The New Yorker articles from April 2008

The New Yorker archives from April 2008

Maison Martin Margiela.
April 7, 2008... No, you have not stepped into a defunct deli. The ice-cream-parlor freezer containing plastic ice cubes is part of the decor of the Martin Margiela men's boutique. So are the plastic fishing-boat chairs, the opened umbrellas, and the...

Hail to the Chief.(Lester Young)(Sound recording review)(Brief article)
April 7, 2008... In the mid-nineteen-thirties, a fat, stomping tone was viewed as the ideal for a tenor saxophonist. "Some of you guys are all belly," complained Lester Young, who crashed the scene as a member of Count Basie's legendary travelling ensemble....

Egg.
April 7, 2008... Three years ago, Egg began life as a breakfast spot, one of those no-nonsense joints that throw the doors open at seven, to feed and caffeinate bespectacled, Times-clutching L.L. Bean types, and don't close them until the post-meridiem hours,...

Green.(The Talk of the Town)
April 7, 2008... Baseball impends, and, with the flags aloft in the Bronx and, next week, at Shea, fans will grab at the chance to forget about the abysmal closing innings in these neighborhoods last fall. The looming left-field presences of the new Yankee...

Gristede's Guy.(The Talk of the Town)(John Catsimatidis)
April 7, 2008... John Catsimatidis, whose name rhymes with Gristede's, has been considering a run for mayor since 2003, on the strength of his business record and his life story: born in Greece, son of a busboy, amateur pilot, self-made billionaire....

Enchanted Evening.(The Talk of the Town)
April 7, 2008... Mary Rodgers Guettel and Alice Hammerstein Mathias, the daughters of the composer and the lyricist, respectively, of "South Pacific," are jointly keeping a sharp eye on the current Broadway production of the show, the first since the 1949...

Va Bene.(The Talk of the Town)(The Art of Living Slowly)
April 7, 2008... "We started as a group of friends with the same problem: difficulty in our personal life to manage our time, being always in a hurry, and being always suspended between past and future." This philosophy--part Deepak Chopra, part Hannah...

Going for Broke.(The Talk of the Town)(bankruptcy law)
April 7, 2008... In recent months, a lot of people have been handed financial get-out-of-jail-free cards. C.E.O.s who presided over billions in losses have walked away with tens of millions in compensation. The Federal Reserve has showered cheap money on banks...

Project Trinity.(Trinity United Church of Christ's Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.)(Brief biography)
April 7, 2008... "I have never seen so many white people here in my life!" It was Good Friday on the South Side of Chicago, at Trinity United Church of Christ, which has been Senator Barack Obama's church for about twenty years and the most notorious...

Mine Is Longer than Yours.
April 7, 2008... At first, I thought I was alone in the pool. It was a sparkling blue gem, implausibly planted in the skyscraper canyon of downtown Los Angeles, as if David Hockney, heading toward Beverly Hills, had taken the wrong exit on the I-10 freeway....

Secrets of the Deep.(Odyssey Marine Expedition's discovery of Spanish shipwreck in Atlantic Ocean)(Brief biography)
April 7, 2008... One morning last October, the Explorer, a two-hundred-and-fifty-one-foot ship owned by Odyssey Marine Exploration, an American deep-sea treasure-hunting company, left the Port of Gibraltar and headed out to sea. On the horizon, three miles...

Say What?(Book review)
April 7, 2008... What if, for once, we did not credit Richard Price with having a "wonderful ear for dialogue"? What if we praised his wonderful mind for dialogue instead? An "ear" for dialogue always seems to imply reportorial or stenographic prowess, the...

Fast Company.(Brad Gooch's Fast Company: The World of Frank O'Hara)
April 7, 2008... Frank O'Hara lived in New York City for fifteen years, from 1951 until his death, in 1966. In that time, he wrote hundreds of poems, often several a day, hunting and pecking on a portable Royal with great speed. (Trained as a pianist, he called...

Split Estate.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 7, 2008... Laura King's suicide--she jumps from a window--unmoors her family from their New York life. When a second mother of their acquaintance jumps, Arthur King hastily moves his adolescent children, Cam and Celia, back to the Wyoming ranch where he...

The Journey Home.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 7, 2008... Bolger's 1990 novel, never before published in the United States, moves between the industrial rigidity of nineteen-eighties Dublin, with its dull suburbs, and the haunted bogs of rural Ireland. Its pages bristle with murder, sexual assault,...

