The New Yorker articles from April 2009

The New Yorker archives from April 2009

Lulu.(Restaurant review)
April 6, 2009... On a recent evening at this narrow, dimly lit restaurant, where the bar was more crowded than the dining area, a pair of young women discussed seasonal cupcakes: "I mean, summer is really for stone fruit." The bartender gave away free shots of...

Mad And Madder.(The Talk of the Town)
April 6, 2009... When Barack Obama was running for President, people used to wonder if he appeared so calm because he and his advisers had calculated that the American electorate wouldn't be able to handle an angry black man. Now it's beginning to look as if...

Shuttle Diplomacy.(The Talk of the Town)(Battlestar Galactica)
April 6, 2009... In 1978, the word "frak," as in "Go frak yourself!," quietly entered and exited the lexicon, when the ABC science-fiction drama "Battlestar Galactica," which had introduced it, was cancelled after one season. Twenty-seven years later, the Sci...

Birds, Bees, Fish.(The Talk of the Town)("Green Porno" )
April 6, 2009... Two zoologists walked into a bar. They were guests at a reception for their friend Isabella Rossellini, the actress and model, whose latest project, "Green Porno," is a series of one-to-three-minute-long films about animal reproduction. "When...

Primary Sources.(The Talk of the Town)(new play "33 Variations")
April 6, 2009... In 1819, the music publisher Anton Diabelli wrote a waltz and sent it to fifty composers, asking each to contribute a variation. They all agreed, except one--Ludwig van Beethoven, who dismissed the waltz as a Schusterfleck, or "cobbler's...

Balancing Banks.(The Talk of the Town)
April 6, 2009... Not long ago, many of America's biggest banks made terrible bets on overpriced real estate and suffered huge losses. While the banks insisted that they were fundamentally healthy, economists and politicians declared many of them to be...

Syria Calling.(bombing of Gaza Strip, USA foreign policy, and Syria and Israel relations)
April 6, 2009... When the Israelis' controversial twenty-two-day military campaign in Gaza ended, on January 18th, it also seemed to end the promising peace talks between Israel and Syria. The two countries had been engaged for almost a year in negotiations...

Cash for Keys.(real estate agent and marketing)
April 6, 2009... Leo Nordine turned the front-door key and cat-footed into one of his three hundred homes, a four-bedroom in South Gate. "Hello, Leo Nordine!" he announced himself. He walked into a living room stuffed with boxes and saw three girls huddled...

Couplet.(works and practice of poets and brothers Michael and Matthew Dickman )
April 6, 2009... One August afternoon, Michael and Matthew Dickman boarded a bus in Lents, the working-class neighborhood in southeast Portland, Oregon, where they grew up. Michael, who is six feet one and a half inches, with pale, freckled skin, sandy hair,...

Message In a Bottle.(David de Rothschild in constructing a prototype for a sixty-foot bottle boat)
April 6, 2009... One morning last June, David de Rothschild, a thirty-year-old heir to the European banking fortune, arrived on his bicycle at Pier 31, a vast, hangarlike building that juts from the Embarcadero into San Francisco Bay, in the city's North Beach...

A Nervous Splendor.(The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War)(Biography)
April 6, 2009... The family of Karl Wittgenstein, who was one of Austria's richest men when he died, in 1913, may deserve some gloomy sort of prize, the Palm of Atreus, perhaps. His youngest child, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, once asked a pupil if he...

The Believers.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 6, 2009... Set in New York City in 2002, with the terror of September 11th still fresh and the confrontation with Iraq starting to take shape, this searing comic novel takes on hypocrisy of all kinds. Joel Litvinoff, a noted radical lawyer, suffers a...

The Good Parents.(The Good Parents: A Novel )(Brief article)(Book review)
April 6, 2009... A girl from the Australian outback heads to Melbourne and, in thrall to the idea of having a secret, grownup life, runs off with her older, married boss, a shady businessman who, she recognizes, has little genuine feeling for her. This is just...

Store Front.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 6, 2009... New York's storefronts constitute the city's vernacular architecture, shaping the look and feel of the five boroughs no less than more celebrated elements of the skyline. These unfussy, elegant, and richly colored photographs of butcher shops,...

