The New Yorker articles from April 2007

The New Yorker archives from April 2007

Sripraphai.(Restaurant review)
April 2, 2007... Sripraphai could be said to be the restaurant that Chowhound, the Web bulletin board frequented by intrepid food hunters, built. When the site started up, in 1997, the place was a thirty-five-seat hole in the wall. Chowhounders--who, by...

Bus Ride.(The Talk of the Town)(Students for a Democratic Society's protests on Iraq War)
April 2, 2007... At 5:30 A.M. one recent Saturday, twenty or so people stood huddled in the northeast corner of Union Square. They were waiting for buses that would take them to Washington, D.C., for a protest at the Pentagon, timed to coincide with the fourth...

Never, Ever Land.(The Talk of the Town)(firing of the United States Attorneys)
April 2, 2007... "I would never, ever make a change in a United States Attorney position for political reasons, or if it would in any way jeopardize an ongoing serious investigation," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee on...

The Man Who Was There.(The Talk of the Town)(Joe Boyd)
April 2, 2007... Every year or so, the record producer Joe Boyd stops in at Caffe Dante, on MacDougal Street, for a pistachio gelato. It's a matter less of nostalgia than of taste. "I can only like what I like," he said the other day, during one of these...

Smart Cookies.(The Talk of the Town)(educating kindergartners)
April 2, 2007... It is sometimes suggested that schools no longer teach children values, but this assertion would not be true of P.S. 321, in Park Slope, which has been offering an "Ad-Busters" class as an after-school program, intended to impart radical...

Rare Bird.(The Talk of the Town)(Airbus A380)
April 2, 2007... For all its eccentricities, bird-watching is a respectable hobby, practiced by psychiatrists, kings, and forty-six million Americans. But plane spotting--which also entails tramping around swamps to watch flying objects--somehow lacks the same...

Selling Wal-Mart.
April 2, 2007... On the second floor of Wal-Mart's headquarters, in Bentonville, Arkansas, is a windowless room called Action Alley. In the Wal-Mart idiom, the term "Action Alley" usually refers to the main aisle of the company's two thousand Supercenters--the...

Our Town.(Jamestown)(Biography)
April 2, 2007... Somewhere under the south aisle of St. Sepulchre's Church in London lie the remains of Captain John Smith, who died in 1631, at the age of fifty-one. On a brass plaque, his epitaph reads: Here lyes one conquered that hath conquered Kings.,...

The Taming of the Chef.(Gordon Ramsay)
April 2, 2007... Gordon Ramsay, the only chef in London honored with three stars by the Guide Michelin, is not a monster. Ramsay, who is also the host of three uniquely adversarial in-your-face television shows ("Hell's Kitchen" in the United States; "The F...

The Pope and Islam.(Pope Benedict XVI)
April 2, 2007... These are fierce theological times. It should come as no surprise that the Vatican and Islam are not getting along, or that their problems began long before Pope Benedict XVI made his unfortunate reference to the Prophet Muhammad, in a speech...

The Valiant Swabian.(Albert Einstein)(Biography)
April 2, 2007... When youthful and frisky, Albert Einstein would refer to himself as "the valiant Swabian," quoting the poem by Ludwig Uhland: "But the valiant Swabian is not afraid." Albert--the name Abraham had been considered by his unreligious parents but...

The Post-Birthday World.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 2, 2007... Irina McGovern, a children's-book illustrator, and Lawrence Trainer, a political analyst, are American expatriates living in London; their friends consider them a stalwart (if perhaps slightly boring) testament to the virtues of monogamy. But...

Nerve Damage.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 2, 2007... The care with which Abrahams brings his characters to life sets him apart from most thriller writers working today. In this inventive novel, Roy Valois, a successful sculptor, is given the diagnosis of a rare form of cancer caused by exposure...

The Cigarette Century.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 2, 2007... Brandt, a medical historian, has constructed an enthralling social, commercial, and medical account of the rise and fall of cigarettes in the United States in the twentieth century. Nearly all aspects of American life, from T. S. Eliot to...

Dog Years.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 2, 2007... "No dog has ever said a word," Doty writes in this memoir of his retrievers, Arden and Beau, "but that doesn't mean they live outside the world of speech." Acting as an "interpreter," which he calls "part of the pet owner's work," Doty traces...

Dangerous Games.(Sandor Marai)(Biography)
April 2, 2007... Sandor Marai keeps getting younger. Twelve years after he committed suicide, in 1989, at the age of eighty-nine, Knopf published the first American edition of his novel "Embers," which had originally appeared in Hungary when he was forty-two....

