Lawrence Osborne (Crown)

In this travelogue, a proud and perceptive drinker imbibes his way around the globe, with particular emphasis on the Muslim world. In Islamic countries from Turkey to Malaysia, he tries to make sense of a culture of prohibition while undertaking such stunts as searching out a cold bottle of champagne in Oman on New Year’s Eve. At times, Osborne is a bit too pleased with his blasphemy, but he is an astute and sympathetic observer of figures ranging from the devout young teetotallers he meets in Java to winemakers in Egypt and vodka distillers in Pakistan, dedicated craftsmen at odds with the increasing conservatism of their respective countries. Though mostly fair-minded, he is at no point a likely convert, to either Islam or abstention. Instead, this book, purportedly about drying out, is really an ode to the civilizing effects of alcohol. Of the drinker, Osborne writes, “He just needs a little quiet music, and a gentle freedom from priests.”

BOOKS
Mindless

The new neuro-skeptics.

by Adam Gopnik

Good myths turn on simple pairs— God and Lucifer, Sun and Moon, Jerry and George—and so an author who makes a vital duo is rewarded with a long-lived audience. No one in 1900 would have thought it possible that a century later more people would read Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson stories than anything of George Meredith’s, but we do. And so Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek,” despite the silly plots and the cardboard-seeming sets, persists in its many versions because it captures a deep and abiding divide. Mr. Spock speaks for the rational, analytic self who assumes that the mind is a mechanism and that everything it does is logical, Captain Kirk for the belief that what governs our life is not only irrational but inexplicable, and the better for being so. The division has had new energy in our time: we care most about a person who is like a thinking machine at a moment when we have begun to have machines that think. Captain Kirk, meanwhile, is not only a Romantic, like so many other heroes, but a Romantic on a starship in a vacuum in deep space. When your entire body is every day dissolved, reënergized, and sent down to a new planet, and you still believe in the ineffable human spirit, you have really earned the right to be a soul man.

Writers on the brain and the mind tend to divide into Spocks and Kirks, either embracing the idea that consciousness can be located in a web of brain tissue or debunking it. For the past decade, at least, the Spocks have been running the Enterprise: there are books on your brain and music, books on your brain and storytelling, books that tell you why your brain makes you want to join the Army, and books that explain why you wish that Bar Refaeli were in the barracks with you. The neurological turn has become what the “cultural” turn was a few decades ago: the all-purpose non-explanation explanation of everything. Thirty years ago, you could feel loftily significant by attaching the word “culture” to anything you wanted to inspect: we didn’t live in a violent country, we lived in a “culture of violence”; we didn’t have sharp political differences, we lived in a “culture of complaint”; and so on. In those days, Time, taking up the American pursuit of pleasure, praised Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism”; now Time has a cover story on happiness and asks whether we are “hardwired” to pursue it.

Myths depend on balance, on preserving their eternal twoness, and so we have on our hands a sudden and severe Kirkist backlash. A series of new books all present watch-and-ward arguments designed to show that brain science promises much and delivers little. They include “A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind” (St. Martin’s), by Robert A. Burton; “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuro-Science” (Basic), by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld; and “Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind” (Princeton), by a pair of cognitive scientists, Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached.

“Bumpology” is what the skeptical wit Sydney Smith, writing in the eighteen-twenties, called phrenology, the belief that the shape of your skull was a map of your mind. His contemporary heirs rehearse, a little mordantly, failed bits of Bumpology that indeed seem more like phrenology than like real psychology. There was the left-right brain split, which insisted on a far neater break within our heads (Spock bits to the left, Kirk bits to the right) than is now believed to exist. The skeptics revisit the literature on “mirror neurons,” which become excited in the frontal lobes of macaque monkeys when the monkeys imitate researchers, and have been used to explain the origins of human empathy and sociability. There’s no proof that social-minded Homo sapiens has mirror neurons, while the monkeys who certainly do are not particularly social. (And, if those neurons are standard issue, then they can’t be very explanatory of what we mean by empathy: Bernie Madoff would have as many as Nelson Mandela.)

It turns out, in any case, that it’s very rare for any mental activity to be situated tidily in one network of neurons, much less one bit of the brain. When you think you’ve located a function in one part of the brain, you will soon find that it has skipped town, like a bail jumper. And all of the neuro-skeptics argue for the plasticity of our neural networks. We learn and shape our neurology as much as we inherit it. Our selves shape our brains at least as much as our brains our selves.

Each author, though, has a polemical project, something to put in place of mere Bumpology. (People who write books on indoor plumbing seldom feel obliged to rival Vitruvius as theorists of architecture, but it seems that no one can write about one neuron without explaining all thought.) “Brainwashed” is nervously libertarian; Satel is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and she and Lilienfeld are worried that neuroscience will shift wrongdoing from the responsible individual to his irresponsible brain, allowing crooks to cite neuroscience in order to get away with crimes. This concern seems overwrought, copping a plea via neuroscience not being a significant social problem. Burton, a retired medical neurologist, seems anxious to prove himself a philosopher, and races through a series of arguments about free will and determinism to conclude that neuroscience doesn’t yet know enough and never will. Minds give us the illusion of existing as fixed, orderly causal devices, when in fact they aren’t. Looking at our minds with our minds is like writing a book about hallucinations while on LSD: you can’t tell the perceptual evidence from your own inner state. “The mind is and will always be a mystery,” Burton insists. Maybe so, and yet we’re perfectly capable of probing flawed equipment with flawed equipment: we know that our eyes have blind spots, even as we look at the evidence with them, and we understand all about the dog whistles we can’t hear. Since in the past twenty-five years alone we’ve learned a tremendous amount about minds, it’s hard to share the extent of his skepticism. Psychology is an imperfect science, but it’s a science.

In “Neuro,” Rose and Abi-Rached see the real problem: neuroscience can often answer the obvious questions but rarely the interesting ones. It can tell us how our minds are made to hear music, and how groups of notes provoke neural connections, but not why Mozart is more profound than Manilow. Courageously, they take on, and dismiss, the famous experiments by Benjamin Libet that seem to undermine the idea of free will. For a muscle movement, Libet showed, the brain begins “firing”—choosing, let’s say, the left joystick rather than the right—milliseconds before the subject knows any choice has been made, so that by the time we think we’re making a choice the brain has already made it. Rose and Abi-Rached are persuasively skeptical that “this tells us anything about the exercise of human will in any of the naturally occurring situations where individuals believe they have made a conscious choice—to take a holiday, choose a restaurant, apply for a job.” What we mean by “free will” in human social practice is just a different thing from what we might mean by it in a narrower neurological sense. We can’t find a disproof of free will in the indifference of our neurons, any more than we can find proof of it in the indeterminacy of the atoms they’re made of.

A core objection is that neuroscientific “explanations” of behavior often simply re-state what’s already obvious. Neuro-enthusiasts are always declaring that an MRI of the brain in action demonstrates that some mental state is not just happening but is really, truly, is-so happening. We’ll be informed, say, that when a teen-age boy leafs through the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue areas in his brain associated with sexual desire light up. Yet asserting that an emotion is really real because you can somehow see it happening in the brain adds nothing to our understanding. Any thought, from Kiss the baby! to Kill the Jews!, must have some route around the brain. If you couldn’t locate the emotion, or watch it light up in your brain, you’d still be feeling it. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean you don’t have it. Satel and Lilienfeld like the term “neuroredundancy” to “denote things we already knew without brain scanning,” mockingly citing a researcher who insists that “brain imaging tells us that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a ‘real disorder.’ ” The brain scan, like the word “wired,” adds a false gloss of scientific certainty to what we already thought. As with the old invocation of “culture,” it’s intended simply as an intensifier of the obvious.

Phrenology, the original Bumpology, at least had the virtue of getting people to think about “cortical location,” imagining, for the first time, that the brain might indeed be mapped into areas. Bumpology brought a material order, however factitious, to a metaphysical subject. In the same way, even the neuro-skeptics seem to agree that modern Bumpology remains an important corrective to radical anti-Bumpology: to the kind of thinking that insists that brains don’t count at all and cultures construct everything; that, given the right circumstances, there could be a human group with six or seven distinct genders, each with its own sexuality; that there is a possible human society in which very old people would be regarded as attractive and nubile eighteen-year-olds not; and still another where adolescent children would be noted for their rigorous desire to finish recently commenced tasks. How impressive you find modern pop Bumpology depends in part on whether you believe that there are a lot of people who still think like that.

For all the exasperations of neurotautology, there’s a basic, arresting truth to neo-Bumpology. In a new, belligerently pro-neuro book, “The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime” (Pantheon), Adrian Raine, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses a well-studied case in which the stepfather of an adolescent girl, with no history of pedophilia, began to obsess over child pornography and then to molest his stepdaughter. He was arrested, arraigned, and convicted. Then it emerged that he had a tumor, pressing on the piece of the brain associated with social and sexual inhibitions. When it was removed, the wayward desires vanished. Months of normality ensued, until the tumor began to grow back and, with it, the urges.

Now, there probably is no precise connection between the bit of the brain the tumor pressed on and child lust. The same bit of meat-matter pressing on the same bit of brain in some other head might have produced some other transgression—in the head of a Lubavitcher, say, a mad desire to eat prosciutto. But it would still be true that what we think of as traditionally deep matters of guilt and temptation and taboo, the material of Sophocles and Freud, can be flicked on and off just by physical pressure. You have to respect the power of the meat to change the morals so neatly.

In one sense, this is more neuro-redundancy. Charting a path between these two truths is the philosopher Patricia S. Churchland’s project in “Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain” (Norton), a limited defense of the centrality of neuro. She is rightly contemptuous of the invocation of “scientism” to dismiss the importance of neuroscience to philosophy, seeing that resistance as identical to the Inquisition’s resistance to Galileo, or the seventeenth century’s to Harvey’s discovery of the pumping heart:

This is the familiar strategy of let’s pretend. Let’s believe what we prefer to believe. But like the rejection of the discovery that Earth revolves around the sun, the let’s pretend strategy regarding the heart could not endure very long. . . . Students reading the history of this period may be as dumbfounded regarding our resistance to brain science as we are now regarding the seventeenth-century resistance to the discovery that the heart is a meat pump.

Humanism not only has survived each of these sequential demystifications; they have made it stronger by demonstrating the power of rational inquiry on which humanism depends. Every time the world becomes less mysterious, nature becomes less frightening, and the power of the mind to grasp reality more sure. A constant reduction of mystery to matter, a belief that we can name natural rules we didn’t make—that isn’t scientism. That’s science.

Yet Churchland also makes beautifully clear how complex and contingent the simplest brain business is. She discusses whether the hormone testosterone makes men angry. The answer even to that off-on question is anything but straightforward. Testosterone counts for a lot in making men mad, but so does the “stress” hormone cortisol, along with the “neuromodulator” serotonin, which affects whether the aggression is impulsive or premeditated, and the balance between all these things is affected by “other hormones, other neuromodulators, age and environment.”

So this question, like any other about neurology, turns out to be both simply mechanical and monstrously complex. Yes, a hormone does wash through men’s brains and makes them get mad. But there’s a lot more turning on than just the hormone. For a better analogy to the way your neurons and brain chemistry run your mind, you might think about the way the light switch runs the lights in your living room. It’s true that the light switch in the corner turns the lights on in the living room. Nor is that a trivial observation. How the light switch gets wired to the bulb, how the bulb got engineered to be luminous—all that is an almost miraculously complex consequence of human ingenuity. But at the same time the light switch on the living-room wall is merely the last stage in a long line of complex events that involve waterfalls and hydropower and surge protectors and thousands of miles of cables and power grids. To say the light switch turns on the living-room light is both true—vitally true, if you don’t want to bang your shins on the sofa sneaking home in the middle of the night—and wildly misleading.

It’s perfectly possible, in other words, to have an explanation that is at once trivial and profound, depending on what kind of question you’re asking. The strength of neuroscience, Churchland suggests, lies not so much in what it explains as in the older explanations it dissolves. She gives a lovely example of the panic that we feel in dreams when our legs refuse to move as we flee the monster. This turns out to be a straightforward neurological phenomenon: when we’re asleep, we turn off our motor controls, but when we dream we still send out signals to them. We really are trying to run, and can’t. If you feel this, and also have the not infrequent problem of being unable to distinguish waking and dreaming states, you might think that you have been paralyzed and kidnapped by aliens.

There are no aliens; there is not even a Freudian wave of guilt driving the monster. It’s just those neuromotor neurons, making the earth sticky. The best thing for people who have recurrent nightmares of this kind is to get more REM rest. “Get more sleep,” Churchland remarks. “It works.” Neurology should provide us not with sudden explanatory power but with a sense of relief from either taking too much responsibility for, or being too passive about, what happens to us. Autism is a wiring problem, not a result of “refrigerator mothers.” Schizophrenia isn’t curable yet, but it looks more likely to be cured by getting the brain chemistry right than by finding out what traumatized Gregory Peck in his childhood. Neuroscience can’t rob us of responsibility for our actions, but it can relieve us of guilt for simply being human. We are in better shape in our mental breakdowns if we understand the brain breakdowns that help cause them. This is a point that Satel and Lilienfeld, in their eagerness to support a libertarian view of the self as a free chooser, get wrong. They observe of one “brilliant and tormented” alcoholic that she, not her heavy drinking, was responsible for her problems. But, if we could treat the brain circuitry that processes the heavy drinking, we might very well leave her just as brilliant and tormented as ever, only not a drunk. (A Band-Aid, as every parent knows, is an excellent cure whenever it’s possible to use one.)

The really curious thing about minds and brains is that the truth about them lies not somewhere in the middle but simultaneously on both extremes. We know already that the wet bits of the brain change the moods of the mind: that’s why a lot of champagne gets sold on Valentine’s Day. On the other hand, if the mind were not a high-level symbol-managing device, flower sales would not rise on Valentine’s Day, too. Philosophy may someday dissolve into psychology and psychology into neurology, but since the lesson of neuro is that thoughts change brains as much as brains thoughts, the reduction may not reduce much that matters. As Montaigne wrote, we are always double in ourselves. Or, as they say on the Enterprise, it takes all kinds to run a starship. ♦

THE CURRENT CINEMA
Spectacles

“The Grandmaster,” “Drinking Buddies,” “Our Nixon.”

by David Denby

In “The Grandmaster,” kung-fu warriors fight as the rain falls in torrents. It’s like a forties noir, but every raindrop in this movie appears to shine, by some digital-spiritual miracle, in iridescent glory. The writer-director Wong Kar-wai, in the past a maker of romantic-erotic drama (“Happy Together,” “In the Mood for Love”), has turned back to martial-arts movies, after reworking an early effort (“Ashes of Time”) that didn’t quite satisfy him. He has created a gorgeous, entirely aestheticized spectacle. The men fight at night, in chic black suits, crashing into doors and windows; the black-on-black color design, with its sparkle of water and broken glass, is a glamorous delight.