Potato.(Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent )(Brief article)(Book review)
April 6, 2009... This enjoyably meandering history looks at the potato as a plant of paradox. It has been revered as an aphrodisiac and feared as a cause of leprosy. Populations rise dramatically wherever it is introduced, but reliance on it "ensnares more...

Bearing Fruit.(art appreciation and Masterpieces of European Painting exhibit from the Norton Simon Museum)
April 6, 2009... We know what a great painting looks like while we are looking at one. Turning away, we don't exactly forget, but our recall of the experience--how we felt, looking--starts to edit what we saw. Some details and qualities are magnified; others...

Warmongers.('Exit the King' and 'Rambo Solo')(Theater review)
April 6, 2009... "What the fuck was that!!" King Berenger the First (Geoffrey Rush) exclaims midway through "Exit the King" (at the Barrymore). A storm--brief but "King Lear"-like in its intensity--has just hit his bare-bones, broken-down kingdom, flooding it...

The Longest Run.(No Line on the Horizon)(Sound recording review)
April 6, 2009... In thirty-three years of existence, U2 has sold more than a hundred and forty million albums. Its "Vertigo" tour made $389 million, second only to the Rolling Stones for a single-tour gross. In 2005, I saw the band on that tour, at Madison...

Changing Places.('Monsters vs. Aliens' and 'Shall We Kiss?')(Movie review)
April 6, 2009... To what period does "Monsters vs. Aliens" belong? It is set in the present day, but its snout is pointed proudly at the future. The skills it employs, in its capacity as the latest animated feature from DreamWorks, could not be more gleamingly...

Price Point.(California Years)(Sound recording review)
April 13, 2009... This past year, Jill Sobule was in the news more for a song she didn't write than for any of the songs she has written. Katy Perry's pop hit "I Kissed a Girl" shared a title (but little else) with Sobule's 1995 quirk-pop landmark, and Sobule...

Co.(Restaurant review)
April 13, 2009... In the world of pizza, debates over crust can resemble sectarian disputes. There are the ascetics, who demand pies as thin and brittle as Communion wafers, versus the libertines, who prefer something they can sink their teeth into. If anyone...

Obamaism.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama's economic policy)
April 13, 2009... Another week, another earthquake. Having already signed a nearly eight-hundred-billion-dollar stimulus bill, restored the rule of law to America's treatment of detainees in its custody, developed plans to shore up the banking and housing...

All Together Now.(The Talk of the Town)(Paul McCartney)
April 13, 2009... It's one thing to expect, at the age of seven, that you would grow up to marry Paul McCartney, and it's another thing entirely to meet him in person, forty-five years later. Kidding! They're exactly the same thing. That early expectation and...

The Bush Six.(The Talk of the Town)(Philippe Sands's 'Torture Team')(Interview)
April 13, 2009... About a year ago, a book came out in England that made a fascinating prediction: at some point in the future, the author wrote, six top officials in the Bush Administration would get a tap on the shoulder announcing that they were being...

Ayn Crowd.(The Talk of the Town)(Ayn Rand)
April 13, 2009... Every month, a group of Ayn Rand enthusiasts get together at the Midtown Restaurant, on Fifty-fifth Street, for ice water and grilled cheese and a discussion of Objectivism--the philosophy, expressed in Rand's novels, that celebrates the...

Makeover.(The Talk of the Town)(Hedge Funds Care )
April 13, 2009... Rob Davis, a prime broker to hedge funds, began worrying about his industry's image on September 29, 1998, not long after the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital. That evening, as he sat reading the Wall Street Journal, he came upon...

Last Laugh.(Katt Williams)(Interview)
April 13, 2009... A small black man on a big white horse is bound to get attention. The comedian Katt Williams was in an Atlanta parking lot, on a Thursday morning last October, getting a riding lesson in preparation for the BET Hip-Hop Awards, which were two...

Can Iran Change?
April 13, 2009... Ever since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first ran for President of Iran, four years ago, he has shown a canny understanding of communications. He has a blog, called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Personal Memos, in which he expounds on God, philosophy, and his...

A Fine Rage.(on George Orwell)(Critical essay)
April 13, 2009... I vividly remember when I first read George Orwell. It was at Eton, Orwell's old school. Not coming from a family with any Eton connections (a portion of my fees was paid by the school), I had refined a test: if a boy's father had gone there,...