Negro with a Hat.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 7, 2008... In 1914, on a ship between Jamaica and England, an impoverished twenty-six-year-old named Marcus Garvey had what he later called a vision of "a new world of black men." Six years later, he rode through Harlem in regal robes and a plumed...

The Art of Small Things.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 7, 2008... This lavishly illustrated compendium of miniature art explores our fascination with "the outer limits of visual perception and technical precision." Mack delves into the materials and technologies involved in the production of tiny artifacts,...

Mother Load.(Theater review)
April 7, 2008... "God is love, but get it in writing." So said the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, who knew a lot about conditional love. She grew up Rose Louise Hovick, the fetching but untalented elder daughter of a stagestruck Seattle divorcee, Rose Hovick, who...

Dovetail.(Restaurant review)
April 14, 2008... Dovetail seems at first like a version of Blue Hill transported north. There is the town-house location and discreet entrance, the understated decor, and the menu so emphatically New England in character that several of the ingredients claim to...

Military Conflict.(The Talk of the Town)(need for more American soldiers)
April 14, 2008... General Richard A. Cody graduated from West Point in 1972, flew helicopters, ascended to command the storied 101st Airborne Division, and then, toward the end of his career, settled into management; now, at fifty-seven, he wears four stars as...

Three Months.(The Talk of the Town)(New York State Mega Millions winner Jhon Gallego)
April 14, 2008... Last week, Jhon Gallego, one of the survivors of last month's crane collapse, took a drive through his old neighborhood, Turtle Bay, by the U.N. It was a sunny day, and he was being driven by his sister's boyfriend, Felipe Rodriguez. Gallego...

Still Flying.(The Talk of the Town)(Erica Jong)
April 14, 2008... Erica Jong, the novelist, essayist, and poet, has long lamented that "Fear of Flying," which has sold more than eighteen million copies worldwide since it was published, in 1973, has overshadowed the remainder of her sizable oeuvre. "I used to...

Sachs & Co.(The Talk of the Town)(Tom Sachs)
April 14, 2008... Moon rocks, wooden shotguns, and a life-sized replica of a Bosendorfer grand piano were just a few of the projects the do-it-yourself sculptor Tom Sachs--who has two big shows opening on May 8th, one at Lever House and the other at the Sperone...

This Boot Is Work.(The Talk of the Town)(Monica boots)
April 14, 2008... Boots tend not to be twenty-eight inches high. Twenty-eight-inch-high things are more like: your daughter who's nearly two, an M.T.A. subway turnstile, the bathroom sink, or a suitable-for-show female Great Dane. The measurement is also the...

Capital Fellows.(London's mayoral election)
April 14, 2008... As the mayoral campaign in London officially got under way late last month, it occurred to me that, no matter how the voting turns out, Londoners will be electing a mayor with no equivalent in American politics. The incumbent, Ken Livingstone,...

Camp Justice.(Guantanamo Naval Base)
April 14, 2008... The future of the detention facility on the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, inspires an unusual degree of bipartisan consensus, at least in theory. All three remaining candidates for President, the Republican John McCain and the...

Somebody Has to Be in Control.(George Clooney)(Brief biography)
April 14, 2008... George Clooney was at home in Los Angeles one afternoon in mid-January, a few days before he flew to Sudan in his new role as a United Nations "Messenger of Peace" (an appointment that overlooked reports of a recent public scuffle with Fabio,...

The Petition.(Nadia Abu El-Haj's Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society)
April 14, 2008... In 1990, when Nadia Abu El-Haj was a graduate student at Duke, three years into her coursework in anthropology, she started thinking about a field-work project. She was not much moved by the prospect of adding a village study to the school's...

Buying It.(Takashi Murakami)(Brief biography)
April 14, 2008... My favorite part of "[c]Murakami," a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of the juggernautish Japanese artist-entrepreneur Takashi Murakami, was the most controversial element in the show when it originated, at the Museum of Contemporary Art...

Prior Convictions.(America's religious liberty)
April 14, 2008... "A wise man adheres not to his reli gion, because it was that of his ancestors," a smooth-tongued mullah says to a tongue-tied American in Royall Tyler's 1797 novel "The Algerine Captive." The American, a luckless New Englander named Updike...

The White Tiger.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 14, 2008... In this darkly comic debut novel set in India, Balram, a chauffeur, murders his employer, justifying his crime as the act of a "social entrepreneur." In a series of letters to the Premier of China, in anticipation of the leader's upcoming visit...

The Rain Before It Falls.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 14, 2008... Time seems to collapse in this troubling family saga, more notable for its meditative aspects than for its relatively straightforward story of betrayal and loss. From her deathbed, the elderly Rosamond tells the story of her life and...

The Craftsman.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 14, 2008... Sennett considers an array of artisans across different periods, from ancient Chinese chefs to contemporary mobile-phone designers, in this powerful meditation on the "skill of making things well." The template of craftsmanship, he finds,...

Dandy in the Underworld.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 14, 2008... Horsley, a British dandy and putative artist notorious for having undergone a crucifixion, turns a grim childhood into cocktail-party fodder in this compulsively fizzy memoir. He spins tales of his wealthy father's infidelities and his...

PEACE NOW.
April 14, 2008... Nicholson Baker

Something Else.(Ornette Coleman)
April 14, 2008... Avid expectation invariably precedes a concert by Ornette Coleman, the revolutionary alto saxophonist, composer, and sometime trumpeter and violinist. But the revivalist fervor that accompanied his appearance at Town Hall on a recent Friday...

Mambo!(Dancing with the Stars)
April 14, 2008... "Dancing with the Stars" is back, for its sixth season. The women have dusted off their sequinned bras, the men have reassumed their matador poses, and the whole big diamante cheese ball is rolling down the highway again, into your living room....

A Thing Called Hope.(South Pacific)
April 14, 2008... By the time "South Pacific" closed its run on Broadway, after five years and nineteen hundred and twenty-five performances, it had done its work in the world. The 1949 musical--the first show that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein produced...

Not Fade Away.(Movie review)
April 14, 2008... In the seventeenth chapter of "The Voyage of the Beagle," Charles Darwin turned to the mating habits of the giant Galapagos tortoise. "When the male and female are together, the male utters a hoarse roar or bellowing, which, it is said, can be...

Allen & Delancey.(Restaurant review)
April 21, 2008... The British chef Neil Ferguson is in the midst of a Tony Dungy-esque moment at Allen & Delancey. Dismissed last year by Gordon Ramsay after an iffy start at his midtown restaurant, Ferguson decamped to the Lower East Side, where he has been--at...

In Country.(Sound recording review)
April 21, 2008... A few weeks ago, Dolly Parton appeared on "American Idol," coaching contestants through her songbook and performing a number from her latest CD, "Backwoods Barbie." Though the aspiring Idols were game, Parton's spirit is more easily found in a...

Mr. and Ms. Spoken.(The Talk of the Town)(John McCain and Hillary Clinton)
April 21, 2008... When the footage surfaced showing that Hillary Clinton, contrary to what she had been claiming in campaign speeches, had not been obliged to duck and run from sniper fire during her visit to Bosnia in 1996 but, rather, had listened smilingly as...

Goodbye Again.(The Talk of the Town)
April 21, 2008... Robin Morgan was flopping around her apartment the other day in a brown velour sweatsuit and socks, popping olives in her mouth and lamenting the pace of her recovery from rotator-cuff surgery. "Aging is a bitch," she said. "Excuse the sexist...

Cover Guy.(The Talk of the Town)(George Lois)
April 21, 2008... The Big Idea at breakfast last week with Mr. Big Idea, the advertising and graphic-design legend George Lois ("I Want My Maypo"; "I Want My MTV"; the world as we know it), was probably "Well, it's about time." This was, by his reckoning, and...

You Say Stanton.(The Talk of the Town)(Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
April 21, 2008... In 1974, Immy Humes, a high-school senior, was doing some research in the women's history archive at Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library when she noticed a faded piece of stationery. According to the letterhead, it had belonged to Elizabeth Cady...

Iceland's Deep Freeze.(The Talk of the Town)
April 21, 2008... By now, we're all familiar with the major victims of the subprime meltdown: greedy mortgage brokers, overleveraged hedge funds, feckless banks and brokerages, incautious homeowners, and so on. But the crisis is also wreaking havoc in places...

A Dip in the Cold.(long distance swimming)(Travel narrative)
April 21, 2008... In June, 1972, I flew over the North Atlantic Ocean. I was fifteen years old, and on my way to England to swim across the English Channel. I gazed out the window of the plane and saw Greenland. Glacial domes sparkled in the clear blue Arctic...

Tigerland.(Travel narrative)
April 21, 2008... The old man stepped onto our boat out of the utter blackness that falls between the abrupt fall of twilight, at five o'clock, and the rising of the full moon. His name was Phani Gayen, and he was employed at the Saznekhali Wildlife Sanctuary,...