The movie begins in 1936, when the Japanese have moved into Manchuria, and China is on the edge of a murderous occupation. It is a time of reckoning—and of reconciliation, too. The severe martial-arts grand master of the north (Qingxiang Wang), his city occupied, arrives in Foshan, the southern center of kung fu, where he announces his retirement and allows his daughter Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang) to represent the north in a challenge match. Her opponent is the great fighter of the south—Ip Man (Tony Leung), an exponent of the Wing Chun style of fighting. “The Grandmaster” presents a series of ceremonious confrontations (all choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, the grand master of movie fighting): the handsome, impervious Leung and the exquisite Zhang face each other silently, and rotate their hands into position—the solemn preliminaries are as momentous as the combat itself. As the two move into battle, slashing and spinning, often in closeup, the uninitiated may not be able to see much difference in method (Gong Er is a mistress of something called Bagua-style 64 Hands). The fight is a stunning whirl nonetheless; both the cinematography (by Philippe Le Sourd) and the editing (by Wong himself) have an indelible high excitement and precision.

Wong Kar-wai has taken much care with the authenticity of fighting style and décor, but authenticity and realism are two different things. Gong Er and Ip Man fight in a kind of upscale brothel, the Gold Pavilion, with colored-glass walls bordering highly confined spaces. They fight up and down a staircase and, in one tumbling moment, go over the railing in elegant slow motion. Later in the film, Ip Man takes on an assassin known as the Razor (Chen Chang), who turns out to be a modern dude in snazzy Western clothes—the two fly at each other like enraged pythons. “The Grandmaster” is a dreamily beautiful piece of historical mythmaking, and I enjoyed it, but I would be fooling if I said that the movie’s sonorous talk of great traditions of fighting and esoteric cults meant very much to me. I wish that in place of all this self-important puffing Wong Kar-wai had addressed certain obvious questions: What does unarmed fighting mean in the era of modern mechanized warfare? Did the various warriors play any role in the resistance to the Japanese occupation?

The movie carries Ip Man through the occupation and into a new life as a kung-fu teacher in Hong Kong in the nineteen-fifties. But the version released here has been seriously cut, and the film’s epic structure is now in ruins, with mysterious references and characters who appear out of nowhere. “The Grandmaster” is imperious but baffling, and I was nonplussed by the epilogue, which informs us grandly that Ip Man taught the movie star Bruce Lee, as if that were his crowning achievement. A superb martial discipline has ended in a commercial movie genre—not the worst fate in the world, but the comic irony of it is of little interest to a director bent on glorification.

In Joe Swanberg’s “Drinking Buddies,” a group of young Chicago brewery workers labor together, hang out together, and drink beer—they drink it at lunch, at dinner, even at breakfast. Beer is the medium in which they live. The hops-enhanced, slightly giddy sociability is a large part of what the movie is about, though we can see, amid all the teasing and jostling, that something serious is going on: Luke (Jake Johnson), a smart, funny guy with a bushy black beard and penetrating dark eyes, can’t stop looking at Kate (Olivia Wilde), the startlingly beautiful woman who does the promotional work for the brewery. Luke and Kate have the same kind of humor, the same self-deflating irony. They are soul mates but not bedmates: Luke lives with the anxious Jill (Anna Kendrick), who very much wants to marry him; Kate’s boyfriend, Chris (Ron Livingston), a rather taciturn music producer, awaits her appearance at his apartment after work. The situation is unstable, especially after Chris pulls away from Kate, leaving her free. Will the two people who are obviously right for each other get together?

Joe Swanberg, the speedy up-from-mumblecore filmmaker (fifteen features in eight years), has become adept at establishing a small group of characters within a larger social setting. “Drinking Buddies” is a portrait of life in the middle. The people in this film, neither rich nor poor, work hard but have no apparent ambitions, no children, no ideas, no obligations that we can see except to one another. Swanberg moves smoothly and gently through their lives, and his camera (Ben Richardson is the cinematographer), hanging close but not too close, is remarkably sensitive to the distance that determines mood. Swanberg has become a very capable low-key director; the performance he coaxes out of Olivia Wilde as the irresolute, slightly self-damaging Kate is particularly touching.

I feel strongly, however, that the improvisational method used here, and in many other low-budget films, is more a handicap than a strength. On location for “Drinking Buddies,” Swanberg set out a general idea of what he wanted to accomplish in a scene, and then let the actors work out the details. Much of the conversational space—this can’t be a surprise—is filled with hesitations, backing and filling, plans to talk about something another time. “Drinking Buddies” is more about behavior than about character: the movie is expressive as a re-creation of moment-by-moment dithering but inept at revealing the fundaments that drive people to act the way they do. We want to know more about this crew—the things that a good screenwriter would tell us, or at least hint at. We want to know why the moody, opaque Chris leaves Kate. And whether Kate wants to go to bed with Luke. Or how she feels about Luke’s girlfriend Jill. And so on.

Some of my critical colleagues have celebrated this uncertainty as a profound observation of life as we live it now, but I wonder if it isn’t produced—determined, really—by the directorial method that Swanberg has chosen. By using improvisation, he’s trying to avoid banality, of course, but the emotional reticence of an unwritten script condemns the movie to minor status. In Chekhov’s plays, people hesitate and dissemble and speak nonsense and trip all over themselves, but they do eventually blurt out what they’re feeling. Citing Chekhov at this early time in Swanberg’s career may be unfair, but an amiable movie like “Drinking Buddies” cries out for the revelations that a great dramatist—or even a talented screenwriter and director working together—can give us.

Watergate has never really gone away for those of us who lived through it, and, in Penny Lane’s “Our Nixon,” a shrewdly edited collection of news footage and “home movies” taken by members of the Nixon White House staff, there they are again, our familiars: Dwight Chapin, the clean-cut, stolid special assistant who hired the dirty trickster Donald Segretti; the chief of staff, H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, calculating, bland, inarticulate, with a malevolent upper lip and a forced bright smile; John Ehrlichman, fraudulent, ironic, the most intelligent member of this semi-fascist apparat; and the President himself, at times masterful, at other times desperate, alcoholic, and sad. Most of the footage taken by the staff is of no distinction—the two Inaugurations, state visits to Italy and China, and the like. One moment, long forgotten, stands out: at a White House entertainment in 1972, as the Vietnam War is raging, a female vocalist with the super-square Ray Conniff Singers holds up a protest sign and says, into a mike, “President Nixon, stop bombing human beings, animals, and vegetation.” The singer, Carole Feraci, unnamed in the movie, is an obscure, noble claimant to immortality.

Stuck with this mostly ordinary tourist stuff, Penny Lane resorted to the Oval Office audiotapes, especially the late-night telephone calls, when Nixon, deep in Watergate and seeking reassurance from his henchmen that all is well, finally runs into a brick wall: Ehrlichman tells him that, yes, he did inform the President about the existence of the secret police force, the Plumbers, and the Plumbers’ theft of medical records belonging to Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Nixon insists that he knows nothing, stops, loses his way, and then, realizing that his staff will no longer take the fall for him, collapses into an embarrassed silence (both Haldeman and Ehrlichman were fired soon afterward). This moment is as devastating an impression of a powerful man facing the end as we are ever likely to have. ♦

FICTION
“The Heron”

by Dorthe Nors

I won’t feed birds, but, if you must, then you should do so in Frederiksberg Gardens. There are tame herons in Frederiksberg Gardens, and by placing the park’s benches at some distance from one another the park authorities hope to avoid attracting too many birds to one area. There are problems at the end of the park where the alcoholics sit, especially with ducks, but I never go that way, and you can see the herons everywhere. Of the heron itself, one can say only that from a distance it looks impressive, but this doesn’t apply when you get close up. It’s too thin, and the tame herons in particular look malnourished. Most likely all that bread gives the herons of Frederiksberg Gardens bad stomachs and is to blame for their not making an effort to fly. Last winter I saw one slouching on the back of a bench with its long, thin neck. Its feet were white and it barely even reacted when I walked past. The way the wind ruffled its neck feathers made me want to go back and sit down next to it. It was the way the suffering had to be drawn out like that, the way herons never really muster the enthusiasm. But I won’t touch birds, alive or dead. They shouldn’t be played with, and, if you do, you should take care never to touch others with your infected hands. If a bird is dead you should make sure not to come into contact either with it or with its excrement. Disposable gloves must be used, and the bird should be picked up using a plastic bag, the same way you pick up dog shit. The bag should be sealed and disposed of with the household garbage or else buried. How difficult is that, with all the knowledge we have available?

In order to avoid herons in large numbers, as well as the strange man who often stands on the path leading to the Chinese Pavilion and feeds them herrings while claiming to be able to talk to them, I tend to walk instead around Damhus Pond. At Damhus Pond whatever a heron might have to say is meaningless. Besides, herons have difficulty colonizing Damhus Pond because of the nearby houses, the foot traffic, and all the cyclists. It’s easy to see from the wrecks littering the water’s edge that the pond has been ruined by cyclists. There are many out-of-place objects there, and in addition to the bikes they once found a dismembered female body in a suitcase in the pond. An entire woman in little pieces put into freezer bags. The suitcase was found by someone out walking his dog. Or, presumably, it was the dog that found it. Credit where it’s due. There are always lots of dogs around Damhus Pond, and I can picture this particular dog very clearly as I walk along the path. It’s a golden retriever and it’s fussing in front of the suitcase, which has drifted halfway up onto the shore. The golden retriever has a secret urge to roll around in carcasses, preferably those of birds or mice, but how is it to tell the difference? I can picture it, and I can imagine its owner at the moment the realization kicks in. I imagine he remembers the moment the suitcase was opened whenever he is getting ready to take a trip, and likely even the dog itself was never the same again.

Things are contagious. Things want to get in through the cracks. That’s the way they are, and I know from a former colleague of mine that the woman was killed and dismembered in an apartment in the Vesterbro district and that the girl who lived in the apartment downstairs and who was studying veterinary science moved out not long afterward, even though her upstairs neighbor had been apprehended and sentenced for the murder. Who could blame her? She probably kept thinking about all the times she had passed him on the stairs. Most likely she felt the building was contaminated and even the slightest sound reminded her of the night she heard something going on upstairs. But something is always going on in the night, there are always the smells and the sounds: pigeons rustling in the attic, creatures on the move, and the herons of Frederiksberg Gardens can sometimes be seen, looking like gray poultry shears in the sky over Valby. The heron is an awkward bird in flight, and the Heron Man on the path leading to the Chinese Pavilion would do well to tell the herons so, seeing as how he’s always babbling away at them like that.

Although my apartment is on Frederiksberg Avenue I willingly walk the extra distance to Damhus Pond to escape the gathering of birds, and as for dismembered bodies I’ve walked around the pond most of my life without ever finding one myself. When I was a child, my friends and I would run around the pond because our teachers at Vigerslev Allé School told us to do so in our physical-education class. I still see children who look like me and my best friend, the dentist’s son, Lorenz, running around the pond. Whenever a tall, skinny boy runs past, I picture Lorenz racing to come in first. I tend to stop and smile when I see kids running around the pond like that. But after going around it myself I no longer want to stop and smile at anyone, certainly not the young women with their stony faces and big baby carriages. They always come in flocks, great flocks of mothers, and they stir up bad feelings in one another, so none of them will even look at you when you walk past.

I step aside into the grass, thinking about the dog, the suitcase, the body, and how the veterinary student lost her swagger overnight, and how it doesn’t take a doctorate to have kids. I have known hopeless individuals to have children. It doesn’t require much more than a certain degree of sexual excitement, at least in the male, and at any rate it’s not the women with the baby carriages who are in charge of the chemistry of it. If anyone is in charge of the chemistry it’s God, but they probably made Him step aside, too. No one that age believes she needs eternal life, and even the concept of giving way to oncoming traffic seems unreasonable. But it’s important to me, and sometimes when those mothers have passed by I look back at them and wonder what it would be like if they swelled up. They’d begin to expand, and eventually they’d expand so much that they could no longer keep themselves together, and then I picture them exploding: shreds of flesh in the trees and along the shore, blood spattering on the swans, the ducks, and the coots walking in the grass. There’s a rustling in the grass, the kind that makes dogs want to roll on the banks. I hear the rustle, and I hear the babies screaming in their carriages. I picture Lorenz skating through the mud, racing on around the pond on his pale, thin legs, long since dead, eaten up from within by sick-cell divisions, cremated and interred in the ground, while I keep going, through the dead birds and the dead mothers, to get to the baby carriages. I have to be careful not to lose my balance, and then I reach my hand down into one of the baby carriages, my hand with a cookie in it, and the child inside looks up at me with eyes full of astonishment. I pick it up. I lift it high into the air, and the movement causes its pacifier and its rattle to fall to the ground. I wish the child no harm; all I want is to lift it into the air before putting it back and walking home through Frederiksberg Gardens.

The heron was there last winter. Sitting with its beard blowing in the wind and its long pale fingers clutching the back of the bench. Incapable of fright, tired and sallow in its gaze, smelling of the mites that live in its under-feathers, and I should have sat down next to it. ♦

(Translated, from the Danish, by Martin Aitken.).)

POEMS
“Adventure”

by Helen Klein Ross

A shampooist in an uptown hair salon warns a matron not to lean too far back on the sink. The salon is being renovated and the sink needs adjustment.

The shampooist is new. This time last year, she wasn’t a shampooist. She was a chemist in a country now erased by a war.

This is an adventure, the matron observes, gingerly tilting her head back until it rests on the porcelain.

Yes, an adventure, the shampooist says, reaching for a towel to cushion her neck.

POEMS
“The Guttural Muse”

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) | Late summer, and at midnight . . .

by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

Late summer, and at midnight

I smelt the heat of the day:

At my window over the hotel car park

I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake

And watched a young crowd leave the discothèque.

Their voices rose up thick and comforting

As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up

That evening at dusk—the slimy tench

Once called the doctor fish because his slime

Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

A girl in a white dress

Was being courted out among the cars:

As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs

I felt like some old pike all badged with sores

Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

TABLES FOR TWO
Umami Burger

by Hannah Goldfield

It’s a risky move, opening a burger joint in a burger town. Like its pizza and its bagels, New York’s most beloved burgers are diverse and many-numbered, each with devoted multitudes. It’s downright bold to open a burger joint that purports to blow them all out of the water. “New York has some O.K. burgers,” Adam Fleischman said last spring, before launching the first East Coast outpost of his popular California restaurant, Umami Burger, in Greenwich Village. His would be better, thanks to his focus on ramping up the umami flavor (the hard-to-pinpoint fifth taste, after sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, best exemplified by MSG) in almost every component of his sandwiches.

For the first couple weeks after the restaurant débuted, in July, New Yorkers had to wait for up to three hours to put Fleischman to the test, but the hype has since died down, and it now takes about forty-five minutes to get a table. Fleischman insists that each branch of Umami Burger (there are seventeen in California and one in Florida) is unique. But if walking into one Umami Burger isn’t exactly like walking into another, it is certainly reminiscent of walking into any chain eatery. The menus are large and laminated; the paper placemats are stamped with an icon that looks like both a lipstick kiss and a burger; the servers wear T-shirts emblazoned with the cheesy mottoes “Eating is believing” and “East meats West.” The cocktail list, featuring more than a dozen mostly fruity concoctions with names like the BobCat (for the N.Y.U. mascot) and the Big Apple, is essentially an advertisement for Absolut and Bacardi.