Sleuths and Truths.(Curtains)(Theater review)
April 2, 2007... "Why must the show go on?" Noel Coward asked, twitting the legendary stoicism of show-biz folk in his 1954 song, and adding, "Why kick up your legs / When draining the dregs / Of sorrow's bitter cup? / Because you have read / Some idiot has...

The Wow Factor.
April 2, 2007... In the classical-music world of ten or fifteen years ago, you heard intermittent murmurs of unease about the number of Asian performers who were showing up on the rolls of conservatories, in the ranks of orchestras, and on concert stages. The...

Men Gone Wild.("300" and "Shooter")(Movie review)
April 2, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File An incomparable marksman, stealthy, silent, relentless, hiding among snowcapped peaks; the muzzle of a high-powered rifle aimed directly at the camera; helicopters swirling over mountains and city streets,...

Klee.(Restaurant review)
April 9, 2007... "To emphasize only the beautiful," the artist Paul Klee said, "seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers." Klee shares a name with a European-American brasserie (sample dishes: Kobe-beef hot...

Risk Management.(The Talk of the Town)(fraud mails for military recruitments)
April 9, 2007... In the wake of a rise in substantiated instances of misconduct by its recruiters, the United States military, it was reported last month, is considering installing surveillance cameras in its recruiting stations. The military may also want to...

Hanging On.(The Talk of the Town)(Movement for Democratic Change)
April 9, 2007... One Sunday afternoon last month, members of Zimbabwe's opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change, were gathering--for a prayer meeting, they said--when President Robert Mugabe's security forces descended on them, firing tear gas, water...

Manchester United.(The Talk of the Town)
April 9, 2007... Being England's second city, like being Prince Charles's second wife or Posh Spice's second innovatively named child, means always being in the shadow of the one who got there first. In Manchester, however, an enterprise is under way to assert...

The Castle.(The Talk of the Town)(Fortune Academy)
April 9, 2007... Not long ago, Roland Woods got an urgent call on his cell phone ("Yo, Ro!") from one of the residents of 630 Riverside Drive, where he works as a kind of super. The caller, who had recently been in prison, had paid a surprise Valentine's Day...

Subprime Homesick Blues.(The Talk of the Town)(Industry overview)
April 9, 2007... Not long ago, New Century Financial--a mortgage lender specializing in loans to the subprime, or high-credit-risk, market--dubbed itself "a new shade of blue chip." Today, with its stock price down more than ninety per cent in the past six...

What's Normal?
April 9, 2007... In April, 2000, Steven Hyman, a psychiatrist who at the time was the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, convened a meeting of nineteen prominent psychiatrists and psychologists in order to discuss bipolar disorder in children....

The Next Crusade.(Paul Wolfowitz)
April 9, 2007... The Selimiye Mosque, in Edirne, a city in northwest Turkey, is a magnificent stone edifice, with four minarets and an austere, octagonal-shaped body supporting a large dome. Built for Sultan Selim II in the sixteenth century, it has withstood...

Den of Antiquity.(Metropolitan Museum of Art's antiquities department)
April 9, 2007... In 1989, Carlos Picon, who is the curator of the Greek and Roman department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, got a telephone call from Richard Keresey, the head of the antiquities department at Sotheby's: A curious sculpture was about to come...

DORIAN PURPLE.
April 9, 2007... Permit me to plan your dream weekend. You're going to see a musician, a great one, play at a small club in Las Vegas. For a hundred and seventy-five dollars, you could stand on the dance floor in front of the stage. But, if you want to sit...

Women's Work.(Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art presents Global Feminisms)
April 9, 2007... "Global Feminisms" is a big, high-minded, intermittently enjoyable show of about a hundred mostly young and lesser-known female artists from about fifty countries. It inaugurates the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist...

Designated Mourner.(The Year of Magical Thinking)(Theater review)
April 9, 2007... David Mamet, in his new volume of polemical mischief, "Bambi vs. Godzilla," coins the term "affliction drama" for the genre of entertainment that "enlists the human capacity for sympathy and asks the sympathetic to weep." Mamet calls this a...

In Disguise.(Black Book)(Critical essay)
April 9, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File The new Paul Verhoeven film, "Black Book," is set almost entirely in Holland during the later stages of the Second World War. It charts the efforts of a young Jewish woman named Rachel Stein (Carice van...

