The New Yorker articles from August 2005

The New Yorker archives from August 2005

ROE V. ROVE.(nomination of John G. Roberts as Supreme Court justice)
August 1, 2005... As of last Monday, when Time and Newsweek hit the stands with Karl Rove on their covers, the elements were in place for a good old-fashioned second-term White House scandal wallow. In Rove himself--baby-faced hatchet man, architect of the...

BAG CHECK.(The Talk of the Town; security checks on New York City subways)
August 1, 2005... Scene: Subway entrance, Grand Central, 9 a.m., Friday. Players: Officers Boyd, Ramson, Kwong, and Morales. Assorted citizens and photographers. "Exit to your left." "Hello, Miss, going up the stairs: stay to your left." "Only...

THE BRITNEY OPTION.(Mass Immediate Response, People for the American Way)
August 1, 2005... In May, the Senate's eleventh-hour compromise on filibusters led to a lot of talk about a return to civility. The President's nomination, last week, of John G. Roberts to fill the upcoming vacancy on the Supreme Court may change that. Advocacy...

ONE-MAN SHOW.(The Talk of the Town; actor Deep Roy plays all Oompa Loompas in Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" )
August 1, 2005... Early on in Roald Dahl's book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," Grandpa Joe lets Charlie in on a secret: late at night, an army of tiny "secret workers"--Oompa Loompas--can be seen plugging away behind Mr. Wonka's gates. Last year, a similar...

THE GOOD NEWS.(The Talk of the Town)(Campus Crusade for Christ installed in the Empire State Building)
August 1, 2005... In 1882, at the back of a theatre on West Twenty-third Street, the pastor A. B. Simpson founded the Missionary Training Institute, North America's first Bible college. In 1897, he moved it thirty miles north, to Nyack. And so it came to pass...

SEX AND THE SUPREMES.(gay rights)
August 1, 2005... There have been occasions in the history of the Supreme Court when simple professional excellence, more than any grittier consideration, was enough to propel a lawyer onto the bench. Ethnic and geographic balance, as well as a measure of...

THE RINGLEADER.(Grover G. Norquist)(Biography)
August 1, 2005... For much of the twentieth century, Washington was a Democratic town. Presidents came and went, but on Capitol Hill, which is where the tax dollars get spent, liberals and moderates dominated the key committees and set the legislative agenda....

TIDES OF WAR.(conflicts between government of Sri Lanka, nationalist group Tamil Tigers)
August 1, 2005... There was talk in Sri Lanka, not long after the tsunami, of an expensive coffin heading north. The story appeared in the press and was passed on in conversation, unencumbered by any trace of verifiable reality: Did you hear . . . a coffin, very...

WRITER, INTERRUPTED.(Henry Roth)(Biography)
August 1, 2005... In 1993, I went to visit Henry Roth, a man as famous for his decades of silence as for the great novel he had published almost sixty years earlier, "Call It Sleep." Roth was living in Albuquerque, in a converted funeral home (by then everything...

LIQUID ASSETS.(A History of the World in 6 Glasses)(Book Review)
August 1, 2005... A typical day's drinking for Samuel Pepys in early Restoration London might go like this. At about ten o'clock, he would have his "morning draft"--usually "small" (or weak) beer, but sometimes regular beer or even wine. Cakes might be eaten...

BRAZILIAN WAX.(disc jockeys Wesley Pentz, Fernando Luis Mattos da Matta)(international influences on hip-hop music)(Interview)
August 1, 2005... On a hot night in June, an unadvertised show by two influential d.j.s was getting under way at Rothko, a small club on the Lower East Side. Wesley Pentz, who is twenty-six and goes by the name Diplo--"Just like 'Delta' or 'Chevrolet,' it's a...

THE YANKS ARE COMING.(Over There)(Television Program Review)
August 1, 2005... Steven Bochco, the co-creator of "Over There," the new FX series about the war in Iraq, which begins on July 27th, has taken pains in interviews to declare that the show has nothing to do with politics. This is the first television series set...

THE NEW NOMADS.(Le Dernier Caravanserail (Odyssees)." )(Theater Review)
August 1, 2005... In hide-and-seek, it's a tragedy if you are not found: this turns out to be the existential predicament of the refugees who populate Ariane Mnouchkine's pageant of the uprooted, "Le Dernier Caravanserail (Odyssees)." The saga, which has a...

OPTING OUT.(Last Days)(The Edukators)(9 Songs)(Movie Review)
August 1, 2005... Movie Listings The Film File What do you do with a hero, or a heroine, who refuses the duties of the heroic? Given that movies rejoice in stardom, in the will of actors to besiege the screen, what happens when the characters whom they...