The distinction lies in the food. Waste no time with “Greens”—the underdressed Umami Caesar will only disappoint. (If you must have a vegetable, the pickle plate, with brightly colored okra, beets, and green beans, is excellent.) Fries are, for some reason, listed as a starter, and the waitstaff seem determined to serve them as such. It’s hard to find fault with them otherwise: they’re thin, crispy, and perfectly salted, in the McDonald’s image. But you came here to eat meat: freshly ground Wagyu beef formed into loose six-ounce patties, cooked medium rare (“Is that O.K.?” the servers ask, rhetorically), then sandwiched into brioche-like buns branded with the letter “U.” With little exception, they are supremely delicious, each juicy, messy bite enhanced by a carefully chosen combination of toppings. Both the Original (crisp Parmesan wafer, shiitake mushrooms, caramelized onions, and roasted tomato) and the Truffle (truffle glaze, truffle cheese, and a slather of roasted-garlic aioli) are said to pack extra “serious Umami Burger flavor,” and they are, indeed, particularly satisfying. For a more refined experience, ask for the off-menu 5 Spice Duck Burger, a subtler but exceptional composition of ground breast and leg topped with chutney and roasted fennel, suggestive of a Chinese bao. Best burgers in New York? Among the best. (Open daily for lunch and dinner. Burgers $11-$15.) ♦

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
This Week

The Theatre

BLUE MOON

The monologuist Mike Daisey mounts a series at Joe’s Pub called “All the Faces of the Moon,” in which he presents a different show every night for twenty-nine nights, one for each lunar phase. Jean-Michele Gregory, his wife, directs, for the Public.

Night Life

IT TAKES TWO

Aluna Francis and George Reid, two Londoners who craft glossy, impossibly catchy R. & B. as AlunaGeorge, released their first album, “Body Music,” in July. They’re now on their first tour of the U.S., making their New York City début at the Bowery Ballroom and the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

Art

PRESENT COMPANY

Black artists are pivotal figures in the history of performance art, from Benjamin Patterson, the pioneering co-founder of Fluxus, to the promising newcomer Jayson Musson, a.k.a. Hennessy Youngman. The Grey Art Gallery surveys the subject in “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art,” an exhibition and related series of live programs.

Classical Music

WELCOME HOME

Many New York musicians like to specialize in early music and contemporary performance, leaving works of the intervening centuries to others. Two fine examples are the mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn and the baritone Jesse Blumberg; they lead the cast in Opera Omnia’s production of Monteverdi’s “Return of Ulysses,” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Movies

OUT OF THE PAST

The French curator Serge Bromberg, who often unearths unfamiliar cinematic treasures, comes to New York with new restorations of well-known but poorly preserved early masterworks by Charlie Chaplin, including “Easy Street,” as well as films by Max Linder, whom Chaplin admired.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Fall Preview: The Theatre

How does Julie Taymor, the creative genius behind “The Lion King,” follow the circus—technical difficulties, actors’ injuries, rewrites, and scathing reviews, which culminated in Taymor’s ultimate firing, lawsuits, and countersuits—of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”? She goes back to her roots. This fall, Taymor directs Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the inaugural show at Theatre for a New Audience’s new home in downtown Brooklyn, the Center for Shakespeare and Classical Drama (previews begin Oct. 19). Taymor first worked with the company in 1984; nearly thirty years later, she brings not just her love of Shakespeare (her films include “Titus” and “The Tempest”) but her love of spectacle—there’s a cast of thirty-three, and there will, of course, be flying. Taymor isn’t the only familiar face turning to Shakespeare: Elizabeth Olsen, T. R. Knight, and William Hurt headline “Romeo & Juliet” at Classic Stage Company (Sept. 27). At the Belasco, Mark Rylance is featured in two all-male productions by Shakespeare’s Globe in repertory (Oct. 15), playing Olivia in “Twelfth Night” and the title role of “Richard III.” And Ethan Hawke and Anne-Marie Duff star in “Macbeth,” directed by Jack O’Brien, at the Vivian Beaumont (Oct. 24).

Two plays by the master of manipulation Harold Pinter open this fall. “Betrayal,” from 1978, his searing autobiographical look at a marriage, stars the real-life married couple Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig. Mike Nichols directs, at the Barrymore (Oct. 1). At the Cort (Oct. 26), Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Billy Crudup, and Shuler Hensley star in Pinter’s 1975 play “No Man’s Land,” in repertory with Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”; both are directed by Sean Mathias.

Alison Bechdel’s trenchant graphic novel “Fun Home” chronicles her childhood in small-town Pennsylvania in the early seventies, during which she and her father, a funeral-parlor director, failed to speak about one thing they shared: their homosexuality. “Fun Home” (Sept. 30), a new musical adapted from the memoir, has music by Jeanine Tesori and a book and lyrics by Lisa Kron. With Beth Malone, Michael Cerveris, and Judy Kuhn; Sam Gold directs, at the Public.

Robert Falls, the artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, directs the New York première of a 2012 play by Beth Henley, “The Jacksonian,” for the New Group, at the Acorn (Oct. 25). Henley sets the play in a dingy motel in her home town, Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964. Ed Harris plays a dentist who holes up there after a split with his wife (Amy Madigan); Glenne Headly and Bill Pullman play the unsavory local characters who meddle in his life.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
The Theatre

OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS

Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information.

ALL THE FACES OF THE MOON

Mike Daisey returns to the Public with a series of monologues, a new one every night, for each phase of the moon. Jean-Michele Gregory directs, at Joe’s Pub. Opens Sept. 5. (425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.)

ARGUENDO

Elevator Repair Service created this piece, about the 1991 Supreme Court case Barnes v. Glen Theatre, in which a group of exotic dancers challenged a ban on nudity. John Collins directs. Previews begin Sept. 10. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.)

BIG FISH

Norbert Leo Butz, Kate Baldwin, and Bobby Steggert star in this musical adaptation of the novel by Daniel Wallace, in which a man tries to determine whether the tall tales of his dying, estranged father are true. Andrew Lippa wrote the music and lyrics and John August, who wrote the screenplay for the 2003 film adaptation, wrote the book. Susan Stroman directs and choreographs. Previews begin Sept. 5. (Neil Simon, 250 W. 52nd St. 877-250-2929.)

FETCH CLAY, MAKE MAN

New York Theatre Workshop presents a play by Will Power, directed by Des McAnuff, about the friendship between Muhammad Ali and the actor and comedian Stepin Fetchit in the sixties. Starring Ray Fisher, K. Todd Freeman, Anthony Gaskins, Richard Masur, and Nikki M. James. In previews. (79 E. 4th St. 212-279-4200.)

THE FILM SOCIETY

Keen Company presents the 1988 play by Jon Robin Baitz (“Other Desert Cities”), set in a South African boys’ school in 1970, about a teacher attempting to keep politics out of his film club. Euan Morton and Roberta Maxwell star. Jonathan Silverstein directs. Previews begin Sept. 10. (Clurman, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200.)

FRINGENYC ENCORE SERIES

The Fringe reprises some of the most popular shows from this year’s festival. Plays include “Why You Beasting?,” by David Don Miller; “Rubble,” by Mike Reiss; and “Peninsula,” by Nathan Wright. At Baruch Performing Arts Center (55 Lexington Ave.) and the Players Theatre (115 MacDougal St.). Opens Sept. 6. (212-352-3101.)

THE GLASS MENAGERIE

Cherry Jones, Zachary Quinto, Brian J. Smith, and Celia Keenan-Bolger star in the American Repertory Theatre production of the Tennessee Williams play, directed by John Tiffany (“Once”). Original music was composed by Nico Muhly, and movement was designed by Steven Hoggett. Previews begin Sept. 5. (Booth, 222 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.)

THE HATMAKER’S WIFE

Rachel Chavkin directs this Playwrights Realm production, a surreal romantic comedy by Lauren Yee, about a young woman who moves in with her boyfriend. In previews. Opens Sept. 5. (Peter Jay Sharp, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.)

THE HILL TOWN PLAYS

The Rattlestick presents a play cycle by Lucy Thurber, about a young woman from a mill town in Western Massachusetts who works her way out of abuse and poverty to make a better life. The series includes “Scarcity,” directed by Daniel Talbott, at the Cherry Lane Studio Theatre (38 Commerce St.); “Where We’re Born,” directed by Jackson Gay, at the Rattlestick (224 Waverly Pl.); “Killers and Other Family,” directed by Caitriona McLaughlin, at the Axis (1 Sheridan Sq.); “Ashville,” directed by Karen Allen, at the Cherry Lane (38 Commerce St.); and “Stay,” directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, at the New Ohio (154 Christopher St.). In previews. Opens Sept. 5. (866-811-4111.)

THE LIFE AND SORT OF DEATH OF ERIC ARGYLE

Ross Dungan wrote this play, about the ways in which humans find connections in everyday life. With guitar, harmonium, and glockenspiel performed by the cast. Dan Herd directs, as part of the 1st Irish festival. In previews. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)

MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY

Playwrights Horizons begins its season with the New York première of a play by Anne Washburn, a mash-up of “The Simpsons,” apocalyptic movies, and origin myths, with music by Michael Friedman. Steve Cosson directs. In previews. (416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.)

THE OLD FRIENDS

At the Signature Theatre, Betty Buckley, Veanne Cox, Hallie Foote, and Lois Smith star in the world première of a play by Horton Foote, about news that deeply affects two Texas farming families. Directed by Michael Wilson. In previews. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529.)

PHILIP GOES FORTH

The Mint presents a comedy by George Kelly, from 1931, in which a young man abandons the family business for a life as a playwright. Jerry Ruiz directs. In previews. (311 W. 43rd St. 866-811-4111.)

THE RECOMMENDATION

The Flea premières a play by Jonathan Caren, which explores the limits of friendship through the prism of privilege and class. Directed by Kel Haney and featuring members of the Bats. In previews. Opens Sept. 6. (41 White St. 212-352-3101.)

ROMEO AND JULIET

Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad star in the first Broadway production of the Shakespeare tragedy since 1977. David Leveaux directs. Also featuring Brent Carver, Jayne Houdyshell, Chuck Cooper, Christian Camargo, Justin Guarini, and Roslyn Ruff. In previews. (Richard Rodgers, 226 W. 46th St. 800-745-3000.)

STOP. RESET.

Signature Theatre Company presents a play written and directed by Regina Taylor, about the owner of a company that publishes books by African-American writers, who questions his relevance in a dying business. In previews. Opens Sept. 8. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529.)

TALIESIN

Ralph Lee employs his majestic puppets to tell a story adapted from a medieval Welsh tale, presented by the Mettawee River Theatre Company. Opens Sept. 6. (Outdoor Garden of St. John the Divine, 111th St. at Amsterdam Ave. 212-929-4777.)

THE TEMPEST

The Public’s new free initiative, Public Works, kicks off with a musical adaptation of the Shakespeare play, with music and lyrics by Todd Almond. Lear deBessonet directs; the cast includes Laura Benanti, Norm Lewis, and some two hundred members of participating community groups. Sept. 6-8. (Delacorte, Central Park. Enter at 81st St. at Central Park W. 212-967-7555.)

A USER’S GUIDE TO HELL, FEATURING BERNARD MADOFF

Michole Biancosino directs the world première of a play by Lee Blessing, which satirizes the Madoff scandal. Presented by the Project Y Theatre Company. Previews begin Sept. 5. Opens Sept. 7. (Atlantic Stage 2, at 330 W. 16th St. 212-352-3101.)

WOMEN OR NOTHING

Atlantic Theatre Company begins its season with the world première of a new comedy by Ethan Coen, directed by David Cromer. Starring Robert Beitzel, Halley Feiffer, Susan Pourfar, and Deborah Rush. In previews. (336 W. 20th St. 866-811-4111.)

YOU NEVER CAN TELL

The Pearl, in a co-production with the Gingold Theatrical Company, presents this rarely produced 1896 comedy by George Bernard Shaw, for its thirtieth-anniversary season, directed by David Staller. In previews. (555 W. 42nd St. 212-563-9261.)

NOW PLAYING

THE AWAKE

Ken Urban wrote this play, in which three people discover that they are connected through the workings of a mysterious corporation. Adam Fitzgerald directs. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200. Through Sept. 8.)

THE CHEATERS CLUB

In the Amoralists’ campy ghost story, written and directed by Derek Ahonen, three foulmouthed white siblings from New York City—one of them gay—and their well-mannered black friend (Jordan Tisdale) come to Savannah to cheat on their spouses, and end up at an inn haunted by people who died violently in one of the rooms. When the four visitors go missing, their spouses come to Savannah looking for them, and happen to arrive at the inn on the one night in three hundred years when ghosts can cross back into the world of the living. Part of the Amoralists’ credo is to “produce work of no moral judgment,” which, here, results in tiresome racial and sexual stereotyping. The contrast between crass New Yorkers and genteel Southerners is well done, but there’s not much of a story underneath the vulgarity. (Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. 212-352-3101.)

EVERYTHING IS OURS

Colt Coeur presents a comedy of manners by Nikole Beckwith, in which a wealthy, successful couple is visited by a ten-year-old girl with a surprise. Adrienne Campbell-Holt directs. (HERE, 145 Sixth Ave., near Spring St. 212-352-3101.)

ALSO PLAYING

ANNIE: Palace, Broadway at 47th St. 877-250-2929. AWAKE & SING!: Walkerspace, 46 Walker St. 866-811-4111. Through Sept. 8. BUYER & CELLAR: Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St. 212-868-4444. CHICAGO: Ambassador, 219 W. 49th St. 212-239-6200. FIRST DATE: Longacre, 220 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200. JERSEY BOYS: August Wilson, 245 W. 52nd St. 212-239-6200. KINKY BOOTS: Hirschfeld, 302 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. THE LION KING: Minskoff, 200 W. 45th St. 866-870-2717. MAMMA MIA!: Winter Garden, Broadway at 50th St. 212-239-6200. MATILDA THE MUSICAL: Shubert, 225 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. MOTOWN: THE MUSICAL: Lunt-Fontanne, 205 W. 46th St. 877-250-2929. NEWSIES: Nederlander, 208 W. 41st St. 866-870-2717. ONCE: Jacobs, 242 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. PIPPIN: Music Box, 239 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. ROCK OF AGES: Helen Hayes, 240 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. RODGERS + HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA: Broadway Theatre, Broadway at 53rd St. 212-239-6200. SOUL DOCTOR: Circle in the Square, 235 W. 50th St. 212-239-6200. SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK: Foxwoods, 213 W. 42nd St. 877-250-2929. THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL: Stephen Sondheim, 124 W. 43rd St. 212-239-6200. THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY: New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St. 212-239-6200. THE WEIR: Irish Repertory, 132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737. WICKED: Gershwin, 222 W. 51st St. 212-239-6200.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Fall Preview: Night Life

One can never step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus said, but Sting’s latest project, “The Last Ship,” has him returning to the place of his birth, Wallsend, England, on the River Tyne. Wallsend was known for its shipyards (the R.M.S. Mauretania was built there), and Sting grew up in the shadows of massive hulls rising. The yards are now closed, and “The Last Ship,” which is both a new album (his first collection of original material in nearly ten years, out Sept. 24) and the name of his play slated to hit Broadway next year (Joe Mantello is the director), concerns their turbulent final days, centering on the story of a wayward son who comes home to bury his father. The music is folksy and dark, drawing on Celtic sounds from the North of England, and was recorded, Sting has said, in the spirit of a performance in a pub. He’ll be playing songs from “The Last Ship” live for the first time—backed by an ensemble that includes musicians from back home on violin, Northumbrian pipes, melodeon, and mandolin—at a small, two-hundred-and-sixty-seat space at the Public Theatre. The ten shows, from Sept. 25 to Oct. 3, benefit the Public, which is giving away a few free tickets each evening.