The Typing Life.(Critical essay)
April 9, 2007... Many of the early inventors of the typewriter thought that what they were inventing was a prosthetic device for the blind. Why would ordinary writers need a writing machine? They had pens. Eventually, it became clear that such a mechanism could...

Fieldwork.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 9, 2007... In a thickly plotted twist on the genre of aimless Americans seeking redemption abroad, Berlinski's freelance-journalist narrator (also named Mischa Berlinski) stumbles on the case of an anthropologist who killed herself in a Thai prison while...

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.(Critical essay)(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... Set mostly in a shabby storefront in a Washington, D.C., neighborhood undergoing the first stages of gentrification, this searing novel is narrated by Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian forced to flee his native country because of his involvement in...

The Raw Shark Texts.(Critical essay)(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... Eric Sanderson wakes up amnesiac, without an identity, but gradually discovers that he is the second iteration of another Sanderson, the First, who clues in his successor through a series of artfully organized letters composed before his death....

The Secret of Lost Things.(mystery of a teenage girl)(Critical essay)(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... Recently orphaned and almost penniless, eighteen-year-old Rosemary Savage arrives in New York from Tasmania clutching a Huon-pine box containing her mother's ashes, a remembrance of one of the many lost things in this intricate literary...

Karma.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 9, 2007... Each of the stories in this startlingly mature collection shows first- and second-generation Indian-Americans attempting to manage the disconnect between cultures. The premise is hardly a new one, but Reddi's understated prose and her choice of...

Home Remedies.(story of pregnant virgin teenage girl)(Critical essay)(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... In these eight carefully wrought stories, set mostly in Kentucky, an exorcism is performed in the basement of a Methodist church, a teen-ager becomes convinced that she is "history's second pregnant virgin," a divorced father returns from a...

Vellum.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 9, 2007... These ambitious poems aim to encompass a mass of intellectual and cultural bric-a-brac: "let's begin with macadam, fruit bowls, a Florentine mosaic, / Louie Louie's three slurred chords, & perhaps for now end there." For Donovan, human...

Frail-Craft.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 9, 2007... In this intelligent, often playful collection, by the winner of last year's Yale Younger Poets prize, a series of elliptical vignettes hint at larger, incompletely apprehended narratives. Fisher builds her verse around absences--roads not...

Cooked Books.
April 9, 2007... Recently, there was an exchange in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement about the presence, and the propriety, of recipes in novels, and we intend to settle the questions that have arisen there in the American way, right now, and for...

Blood On The Borders.
April 9, 2007... If you've spent a couple of years being unable to get past the opening chapter of one of the later novels of Henry James, it's hard to resist the idea that there might be a more easily enjoyable version of literature: a crime novel, for...

The Shoniwa Show.(Shingai Shoniwa of the Noisettes)(Brief article)
April 16, 2007... Times Square, a source of unembarrassed endorsement, does not have a billboard for the London band Noisettes. This is odd, because Noisettes are what billboards were invented to announce: improbably big entertainment. If you can see Noisettes...

Pileup.(The Talk of the Town)(constituting government)
April 16, 2007... Over the past few months, the constitution of the United States has been quietly amended. We're not talking here about the written, capital-"C" Constitution, which can't be changed on the sly, but about the constitution broadly understood: the...

Elements of E-style.(The Talk of the Town)
April 16, 2007... E-mail isn't the most self-conscious medium; haste and volume encourage many correspondents to forget themselves. Still, everyone settles on a style. The lower-case non-punctuators, the serial capitalizers, the rhetorical questioners, the...

Rollin' With Dad.(The Talk of the Town)(Doug Ellin)
April 16, 2007... One entrance is pretty much as cool as another when you're visiting outer space. So it came as a surprise that Doug Ellin, the creator of "Entourage," the HBO series, based partly on his experiences, about a posse of young friends making the...

Sh-h-h.(The Talk of the Town)(Into Great Silence, documentary)(Interview)
April 16, 2007... It can be hard to find a quiet spot to think in this town, and movie theatres generally don't top the list. Lately, however, Film Forum has emerged as an oasis of silence, owing to the runaway success of a nearly three-hour documentary, by the...

My First Passport.
April 16, 2007... In 1959, when I was seven years old, my father went missing under mysterious circumstances; several weeks later, we received word that he was in Paris, living in a cheap hotel in Montparnasse. He was filling up the notebooks that he would later...