Paper Tigers.(books on the mass media's elite)(Book review)
April 13, 2009... The Wall Street Journal began as a late-nineteenth-century version of a Bloomberg terminal--a high-priced, custom-produced collection of timely data on the financial markets which was distributed to people who planned to trade on the...

A Strange Eventful History.(A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 13, 2009... Holroyd's sweeping group biography traces the lives of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, two stars of the Victorian theatre, and their descendants. Terry was "embodied sunshine," beloved for her naturalness and grace onstage. In 1878, when she was...

You Are Here.(You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 13, 2009... Those for whom particle physics and string theory are impenetrable mysteries may not be entirely enlightened by Potter's genial exegesis of the mysteries of the universe, in which quarks, squarks, and "vibrating lengths of pure energy" are...

A Fortunate Age.(A Fortunate Age: A Novel)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 13, 2009... This debut novel updates Mary McCarthy's "The Group," a satirical portrait of nineteen-thirties Vassar graduates, for the late-nineties boom years in Manhattan, where six Oberlin graduates struggle to make it as writers, actors, musicians, and...

The Spare Room.(The Spare Room: A Novel)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 13, 2009... Following a Melbourne-based writer as she cares for a friend dying of cancer, this is the first work of fiction in sixteen years from an Australian writer whose accomplished early novels were overshadowed by the controversial publication, in...

Voice of the Century.(contralto Marian Anderson )
April 13, 2009... On Easter Sunday, 1939, the contralto Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to let her appear at Constitution Hall, Washington's largest concert venue, because of the...

Not So Free Love.(Hair: American Tribal Love-Rock Musical and Reasons to Be Pretty)(Theater review)
April 13, 2009... Will someone who's associated with "Hair" (in revival at the Al Hirschfeld, under the direction of Diane Paulus) do the production a favor and turn the shit down? Let's start with the sound design. As conceived by Acme Sound Partners, the...

Chopin List.('Chopin', 'Chopin: The Piano Concertos')(Sound recording review)
April 20, 2009... Is there a composer who blends shadow and substance as unforgettably as Chopin? The music invades our soul but also stands apart with an aristocratic reserve; the melodies quiver with sensitivity but arise from an intricate web of counterpoint...

No Nukes.(The Talk of the Town)
April 20, 2009... There is no madness like nuclear madness. That was the conceit of the Cold War's greatest comedy, "Dr. Strangelove," and it was the conceit of North Korea's recent rocket-launch extravaganza. By testing a missile that might one day be able to...

The Tweets Of Roland Hedley.(The Talk of the Town)
April 20, 2009... The following is an unedited transcript of the complete G-20 Summit coverage of Roland Hedley, senior Twitter correspondent for Fox News, who appears regularly in "Doonesbury": At Dulles, on way to London for G-20 Summit. In taxi to...

The Comeback.(The Talk of the Town)(on Vincent Cincotta)
April 20, 2009... Vincent Cincotta--a.k.a. Jimmy the Peddler--was in the running to win the N.C.A.A. men's-basketball-tournament pool last week at his local watering hole, the Cafe on Clinton, in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. What's significant about the...

A Roosevelt Reading List.(The Talk of the Town)(Edith Kermit Roosevelt's letters)
April 20, 2009... About a year and a half ago, Harriet Shapiro, who is the head of exhibitions at the New York Society Library, was, in the manner of modern-day researchers everywhere, randomly Googling--looking for information about Marion King, the...

Hanging Tough.(The Talk of the Town)(business in recessions)
April 20, 2009... In the late nineteen-twenties, two companies--Kellogg and Post--dominated the market for packaged cereal. It was still a relatively new market: ready-to-eat cereal had been around for decades, but Americans didn't see it as a real alternative...

The Ghost Course.(Askernish golf course)
April 20, 2009... In 2005, a Scottish golf-course consultant named Gordon Irvine took a fishing trip to South Uist, a sparsely populated island in the Outer Hebrides, fifty miles off Scotland's west coast. South Uist (pronounced YEW-ist) is about the size of...