Edith Piaf, who rose from poverty to become one of the world’s most cherished singers, died fifty years ago, at the age of forty-seven. Harry Connick, Jr., Duffy, Madeleine Peyroux, Angélique Kidjo, Beth Ditto, and many others pay her tribute at the Beacon Theatre on Sept. 19. The concert is also the American début of the Francofolies festival, an annual gathering in La Rochelle that has been celebrating contemporary Francophone music since 1985.

American punk rock and New Wave found a home at CBGB, the legendary club at Bleecker and Bowery. It closed in 2006, but its spirit lives on with the annual CBGB Music and Film Festival, which is presenting more than five hundred acts Oct. 10-13, at venues around town. This is the fortieth anniversary of the club’s opening, and the festival includes the U.S. premièreof “CBGB,” a film about the club, starring Alan Rickman and Ashley Greene.

For the past couple of years, Haim, comprising three sisters—Este, Alana, and Danielle Haim—and a drummer, Dash Hutton, have been touring just about everywhere. They became one of the most sought-after live acts on the scene, beloved for winsome performances of their catchy eighties-influenced pop, without releasing a proper album. That changes on Sept. 30, when “Days Are Gone” comes out—a treat for those who haven’t yet caught them live.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Night Life

ROCK AND POP

Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements.

BARCLAYS CENTER

620 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn (800-745-3000)—Sept. 6: The electronica giants Depeche Mode barrel through town with their sombre dance hits. Their latest release, “Delta Machine,” shows the band in fine form, retaining the vitriol and the musical intensity that first made them so appealing all those years ago. With Bat for Lashes, the project of Natasha Khan, a sultry-voiced singer whose album “The Haunted Man” fuses electronic, dance, and folk elements.

B. B. KING BLUES CLUB & GRILL

237 W. 42nd St. (212-997-4144)—Sept. 10: Marion Walter Jacobs—Little Walter, that is—came to prominence in the early fifties as a sideman in the Muddy Waters band. He revolutionized the approach to the blues harmonica, not just by blowing great figures into a small hand mike but by turning the amp way up and creating distortions that prefigured Hendrix. He had some success as a solo artist—“Juke” and “My Babe” were his biggest hits—but he was an alcoholic with a hot temper, and he died after a fight in a club in Chicago’s South Side, in 1968, at age thirty-seven. Mark Hummel, leader of the Blues Survivors, leads a tribute to him, with a group that includes Anson Funderburgh and Billy Boy Arnold.

BEACON THEATRE

Broadway at 74th St. (212-465-6500)—Sept. 6: John Prine, a singer-songwriter’s singer-songwriter since the seventies, was the subject of a tribute album, “Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows,” a couple of years ago, in which artists including My Morning Jacket, Lambchop, and Justin Townes Earle covered such compositions as “All the Best,” “Six O’Clock News,” and “Far from Me.” Prine will be supported by another gifted vocalist-composer, Rosanne Cash, who can be expected to join him on some tunes from “In Spite of Ourselves,” his 1999 album of duets with women.

THE BELL HOUSE

149 7th St., Brooklyn (718-643-6510)—Sept. 6: Jamie Stewart, of Xiu Xiu, has recently collaborated with the author, musician, and amateur M.M.A. fighter Eugene S. Robinson on a fascinating project called Sal Mineo, which takes its name from the gay fifties icon who made his name as John (Plato) Crawford in “Rebel Without a Cause” and who was stabbed to death behind his Los Angeles apartment in 1976. The twenty-three song fragments on the band’s self-titled début LP tumble into an apocalyptic Lynchian underworld, as Robinson’s hardboiled spoken word outlines macabre examples of heinous living.

BOWERY BALLROOM

6 Delancey St. (212-533-2111)—Sept. 5: The irresistible R. & B. of Aluna Francis and George Reid, two Londoners who record and perform as AlunaGeorge. Listeners would be hard pressed to find a modern group with a more current pop sound. Francis’s voice is like cotton candy, and Reid’s beats are shifty and energetic; it’s as if the xx had moved from the bedroom to the living room. Their début album, “Body Music,” came out this summer, and they’re currently on their first tour of the States. With the Chicago production duo Supreme Cuts. Sept. 6: Alex Zhang Hungtai, the Taiwanese-born Canadian musician who performs under the name Dirty Beaches, creates a largely instrumental world of dissonance, melancholia, and sounds that go bump in the night on his double album, “Drifters/Love Is the Devil.” Sept. 9: Archy Marshall, a.k.a. King Krule, sings brooding, stripped-down songs in a gravelly baritone made all the more surprising by the fact that he’s only just turned nineteen. His birthday coincided with the release of his début album, “6 Feet Beneath the Moon,” and his recent single “Easy Easy” has garnered support from Earl Sweatshirt and Beyoncé; he seems perfectly positioned to be the season’s crossover indie hit.

CITY WINERY

155 Varick St. (212-608-0555)—Sept. 4: The Brooklyn-based act Yarn plays rootsy alt-country rock that is heavy on harmonies, storytelling, and mandolin. The ensemble’s fans, known as the “yarmy,” helped fund its latest album, “Almost Home,” which was produced by the renowned bluegrass engineer Bil VornDick. Sept. 7-8: When the British band Squeeze first hit, in the late seventies, with its pop hooks, sweet harmonies, classic lead vocals, and twisty lyrics, critics were tripping over each other in the rush to declare Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford the new Lennon and McCartney. The group did have some international Top Ten hits, including “Tempted” and “Cool for Cats,” but the duo’s relationship was volatile and largely unsustainable. Tilbrook, the melodist and primary lead singer, continues to tour, leading his own group.

“LET’S ZYDECO!”

Sept. 7: Rosie Ledet, one of the few women fronting a zydeco band, comes out of Church Point, Louisiana, leading her Zydeco Playboys with a soulful voice, an impressive accordion technique, and a sassy fearlessness as she ventures into down-home double-entendre. Free dance lessons precede the festivities. (Connolly’s, 121 W. 45th St. For more information, call 212-685-7597 or visit letszydeco.com.)

“LIVE ON PIER 26”

Sept. 5: The flamboyant Australian duo Empire of the Sun plays retro-leaning electronic pop, and they have an outlandish image that matches their colorful sound. The band’s sartorial aesthetic is a collision of “Sgt. Pepper” epaulet chic and Adam & the Ants-style buccaneer. This would be a hollow distraction if their rich anthems weren’t so lavishly realized. Sept. 6-7: Passion Pit. Armed with irresistible synth hooks and athletic electronic beats, this indie outfit has the perfect soundtrack for summer. Its début record, “Manners,” put it on the map in 2009, and its latest release, “Gossamer,” which came out last year, lives up to its name. With Best Coast. (Pier 26, Hudson River Park, North Moore St. at West St. bowerypresents.com.)

MUSIC HALL OF WILLIAMSBURG

66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn (718-486-5400)—Sept. 6: AlunaGeorge (see the Bowery Ballroom). Sept. 9: The British folk star Laura Marling is young, but she has a mature approach to songcraft. Her confident take on folk traditions could easily place her songs in a number of bygone eras, but, lucky for us, she belongs to ours.

(LE) POISSON ROUGE

158 Bleecker St. (212-505-3474)—Sept. 10: For the past few years, the Icelandic composer and keyboardist Jóhann Jóhannsson’s most significant works have been film scores, a context well suited to his artful blend of contemporary classical, electronica, and indie pop. His 2011 score “The Miners’ Hymns,” in particular, for the experimental director Bill Morrison’s magnificent homage to coal miners in northeast England, showcased his most impressive compositional tropes—sweeping Copland-esque gestures, fragmented electronica beats, and consonant melodies tinged by Nordic melancholy. For this concert, Jóhannsson will be performing an excerpt of a score for a forthcoming thriller called “Prisoners,” along with older works.

UNION POOL

484 Union Ave., Brooklyn (718-609-0484)—Sept. 10: A performance from Body/Head, a “scripted improvisation” duo from the guitarist Bill Nace and Kim Gordon, formerly of Sonic Youth. Gordon and Nace are neighbors in Western Massachusetts; she first became aware of him when he was scooping popcorn at Northampton’s Pleasant Street Theatre, a small and much loved cinema that closed last summer. The pair started in the instrumental realm, but they have recently added Gordon’s confrontational spoken-sung vocals to their jagged, planar compositions crafted from droning feedback and chugging guitars. This show celebrates the release of “Coming Apart,” a new double LP, on Matador Records.

WEBSTER HALL

125 E. 11th St. (212-353-1600)—Sept. 10: Jason Pierce—a.k.a. J. Spaceman—who pilots the English act Spiritualized, has a way of lifting your heart with heavenly string arrangements and then slamming it down with devil-may-care stoner rock worthy of the dirtiest hangover. “Sweet Heart, Sweet Light,” his seventh album with the ever-changing ensemble, is his most ambitious and moving work since 1997’s seminal “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space.” Guy Blakeslee, of the Entrance Band, supports with his twangy psych rock.

JAZZ AND STANDARDS

BIRDLAND

315 W. 44th St. (212-581-3080)—The pianist Arturo O’Farrill can be found here on Sunday nights at the helm of his lavish Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra. From Sept. 3-8, he has the run of the club, scaling down with a sextet. The smaller group will in no way diminish the excitement he generates.

BLUE NOTE

131 W. 3rd St. (212-475-8592)—Sept. 5-8: The smoky-voiced Cassandra Wilson, a defiantly eccentric visionary, is one of the most influential and consistently captivating singers of her generation.

DIZZY’S CLUB COCA-COLA

Broadway at 60th St. (212-258-9595)—Through Sept. 8: Trio da Paz, joined by the singer Maucha Adnet, the saxophonist Harry Allen, and the vibraphonist Joe Locke, concludes a two-week engagement celebrating the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Stan Getz.

JAZZ STANDARD

116 E. 27th St. (212-576-2232)—A man of numerous ambitions, the pianist and composer Orrin Evans, whose recent work has been with his Captain Black Big Band, splits the week here with two different units. Sept. 5-6, he steers a trio, and Sept. 7-8, he leads a quintet, featuring the trumpeter Ralph Alessi and the saxophonist Greg Osby.

SMOKE

2751 Broadway, between 105th and 106th Sts. (212-864-6662)—Sept. 6-7: Eric Reed, a communicative and decorous pianist with an affinity for the music of Thelonious Monk, leads a quartet that will benefit from the presence of three exceptional talents: the saxophonist Seamus Blake, the bassist Ben Williams, and the drummer Greg Hutchinson.

VILLAGE VANGUARD

178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. (212-255-4037)—Sept. 3-8: The powerhouse drummer Jeff (Tain) Watts takes charge of a quartet, featuring the pianist Geri Allen.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Fall Preview: Art

In 2010, Isa Genzken romanced New York with a long-stemmed rose—a twenty-eight-foot-tall sculpture installed on the façade of the New Museum. But don’t expect hearts and flowers from the German artist’s retrospective at MOMA, her first in the United States, which will travel to Chicago and Dallas. Genzken’s multifarious output in the four decades since she made her solo début, at Düsselfdorf’s legendary Konrad Fischer gallery, has defied categorization, from the long wooden “Ellipsoids” that she made in the heyday of minimalism to the flotsam-and-jetsam assemblages for which she’s best known. (The influence of these radically hybridized pieces on younger artists is incalculable.) It’s tempting to view Genzken’s career as a feminist deflation of the power dynamics of the male-dominated art world, but to do so would be to rob her work of its Delphic complexity. As Genzken has said, “There is nothing worse in art than ‘You see it and you know it.’ Many artists seem to work from a theory that they invent . . . a theory they never deviate from. That’s a certainty I don’t like.” (Opens Nov. 23.)

The superb Swiss-French painter Balthus (1908-2001)—notorious for his portraits of Lolita-age girls and fond of self-portraits in the guise of a feline—once sent a telegram to the Tate, on the eve of his retrospective there: “NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS. BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES. REGARDS B.” One wonders what he would make of the Met’s “Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations.” (Opens Sept. 25.)

Memorialized in fiction and film, Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” is one of the world’s best-loved pictures. It comes to the Frick—along with masterpieces by Rembrandt and Hals—on loan from Holland’s Royal Picture Gallery, the Mauritshuis. The Vermeer, which has not been seen in New York since 1984, will take center stage—the only work installed in the museum’s Oval Room. Tickets are available now through the Frick and through Telecharge. (Opens Oct. 22.)

It’s not breaking news that performance has migrated from the margins of contemporary art to the center. (Two words: Marina Abramovic.) That shift is due in no small part to Performa, New York’s biennial of live events, founded in 2005 by the art historian RoseLee Goldberg. Expect some hundred productions spread out across forty venues, including the U.S. première of works by Alexandre Singh and by Jérôme Bel and Theatre Hora. (Opens Nov. 1.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Art

MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective.” This compact show is a chamber of wonderments. Price, the ceramics artist who died last year at his home in New Mexico, spent half a century flirting with greatness in a disrespected medium. His confidence owed to timing—a brief renaissance of ceramic art in Southern California in the late fifties, led by Price’s teacher Peter Voulkos—and his quality to wit and (no other word will quite do) genius. Price’s manipulations of cup forms, variously geometric and biomorphic, amounted to a surprise attack on the history and aesthetics of modern art, spankingly refreshed and made the artist’s own. His later mode of globular masses with sanded, speckled patinas of paint is sui generis. It exalts color to practically metaphysical intensities. The artist Robert Irwin remarked, “You had the feeling that if you cut that thing in half it would be that color all the way through.” The architect Frank Gehry, who designed the Met show, said, “I can’t imagine living in a place without a Ken Price.” Go see. Join the club. Through Sept. 22. |  “The Roof Garden Commission: Imran Qureshi.” Through Nov. 13. |  “Julia Margaret Cameron.” Through Jan. 5. |  “Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969.” Through Jan. 26. (Open daily, 10 to 5:30, and Friday and Saturday evenings until 9.)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9400)—“Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes.” Through Sept. 23. |  “American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe.” Through Jan. 26. |  “Walker Evans American Photographs.” Paintings by Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, and Franz Kline have been displaced from their positions in the permanent-collection galleries to make way for a roomful of Walker Evans pictures. They’re hung in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the museum’s first one-person photography show and its even more influential catalogue. As in 1938, the exhibition includes pictures of people and places, many of them made under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, the New Deal agency charged with documenting rural poverty. But Evans was never a strictly objective observer; for all their blunt simplicity, his photographs are sharply opinionated, as “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” his 1941 collaboration with James Agee, made quite clear. In his essay for “American Photographs,” Lincoln Kirstein describes Evans as both a “visual doctor, diagnostician rather than specialist,” and “the family physician, quiet and dispassionate.” However one defines his role, the photographer made work that was at once plainspoken and eloquent—images that still define something essential and true about America and Americans. Through Jan. 26. |  “Soundings: A Contemporary Score.” Through Nov. 3. |  “Images of an Infinite Film.” Opens Sept. 7. (Open daily, 10:30 to 5:30, and Friday evenings until 8.)

