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• Lizzie Widdicombe: Forbidden Fruit

The three-week citywide performance-art festival Performa begins next week, opening not with a dinner but with a “food event”: “a series of food installations and happenings,” according to the invitation, “that will lead guests”—Cindy Sherman, Mario Batali—“on . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Kids get real on MTV’s “Skins.”

Six years ago, in Bristol, England, the television writer Bryan Elsley was brainstorming ideas for a new series—cop show? courtroom drama?—and he approached his nineteen-year-old son, Jamie Brittain, for advice. The response was tough but useful. “He basically told me all my ideas . . ....

• Hendrik Hertzberg: Obama’s nuclear spring.

Now then, Dmitri. You know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb. The bomb, Dmitri. The hydrogen bomb. —President Merkin Muffley to Premier Dmitri Kissov, 1964. Dmitri, we agreed.—President Barack Obama to President Dmitri Medvedev, 2010. “Dr . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: The taxi-driver’s advocate.

On Houston Street at Avenue A the other day, a woman stuck out her hand to hail a taxi. It was cold and drizzly—hyper-competitive cab-hailing conditions—but she was likely to have better luck than most people. The woman was Bhairavi Desai, the executive director . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Lizzie Widdicombe: What would Shakespeare say about WikiLeaks?

8220;A sincere diplomat,” Stalin once said, “is like dry water or wooden iron.” As any diplomat knows, the role requires a doubleness not just of message but of manner—an extra slathering of the flatteries and false civilities that grease the wheels of all human . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: A pedicab ride with the actor Jesse Eisenberg.

Who’s the biggest nerd in the movies? Jesse Eisenberg, who played the older brother in “The Squid and the Whale” and starred in “Adventureland,” might seem like an outside contender, but he has three films opening this month—“Solitary Man” (with . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: You’ve Got Mail

Moral-reasoning pop quiz: There’s a film coming out—a thinly disguised portrayal of a media mogul—and word is that if it’s released it will hurt the mogul’s reputation. Powerful people intervene: they call a meeting and offer the movie studio . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Defending the accused after a giant Mob bust.

It’s a common refrain, among the city’s armchair criminologists, that the Mob is dead in New York. So last Thursday’s giant federal Mob bust—a hundred and twenty-seven people, encompassing seven crime families—elicited a special fascination. It seemed almost nostalgic . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Defending the accused after a giant Mob bust.

It’s a common refrain, among the city’s armchair criminologists, that the Mob is dead in New York. So last Thursday’s giant federal Mob bust—a hundred and twenty-seven people, encompassing seven crime families—elicited a special fascination. It seemed almost nostalgic . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Occupy Wall Street, a culture of its own.

Visiting the site of Occupy Wall Street last week—a month after the protest began, and shortly before Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s threatened and aborted cleanup—was a bit like visiting a civilization at its peak: Paris in the twenties, Rome in the second century, or, at . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Van Cleef & Arpels diamonds on display.

Paris, France, sometime in the nineteen-fifties. A woman walks into Van Cleef & Arpels and falls in love with a diamond necklace. It’s expensive—say, four hundred thousand francs. “Listen,” she tells the jeweller, “tomorrow I’m going to come with my . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Young Professionals United for Change watch the State of the Union.

Four years ago, the Young Professionals United for Change—three thousand black banker and lawyer types under the age of forty—held a formal gala in Washington to celebrate Barack Obama’s Inauguration. By contrast, the group’s State of the Union “watch party,&#8221 . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Books: “The Killer.”

This début novel uses familiar ingredients—sunken missiles, corrupt C.I.A. agents, hulking Russian mobsters—to create an impressively intricate thriller. At its center is Victor, a.k.a. Tesseract, a meticulous assassin who finds himself targeted by the same group that has just hired him to kill a . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: David Burke Kitchen in SoHo.

David Burke Kitchen, in the James Hotel, in SoHo, is the place to see David Burke—the man who brought cheesecake lollipop trees to Bloomingdale’s and pupu platters to the Hawaiian Tropic Zone, in Times Square—get on board with the farm-to-table craze. If . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Scott Stringer, Scarlett Johansson, and New York’s mayoral race.

One of the many collateral effects of Anthony Weiner’s political demise—besides immortalizing the direct-messaging function on Twitter—was to blow open the race to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City. Officially, campaigning won’t start for at least another year . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Books: “The Ticking Is the Bomb.”

Flynn’s memoir, his second after “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” covers impending fatherhood, his mother’s suicide, revelations of torture, and his father’s alcoholism and dementia. The structure—a few pages on each subject—gives the book a jittery energy . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Ben Walker plays Andrew Jackson in eyeliner.

The high-camp American-history rock musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” has been extended through June at the Public Theatre—good news for the packs of teen-age girls who can be seen hovering outside the lobby. They’re not all students of nineteenth-century populism . . ....

• Colin Jost: “Explaining Your Time Warner Bill.”

36;17.23 — Basic service $37.35 — Standard service $40.81 — Actual service $12.50 — Federal taxes $11.75 — Federal taxes, part two $6.85 — New York City taxes $5.35 — Fort Wayne, Indiana, city taxes $3.45 — Singapore Nuclear Defense Fund &#36 . . ....