Guy Walks into a Bar Car.
April 20, 2009... In the golden age of American travel, the platforms of train stations were knee deep in what looked like fog. You see it all the time in black-and-white movies, these low-lying eddies of silver. I always thought it was steam from the engines,...

Roughing It.(Essay)
April 20, 2009... Late on the evening of July 27, 1916, after a five-day journey culminating in a twelve-hour train ride across the Continental Divide, Rosamond Underwood and Dorothy Woodruff arrived at the depot in Hayden, Colorado. They had been hired to teach...

The Vertical Tourist.(building climber Alain Robert)(Interview)
April 20, 2009... February 17, 2009, 1:10 P.M. As the thousands of bankers, consultants, and accountants who work in the Cheung Kong Center, a sixty-two-story office tower in Hong Kong's central business district, returned from their lunch breaks, a slight...

Swamp Things.(exotic lizards loose in Florida)
April 20, 2009... Just before daybreak, in the eerie hour after Hurricane Andrew struck southern Florida, a zoo worker named Ron Magill went to see what was left of his animals. He'd spent the night in his ranch house in suburban Miami, huddled in the master...

Living on the Radio.(music producers The-Dream and Christopher Stewart)
April 20, 2009... One way to understand social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is to consider that younger digital natives are not necessarily being exhibitionists when they post photographs of themselves and share personal details there. Instead,...

Enameled Lady.(Katherine Anne Porter)(Biography)
April 20, 2009... New York, after the war. A young writer--more of a hustler, really--named P. B. Jones attends a publishing party full of artists and literary types. There he meets an older, established author he has long admired named Alice Lee Langman; he...

From Venice to Varanasi.(Geoff Dyer's works)(Critical essay)
April 20, 2009... Walter Benjamin once said that every great work dissolves a genre or founds a new one. But is it only masterpieces that have a monopoly on novelty? What if a writer had written several works that rose to Benjamin's high definition, not all...

It Will Come to Me.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 20, 2009... In this campus satire, Ben and Ruth Blau have settled into what appears to be a comfortable routine at their Southern university campus. Ruth, mourning her inability to follow up on an acclaimed early trilogy of novels, drinks a little too...

One D.O.A. One on the Way.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 20, 2009... Robison could work for a food or drug packager: she squeezes dire warnings into tiny spaces. Her new novel, at a hundred and sixty-six pages, broken into two hundred and twenty-five numbered chapters, recounts an unkempt marriage between Eve, a...

Tall Man.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 20, 2009... In 2004, in a remote Aboriginal community in northern Australia, Cameron Doomadgee, a drunk young indigenous man, was arrested and, a few hours later, died in his prison cell. A witness claimed that the six-foot-seven-inch arresting officer...

Birdscapes.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 20, 2009... Who watches the bird-watchers? This inventive disquisition is alert to both the dawn chorus of birds and the great choir of poets, travellers, and naturalists who have rhapsodized them. Central to the book is the ambiguity of the word...

Clowns of Catastrophe.('Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them', 'The Toxic Avenger')(Theater review)
April 20, 2009... I have seen actors walk off the set. I have seen audiences walk out of the theatre. But not until Christopher Durang's "Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them" (at the Public) have I seen a playwright walk out on his own play. "I...

Rock Solid.(Anvil! The Story of Anvil)(Movie review)
April 20, 2009... The most stirring release of the year thus far is a documentary. No surprise in that, given the current state of feature films, or in the fact that "Anvil! The Story of Anvil" is a documentary about a heavy-metal band. But this film is about a...

Organ Donor.(Potato Hole)(Sound recording review)(Brief article)
April 27, 2009... The organist, songwriter, and arranger extraordinaire Booker T. Jones is one of the legends of soul music. A multi-instrumentalist as a child and later a student in music composition at Indiana University, he went on to head up the Stax house...

Schnipper's Quality Kitchen.(Restaurant review)
April 27, 2009... Generally, if a diner's first thought when trying a new restaurant is, Is this a chain?, the subsequent meal proves to be, if a little boring, pleasantly safe--reassuring whether in New York, Kansas City, or Seattle. Schnipper's Quality...

In The Air.(The Talk of the Town)(preventing global warming)(Essay)
April 27, 2009... The first celebration of Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, was a raucously exuberant affair. In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic. People picnicked on the sidewalk; dead fish were dragged through midtown; and Governor Nelson Rockefeller...