NAME CALLING.(The Talk of the Town)("global struggle against violent extremism" replaces "global war on terrorism" in U.S. government jargon)
August 8, 2005... You had to be a careful reader of the inside pages of the Times last week to notice that America is no longer fighting the global war on terrorism. The Administration has replaced, or revised, or expanded the G.W.O.T. with a new phrase: "a...

DEAR DIARIST.(The Talk of the Town)(composer and author Ned Rorem)(Interview)
August 8, 2005... Ned Rorem, the composer and author of scandalous diaries, summers on Nantucket, but he ventured into town the other day to give a reading, in connection with the publication of his selected letters. Two days later, retreating from a steamy...

LET'S GO: LIBEL.(legal battle between journalist author Rachel Ehrenfeld and Saudi banker Khalid bin Mahfouz)(Interview)
August 8, 2005... When the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, Rachel Ehrenfeld was sitting at her desk in her apartment in midtown. "I was on the phone with my editor in Brussels, finishing an op-ed about terror financing for the European edition...

CROSSTOWN BUS.(The Talk of the Town; anecdote)
August 8, 2005... Among the passengers the other afternoon on the Ninety-sixth Street crosstown bus was a young black man in bluejeans and a white T-shirt. He wore a black brimmed hat, with earflaps that were pulled down over his ears, despite the heat. He was...

DISK AVERSE.(The Talk of the Town; movie and DVD industry trends)
August 8, 2005... In 1918, the movie business found itself in crisis. Moviegoers, who, increasingly, were more educated and more middle-class, had been growing bored with the crude, melodramatic shorts of the day. "Neither the producers nor the theatres are...

MINORITY RETORT.(Senator Harry Reid)(nomination of John G. Roberts, Jr. as Supreme Court justice)(Interview)
August 8, 2005... About twenty minutes before President Bush announced that John G. Roberts, Jr., was his choice to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, he telephoned Harry Reid, of Nevada, the Senate Minority Leader. As Reid recalls the brief...

MY BIRD PROBLEM.(personal account of bird watching and its significance in one life)
August 8, 2005... February in South Texas: I'd checked into a roadside motel in Brownsville and was getting up in the dark every morning, making coffee for my friend Manley, who wouldn't talk to me or leave his bed until he'd had some, and then bolting the...

THE DAWN PATROL.(trends in television morning shows)
August 8, 2005... Katie Couric still finds it surprising when people come up to her and say things like "You're in my bedroom every morning." But Couric, the co-anchor of NBC's "Today" show, understands the impulse. "People have a very personal relationship...

MISSIONARY.(critic Edmund Wilson considered)
August 8, 2005... Edmund Wilson disliked being called a critic. He thought of himself as a journalist, and nearly all his work was done for commercial magazines, principally Vanity Fair, in the nineteen-twenties; The New Republic, in the nineteen-twenties and...

PRIMAL EAR.(American poets Theodore Roethke and James Wright considered)
August 8, 2005... On August 22, 1957, Pete Rademacher fought Floyd Patterson in Seattle for the world heavyweight championship. In the stands that day were two boxing fans from the English Department of the University of Washington: Theodore Roethke, a...

MYSTERY THEATRE.(Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins)(Tense Dave)(Daylight)(Dance Review)
August 8, 2005... Right now, New York's "downtown" dance shows no engulfing trends, as it did in the nineteen-sixties and seventies (conceptualism and politics), or in the eighties and nineties (irony and politics). Nevertheless, there is a busy little nest of...

TELLING STORIES.(Winslow Homer's painting)
August 8, 2005... Winslow Homer's first oil painting, which he made in 1863, when he was a twenty-six-year-old freelancer illustrating Civil War scenes for Harper's Weekly, shows a Union sharpshooter in a tree, balancing a rifle for an imminent shot. The man's...

LONERS.(Broken Flowers)(Grizzly Man)(Movie Review)
August 8, 2005... Bill Murray has strong cheekbones, a lordly crest of hair, and thin lips that he presses together in an act that suggests self-containment more than disapproval. In Jim Jarmusch's new "Broken Flowers," as in "Rushmore" and the recent "Lost in...

TABLES FOR TWO.(BLT Prime )(Restaurant Review)
August 22, 2005... BLT PRIME -- 111 E. 22nd St. (212-995-8500)--Laurent Tourondel's burgeoning chain (the name doesn't stand for "bacon, lettuce, and tomato"--it's an acronym of "bistro" plus his name) makes dependable, high-quality meals fancy enough to impress...