There and Back Again.(commuting)
April 16, 2007... Last year, Midas, the muffler company, in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, gave an award for America's longest commute to an engineer at Cisco Systems, in California, who travels three hundred and seventy-two miles--seven hours--a day, from...

The Train to Tibet.
April 16, 2007... On an evening in late December, amid the chaos of Beijing West Railway Station, I stood in line for a train that looked little different from any of the other long-distance services shuffling into the vast Chinese hinterland. And yet the train...

Emotional Baggage.(luggage)
April 16, 2007... They say you can't take it with you, but why not? That's why we have luggage--not to mention suitcases on wheels, expandable pockets, and porters. If what they're really worked up about is the airline surcharge for bags that weigh more than...

No Obstacles.(parkour)
April 16, 2007... Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means "route," is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path--a vocabulary, that is, to be...

Prince of the City.(Lincoln Kirstein)(Biography)
April 16, 2007... "A world wholly, profoundly dedicated to the realization of the unreal": this was the Bayreuth Festival in 1924, as it impressed a seventeen-year-old aspiring artist named Lincoln Kirstein. It was the Wagner shrine's first opera season since...

A Far Country.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 16, 2007... Mason's second novel has echoes of his ardent debut, "The Piano Tuner": once more, a shy protagonist is thrust out of the familiar, on a quest for an elusive figure in a terrifying jungle. Here the sultry atmosphere of nineteenth-century Burma...

Gertrude Bell.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 16, 2007... A passionate enthusiast of the Arab world, whose deserts she travelled with evening bags and embroidered tablecloths, Bell was instrumental in the creation, after the First World War, of an independent Iraq. Working as a diplomat and...

Henry James Goes to Paris.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 16, 2007... In 1875, when Henry James was thirty-two, he boarded a Cunard liner, stopped to visit London tailors, and then went on to Paris, where he soon counted Turgenev, Zola, and Maupassant among his friends. Although James is now known as the master...

Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants. (Brief article)(Book review)
April 16, 2007... Barry shows how "pink-collar" activists among the ranks of flight attendants worked to improve the status of their profession. From the moment the first stewardess took flight, in 1930, these young, attractive, white women were essential to...

The Changeling.(life of Edith Wharton)(Biography)
April 16, 2007... The life of Edith Wharton is not an inspiriting rags-to-riches saga, nor is it a cautionary tale of riches to rags--riches to riches, rather. Born Edith Newbold Jones, in January of 1862, into one of the leading families of New York--the phrase...

The Wives of Others.(Feminine Mistake)(Book review)
April 16, 2007... When Betty Friedan wrote "The Feminine Mystique," forty-four years ago, she did more than launch a revolution by identifying "the problem that has no name"--the crushing ennui of the modern housewife. She also invited a bit of wordplay that has...

Feeling It.(Leslie Feist)
April 16, 2007... In 2001, the Canadian musician Leslie Feist was twenty-five years old, couch-surfing in Berlin, and occasionally performing with two musicians from Toronto: Peaches (born Merrill Nisker), an electronic-music artist given to profane lyrics, and...

Landscape Artist.(Ira Glass)
April 16, 2007... One is so reluctant to express any degree of dislike for "This American Life," the popular public-radio storytelling program created by Ira Glass twelve years ago, and featuring such stars as David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, and John Hodgman, that...

Club Acts.
April 16, 2007... I had a curious experience in downtown Manhattan the other night. Early in the evening, I attended a concert of works for instruments and electronics by Alexandra Gardner, at the Greenwich House Music School, on Barrow Street. Then I went to...

Sleaze City.(Grindhouse)
April 16, 2007... With the three-hour-and-eleven-minute "Grindhouse," the writer-directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have put together an entire evening's entertainment devoted to the violent schlock movies and decrepit theatres that they loved as...

The E.U.(Restaurant review)
April 23, 2007... This new restaurant, in the East Village, seems an improbable underdog. When plans for the restaurant were announced, it appeared likely to be an instant success. Its owners, Bob Giraldi and Jason Hennings, were veterans of the New York...

Imus Versus Imus.('The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything')(Book review)
April 23, 2007... Last month, on the eve of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, Bloomsbury published a novelty called "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything." In the estimation of the book's editors--Richard Sandomir, a sports-media...

Liar, Liar.(The Hoax)(Movie review)
April 23, 2007... The new movie "The Hoax" concerns the activities of the literary grifter Clifford Irving, who perpetrated the most intrepid publishing fraud of the modern era when, in the early nineteen-seventies, he sold McGraw-Hill the "autobiography" of...