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 89th St. (212-423-3500)—“James Turrell.” Imagine this show as air-conditioning for the eye and, if you’re gamely susceptible, the soul. Turrell, seventy, is a wizard of installations that involve illusory effects of light, both natural and artificial. For the centerpiece, Frank Lloyd Wright’s great rotunda has been fitted with six evenly spaced, concentric ovoid rings, smoothly clad in white plastic. An orchestration of slowly shifting colored light, from unseen L.E.D. fixtures, suffuses the atmosphere with one ravishing payoff after another: breathable beauty. The range of colors, from white to charcoal and from peach to plum, feels limitless: every tone, hue, and saturation that you know and some that seem minted for the occasion. Their sequence, while silent, feels musical, in the way that it flavors time, and hallucinogenic, in the way that it plays hob with spatial perception. The show’s excellence couldn’t be more timely. It satisfies two big present cravings: that of museums to attract crowds, and that of at least some in those crowds for good art. It hits an unchanging sweet spot of what we want from any museum: a place where we can go en masse and be alone. Through Sept. 25. |  “New Harmony: Abstraction Between the Wars, 1919-1939.” Through Sept. 8. (Open Fridays through Wednesdays, 10 to 5:45, and Saturday evenings until 7:45.)

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

Madison Ave. at 75th St. (212-570-3600)—“Hopper Drawing.” This exhibition lets us into the factory of hand and mind that created “Nighthawks,” “New York Movie,” “Early Sunday Morning,” “Office at Night,” and other touchstones for which the word “iconic” is praise too faint. Those paintings hang here with entourages of studies that document the methods not of a realist painter but of a visual dramaturge. Every detail of a hand, a bed, a cornice, or a slant of light in a scene had to be auditioned and rehearsed in its role. The show explains the power of Hopper’s compositions but leaves their spiritual pang mysterious. What he was getting at—slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life—could yield only to paint, and only to him. Also on view are masses of early work which establish Hopper’s talents, developed in Paris, as a master sketcher and an apt emulator of Post-Impressionism—gifts that he plowed under to achieve a mature style, which confronts the world not as a reflection but as a précis of soul-testing melancholy and life-saving glints of grace. Through Oct. 6. (Open Wednesdays, Thursdays, and weekends, 11 to 6, and Fridays, 1 to 9.)

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway (718-638-5000)—“The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001-2013.” Through Sept. 22. |  “Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories.” Through Dec. 1. |  “ ‘Workt by Hand’: Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts.” Through Sept. 15. (Open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Thursday evenings until 10.)

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Central Park W. at 79th St. (212-769-5100)—“Whales: Giants of the Deep.” Through Jan. 5. (Open daily, 10 to 5:45.)

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Columbus Ave. at 66th St. (212-595-9533)—“Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections.” Through Sept. 22. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 7:30, and Sundays, noon to 6.)

ASIA SOCIETY

Park Ave. at 70th St. (212-288-6400)—“Iran Modern.” Opens Sept. 6. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Friday evenings until 9.)

THE CLOISTERS

Fort Tryon Park (212-923-3700)—“Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet.” Opens Sept. 10. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 9:30 to 5:15.)

DIA ART FOUNDATION AT THE FOREST HOUSES

Tinton Ave. between 163rd and 165th Sts., the Bronx (212-989-5566)—“Thomas Hirschhorn: Gramsci Monument.” This year’s most captivating new art work, an installation at a city housing project in the South Bronx, excites so many thoughts that you may want help thinking them. Start with the artist. Hirschhorn, fifty-six, a rangy and intense Swiss, is on hand all day, every day, at his tree-house-like village of purpose-built shacks, set on open land amid the brick towers of the Forest Houses, which are home to thirty-four hundred people. The sprawling construction bridges a walkway and is shaded by sycamores that poke up through its raised plazas. It incorporates a library and a museum of memorabilia commemorating the humanist Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a theatre for daily lectures and performances, an office for a photocopied free daily newspaper, a micro radio station, an art classroom, an Internet center, a food kiosk, and a children’s wading pool. One feels safely remote here from the current art world’s baleful pressures of ravening money and pandering institutions. The democracy of the place, levelling the artist with the kids asplash in the pool, brings tones of Walt Whitman to mind. Through Sept. 15. (Open daily, 10 to 6.)

FRICK COLLECTION

1 E. 70th St. (212-288-0700)—“Precision and Splendor: Clocks and Watches at the Frick Collection.” Through Feb. 2. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, 11 to 5.)

GREY ART GALLERY

100 Washington Sq. E. (212-998-6780)—“Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art.” Opens Sept. 10. (Open Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 to 6, Saturdays, 11 to 5, and Wednesday evenings until 8.)

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

1133 Sixth Ave., at 43rd St. (212-857-0000)—“A Different Kind of Order: The I.C.P. Triennial.” Through Sept. 8. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 to 6, and Friday evenings until 8.)

JEWISH MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 92nd St. (212-423-3200)—“Jack Goldstein * 10,000.” Through Sept. 29. |  “Elaine Reichek: A Postcolonial Kinderhood Revisited.” Through Oct. 20. (Open Saturdays through Tuesdays, 11 to 5:45, Thursdays, 11 to 8, and Fridays, 11 to 4.)

NEW MUSEUM

235 Bowery, at Prince St. (212-219-1222)—“Llyn Foulkes.” Through Sept. 1. |  “Erika Vogt: Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll.” Through Sept. 22. |  “Ellen Gallagher: Don’t Axe Me.” Through Sept. 15. (Open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Thursday evenings until 9.)

NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

170 Central Park W., at 77th St. (212-873-3400)—“AIDS in New York: The First Five Years.” Through Sept. 15. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 to 6, Friday evenings until 8, and Sundays, 11 to 5.)

STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM

144 W. 125th St. (212-864-4500)—“Robert Pruitt: Women.” Through Oct. 27. |  “Things in Themselves: Steffani Jemison, Jennifer Packer, and Cullen Washington, Jr.” Through Oct. 27. |  “Body Language.” Through Oct. 27. (Open Thursdays and Fridays, noon to 9, Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, noon to 6.)

GALLERIES—CHELSEA

PIETER HUGO

The South African photographer’s ambitious new project, made over the past eight years, is both deeply personal and pointedly political. Titled “Kin,” it explores the complex and volatile relationship between the races in his homeland, primarily through portraiture that suggests a broad range of intimacy and estrangement. Landscapes (including sites of historic and contemporary conflict) and domestic interiors give the figures some context. Working in the ever-lengthening shadow of colonialism and apartheid, in a country still divided, Hugo looks for common ground and finds it in a series of strong, troubled, eloquent faces. Opens Sept. 6. (Milo, 245 Tenth Ave., at 24th St. 212-414-0370.)

Short List

GRETCHEN BENDER: The Kitchen, 512 W. 19th St. 212-255-5793. Through Oct. 5. NATHAN CARTER: Kaplan, 525 W. 21st St. 212-645-7335. Opens Sept. 5. KIM GORDON: White Columns, 320 W. 13th St. 212-924-4212. Opens Sept. 7. LESLIE HEWITT: Sikkema Jenkins, 530 W. 22nd St. 212-929-2262. Through Oct. 5. CHARLINE VON HEYL / ALLAN MCCOLLUM: Petzel, 456 W. 18th St. 212-680-9467. Opens Sept. 6. MATTHEW DAY JACKSON: Hauser & Wirth, 511 W. 18th St. 212-790-3900. Opens Sept. 6. SOL LEWITT: Cooper, 534 W. 21st St. 212-255-1105. Through Oct. 10. MICHAEL RAEDECKER: Rosen, 525 W. 24th St. 212-627-6000. Opens Sept. 7.

GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN

“SUMMERTIME SALON”

For those of us reluctant to let go of summer, the hundred and sixteen photographs on the theme, filling the walls of this small gallery from baseboard to ceiling, may provide solace. The sizes of the images vary almost as widely as their quality, but works by the gallery’s roster of editorial and fashion photographers tends to occupy an accessible middle ground. As usual, Jose Picayo’s black-and-white pictures stand out; there’s an easy sensuality to his images of young men in and out of the surf, and his large-scale study of a fringed palm tree has the solid presence of an ancestral portrait. Other highlights include images by Benjamin Heller, Laurence Salzmann, Cig Harvey, Patricia McDonough, and Kristen and Mark Sink. Through Sept. 8. (Rice, 325 W. 11th St. 212-366-6660.)

“THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING”

No, that clown at City Hall isn’t running for mayor—he’s the star of “Dog Days Are Over,” a performance piece by Ugo Rondinone, one of eleven international artists exhibiting public works in this happy-go-lucky show. (The clown hangs out near the fountain on Fridays, from 11 to 5, weather permitting.) The French artist Daniel Buren, once the staunchest of deconstructionists, exhibits a pavilion that wouldn’t look out of place in a playroom, with a tinted transparent roof casting candy-colored shadows on the ground. The best surprise is supplied by the British cutup David Shrigley: what looks like a pair of cast-off rubber flip-flops is, in fact, a sculpture cast out of steel. Through Dec. 13. (Public Art Fund at City Hall Park, Broadway between Chambers St. and Park Row. 212-223-7800.)

Short List

DAVID ADAMO / JAMES CASTLE: Freeman, 140 Grand St. 212-966-5154. Opens Sept. 7. CAROL BOVE: Maccarone, 630 Greenwich St. 212-431-4977. Opens Sept. 7. CYNTHIA DAIGNAULT: Cooley, 107 Norfolk St. 212-680-0564. Opens Sept. 8. JOHN HOUCK: On Stellar Rays, 1 Rivington St. 212-598-3012. Opens Sept. 8. JOSH KLINE: 47 Canal, 47 Canal St. 646-415-7712. Through Oct. 13. CARY LEIBOWITZ: Invisible Exports, 14A Orchard St. 212-226-5447. Opens Sept. 6. AARON SPANGLER: Horton, 55-59 Chrystie St. 212-253-0700. Opens Sept. 7. “PIZZA TIME”: Marlborough Broome Street, 331 Broome St. 212-219-8926. Opens Sept. 8.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Fall Preview: Dance

The last time American Ballet Theatre danced in the home of its rival, New York City Ballet, the year was 1976 and the building was called New York State Theatre. When the company returns this fall (Oct. 30-Nov. 10), it will be to the David H. Koch Theatre, which, since the departure of New York City Opera, two years ago, has welcomed more and more dance troupes to its stage, which was built for ballet. Its new name isn’t unfamiliar at A.B.T.—Koch is a vice-chairman of the company’s board and the chief underwriter of this season’s big première, Alexei Ratmansky’s one-act version of “The Tempest.” Shakespeare’s play is notoriously difficult to translate into ballet, but its humanist fantasy, and an evocative Sibelius score, should play to several of the choreographer’s many strengths. (The casting of the quicksilver Herman Cornejo as Caliban, rather than as Ariel, is intriguing.) Ratmansky is at a point where whatever he does is the thing to see. In 1983, when Twyla Tharp made “Bach Partita” for A.B.T., she was in a similar place. The company’s revival of that fiendishly difficult dance, which it last performed in 1985, offers a fine parallel. Ratmansky, Tharp: these are names worthy of a place in what is still the house of Balanchine.

Mark Morris’s grand ensemble work “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” (1988) imbues Handel’s music with a brilliant playfulness. The movement—earthy, eloquent, saucy—accentuates the score, which brims with nature’s sounds. Milton’s verses surface, as do images from William Blake. Accompanied by Morris’s musical ensemble and by the Riverside Choral Society Chamber Singers, “L’Allegro” closes the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center (Nov. 21-23).

The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s flexible Fishman Space, new last year, is bigger than New York Live Arts and smaller than the Joyce. Its promising fall lineup occupies a corresponding aesthetic territory, between audience-challenging and audience-pleasing. In the middle, chronologically and with respect to choreographic experience, comes “Dark Lark” (Nov. 6-9), a dive into sensual fantasy by Kate Weare, who excels at kindling sexual heat.

San Francisco Ballet comes for a rare two-week visit to the David H. Koch Theatre (Oct. 16-27). S.F.B., the oldest ballet company in the country, brings five programs full of dances never seen in New York. The highlights are Christopher Wheeldon’s inventive new evening-length “Cinderella”; Mark Morris’s “Beaux,” an all-male nonet with a score by Martinu; and Yuri Possokhov’s virtuosic “Classical Symphony.” The New York City Ballet Orchestra accompanies.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Dance

DUŠAN TÝNEK DANCE THEATRE

The two premières and one repertory work in this tenth-anniversary season share an interest in the tension between science and myth. Less typically for this talented choreographer, the pieces in the program are accompanied by footfalls and voices instead of music. “Stereopsis” addresses depth perception with a spoken-word text reimagining Homer’s story of Cyclops. In “Romanesco Suite,” the subject is fractals and homunculi; the score, cicada songs captured earlier this year. “Base Pairs,” from 2010, sets evolutionary theory against creationism to the ticking of a metronome and a recording of Lucinda Childs. (BAM Fishman, 321 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100. Sept. 4-7 at 7:30.)

NEW CHAMBER BALLET

The young German-born choreographer Miro Magloire is also a trained composer, interested in knotty, tonally ambiguous compositions from the mid-twentieth century. His dances are miniatures, full of stillness and mystery. How does one move to the banging chords of Stockhausen’s “Klavierstück IX”? Magloire shows us, with the help of his excellent musicians—Melody Fader, on piano, and Doori Na, on violin—and five punctilious dancers. The fall program includes four works by Magloire, two with music by Stockhausen, as well as a dance drama set to music by the young British composer Rebecca Saunders (“Anna’s Last Day”) and a duet to Haydn (“The Letter”). (City Center Studio 4, at 130 W. 56th St. 212-868-4444. Sept. 6-7 at 8.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Fall Preview: Classical

“We’re having a lounge.” So said a Lincoln Center staffer, guiding a visitor to a recent post-concert event that anyone else would have called a reception. That earnestly laid-back vibe will continue through this fall’s White Light Festival, a catchall that groups together important concerts with a “spiritual” theme—everything from a Beethoven-Messiaen program given by the Cleveland Orchestra (Nov. 4) to a performance (held in near-total darkness) by the JACK Quartet of Georg Friedrich Haas’s String Quartet No. 3 (Nov. 19). Most of the concerts will, indeed, come with lounges, at which audience members can sip water or wine. Further events include concerts by the St. Thomas Boys Choir of Leipzig (Nov. 12) and a musical exploration of the Balkans with Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI (Nov. 3). One of the most rewarding will likely be “Era la Notte” (Nov. 13-14), a dramatic program performed by Anna Caterina Antonacci, the stellar soprano whose New York recital début, in 2012, caused a sensation. Joined by soloists from the orchestra Les Siècles, she will sing music by Monteverdi and Barbara Strozzi that illuminates the healing of a woman’s heart; Christian Lacroix designed the costumes, and Juliette Deschamps directs.

Ned Rorem, America’s greatest living composer of classical song, turns ninety this fall. The eternally elegant Rorem will be in attendance as the New York Festival of Song offers a concert celebration at Merkin Concert Hall (Nov. 5) that features gems such as “The Lordly Hudson,” as well as songs by Poulenc, Barber, and Thomson, sung by the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, a young Met star, and the baritone Andrew Garland, an impeccable recitalist.

The Bleecker Street music club (Le) Poisson Rouge has found success by erasing the lines between genres and providing a relaxed atmosphere (with a full bar). Now, just down the street, comes a new underground venue, SubCulture. Its classical shows include a New York Philharmonic “Contact!” concert with Esa-Pekka Salonen (Nov. 4) and an evening with the guitarist Jason Vieaux and the accordionist Julien Labro, co-sponsored by the 92nd Street Y (Oct. 8).

Nico Muhly—once a downtown darling, now a seasoned pro—is the composer of “Two Boys,” the only work born of the Metropolitan Opera-Lincoln Center Theatre new-music initiative to actually reach the Met’s stage. First performed at English National Opera, in 2011, it’s an attempted-murder mystery that takes place partially in the wilds of the Web. Two superb singers, Paul Appleby and Alice Coote, lead the cast (Oct. 21-Nov. 14).

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Classical

CONCERTS IN TOWN

TRINITY WALL STREET BRITTEN FESTIVAL

The centennial celebration of the music of Benjamin Britten, already under way, intensifies this fall, and Julian Wachner’s program at the grand Episcopal church is out in front. Its first concert, with Wachner’s Novus NY ensemble, is ambitious, featuring not only the composer’s official Opus 1, the Sinfonietta, but also two of his most complex and compelling song cycles with orchestra: the mysterious “Nocturne” (with strings and seven obbligato instruments, written for Peter Pears) and the trenchant “Phaedra” (based on Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine, composed for Janet Baker). The singers are the tenor Nicholas Phan and the mezzo-soprano Virginia Warnken. (Broadway at Wall St. Sept. 5 at 1. No tickets required.)

RESONANT BODIES FESTIVAL

New-music vocalists, who usually ride shotgun in contemporary-music concerts, have claimed a space all their own with this new concert mini-series, held in the edgy little ShapeShifter Lab, in Gowanus. The crew (occasionally joined by specialists on double bass, harp, piano, and teapot, in addition to the invisible craftsmen of electronica) includes such breakout singers as the soprano Charlotte Mundy and the baritone Jeffrey Gavett, singing pieces by such composers as Beat Furrer, George Crumb (“Apparition,” a shattering Whitman setting), Yoko Ono, Allen Shawn, Babbitt, Feldman, and Coltrane. (18 Whitwell Pl., Brooklyn. Sept. 5-7, with sets at 7, 8, and 9. For full programming and ticket information, see resonantbodies.org.)

MOHAMMED FAIROUZ: “THE NAMED ANGELS”

(Le) Poisson Rouge hosts the latest concert from Fairouz, who in the past five years has become one of the most frequently performed composers in the city. He shares the stage with his two adventurous composer colleagues Daniel Bernard Roumain (who doubles on violin) and Du Yun, who will enjoy performances of their works by the pianists Taka Kigawa and Kathleen Supové, the soprano Amelia Watkins, the clarinettist David Krakauer, and the Voxare String Quartet (performing Fairouz’s marquee piece). (158 Bleecker St. lprnyc.com. Sept. 6 at 8.)

BARGEMUSIC

A group of distinguished chamber-music veterans—the pianist Ursula Oppens and the Cassatt String Quartet—come to Brooklyn’s cozy floating chamber-music series to offer a program that features Shostakovich’s searing Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Beethoven’s delightful “Harp” Quartet (Op. 74), and the Piano Quintet No. 1 in D Minor by Fauré, a true rarity. (Fulton Ferry Landing. bargemusic.org. Sept. 8 at 4.)

JUPITER SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS

Great composers of vocal music are prominent on this all-instrumental program, which includes, among other works, pieces by Strauss, Schumann, and Schubert (the “Trout” Quintet), in addition to curiosities by Stamitz and Spohr. Two notable guest artists, the pianist Alexander Kobrin and the violinist Mark Kaplan, join the Jupiter ensemble. (Good Shepherd Church, 152 W. 66th St. 212-799-1259. Sept. 9 at 2 and 7:30.)

ADAM LEVIN

(Le) Poisson Rouge is the hot spot this week: also featured on its schedule is a New York début recital by this acclaimed young classical guitarist, with a new Naxos disk under his belt. His program includes not only music by Bach, Turina, and Ysaÿe (a transcription of the “Obsession” Prelude from the Sonata No. 5 for Solo Violin) but also a range of contemporary works. (158 Bleecker St. lprnyc.com. Sept. 9 at 7.)

OPERA OMNIA: “THE RETURN OF ULYSSES”

This vital small company brings an inventive, modern energy into Baroque works, performing them exclusively in English translation. A staging of Monteverdi’s heroic work, the least performed of his three extant operas, will be presented at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, featuring two of New York’s most versatile young singers, the baritone Jesse Blumberg and the mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn; Avi Stein conducts from the harpsichord. (450 W. 37th St. 866-811-4111. Sept. 10-12 at 7:30.)

IAN HOBSON: “JOHANNES BRAHMS”

Hobson, long a noted pianist and conductor, is establishing a Gotham beachhead (with several colleagues from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) at the DiMenna Center to offer a series of concerts illuminating aspects of the music of Brahms. The first, devoted to piano music, includes the Piano Sonata No. 1 in C Major and the “Schumann Variations” (for four hands, with the pianist Claude Hobson). (450 W. 37th St. brownpapertickets.com. Sept. 10 at 7:30. Through Nov. 14.)

WORLD PEACE ORCHESTRA

The violinist Alexander Markov (playing Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 and Massenet’s “Méditation”) is the star attraction in this new venture, which brings young musicians together from all over the world. The noted Lithuanian maestro Gintaras Rinkevičius conducts an eclectic program that features music by Beethoven, Bernstein, and Rimsky-Korsakov; the actor Kevin Spacey introduces the concert. (Avery Fisher Hall. lincolncenter.org. Sept. 10 at 8.)

OUT OF TOWN

MAVERICK CONCERTS

The Maverick, one of two area festivals that wrap up their seasons this weekend, regularly offers jazz and world-music concerts on Saturday night. This one, however, from the impressive young jazz pianist Dan Tepfer, has a classical twist: it’s Tepfer’s very original take on Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Sunday afternoon brings the finale, with the warmly admired American String Quartet performing Haydn’s last completed quartet (in F Major, Op. 77, No. 2), Shostakovich’s thrilling Quartet No. 3 in F Major, and, in a jubilant close, Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” Quartet No. 3 in C Major. (Woodstock, N.Y. maverickconcerts.org. Sept. 7 at 6:30 and Sept. 8 at 4.)

TANNERY POND CONCERTS

Christian Steiner’s almost-private series, held in a comfortable old Shaker tannery barn, is based on long-standing alliances with old friends. This concert features Duo Parnas—the violinist Madalyn Parnas and the cellist Cicely Parnas, who, as granddaughters of the distinguished cellist Leslie Parnas, are classical-music aristocracy. They team up with the pianist Vincent Adragna for Prokofiev’s stormy Sonata No. 1 in F Minor for Violin and Piano, Brahms’s soulful Sonata No. 1 in E Minor, as well as Schubert’s comparatively tranquil Piano Trio No. 2 in E-Flat Major. (Darrow School, New Lebanon, N.Y. tannerypondconcerts.org. Sept. 7 at 8.)

MUSIC MOUNTAIN

The summer shrine to the string quartet, nestled in the foothills of northwestern Connecticut, concludes its season by inviting some fine colleagues from over the New York border, the Bard Festival String Quartet, to play in its air-conditioned, whitewashed hall. Quartets by Haydn (the “Joke”) and Casella are on the program, in addition to Brahms’s invigorating Piano Quartet in G Minor, Op. 25 (with Xak Bjerken assisting). (Falls Village, Conn. 860-824-7126. Sept. 8 at 3.)

SOUTH MOUNTAIN CONCERTS

This end-of-summer series—just five Sundays—makes up in star power what it lacks in size. The first of several gilt-edged chamber groups appearing this year is Boston’s Borromeo String Quartet, a group, now in its prime, that plays in a richly expressive style that brings to mind the great mid-century quartets. The ensemble begins with music by Beethoven (at which it excels), completing the concert with the world première of Lera Auerbach’s String Quartet No. 8 and Dvořák’s Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 51. (Pittsfield, Mass. southmountainconcerts.org. Sept. 8 at 3.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Fall Preview: Movies

One of Hollywood’s greatest directors, Howard Hawks was also, in effect, one of its most ingenious casting directors. In the twenties, he made Louise Brooks an international star; later, he discovered Lauren Bacall and Montgomery Clift, launched Carole Lombard and Angie Dickinson, revealed the comic gifts of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn and the dramatic talents of John Wayne, and, in the mid-sixties, gave James Caan his first starring role. Hawks shaped their personae with his subtly stylized direction. An adventurer and an outdoorsman, a friend of Ernest Hemingway (whose novel “To Have and Have Not” he filmed) and William Faulkner (who co-wrote that script), Hawks devised a spare yet spacious visual prose that is the cinema’s closest equivalent to Hemingway’s work. Hawks was a master of genres, from the gangster film (“Scarface”) and the screwball comedy (“Bringing Up Baby”) to the Western (“Rio Bravo”), the musical (“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”), and even science fiction (“The Thing from Another World”), which he infused with his daring gender-based themes; he was the original bromantic. Museum of the Moving Image’s complete retrospective of his thirty-nine features runs from Sept. 7 to Nov. 10; all but one will be screened in a 35-mm. print.

The musician and composer John Zorn turns sixty this month. Anthology Film Archives hosts a pair of series in tribute: “A Pocketful of Firecrackers” (Sept. 20-28) features movies that he has scored (including Sheila McLaughlin’s 1987 drama, “She Must Be Seeing Things”), and “John Zorn Selects” (Sept. 12-30) presents movies with Zorn’s favorite scores, such as “Vertigo,” “Chinatown,” and Irving Lerner’s film noir “Murder by Contract,” from 1958.

Film Forum’s revival series are among the city’s grand artistic candy boxes, and this fall—in the theatre’s hundredth repertory calendar—the programmer Bruce Goldstein fills them lavishly, with new restorations of Stanley Kubrick’s early film noir “The Killing”; Jacques Becker’s graceful and streetwise Parisian romance “Antoine and Antoinette”; and a generous helping of films by Jacques Demy, including a weeklong run of “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.”

After winning an Oscar for Best Director (for “The Departed”), Martin Scorsese—never a shrinking violet—came out swinging, with the hallucinatory thriller “Shutter Island” and the 3-D cinema-historical comedy “Hugo.” He returns with a drama of New York swagger and its comeuppance, “The Wolf of Wall Street” (Nov. 15), based on the true story of the Long Island penny-stock brokerage Stratton Oakmont and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the firm’s founder.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Movies

OPENINGS

LA MAISON DE LA RADIO

Nicolas Philibert directed this documentary, about France’s national public-radio station. In French. Opening Sept. 4. (Film Forum.)

POPULAIRE

A comedy, set in 1958, about a French secretary (Déborah François) who is in training for a speed-typing competition. Co-starring Romain Duris and Bérénice Bejo. In French. Opening Sept. 6. (In limited release.)

RIDDICK

The third installment in the action-film series, starring Vin Diesel, as a solitary warrior fighting to survive on a distant planet. Directed by David Twohy. Opening Sept. 6. (In wide release.)

SALINGER

A documentary about the writer, directed by Shane Salerno. Opening Sept. 6. (In limited release.)

A TEACHER

Reviewed below in Now Playing. Opening Sept. 6. (In limited release.)

TOUCHY FEELY

Lynn Shelton directed this drama, about a massage therapist (Rosemarie DeWitt) whose health issues impede her practice, and her brother, a dentist (Josh Pais), who takes up massage in her stead. Co-starring Ellen Page, Allison Janney, and Ron Livingston. Opening Sept. 6. (In limited release.)

NOW PLAYING

AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS

The director David Lowery’s bighearted Texan melodrama, set in the seventies, stars Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara as a young married couple, Bob Muldoon and Ruth Guthrie, who try to shoot their way out of a corner after robbing a bank. Bob takes the rap and rots in jail while Ruth gives birth to their daughter; when Bob escapes, the small town mobilizes for his arrival—especially Sheriff Patrick Wheeler (Ben Foster), an officer and a victim of the shoot-out, who in Bob’s absence has been courting Ruth. Lowery filters the classic lovers-against-the-world plot through a romantic-modernist sensibility, fragmenting and foregrounding the action to capture shuddering depths of mood with impressionistic images and fleeting gestures, the hush of impassioned voices, and the flash of steadfast, yearning gazes. The grand emotional spectrum recalls golden-age Westerns (as with the sheriff’s name, borrowed from Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo”) and the attention to tone and texture is reminiscent of new-Hollywood classics (embodied here by Keith Carradine, as a Machiavellian patriarch), but the feel of the movie is intimate and handmade, as if Lowery were renewing, lovingly and poignantly, the landscape’s ruined landmarks and infusing them with his own memories and dreams.—Richard Brody (In limited release and video on demand.)

AUSTENLAND

A tale of two Janes. The first is a young American (Keri Russell) who is obsessed with the life and works of the second—Miss Austen—to the point of paralysis. Such mania, twinned with a peculiar blindness to the import of the literature that inspires it, could conceivably form the subject of a good movie. This is not that movie. Instead, we have an all but unwatchable mess, in which our heroine flies to England for an Austen-themed vacation—no better than a scam, it turns out, with hired performers dressing up in mock-period costume and spouting anachronistic lines. But the director, Jerusha Hess, and her fellow-screenwriter, Shannon Hale, are in a fix: they need both to play up the travesty of Jane’s excursion (which becomes an excuse for horrendous hamming on all sides) and to propose that she will, in the end, derive satisfaction from what it brings. As a result, everything rings false, and the spectacle of bad actors pretending to be bad actors may trouble your sleep for some time. Kindergarten plays have been delivered with more conviction and panache. Meanwhile, lovers of the true Jane will be driven out of the cinema, never to return, and back to the novels; to that extent, perhaps, a service has been rendered. With Jennifer Coolidge.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 9/2/13.) (In limited release.)