TABLES FOR TWO - BLT PRIME.(Restaurant Review)
August 22, 2005... BLT PRIME -- 111 E. 22nd St. (212-995-8500)--Laurent Tourondel's burgeoning chain (the name doesn't stand for "bacon, lettuce, and tomato"--it's an acronym of "bistro" plus his name) makes dependable, high-quality meals fancy enough to impress...

MIRED.(The Talk of the Town)
August 22, 2005... How did we--not just Americans but human beings in general--come to be? Opinions differ, but for most of recorded history the consensus view was that people were made out of mud. Also, that the mud was originally turned into people by a being...

HELLO, LONELINESS.(www.moviecodec.com)
August 22, 2005... On July 14, 2004, someone using the pseudonym Lonely logged on to www.moviecodec.com, a Web site dedicated to the technicalities of creating, uploading, downloading, and viewing digital video files. Typically, the site's message boards carry...

SNAKEHEAD, THE SEQUEL.(The Talk of the Town)
August 22, 2005... The news the other day that the snakehead fish, voracious pond-dominator and alleged traverser of dry land, had turned up in local waters was generally bad, at least for the other fish (and frogs, turtles, and perhaps even fowl) now destined to...

O.B.L.(The Talk of the Town)(Osama bin Laden)
August 22, 2005... Bruce Lawrence, a professor of Islamic studies at Duke University, lives near Durham, North Carolina, with his wife, Miriam Cooke, a scholar of modern Arabic literature. "Our house is on a hill, and we have a guesthouse-library that we use as a...

THE PRE-SEASON KID.(The Talk of the Town)
August 22, 2005... Each week in the fall, Andy Benoit decorates the family basement by arranging cutout cardboard logos of pro football teams on the wall; the pattern varies according to who's playing whom. On Sunday morning, he watches pre-game coverage from...

THE REAL THING.
August 22, 2005... The Samaritaine department store sits, vast and proud and ten stories high, on the right edge of the Seine; its terrace commands the best view of Paris around, its roof flies two pennants, its prow-shaped front seems more docked than settled on...

LONE STAR.
August 22, 2005... Here are a few lessons from modern American music. First, he not busy being born is busy dying. Second, you can't hang a man for killing a woman who is trying to steal your horse. And, third, you come to see what you want to see; you come to...

THE BIG TENT.(Billy Graham)(Biography)
August 22, 2005... Billy Graham's final crusade had reached the midway point, on a sweltering evening last June in Flushing Meadows, when things took an unexpected turn. Graham, now eighty-six and using a walker, had slowly made his way to the pulpit, aided by...

KIMWORLD.
August 22, 2005... The charm of dictators has been known to reduce the hardest men to jelly. I remember a tough-minded Japanese photographer returning from Pyongyang in the nineteen-seventies still aglow from the experience of Kim Il Sung's "warm handshake."...

SAY ANYTHING.(obscene words)
August 22, 2005... People have been talking bull, denying that they were talking bull, and accusing others of talking bull for ages. "Dumbe Speaker! that's a Bull," a character in a seventeenth-century English play says. "It is no Bull, to speak of a common...

AFTER THE FALL.(Bolshoi Ballet Company)
August 22, 2005... Whatever the Bolshoi Ballet's difficulties during the thirty-year directorship (1964-95) of Yuri Grigorovich, an autocrat and a convinced Communist, its subsequent troubles have arguably been greater. In ten years, the Bolshoi has had five...

ALL ABOUT SCHREKER.
August 22, 2005... A friend once borrowed a history of opera from the library, only to find that every other page had been marked up by one of those hyper-punctuating annotators who stalk the pages of library books around the world. Whether the topic was...

OVERDRIVE.
August 22, 2005... There are few pop stars as consistently discontent and as obstreperously proud as the rapper and producer Kanye West. You might think that after selling nearly three million copies of his 2004 debut album, "The College Dropout," winning three...

A NEW AGE OEDIPUS.(Oedipus)(Theater Review)
August 22, 2005... On January 4, 1968, The New York Review of Books published a curious document. Written by Edmund Wilson, who was then seventy-two years old, and titled "An Open Letter to Mike Nichols," the essay, in epistolary form, was inspired by the revival...

MAD ABOUT THE BOY.(Asylum)(Theater Review)
August 22, 2005... It is a joke, of sorts, to take a love story of unquenchable ardor and set it in England. To set it in the England of the nineteen-fifties, however, may be stretching the joke too far. "Asylum," directed by David Mackenzie, is hellbent on...