• Philip Levine: “Black Wine”

Have you ever drunk the black wine—vino negro— of Alicante? The English dubbed it Red Biddy and consumed oceans of it for a pence a flagon. Knowing nothing—then or now—about wine, I would buy a litre for 8 pesetas—12 cents&#8212 . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Roberta’s, in Brooklyn.

paragraph class="noindent">This gourmet pizza place, located amid a desolate-looking stretch of warehouses in Bushwick, is often described as a D.I.Y. enterprise. The label is slightly ambiguous—aren’t a lot of other restaurant entrepreneurs doing it themselves, too? Carlo Mirarchi, the chef at Roberta&#8217 . . ....

• Daniel Mendelsohn: What Theodor Fontane’s women want.

Whatever others may have thought of the novels of Theodor Fontane—and the long-standing consensus is that they are, as one critic has noted, “the most completely achieved of any written between Goethe and Thomas Mann”—Fontane himself clearly thought that they were pretty unexciting . . ....

• Hendrik Hertzberg: The Afghanistan strategy.

There are no good options for the United States in Afghanistan. That has been the conventional wisdom for some years now, and this time the conventional wisdom—the reigning cliché—happens to be true. President Obama did not pretend otherwise in his address at West Point last . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: America’s homemade fallout shelters through the years.

If you stopped by the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Center last week, you may have noticed, tucked among the minimalist mirrors and squiggly light fixtures, a booth containing shelves packed with more practical goods—toilet paper, anchovies, bottled water, powdered Jell-O. This was a fallout . . . (Subscription required.)...

• David Denby: Albert Brooks’s “Lost in America,” at BAM.

Albert Brooks, whose comedian father died while performing, has always brought a measure of desperation to comedy, and in his strongest film as director—“Lost in America,” from 1985—he’s at his best when his nervous, double-tracking mind composes itself enough to spin . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Andrew Marantz: Buddy Roemer, Presidential candidate, O.W.S. supporter.

Last Tuesday, while Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney campaigned in Florida, Buddy Roemer walked toward Zuccotti Park. He carried a briefcase and wore a navy suit, a red tie, and loafers. The park had reverted to its pre-Occupy state—construction workers on stone benches eating sandwiches—but . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Books: “The Magician King,” by Lev Grossman

The sequel to Grossman’s visceral “The Magicians” finds the protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, and his friends complacently reigning over a magical land called Fillory. Once an Ivy-bound Brooklyn teen, Quentin became king of Fillory after graduating from an élite wizard college and vanquishing a villain . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Scousers

Clive Owen fans fall into a few categories. There are those (largely female) who like Owen for his looks. Then there are others (mostly male) who like his grizzled demeanor as an action hero in movies like “The International” and “Children of Men.” He seems rough . . ....

• Hilton Als: James M. Cain on the grass widow.

In the rancorous universe of James M. Cain’s early novels, life’s a bitch and she wears lipstick and a skirt. Men who should know better—cynical guys with hearts the size of a blister—burst wide open when they meet the dames who will . . ....

• Goings on About Town: Art

PageBreak --> MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Doug + Mike Starn on the Roof: Big Bambú.” The twin brothers, who made a splash in the eighties with very large, very distressed-looking photographs, are back—big time—with an . . ....

• Hendrik Hertzberg: Can nuclear power make a comeback?

Once the unpleasantness at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had had a little time to recede, America discovered that “the atom” wasn’t all bad. The bomb, yes—it was terrifying, as terrifying as a hundred 9/11s. American children got the wits scared out of them at school . . ....

• Anthony Lane: “Higher Ground” and “One Day.”

Speaking as someone chained to the past—or to an imaginary version, if the real one proves unavailable—I tend to inquire, when grading the current fortunes of an actress, not “How good are her movies?” but “How bright would the gleam have been in . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Bohemian, in NoHo.

paragraph class="noindent">New York does exclusivity well, but Tokyo does it better. There is a Japanese phrase, “Ichigensama okotowari,” that’s used by owners of certain discriminating restaurants and shops, and means, roughly, “We respectfully decline first-time visitors.” In other words: walk-ins . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: Bohemian, in NoHo.

paragraph class="noindent">New York does exclusivity well, but Tokyo does it better. There is a Japanese phrase, “Ichigensama okotowari,” that’s used by owners of certain discriminating restaurants and shops, and means, roughly, “We respectfully decline first-time visitors.” In other words: walk-ins . . ....

• Goings on About Town: Dance

goatTitle-->NEW YORK CITY BALLET With its spiffy new brochures—filled with sexy photographs of the dancers—and its new fall season, N.Y.C.B. is clearly trying to shake things up. Four weeks of repertory programs include something new—“Plainspoken,” yet another ballet by Benjamin Millepied . . ....

• Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.

In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Lizzie Widdicombe: France’s First Lady takes a tour of N.Y.U.

The other day, students in New York University’s visual-arts program received an e-mail advising them to be in their studios the following Monday afternoon. “They said that somebody famous was coming,” Robert Leonardi, a senior, recalled, “and that anything could happen.” A . . ....

• Lizzie Widdicombe: The Leopard at des Artistes.

8220;If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change,” says a young aristocrat in “The Leopard,” the 1958 book by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and the 1963 Visconti movie, about the decline of the Italian ruling class during the Risorgimento. It . . ....

• Goings on About Town: On the Horizon

MOVIES THERE WILL BE MUD Feb. 3-8 The Hungarian director Béla Tarr—whose seven-hour-long “Satantango,” set in the ruins of a communal farm, is one of the landmarks of the modern cinema—says that his most recent film, “The Turin Horse . . ....