Yankees For Sale.(The Talk of the Town)(on the new Yankee Stadium)
April 27, 2009... An hour before Yogi Berra threw out the inaugural pitch at the new Yankee Stadium last Thursday afternoon, a ten-piece band welcomed fans to a stretch of gleaming white concrete identified as Babe Ruth Plaza with a rendition of Neil Diamond's...

The Real Bret Easton Ellis.(The Talk of the Town)(Interview)
April 27, 2009... "The Informers," an ensemble film set in nineteen-eighties L.A.--Ray-Bans, chopper soundtrack, drugs, rock, vodka in the tub, spiritual alienation rendered as standing on the sidelines of a foursome, clothed--maintains a certain fidelity to...

Exit Lawyers.(The Talk of the Town)(Philip Howard on 'Life Without Lawyers')
April 27, 2009... One recent evening, Philip Howard appeared before an audience at the New-York Historical Society, on Central Park West, where Herman Melville once lectured on the South Sea Islands, and James Fenimore Cooper discussed the Battle of Plattsburgh...

Mother Lode.(The Talk of the Town)
April 27, 2009... Hey, Mom, What's going on? You know how my friends and I always get a kick out of the e-mails and texts that our moms send us? Like, after the big Hillary debate, when you wrote, "2 quote Bill, she's a scumbag!" or the time Mrs. Williams...

The Bells.(the Danilov Monastery bells)
April 27, 2009... Father Roman is the head bell ringer at the Danilov Monastery, the working residence of the Moscow Patriarch and the seat of the Holy Synod. But the first time he rang the monastery's original bells was in 2003, at Harvard's Lowell House, where...

Brain Gain.(stimulants for work and studies)
April 27, 2009... A young man I'll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn't on the job,...

The Road Ahead.(automobile industry bailout)
April 27, 2009... Like many Americans who fought in the Second World War, Sam Ridley, a tank commander in Patton's drive across France, came home with big plans and a heightened sense of destiny. Within a year of returning to Smyrna, Tennessee, Ridley ran for...

Ladies Wild.(The Fame)(Sound recording review)
April 27, 2009... Dedicated fans of popular music have a certain conversation at least once a year. Call it The Question of Endurance. You and your friends are talking about music, and the conversation turns to a popular band. You express support. A friend...

The Humbug.(Edgar Allan Poe)(Biography)
April 27, 2009... Edgar Allan Poe once wrote an essay called "The Philosophy of Composition," to explain why he wrote "The Raven" backward. The poem tells the story of a man who, "once upon a midnight dreary," while mourning his dead love, Lenore, answers a...

Sonata Mulattica.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 27, 2009... Dove's verse sequence re-creates the life of the biracial violinist George Bridgetower, best remembered for being the first performer, and the initial dedicatee, of Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata. (Beethoven replaced his humorous dedication to...

It Is Daylight.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 27, 2009... The poems in this bracing collection, which won the 2008 Yale Younger Poets prize, often suggest aftermath. Collins drops hints of a past narrative--"It's a shame / about adorable adults, / that they always seem like untrustworthy...

Inseminating the Elephant.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 27, 2009... The opening pages of this exceptional volume, with an epigraph from Chekhov ("Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out") and acknowledgment of the doctors who care for the author (she writes frankly about...

The Book of Props.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 27, 2009... In his second collection, Miller quietly disassembles everyday life, identifying the rhetoric, folly, expectation, and artifice that make up the world. Light is an important feature--a light on a film set, a car's headlights, the "flash-veins...

Trapped.('Joe Turner's Come and Gone', 'Mary Stuart')(Theater review)
April 27, 2009... The late August Wilson thought of himself as a bluesman. His plays are chronicles of catastrophe, told lyrically; his theatrical mission was "to articulate the cultural response of black Americans to the world in which they found themselves," a...

Extra! Extra!('The Soloist', 'State of Play')(Movie review)
April 27, 2009... Sometimes a mere coincidence in Hollywood's haphazard release schedule crystallizes a national moment--a gathering mood, a twinge of longing. Two ambitious new movies, "The Soloist" and "State of Play," both offer the stirring sight of a daily...