Do I Look Fat?(Loehmann's Inc.)
April 23, 2007... What is it about the Ansonia Hotel, at Broadway and Seventy-third Street, that makes people want to take off their clothes? In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, naked men, sometimes ten thousand of them a week, used to hang out downstairs in...

Prodigal Beaver.(The Talk of the Town)
April 23, 2007... One recent evening, Stephen Sautner sat behind his desk in the Bronx Zoo's administration building, hoping that Jose hadn't washed away. Jose is an American beaver, and after Sautner discovered him, in February, during a lunchtime stroll along...

Say Ahh.(The Talk of the Town)(Malcolm Morley)
April 23, 2007... A convenient place to have fallen ill one recent evening might have been the Cheim & Read gallery, on West Twenty-fifth Street, where, milling around in front of several large abstract canvases, were a gynecologist, a urologist, a breast-cancer...

Round One.(political conditions)
April 23, 2007... Late one night toward the end of March, after a day spent listening to too many Frenchmen talk politics, I called room service at my Paris hotel, hoping for a sandwich. "We have ham and Emmental, on toast," the waiter on the phone told me....

Waiting for Manny.(Manny Ramirez )(Biography)
April 23, 2007... Manny Ramirez is a deeply frustrating employee, the kind whose talents are so prodigious that he gets away with skipping meetings, falling asleep on the job, and fraternizing with the competition. He makes more money than everyone else at the...

Enemy of the State.(Travel narrative)
April 23, 2007... Beijing Second Prison is on the outskirts of the city for which it is named, and you can drive past the drab compound without ever noticing it. It's set about a tenth of a mile off the highway, and when I visit I usually have to tell the...

The Turnaround Artist.(Jeff Koons)(Biography)
April 23, 2007... If art is ever delivered from the grip of postmodern irony, a large share of the credit will go to Jeff Koons. You may think I'm joking. Jeff Koons? The artist whose industrial-scale replicas of balloon animals, gift-shop tchotchkes, and other...

The Old Devil.(Kingsley Amis)(Biography)
April 23, 2007... Every country's difficult literary guys are different, and you know from experience how to handle the kind you've grown up with. Reading Geoffrey Wolff's excellent biography of the truly ornery American writer John O'Hara, you sense that you...

New and Selected Poems (1965-2006).(Shapiro)(Brief article)
April 23, 2007... Shapiro is usually thought of as a New York School poet, but from the evidence of this selection it would prob-ably be more accurate to call him a Greater New York School poet. His metropolis radiates outward to com-prehend Weequahic Park and...

Without Title.(Brief article)
April 23, 2007... For much of Hill's five-decade career, his forbiddingly allusive and elliptical style, his sometimes peevish tone, his interest in English church history, and his rapt pastoralism have made him an unfashionable figure, but also a highly...

Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 23, 2007... Harrington, an award-winning author of children's books, sets her first poetry collection mainly in Alabama during the civil-rights era. Her rich, colloquial poems, drawing on both folklore and science, are paeans to a weary but tenacious black...

Citizen Of.(periodicals)(Brief article)
April 23, 2007... The title of this collection serves as a challenge to readers in a political climate where alarmism seems to alternate with complacency. "Hour with One Hand Inserted in a Time of War" asks, "Should we / stand guard at the Level of One Hand...

Love Among the Ruins.(Eugene O'Neill)
April 23, 2007... When Eugene O'Neill finally finished "A Moon for the Misbegotten," in 1943, at the age of fifty-five, his writing life was almost over. Suffering from the debilitating effects of Parkinson's disease and submerged in gothic-tinged memories of...

Dearly Departed.(Lonely Hearts)(Movie review)
April 23, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File When the morose con man Raymond Fernandez (Jared Leto) puts on a thick dark toupee and a white suit, his eyes come alive and he turns into a fantasy Latin lover--a pocket-size Cesar Romero, complete with...

The Artist's Artist.(Jean Renoir)
April 30, 2007... Throughout his long career, the director Jean Renoir (1894-1979), the second son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, displayed a fascination with all sorts of artistic creation. Most of his films feature painting, music, dance, or...

Spiga.(Restaurant review)
April 30, 2007... This Italian restaurant opened a little over a year ago, in a space that had been occupied for the previous three decades by a tandoori place. In this area, one of the culinary dead zones people love to complain about, one merely hopes for a...

Shootings.(The Talk of the Town)(Virginia Tech)
April 30, 2007... The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric...