The New Yorker articles from April 2006

The New Yorker archives from April 2006

DELUDED.(The Talk of the Town)(Cobra II)(Book review)
April 3, 2006... After the fall of Baghdad, three years ago, the United States military began a secret investigation of the decision-making within Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. The study, carried out by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, drew on captured documents...

LIBERTE, EGALITE, GOLF.(Deepdale Golf Club)
April 3, 2006... The season hasn't even begun, but it's been a tough few weeks at the Deepdale Golf Club. Founded in 1926 by William K. Vanderbilt II and situated on a hundred and seventy-five acres of rolling hills, it was intended, an official history states,...

MAC'S BACK.(The Talk of the Town)(Alan Cumming)(Interview)
April 3, 2006... On a recent morning, Alan Cumming arrived at the Roundabout Theatre's rehearsal studio with a family-sized pizza box. "Your breakfast?" someone asked. "No," he replied, "last night's dinner." Cumming no longer looks the way he did as the m.c....

THE S.A.T.'S WATCHDOG.(The Talk of the Town)(educational tests)
April 3, 2006... The Web site of the test-coaching company the Princeton Review includes a feature called the "Vocab Minute"--a brief original song whose lyrics are intended to help students memorize the kinds of polysyllabic vocabulary words that come up on...

PRINTING MONEY.(The Talk of the Town)(McClatchy buys Knight-Ridder)
April 3, 2006... Two weeks ago, when the newspaper publisher McClatchy announced that it was buying the venerable Knight Ridder chain, for the lowball price of $6.5 billion, McClatchy's C.E.O., Gary Pruitt, called the deal "a vote of confidence in the newspaper...

BEING THERE.(Emergency medical care)
April 3, 2006... One afternoon in 1982, a twenty-eight-year-old Michigan state trooper named Craig Scott stopped a speeding car on U.S. Route 127, outside Jackson. Scott discovered that the car, a Camaro, had been stolen, and arrested the driver. As Scott was...

RELATIVELY DEPRIVED.(Poverty in the US)
April 3, 2006... In the summer of 1963, Mollie Orshansky, a forty-eight-year-old statistician at the Social Security Administration, in Washington, D.C., published an article in the Social Security Bulletin entitled "Children of the Poor." "The wonders of...

CITIZEN PENN.(Sean Penn)(Interview)
April 3, 2006... In San Francisco one day last June, at 7:45 A.M., an hour when even the panhandlers on Geary Street were still asleep, Sean Penn was standing in front of me, in sneakers, gray chinos, and denim work shirt, the quiff of his full brown hair...

THE DUTCH MODEL.(immigration)
April 3, 2006... Consider this story. In the fall of 2004, on the day a Dutch filmmaker is murdered in Amsterdam by a Dutch-Moroccan fanatic (who explains later, at his trial, that it wasn't "personal," it was simply that Islamic law compels him "to chop off...

ON TOP.(works and achivements of Mariah Carey)
April 3, 2006... Mariah Carey is thirty-six years old, and, barring a debilitating illness, or another movie as bad as "Glitter," her 2001 vanity project, she will likely break the world record for the most No. 1 songs before she turns forty. The Beatles had...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Abide with Me, by Elizabeth Strout)(Book review)
April 3, 2006... Abide with Me, by Elizabeth Strout (Random House; $24.95). The handsome minister Tyler Caskey, of West Annett, Maine, is beloved by his parishioners because he really does think they're all God's children. But in the bleak autumn of 1959, more...

THE GOD PROJECT.(Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon)(Book review)
April 3, 2006... Scientists have championed an astonishing variety of views on religion, ranging from the outright hostile to the deeply devout. Even among evolutionary biologists, whose views might seem the most predictable, matters have been surprisingly...

BIG RIVER.(Brookland)(Book review)
April 3, 2006... Where do the dead go? Prudence Winship, the heroine of Emily Barton's beautiful second novel, "Brookland" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25), decided around the age of six that she had the answer. The year was 1778. Prue lived in Brooklyn, where...

RULE LIKE AN EGYPTIAN.(Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh)
April 3, 2006... A thing is mysterious if you don't know what or how to feel about it, and wish you did. Mystery is a lack not of information but of meaning. Indeed, greater knowledge of certain subjects can intensify rather than soothe emotional itchiness...

TOBACCO AND DRUGS.(Thank You for Smoking)(Movie review)
April 3, 2006... Cigarette smoking naturally turns many of us into frothing moralists. How can we tolerate an industry, we ask, that glamorizes poison? That's the kind of sentiment that gets carved up into little pieces by Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), the hero...

ALIEN NATION.(The Talk of the Town)(immigration)
April 10, 2006... In a jaded and stage-managed political culture, it is rare to see the eruption of a genuine popular movement. That's what happened in Los Angeles the other week, when hundreds of thousands of people protested against congressional efforts to...

POPE PROTECTOR.(The Talk of the Town)(The Swiss Guard celebrates 500th anniversary)
April 10, 2006... The chief of the world's oldest and smallest army, Comandante Elmar Theodor Maeder, arrived last week for a reception at the Union League Club, without the royal-blue-and-marigold-yellow striped knickers suit for which his regiment, the Papal...

PEANUTS, MADAM?(The Talk of the Town)(Emirates Airline)
April 10, 2006... When you sign up online for Skywards, which is the frequent-flier program of Emirates, the international airline of the United Arab Emirates, you enter your name, address, passport number, and other information, and you select an honorific for...

WHIPPED AGAIN.(The Talk of the Town)(Whipped Cream And Other Delights)
April 10, 2006... Last spring, during the broadcast of the Preakness Stakes, Bob Costas interviewed Jerry Moss, the owner of Giacomo, the horse that had won the Kentucky Derby. He noted that Moss, along with the trumpeter and producer Herb Alpert, had founded A....

LAST LOOK.(The Talk of the Town)(Things That Hang from Trees)
April 10, 2006... The other day, several men--a director, a screenwriter, a cinematographer, an editor, a type of technician called a color timer, and two producers--gathered in a screening room on an upper floor of a building in the West Fifties. The room had...

ON THE BAY.(Greenport)
April 10, 2006... Mike Osinski was an acquaintance, someone I saw every now and then in the elevator of the Manhattan apartment building we'd both lived in for nearly ten years. Although I never knew what he did exactly (something in finance; he was always...

THE UNDERSTUDY.(babysitters)(Column)
April 10, 2006... In the spring of 1967, my mother and father went out of town for the weekend and left my four sisters and me in the company of a woman named Mrs. Byrd, who was old and black and worked as a maid for one of our Raleigh neighbors. She arrived at...

THE LESSON OF TAL AFAR.
April 10, 2006... Tal Afar is an ancient city of a quarter-million inhabitants, situated on a smuggling route in the northwestern desert of Iraq, near the Syrian border. In January, when I visited, the streets had been muddied by cold winter rains and gouged by...

THE SOUNDTRACK OF YOUR LIFE.(Muzak)
April 10, 2006... If you blindfolded Dana McKelvey and led her into a retail store, a restaurant, a doctor's office, or a bank, she could tell fairly quickly whether the music playing in the background was Muzak. You may think that you would be able to tell,...

ALL OVER THE MAP.(Kronos concert)(Concert review)
April 10, 2006... The Kronos Quartet, which is in the middle of a six-concert series at Carnegie Hall, has enacted two revolutions in its more than three-decade life, one of style and one of substance. Back in the nineteen-eighties, the members of Kronos--the...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Night Watch)(Book review)
April 10, 2006... The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters (Riverhead; $25.95). In the fall of 1947, an androgynous woman walks aimlessly through the scarred streets of London, adjusting her cufflinks. An ambulance driver during the Blitz, she now does nothing more...

HERE'S WHY.(Why?)(Book review)
April 10, 2006... Little Timothy is playing with his older brother Geoffrey, when he comes running to his mother. "Mommy, Mommy," he starts in. "I was playing with my truck, and then Geoffrey came and he said it was his turn to play with the truck even...

DRAWN TO GYPSIES.(Little Money Street: In Search of Gypsies and Their Music in the South of France)(Book review)
April 10, 2006... Fernanda Eberstadt, an ambitious, resourceful novelist with a lush style and a Manhattan background, has written, in "Little Money Street: In Search of Gypsies and Their Music in the South of France" (Knopf; $24.95), a piquant nonfictional...

HUNGRY HEARTS.(Pen)(Theater review)
April 10, 2006... Home is not always where the heart is; according to David Marshall Grant's rueful comedy "Pen" (directed by Will Frears, at Playwrights Horizons), sometimes family members can't find their hearts with two hands and a map. The drama here turns...

MOVING ON.(Dido and Aeneas)(Dance review)
April 10, 2006... For its twenty-fifth-anniversary season, in March, the Mark Morris Dance Group staged a monthlong blowout. There were three full programs of dances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, plus three programs of smaller pieces--"Solos, Duets, and...

SPLITSVILLE, U.S.A.(The New Adventures of Old Christine)(Television program review)
April 10, 2006... The character that Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays in her new show, "The New Adventures of Old Christine," on CBS on Monday nights, will remind viewers of Elaine Benes, the character she played on "Seinfeld." That's a good thing for everyone. Among...