The Way of the Puffin.(Travel narrative)
April 21, 2008... The puffin was a Christmas present from my brother Bob. It came in an unmarked plastic bag and appeared to be some sort of puppet or plush toy. It had a fleece-lined body and a big, orange, squeeze-inviting beak, and its eyes were set in...

Up and Then Down.(elevators)
April 21, 2008... The longest smoke break of Nicholas White's life began at around eleven o'clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the...

After America.
April 21, 2008... Every so often, a grand thesis captures the world's imagination, at least until it is swept away by events or by a newer, more plausible thesis. The latest one to do so, in policy think tanks, universities, foreign ministries, corporate...

Artists in Exile.(Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 21, 2008... During the first half of the twentieth century, thousands of artists fled Europe's turmoil for the United States, in the process becoming more or less unwitting participants in "an ongoing national discussion about American identity." Though...

Light Years.(Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 21, 2008... When Moore, a novelist, was growing up in Hawaii, in the early fifties, it still took five days to reach the islands by sea from San Francisco. Yet life there for haoles (foreigners) was not unlike that of bluebloods summering in Maine: Moore...

Panama Fever.(Panama Fever: The Epic Story of One of the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time; The Building of the Panama Canal )(Brief article)(Book review)
April 21, 2008... This history of the Panama Canal describes the scheming, the speculating, and the backbreaking labor--performed mostly by West Indians, who bore the brunt of the estimated twenty-five thousand fatalities--that went into "the costliest project...

Panther Soup.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 21, 2008... Gimlette has written a travelogue of a vanished place, the "great wheeled city" of more than two million American soldiers that rolled up from Marseilles in 1944 to meet the German Army. He sets out with an American veteran of the campaign to...

Situation Terminal.(airports )
April 21, 2008... Airports are essentially machines for processing people, airplanes, automobiles, cargo, and luggage--all of which move in different ways, and which need to be connected at certain points and separated by rigid security at others. Just getting...

Frenemy Territory.
April 21, 2008... There are people who, when the subject of television comes up, love to make a point of saying, "Ugh, I hate reality TV," scrunching up their noses and pulling their heads back, as if someone had just offered them a plate of fried tarantulas. It...

Spooky Perfection.(Portishead's album, Third)(Sound recording review)
April 21, 2008... In an interview with the London Observer several months ago, Geoff Barrow, the leader of the British trio Portishead, complained, "They turned our songs into a fondue set." "They" could be anyone--critics, fans, or the commercial concerns that...

Doll Houses.(Petrushka by Basil Twist)(Dance review)
April 21, 2008... At this moment, no theatre artist in New York is showing more poetic force or technical skill than the puppeteer Basil Twist. By now, after Julie Taymor's production of "The Lion King," it should not be hard to convince people that puppetry can...

Overripe, Undernourished.(Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Smart People)(Movie review)
April 21, 2008... Why is it so hard to make a good comedy set on a tropical island? This is a question that has vexed the sleep of the greatest film theorists and scholars. Think of the lame "Joe Versus the Volcano" (1990), with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan; or of the...

Bobo.(Restaurant review)
April 28, 2008... This is a tale of two restaurants. Bobo on a Tuesday: chic and laid-back, Harvey Weinstein holding court in one corner, Adrien Brody canoodling with a young woman in another, a nice bottle of Tempranillo. Bobo on a Thursday: crowded and noisy,...

Smiling Through.(Tokyo Chorus, I Was Born, But... and All About Eve)(Video recording review)
April 28, 2008... The Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu's wry humor, on view in Criterion's new boxed set "Silent Ozu--Three Family Comedies," reaches deep: he approaches sentimental domestic themes as microcosms of great social issues. "Tokyo Chorus,"...

Bitter Patter.(The Talk of the Town)(Philadelphia primary debate)
April 28, 2008... Last Wednesday's two-hour televised smackdown in Philadelphia between the two remaining Democratic candidates for President, which might have been billed as the Elite Treat v. the Boilermaker Belle, turned into something worse--something akin...

Puckhead.(The Talk of the Town)(Sean Avery)
April 28, 2008... Sean Avery, who plays left wing for the New York Rangers, is what hockey people call an agitator. His job, which seems to have no analogue in sports--or in any line of work, except maybe terrorism--is to annoy his opponents so intensely that...

Pope-a-Palooza.(The Talk of the Town)(youth rally)
April 28, 2008... The Woodstock-based events producer Chris Wangro is not a very religious person, but he has always believed that something magical happens when a big crowd gets together. (This is what led him, after stints as a clown and an agitprop street...