BLUE JASMINE

Woody Allen’s startlingly powerful homage to “A Streetcar Named Desire” is dramatized in a curt, decisive manner—a “late” style, if ever there was one. In place of Blanche DuBois, the ruined Southern belle who believes in art and gentleness and depends on the kindness of strangers, Allen has given us Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), a contemporary Park Avenue woman who believes in luxury and status and depends on the kindness of wealthy men. But Jasmine’s high-finance husband (Alec Baldwin) turns out to have been a swindler, and Jasmine has lost everything. Broke, her nerves shattered, she moves in with her estranged sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who lives in San Francisco with two chubby and inarticulate little boys in a cramped apartment on South Van Ness. Their relationship is Allen at his flintiest: the two sisters face each other across the great American divide of class and taste. Much of their story plays like farce, but, as in a Chekhov play, the farce is tinged with melancholy. Blanchett, lithe and golden in the monied scenes set in the past, makes Jasmine absurdly haughty yet heartbreaking—and funny. When she drops her voice into its smoky lower register, we know that she’s teasing the tragic mode. With Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Louis C.K., and Peter Sarsgaard.—David Denby (7/29/13) (In limited release.)

THE BUTLER

A high-minded, didactic, but irresistible entertainment in which the long White House service of an African-American butler, Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), is used as a prism through which we view the development of the civil-rights movement. As the liveried Cecil, silent and dignified, serves sandwiches and coffee and exchanges courtesies with a variety of chief executives—including L.B.J. (Liev Schreiber), who addresses him while sitting on the can—Cecil’s son, Louis (David Oyelowo), becomes a militant and manages to hit every highlight, including the Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961, and Martin Luther King’s motel room on the day that he’s shot. History and family life are not merely joined; they are held together in a mutual hammerlock. The movie’s right-mindedness is relieved now and then by scenes at Cecil’s house, where his wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), grows restive and resentful, drinks, and dallies with a neighbor, played by Terrence Howard as a lazily insinuating porch lizard. With John Cusack, as Richard Nixon, and the English actor Alan Rickman doing Ronald Reagan with a wedge of high-riding hair and a voice as soft and slow as poured molasses. Written by Danny Strong. Directed by Lee Daniels.—D.D. (8/26/13) (In wide release.)

THE CANYONS

An everyone-sleeps-with-everyone movie set in Los Angeles. At the center of the picture is Christian (the porn star James Deen, who looks good when dressed), a young, trust-funded mover who is casually producing a film. Christian likes to control his live-in girlfriend, Tara (Lindsay Lohan), keeping tabs on her movements and setting her up with new sex partners that he recruits from the Internet. At the same time, Tara is having an affair (but why?) with a talentless and anxious young actor (Nolan Funk). Several other women connected to the two men in the past or the present linger at the edges of the story. The movie is not porn, but it has the demoralized second-rateness and lowlife inanity of the porn world. Likable characters are hardly a necessity in fiction (we wouldn’t have French literature and movies if it were), but it’s clear to us that none of these people will ever accomplish anything outside of the sack. The director, Paul Schrader, holds the narrative together with his elegant feeling for décor and space, but the movie is empty. Written by Bret Easton Ellis.—D.D. (8/5/13) (In limited release.)

ELYSIUM

Neill Blomkamp’s busy and indignant new film is set in the year 2154. The title refers to a space station: a haven for the wealthy, spinning just beyond the limits of our polluted planet, and clearly related to the elegant wheel that turned in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Not that Blomkamp’s manner owes much to Kubrick; where the latter’s movie finds serenity and wonder, the new film fidgets with anxiety, and the camera cannot hold still for long. Our hero is Max (Matt Damon), who, like the majority of humans, toils and sweats on Earth, where the cops are intemperate robots. After an accident at work, and with nothing to lose, he takes on a reckless task, assailing an evil billionaire (William Fichtner) and winding up on a shuttle to Elysium, hell-bent on reaching this artificial heaven and obtaining justice. The sequence of events is light on logic, yet such is the director’s urge to muscle us along that we barely notice. Politically, his movie flames with insurrectionary fervor, but its most cogent virtue is one of texture; rather than viewing a future world from a distance and admiring its digital enhancements, we feel thrust into the thick of it with such immediacy and sensory impact that, like most of its inhabitants, we can only dream of escape. With Jodie Foster, miscast as a frosty villainness, and Sharlto Copley, well cast as a maniacal rogue.—A.L. (8/12 & 19/13) (In wide release.)

FIG LEAVES

Already in 1926, with his second feature film, Howard Hawks’s effervescent blend of sly sex comedy and riotous slapstick is on gleeful display. The title refers to Eve’s garments in the Garden of Eden, and the story begins there, with the primordial couple living like the Flintstones, with a pet brontosaurus, before leaping ahead to the Roaring Twenties. Adam Smith (George O’Brien), a strapping young plumber, is married to the willowy Eve (Olive Borden), who lives in modest comfort but yearns for high-fashion finery. Comic accidents bring her to the attention of Josef André, the haute-couture king, at whose Fifth Avenue salon she soon becomes the leading model and object of desire—unbeknownst to her husband. Adam’s gender-bending games with his gruff business partner, Eddie (Heinie Conklin), and the viperish wiles of the flapper next door (Phyllis Haver) add ribald laughs, and a loopy, outlandish fashion show (originally shot as a color insert but surviving only in black-and-white) suggests the enticing plumage of exotic birds. Though the film is silent, Hawks’s epigrammatic rapidity is already in evidence—the characters talk non-stop with such lively, pointed grace that a viewer might swear he hears the intertitles spoken before seeing them onscreen.—R.B. (Museum of the Moving Image; Sept. 8.)

FRUITVALE STATION

What is the value of a young black man’s life? In this film, based on actual events, the African-American writer-director Ryan Coogler has mounted a powerful and moving re-creation of what happened to Oscar Grant III in the twenty-four hours before he was shot and killed by a BART officer in Oakland on New Year’s Day, 2009. Michael B. Jordan (“The Wire,” “Friday Night Lights”), who plays Oscar, has a brilliant smile and an easy way about him—outwardly, Oscar glides through his life with complete assurance. He’s charming and friendly, but there’s something lost and irresolute about him that drives the people who love him crazy. The movie sums up Oscar, but the act of summing up can only go so far, since a young life is still a maze of ambition and failure. From the evidence presented here, Oscar Grant was smart and foolish, loving and irresponsible, candid and evasive, and now he’s another young black man gone. With Octavia Spencer, as his tough-talking mother, and Melonie Diaz, as his girlfriend and the mother of his young daughter.—D.D. (7/29/13) (In wide release.)

LOVELACE

The screenwriter Andy Bellin and the directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman tell the story of the seventies porn star Linda Lovelace, twice. In the first version, Linda (Amanda Seyfried), born Linda Boreman, is rescued from her mother’s suburban prison by a fast-talking sex hustler named Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), who pushes her into the 1972 porn feature “Deep Throat,” which excites the socially and culturally prominent of New York as well as the rest of the world. In the second version of the events, the filmmakers show us the squalid intimidation behind this success—Traynor beating Linda, pimping her out to groups of men, and terrifying her so badly that she’s unable to resist doing what he wants. The trouble with the movie is that Linda is of no interest whatsoever in either version. Seyfried, with her huge features crowding her small face, looks like Alice in a very strange Wonderland. But whatever possibilities she may have as an actress are eradicated by the filmmakers, who make the heroine into a new version of the Marquis de Sade’s hapless ninnies, a woman without will, direction, ideas, or temperament. Peter Sarsgaard, with an oozing voice and a wolfish smile, is a terrific creep, and Hank Azaria and Bobby Cannavale have fun overplaying two porn-world figures, but, at its center, the movie remains unawakened.—D.D. (8/26/13) (In wide release.)

MR. ARKADIN

Acting on a million-dollar tip from a dying man in Naples, Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden), a small-time international intriguer with a Flatbush accent, tracks down a feared global potentate, Gregory Arkadin (Orson Welles), who hires him to do a sensitive job: to investigate Arkadin himself. The grandee is pained by “a conscience and no memory at all”—something like original sin—but his conscience does not prevent the bodies from piling up as Van Stratten, trawling the European underworld, unwittingly lets loose the ghosts of the century’s political monsters. This fractured “Citizen Kane,” built of frames within frames and mirrors within mirrors, is aptly brought to life by Welles’s later style, born of low budgets and high anxiety, its grotesque closeups and sharp diagonals suggesting worlds and minds askew. In Welles’s oracular script, Arkadin, a gleefully orotund storyteller, reveals nothing, but the film’s love stories, untender tussles, are a source of bittersweet memories and bad faith: there Welles confesses all. In a sardonic reshuffling of classic sentimental tropes, the story pivots on the difficulty of getting a goose-liver dinner in Munich on Christmas Eve. Released in 1955.—R.B. (MOMA; Sept. 8.)

PASSION

Obsessed by the video trail of modern life, whether it’s stealthy (surveillance cameras) or overt (lovers’ bedroom selfies), Brian De Palma builds this heavily plotted thriller on a witty commercial for a smartphone that Isabelle (Noomi Rapace), a young Berlin art director, shoots on her smartphone. Her boss, Christine (Rachel McAdams), who has been brazenly flirting with her, takes credit for the idea—and, suspecting that her own boyfriend, Dirk (Paul Anderson), another executive at the firm, has been sleeping with Isabelle, contrives intricate vengeance against both of them. De Palma’s virtuosic joy in image-making—with subtly skewed and wildly cocked angles, lurid closeups, overhead shots, needle-threading camera moves, acidulous lighting, and jolting color contrasts—is irrepressible, and one extended split-screen sequence is astonishingly meticulous and seductive. Yet the movie shows, above all, why the mid-level drama is almost extinct: despite De Palma’s lavish proof of what he can accomplish with classical technique, the movie comes off as too much for too little, a collection of mechanisms that decorate mechanisms. The finely woven fabric of sex and death, crime and punishment seems more like a totem than a fetish. This deliberate throwback, with its open Hitchcockian borrowings and allusions, is overwhelming in its exertions, its display of talent, and its insignificance.—R.B. (In limited release and video on demand.)

LE PLAISIR

Though Max Ophüls’s 1952 costume adaptation of three stories by Maupassant matches the originals in frank sensuality and comic irony, the director reshapes the material with his distinctive blend of visual genius and bitter, worldly wisdom. The first two episodes—concerning a legendary seducer, now elderly, who dons a mask to gavotte with the young belles at a dance hall, and the ladies of a small-town brothel who send the local men into a tizzy when they close up shop to attend the first Communion of the madam’s niece—lift the veil of effervescent ribaldry to reveal the agonies of unsatisfied desire. In the dance hall, Ophüls’s gliding, gyrating camera captures the lusty, pounding steps of a quadrille as erotic as a night-club grind; in church, he slyly suggests the compartmentalized faith of unrepentant sinners. (No other director has so touchingly conveyed the exquisite social graces that arise from the pursuit of animal lust.) The third story, about a bright young artist whose relationship with his live-in model goes sour, finds Ophüls pursuing even bigger game—the nature of love, the source of art, even the meaning of life. This philosophical tale with a whiplash ending presses the director’s elegant style to the breaking point, climaxing with a harrowing, vertiginous crane shot that rises to a nightmarish frenzy. In French.—R.B. (MOMA; Sept. 4.)

PRINCE AVALANCHE

There’s nothing in the middle of the road, as Jim Hightower pointed out, but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. Well, here is a film about those yellow stripes. Despite the grandeur of the title, it’s a tale of losers in the wilderness, set in the summer of 1988. Alvin (Paul Rudd) is cramped and uptight, equipped with shorts, socks, medication, and a tragic mustache. His younger companion, Lance (Emile Hirsch), is bored and unadventurous, wanting only to return to civilization and the company of women, although whether most women would welcome his arrival is open to question. David Gordon Green’s movie hangs out with this listless pair as they paint their yellow lines along the near-empty roads of Texas, shoot the breeze, bicker, and—in a rare outburst—get drunk. Rudd, in particular, gives it everything he’s got, but he is vanquished by a story that feels both inconsequential and contrived. Although there is a fearsome backdrop, blackened by unexplained fires, it feels glanced upon, rather than patiently surveyed or pulled into the plight of the men, and we barely grasp the ruin that the conflagration inflicted on the wider community. Imagine what Werner Herzog, say, would have wrought from such devastation.—A.L. (In wide release.)

RUSSIAN ARK

A guide to the treasures of the Hermitage, a rueful glance down the vistas of Russian history, or a show of technical prowess: take your pick. Alexander Sokurov, the creator of “Mother and Son,” proves that his singular method—at once earthy and transcendent—is gaining strength and width. The film unwinds in one take, lasting ninety minutes, and by some miracle we grow happily accustomed to its rhythm, like children held rapt by a bedtime story. The camera glides through galleries as if it were the eye of an invisible visitor; ahead is a black-coated stranger, who accosts passers-by and clucks tenderly, if critically, over the art. Sokurov has made not a documentary, however careful his inspection of painted surfaces, but a collection of small, sorrowful dramas—wait for the imperial children, or the blind woman caressing a marble sculpture. The effect is impenetrable, yet the film is blessed with clarity; maybe, if you spend that much time among Old Masters, they start to rub off on you. In Russian. Released in 2002.—A.L. (Film Forum; Sept. 6-12.)

SALVATORE GIULIANO

In 1961, taking on the subject of the legendary bandit who fell in and out with Sicilian separatists and Mafiosi, Francesco Rosi proved to be an inspired innovator as well as the true heir to the neorealists. He’s a bravura director with passionate social and political convictions. The title character is seen either as a distant guerrilla leader in a dashing white raincoat or as a corpse; the chapters of his career emerge in jagged flashbacks between the identification of his bullet-marked body and the trial of his henchmen. By staging the events in actual locations, with many of the real inhabitants, Rosi achieves a bold new style (one later taken up by Pontecorvo and Costa-Gavras). When the wives and mothers of arrested men scream “Assassins!” at the militia, or Giuliano’s mother cries over his corpse, the scenes have a raw, newsreel poetry. In Italian.—Michael Sragow (Museum of Modern Art; Sept. 4-6.)

SHORT TERM 12

The second feature by Destin Daniel Cretton, set in and around an intake facility for evaluating troubled teens, looks closely at its fascinating characters to get at the notion of character itself. The story centers on Grace (Brie Larson) and Mason (John Gallagher, Jr.), two of the young adults who are the day-to-day, hands-on guardians. Their ill-defined jobs entail everything from physical restraint and police-like snooping to quasi-therapeutic interventions—and even seriocomic pursuits, through city streets, of youths who slip past the gate. The teens in their care fit a familiar, tightly defined array of ethnicities and personalities, but Cretton—who worked in such a facility—narrowly skirts the risk of stereotyping through the force of imagination. His dialogue is wondrously energized, suggesting impulses and experiences that range far beyond the confines of the plot’s problems, and Grace and Mason—a droll and sensible couple whose relationship is tested by their work—remain passionately loose-ended and casual, embodying the rare ideal of peaceful people you’d follow into battle. Subtly inverting the story’s point of view, Cretton sees his protagonists through the eyes of the teens and gets to the ineffable core of trust.—R.B. (In limited release.)