SOUL MATES.(The Double Life of Veronique)(Movie review)
April 10, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Do movies grow old? They may physically fade, as the film stock decays; they may look dated, as the trappings, or the actorly mannerisms, of a former age become more glaring; but what of the feelings that...

DVD NOTES.(The Spike Lee Joint Collection)(Video recording review)
April 17, 2006... NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- Spike Lee's most vital films reveal an extraordinary variety of tones in his deliberately narrow geographical range and social settings. Packaged in "The Spike Lee Joint Collection" (Universal), they serve as a powerful...

CONSUMPTION.(The Talk of the Town)(medical care)
April 17, 2006... Perhaps you have been wondering who or what is to blame for the high cost of medical care in this land of ours--and, more broadly, for the ungainly, unjust mess that is the American health-care system. If so, wonder no more. Your government has...

DUNLEAVY SPEAKS.(The Talk of the Town)(Steve Dunleavy)(Interview)
April 17, 2006... It was Friday afternoon, and Steve Dunleavy, the Post columnist, was in his usual spot at Langan's, an Irish joint on West Forty-seventh Street, his vodka-and-tonic untouched for now. Jesus Christ, he couldn't remember a week like this one....

DUBAI'S DIVAS-IN-TRAINING.(The Talk of the Town)
April 17, 2006... Anticlimactic as it may have been, the news last week that Meredith Vieira would replace Katie Couric on the "Today" show marked the denouement of a fur-flying, nail-biting, years-long game of musical chairs among television's leading ladies....

ZIPLOCK SECURITY.(The Talk of the Town)
April 17, 2006... It is a matter of public record that bags--schoolkids' backpacks, mainly, but also women's handbags--are getting bigger all the time. An undocumented corollary is that bags are more plentiful, too--that there are more bags per capita on the...

HAGGADAH DA-VIDA.(The Talk of the Town)(Gershon Kingsley)(Interview)
April 17, 2006... One recent evening, the composer Gershon Kingsley and his wife, Lillian, had some guests over to their apartment at the Parc Vendome, on West Fifty-sixth Street. The conversation centered on electronic music, which Kingsley pioneered in the...

THE IRAN PLANS.
April 17, 2006... The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former...

NOT NICE.(Maurice Sendak)(Interview)
April 17, 2006... Maurice Sendak, the writer and illustrator, can usually be found in one of two places in Ridgefield, Connecticut: in the studio off the kitchen in his eighteenth-century clapboard farmhouse, where he works most days, or a quarter of a mile...

A CHURCH ASUNDER.(Gene Robinson)
April 17, 2006... In the late summer of 1965, a high-school valedictorian named Gene Robinson anxiously set off from Lexington, Kentucky, for college. He was the first in his family to come so far, and the school he'd chosen, the University of the South, in...

STAGE LEFT.(Clifford Odets, American Playwright)(Book review)
April 17, 2006... On April 17th, to mark the centennial of the birth of the playwright Clifford Odets, Lincoln Center Theatre will open a new production of "Awake and Sing!," Odets's first full-length play and the one that made him a literary superstar in 1935,...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(poetry)(Book review)
April 17, 2006... Poetry Averno, by Louise Gluck (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $22). Few poets can shoulder the weight of myth the way Gluck does. Here, in eighteen linked poems, she rewrites the legend of Persephone, offering the girl respite from centuries of...

JESUS LAUGHED.(The Gospel of Judas: From Codex Tchacos)(Book review)
April 17, 2006... The great wheel of history always turns, if slowly, and so, at last, the ultimate betrayer, Judas Iscariot himself, comes around again for another inspection, a potential record-clearing moment occasioned by the publication of "The Gospel of...

THIRTEEN WAYS.(Black Swan Green)(Book review)
April 17, 2006... For some writers, the end of a chapter is little more than a pause for breath. For the audacious British novelist David Mitchell, the chapter is the organizing principle of his imagination. His first three works--"Ghostwritten" (1999),...

MASQUERADE.(Everything Bad & Beautiful)(Theater review)
April 17, 2006... Sandra Bernhard's latest exercise in ambivalence is called "Everything Bad & Beautiful" (at the Daryl Roth). As she stands before us, in a slinky patterned dress, with a coiffed cascade of copper hair, the first words out of her large trademark...

EXPOSED.(The Notorious Bettie Page)(Movie review)
April 17, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File "The Notorious Bettie Page" might be called a bio-pic devoted to a body--Gretchen Mol's body, which is seen in every degree of cladding, from full to scanty to blissfully naked. Mol plays Page, a real-life...