MERCADITO.(Mercadito Grove)(Restaurant Review)
August 29, 2005... MERCADITO -- 179 Avenue B, between 11th and 12th Sts. (212-529-6490)--"Three's the perfect number," a waitress at this East Village spot told a trio of diners recently. "That way you each get a taste." She meant the diners, but she also meant...

ROCKIN' ROBYN.(pop singer)
August 29, 2005... ROCKIN' ROBYN -- Ten years ago, the press-shy and improbably consistent Swedish pop producer Max Martin was hired to work with a blond teen-age singer. He gave her several great pop songs driven by dance beats, and the two of them sold millions...

COMMENT.(The Talk of the Town)
August 29, 2005... After the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, the Israeli political establishment vowed that the existence of the state would never again be in doubt. Eventually, one bulwark of its strategic defense would be the construction of dozens of...

SHAKEDOWN STREET.(The Talk of the Town)("Sex and the City" Tour)
August 29, 2005... "Sex and the City" stopped shooting in 2003, but for the residents of Perry Street between Bleecker and West Fourth the show hasn't gone away. Twice a day (three times on weekends), around fifty tourists, the majority of them women and about...

PICK SIX.(The Talk of the Town)(Richard Thompson's performances)
August 29, 2005... In 1999, Playboy asked the grudging guitar hero, prolific songwriter, and self-described "folk dinosaur" Richard Thompson to name his ten favorite popular songs of "the millennium." Feeling mischievous, he submitted a list that began in 1050...

NOT A WORD.(The Talk of the Town)(fake word in New Oxford American Dictionary )
August 29, 2005... Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you'll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American...

RIGHT HOOK.(Hugh Hewitt)
August 29, 2005... If one were to confer the distinction of Most Famous Conservative Journalist Whom Liberals Have Never Heard Of, a leading candidate would be Hugh Hewitt: author (of six books, most of which get to the point so efficiently that he brings a new...

THE MORAL-HAZARD MYTH.(insurance's effect on the behavior of the person)
August 29, 2005... Tooth decay begins, typically, when debris becomes trapped between the teeth and along the ridges and in the grooves of the molars. The food rots. It becomes colonized with bacteria. The bacteria feeds off sugars in the mouth and forms an acid...

THE SHROUD OF MARIN.(Tyler Cassity's Fernwood)
August 29, 2005... How much rest do the dead require? Late this spring, two experts were discussing burial theory over lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Mill Valley, California. The elder man, Ron Hast, had just visited Fernwood, a new "green" cemetery on the...

ART AS LIFE.(Henri Matisse)(Biography)
August 29, 2005... Henri Matisse, unlike the other greatest modern painter, Pablo Picasso, with whom he sits on a seesaw of esteem, hardly exists as a person in most people's minds. One pictures a wary, bearded gent, owlish in glasses--perhaps with a touch of the...

Poets and Poetry.(Starred Wire, A Word Like Fire: Selected Poems, by Dick Barnes, Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt, A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan)(Book Review)
August 29, 2005... Starred Wire, by Ange Mlinko (Coffee House; $15). Mlinko has said that she prefers her poems "layered and loaded up," and, in her second book, lines like "Freezing the rapidly flowing global language into spun sugar gardens" show you exactly...

THE BALLAD OF JOHN.(Yoko Ono's performances)
August 29, 2005... For many of the artists and musicians who came of age in a post-Beatles, post-John Lennon late-nineteen-eighties New York, it was Yoko Ono, and not her martyred husband, who had greater cultural resonance. With the release of her retrospective...

A LITTLE LATE-NIGHT MUSIC.
August 29, 2005... A decade ago, the Mostly Mozart Festival, Lincoln Center's venerable summertime series, was offering some of the dullest concerts in the Western Hemisphere. I remember a performance of Mozart's Flute Concerto in D, with Jean-Pierre Rampal as...

STRAIGHT UP.(Emiliana Torrini's performances)
August 29, 2005... When Emiliana Torrini was sixteen, and working in a caviar factory in a small town near Reykjavik, she asked a friend to help her record five pop and blues covers for her father on his fiftieth birthday. The friend persuaded Torrini to record...

DIRTY BUSINESS.(Pretty Persuasion)(Movie Review)
August 29, 2005... Kimberly Joyce (Evan Rachel Wood), the high-school vamp and evil genius in the new satirical comedy "Pretty Persuasion," tells her protegee, Randa (Adi Schnall), an Arab emigree, that she, Kimberly, is glad she is white. Then she wonders what...