THE SPECTACULAR NOW

The director, James Ponsoldt, and the screenwriters, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, from “(500) Days of Summer,” have adapted a novel by Tim Tharp into a sweet, intelligent movie about two kids who have a grownup love affair. Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) is a tall, dark, and not quite handsome high-school senior, a witty and intelligent guy heading toward a life of failure. Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley, from “The Descendants”) is a shy, levelheaded girl who’s not funny like Sutter, but is shrewder. Ponsoldt takes his time: he stages the exploratory scenes between Sutter and Aimee with a feeling for the ebb and flow of the moment, and the actors play off each other easily and happily, finding surprises in their own responses. Their scenes together breathe in a way that has been lost in American moviemaking.—D.D. (8/5/13) (In limited release.)

A TEACHER

The moody wide-screen compositions of this unromantic melodrama, written and directed by Hannah Fidell, offer cautionary lessons on the division of cinematic labor. The story concerns Diana Watts (Lindsay Burdge), a young English instructor in an Austin, Texas, high school, who finds her student, Eric Tull (Will Brittain), a strapping senior with a reserved charm and a confident grin, irresistible. Their affair is his delight and her obsession; vacillating between the prudent course and the pleasant one, she exposes herself to terrifying risks. Fidell, working with the cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo, evokes desire and doom with low-light images and intimate framings, but the effects are merely illustrative. The script offers neither verbal illuminations nor practical insights, neither psychology nor morality, and the plot is little more than the reportorial backstory to a tabloid headline. Burdge, with her searching, closed-in manner, and Brittain, with his muscular grace, do the bulk of the work, and do it sympathetically, but Fidell’s stylish direction is flattened out by the film’s narrow range.—R.B. (In limited release.)

THIS IS MARTIN BONNER

This poised, involuted micro-drama concerns the daily struggle of a lonely sixtyish divorcé (Paul Eenhoorn), an Australian immigrant, to find his footing in Reno, Nevada. His job, as a counsellor to prisoners awaiting release, brings him into connection with Travis Holloway (Richmond Arquette), who is freed after serving a twelve-year sentence and is in need of friendship as well as guidance. The writer and director, Chad Hartigan, transforms the potentially maudlin premise into a poised and luminous reach for grace. As the spare, sharp dialogue and tensely searching performances elicit lives filled with pain and loss, Hartigan’s images (realized by the cinematographer Sean McElwee) capture a serene spiritual bounty that shines through the daily grit and grind. Despite the small scale of the action—Travis’s effort to reconnect with his daughter (Sam Buchanan), Martin’s poignant attempt at a speed-dating encounter—the movie plays for high stakes. Roiling beneath the surface of the action is the question of what makes life worth living; the story pivots on a crisis of faith, and Hartigan audaciously offers practical advice for facing the unbearable—and presents (as in a full-circle pan shot of Travis in his first dawn of freedom) vision itself as the garden of earthly delight.—R.B. (IFC Center.)

THE WOLVERINE

Once again, we are presented with a paradox: Logan (Hugh Jackman) is blessed with unnatural powers, yet he remains unable to shave his own whiskers off, despite having razor-sharp blades popping out of his knuckles. Most of his exploits, this time, unfold in Japan, where he was imprisoned at the end of the Second World War—close to Nagasaki, indeed, when the bomb was dropped—and where he must now bid farewell to a dying friend (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), the head of a commercial empire. What Logan is doing there, apart from protecting the old man’s beautiful granddaughter (Tao Okamoto) and worrying about his own body’s capacity to regenerate, feels vague and undecided, as do the motives of several other characters. If you long to discover, for instance, what the evil doctor (Svetlana Khodchenkova)—part viper, part oncologist—really desires, good luck to you. But it’s a relief to come across a blockbuster that finds a location and stays there, rather than hopping desperately from one place to the next, and you wonder if the director, James Mangold, is really as interested in the spasms of wild action as he is in the tranquil interludes between them. That said, there are kicks to be had from a dizzying fight atop a bullet train, and, for Kurosawa fans, the sight of the Wolverine, on a snowy night, impaled by a forest of arrows, pays stylish—and wholly appropriate—homage to “Throne of Blood.”—A.L. (In wide release.)

THE WORLD’S END

Not a sequel but the third panel of a comic triptych (the others being “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz”), this film reunites the director Edgar Wright with his star and co-writer Simon Pegg, plus an eager squadron of supporting players. The setting is a dreary British town, to which Gary (Pegg, noisier than before) goes back, accompanied by four reluctant friends, in a bid to relive—and, if possible, improve upon—a drinking bout from their teen-age years. As in the earlier films, the fun comes from a clash between the unglamorous grind of routine and the onset of sudden dramatic energy, fuelled entirely by a cinematic genre—in “Shaun of the Dead,” it’s zombie infestation. (It’s as though life, for Wright and Pegg, lacks all purpose and direction until it begins to resemble a movie.) Something similar occurs here, although the clash is more abrupt and the balance more disturbed; the gonzo side of the plot is not quite as engaging as the human drama, and the scenes in which the characters meet up and try to mesh again are some of the best in the film. As the jokes fly, and as the alcoholic consumption goes off the chart, we notice, more strongly than ever, one abiding theme of the triptych: the fear, among grown men, that the growing may have been a waste of time. With Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Rosamund Pike, and the wry, droning voice of Bill Nighy.—A.L. (9/2/13) (In wide release.)

ALSO PLAYING

AFTERNOON DELIGHT: In limited release. CLOSED CIRCUIT: In wide release. GETAWAY: In wide release. YOU’RE NEXT: In wide release.

REVIVALS, CLASSICS, ETC.

Titles with a dagger are reviewed above.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181)—“Genmex Part II: Recent Films from Mexico.” Sept. 4-5 at 7 and 9: “The Last Christeros” (2011, Matías Meyer). | Sept. 6 at 6:45, Sept. 8 at 9, and Sept. 9 at 8:45: “Greatest Hits” (2012, Nicolás Pereda). | Sept. 7 at 7:15: “Inori” (2012, Pedro González-Rubio).

BAM CINÉMATEK

30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100)—“Serge Bromberg Treasures.” Sept. 5 at 7: Short films by Charlie Chaplin and Max Linder, presented by the preservationist Bromberg. | “Skateboarding.”Sept. 6 at 7 and 9:45: “Skateboard” (1978, George Gage). The 7 P.M. screening will be followed by a Q. & A. with the director. | Sept. 7 at 2 and 7: “Thrashin’ ” (1986, David Winters). | Sept. 7 at 4:30 and 9:30: “Freewheelin’ ” (1976, Scott Dittrich). | Sept. 8 at 2 and 7: “Gleaming the Cube” (1989, Graeme Clifford). | Sept. 8 at 4:30 and 9:30: “Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator” (2002, Helen Stickler).

FILM FORUM

W. Houston St. west of Sixth Ave. (212-727-8110)—In revival. Sept. 6-19 at 1:20, 3:25, 5:45, 7:45, and 9:50: “Contempt” (1963, Jean-Luc Godard). | Sept. 6-12 at 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, and 9:30: “Russian Ark” (+).

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-8755610)—“NewFest 2013.” Sept. 6 at 7:15: “Concussion” (2012, Stacie Passon). | Sept. 7 at 7: “Pit Stop” (2013, Yen Tan). | Sept. 7 at 9:15: “Interior. Leather Bar.” (2013, Travis Mathews and James Franco). | Sept. 8 at 7: “You and the Night” (2013, Yann Gonzalez; in French).

IFC CENTER

323 Sixth Ave., at W. 3rd St. (212-924-7771)—“Lone Star Cinema: Texas on Screen.” Sept. 6-8 at 11 A.M.: “Written on the Wind” (1957, Douglas Sirk). | Sept. 6-7 at midnight: “Reality Bites” (1994, Ben Stiller).

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres, 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9480)—“An Auteurist History of Film.” Sept. 4-6 at 1:30: “Salvatore Giuliano” (+). | “An Auteurist History of Film Reprise.” Sept. 4 at 8: “Le Plaisir” (+). | Sept. 4 at 8: “Il Grido” (1957, Michelangelo Antonioni). | Sept. 5 at 4:30: “Roman Holiday” (1953, William Wyler). | Sept. 5 at 8: “The Band Wagon” (1953, Vincente Minnelli). | Sept. 6 at 4:30: “Tokyo Story” (1953, Yasujiro Ozu). | Sept. 6 at 8: “The Earrings of Madame de. . .” (1953, Max Ophüls). | Sept. 7 at 2: “The Actress” (1953, George Cukor). | Sept. 8 at 2:30: “To Catch a Thief” (1955, Alfred Hitchcock). | Sept. 8 at 5:30: “Mr. Arkadin” (+). | Sept. 9 at 4:30: “Pather Panchali” (1955, Satyajit Ray). | Sept. 9 at 8: “Attack!” (1956, Robert Aldrich). | Sept. 10 at 4: “Ordet” (1954, Carl Theodor Dreyer).

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077)—Through Nov. 10: The films of Howard Hawks. Sept. 7 at 2: “To Have and Have Not” (1944). | Sept. 7 at 4:30: “Rio Bravo” (1959). | Sept. 8 at 2: “Fig Leaves” (+). | Sept. 8 at 4: “The Cradle Snatchers” (1927; silent). | Sept. 8 at 6: “Fazil” (1928; silent).

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Readings and Talks

MCNALLY JACKSON BOOKS

Meg Wolitzer talks about her latest novel, “The Interestings,” with the novelist Susan Choi, the author of “My Education.” (52 Prince St. 212-274-1160. Sept. 3 at 7.)

“POETRY FROM THE ARCHIVES AT NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY”

The Academy of American Poets closes out its summer reading series with Stephen Burt, Michael Cirelli, and Amy Lawless, who will share their poems, as well as work written by American poets that they’ve selected from the library’s archive. (Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, Fifth Ave. at 42nd St. Sept. 10 at 6:30. poets.org.)

NATIONAL ARTS CLUB

Gabriel Roth discusses his début novel, “The Unknowns.” (National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park S. 212-475-3424. Sept. 10 at 8.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Above and Beyond

PIG ISLAND

Now in its fourth year, this high-on-the-hog culinary gathering features more than two dozen area chefs, who will be serving strictly local fare. There’ll be whole hogs, pork tacos, pork buns, and more, along with craft beers, New York State wines and ciders, and “vegetarian-friendly side stations.” Cooking demonstrations and live music round out the day. (Ikea Waterfront, Red Hook, Brooklyn. Sept. 7, from 11:30 to 4:30. pigisland.com.)

CONTRIBUTORS
Contributors

Seamus Heaney (Poem) received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in Castledawson, Northern Ireland, on April 13, 1939, and died on August 30th. This poem first appeared in the June 25, 1979, issue of the magazine.

Steve Coll (Comment), the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, is the author of seven books, including “Ghost Wars,” for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005.

Alec Wilkinson (The Talk of the Town; “Cape Fear,” p. 42) is a longtime New Yorker contributor. He has published several books, including “The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration.”

David Finkel (“The Return”), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post, received a MacArthur Fellowship last year. His new book, “Thank You for Your Service,” comes out in October.

Ian Frazier (Shouts & Murmurs) is the author of “The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days,” his first novel.

Helen Klein Ross (Poem), a poet and novelist, is the author of “Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue.”

John Lahr (“Varieties of Disturbance”) was a theatre critic for the magazine for twenty-one years. His book “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh” will be published next year.

Rachel Aviv (“The Imperial Presidency”) is a staff writer and the recipient of a 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.

Dorthe Nors (Fiction), a Danish writer, will publish “Karate Chop,” her first short-story collection in English, next February.

Malcolm Gladwell (A Critic at Large) is the author of “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants,” which comes out in October.

Jill Lepore (Books), a staff writer, is a professor of history at Harvard. “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin” will be published next month.

Bruce McCall (Cover) has contributed art work and humor pieces to the magazine since 1992. He has collaborated with David Letterman on the book “This Land Was Made for You and Me (But Mostly Me),” which comes out in November.

THE MAIL
Re: After Bloomberg; What’s Wrong with Me?; Mentally Fit

Letters in response to Ken Auletta’s article (August 26, 2013), Meghan O’Rourke’s essay (August 26, 2013), and Patricia Marx’s article (July 29, 2013).

CRIME BUSTERS
Ken Auletta’s profile of Mayor Bloomberg mentions the downward trend of violent crime during the administrations of both Bloomberg and Rudolph Giuliani (“After Bloomberg,” August 26th). It seems only fair to mention that the decrease in crime under Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani was a continuation of the decline that began during the administration of Giuliani’s predecessor, David Dinkins.

David Jenkins

New York City

THE FULL TREATMENT
Meghan O’Rourke’s essay on the onset and diagnosis of her autoimmune disease highlights a number of health-care issues (“What’s Wrong with Me?,” August 26th). Our health-care system is reactive in nature and biased toward immediate or terminal illnesses characterized by discrete symptoms. Long-term diseases under the autoimmunity umbrella are often treated on a trial-and-error basis and plagued by a long lag in diagnosis; further, it is often incumbent on the patient to explore methods of healing. Patients living with autoimmunity are in dire need of help. To be able to function in a society with rigid expectations of work hours and performance, they need empathy and dedicated medical research in order to heal. For that, epidemiological studies, environmental assessments, genetics, family history, and exposure to harmful substances need to be completed and evaluated.

Philip Porat

Toronto, Ont.

O’Rourke mentions stress in her description of her search for treatment, but it is not addressed by her physicians. Stress can cause a range of physical symptoms, including fatigue, gastrointestinal upset, fever, and skin reactions. Instead of attacking itself, could her nervous system be responding in a pattern typical of migraine? Migraine appears to occur in those with a hereditarily sensitized nervous system, and could be grouped with other non-organic functional disorders such as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, in what might be called “threshold disorders.” In my clinical practice, I find that, when a patient’s nervous-system threshold is lowered, the body might respond with episodes of alarming but non-organic symptoms. Stress would appear to be a major factor in lowering the threshold, as are sleep disorders, hormonal imbalances, and blood-sugar problems. A physician may identify a neurological response, expressed in chemical and tissue changes, call it an autoimmune disorder, and miss the underlying cause.

Arn Strasser

Portland, Ore.

MENTAL FLABBINESS
Patricia Marx tests the benefits of brain training and mentions studies that both support and dispute that such exercises work (“Mentally Fit,” July 29th). In a key study published in Developmental Psychology, researchers identified twenty-three studies of brain-training programs—including some that Marx tried—and synthesized the results. They concluded that there was no convincing evidence that brain training improves intelligence or academic skills. As Marx writes, brain training makes people better at the training task, but not much else. When benefits are demonstrated, interpretation of the results is complicated by flawed research designs, and by researchers’ financial interests in the brain-training products. Making people’s lives better through brief, economical brain training is an appealing idea, but one for which there is currently no solid scientific support.

David Z. Hambrick

Professor, Department of Psychology

Michigan State University

East Lansing, Mich.