Who ♥ Baltimore?(The Talk of the Town)(Baltimore, Maryland)
April 28, 2008... Baltimore--famous for its harbor, its crab cakes, and its drug trade. Many know it as Charm City, although it's gone by other names: Monument City, Mobtown, Salty Balty, the City of Firsts (first American umbrella factory, first dental...

Parsing Paulson.(The Talk of the Town)(Henry Paulson)
April 28, 2008... In the wake of a crisis, the natural response of government officials is often to offer up new rules and regulations. So it came as no surprise when, a few weeks ago, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed a new regulatory scheme for the...

State Secrets.(Al Haramain Islamic Foundation)(Organization overview)
April 28, 2008... One Friday afternoon in August, 2004, a Washington, D.C., attorney named Lynne Bernabei received a package from the Department of the Treasury. The government was investigating one of her clients, the American branch of a Saudi charity called...

Restoration Drama.(Edith Wharton Restoration)(Brief biography)
April 28, 2008... Stephanie Copeland, the president of the Edith Wharton Restoration, was hoping for sunshine on the April morning, two years ago, that she was to receive First Lady Laura Bush at the Mount, Wharton's country house, in Lenox, Massachusetts; but,...

The Last Folk Song.(blues music)
April 28, 2008... In a small white house on a quiet country road in the foothills of northeastern Georgia--the end of Appalachia or the beginning, depending on your point of view--there lived an old blues singer named Cora Mae (Sweet Petunia) Bryant. Rumor had...

Crazy English.(Li Yang Crazy English)
April 28, 2008... Accompanied by his photographer and his personal assistant, Li Yang stepped into a Beijing classroom and shouted, "Hello, everyone!" The students applauded. Li, the founder, head teacher, and editor-in-chief of Li Yang Crazy English, wore a...

The Last Verse.(blues music)
April 28, 2008... In a small white house on a quiet country road in the foothills of northeastern Georgia--the end of Appalachia or the beginning, depending on your point of view--there lived an old blues singer named Cora Mae (Sweet Petunia) Bryant. Rumor had...

Arms and the Man.(Histories, The Landmark Herodotus)
April 28, 2008... History--the rational and methodical study of the human past--was invented by a single man just under twenty-five hundred years ago; just under twenty-five years ago, when I was starting a graduate degree in Classics, some of us could be pretty...

Sleeping It Off in Rapid City.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 28, 2008... Despite its title, there is very little sleeping in this gathering of new and previously published works. What binds these erudite poems is their restlessness. Planes fly overhead ("Red pulse the big jet's lights / in descent"); the poet...

Rising, Falling, Hovering.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 28, 2008... Wright is a resolutely experimental poet, funny and intemperate, and the poems in her latest volume manage an unusual alchemy--they have a raw, unfinished quality that never feels provisional. Her unpredictable digressions and swift changes of...

The Ghost Soldiers.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 28, 2008... These character-driven poems are variations on a theme: the intrusion of the unexpected on the ordinary and the ordinary on the unexpected. Some take the form of dialogues, sprinkled with misunderstandings; others are first-person musings in...

National Anthem.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 28, 2008... The America of Prufer's fourth collection is an empire in decline, a medicated landscape ("snow / like little tranquilizers all over the yard") peopled by pilgrims to shopping malls. The book opens with a panoramic vision of the aftermath of...

The Big Night.(Philadelphia primary debate)
April 28, 2008... Watching the death match between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has been riveting but severely draining, because, in addition to having to witness what has become a very unsporting and drawn-out spectacle, we've had to do some wrestling of...

Uncluttered.(Take Your Time )(Brief biography)
April 28, 2008... Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic inventor and engineer of minimalist spectacle, is so much better than anyone else in today's ranks of crowd-pleasing installational artists that there should be a nice, clean, special word other than "art"...

Mother of the Bride.(A Catered Affair)(Theater review)
April 28, 2008... "A Catered Affair" (at the Walter Kerr) is a musical based on Paddy Chayefsky's 1955 teleplay, "The Catered Affair," which starred the brilliant Brooklyn-born character actress Thelma Ritter. On the television program, Ritter played Aggie...

Switching Places.(Baby Mama, Roman de Gare, 88 Minutes)(Movie review)
April 28, 2008... With many film stars jumping back into television--and who can blame them, since that is where you find the better scripts these days--it is heartening to see someone make the leap in the other direction. Tina Fey, currently of "30 Rock,"...