The New Yorker articles from August 2007

The New Yorker archives from August 2007

Zipper Factory Tavern.(Restaurant review)(Brief article)
August 6, 2007... This screwy gastropub is a recent addendum to the Zipper Theatre, a playhouse occupying an old zipper factory on the desolate periphery of the garment district. You can get a drink to take in while you see the show--cabaret, burlesque trapeze,...

Votescam.(The Talk of the Town)(California rule on elections)
August 6, 2007... At first glance, next year's Presidential election looks like a blowout. But it might not be. Luckily for the incumbent party, neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney will be running; indeed, the election of 2008 will be the first since 1952...

Hey, La-a-a-dies!(The Talk of the Town)
August 6, 2007... "Girls, y'all got one, a night that's special everywhere, from New York to Hollywood," Kool & the Gang sang, in 1979, and every year thereafter. Ladies' nights, however, are lately in peril (and with them, presumably, sales of coconut rum and...

Moated Manhattan.(The Talk of the Town)(moats and trenches)
August 6, 2007... Manhattan already has a moat--the rivers Harlem, Hudson, and East--but this on its own will not suffice, at least against the incursions of would-be terrorists and unwelcome drivers. And so the city's defenders, in recognition of these...

Dogtown.(The Talk of the Town)(kennel club)
August 6, 2007... If you find yourself on the service road of the Major Deegan, in the shadow of the Cross Bronx Expressway, between the train tracks and the Harlem River, and you hear loud barking interspersed with the crowing of roosters, do not be alarmed....

Rip Van Golfer.(golf tournaments and famous golfers)
August 6, 2007... For many years, I have had a recurrent dream in which Lew Weiland's headlights, in the dark of night, appear like dawn above the tenth fairway. I am standing in a hazard that is really just a pond, and have been looking for balls. Against the...

Damn Spam.(junk mails and internet advertising )
August 6, 2007... In the spring of 1978, an energetic marketing man named Gary Thuerk wanted to let people in the technology world know that his company, the Digital Equipment Corporation, was about to introduce a powerful new computer system. DEC operated out...

An Unsolved Killing.(murder of Tom Wales)
August 6, 2007... Tom Wales was not supposed to be home on the night of October 11, 2001. Wales, an Assistant United States Attorney in Seattle, had planned to have dinner and spend the evening with his girlfriend, Marlis DeJongh, a court reporter who lived...

Stung.(honeybees )
August 6, 2007... Not long ago, I found myself sitting at the edge of a field with a bear and thirty or forty thousand very angry bees. The bear was there because of the bees. The bees were there because of me, and why I was there was a question I found myself...

Lives of others.(Shoot the Widow)(Book review)
August 6, 2007... At a time when instruments for recording and disseminating information about people's intimate behavior are cheap and easy to use, and when newspapers and magazines and television programs and Web sites purvey that kind of information without...

Loving Frank.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 6, 2007... In 1904, Frank Lloyd Wright started work on a house for an Oak Park couple, Edwin and Mamah Cheney, and, before long, he and Mamah had begun a scandalous affair. In her first novel, Horan, viewing the relationship from Mamah's perspective, does...

The Headmaster Ritual.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 6, 2007... Set at an exclusive Massachusetts private school, this debut novel addresses the angst--both teen-age and adult--that percolates on a prep-school campus. Dyer Martin, in crisis after a disastrous foray into real estate, has taken a position in...

Inside the Red Mansion.(Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China's Most Wanted Man)(Brief article)(Book review)
August 6, 2007... In 1999, China's Public Enemy No. 1 was "Fatty" Lai Changxing, an illiterate rice farmer turned real-estate and shipping mogul who fled the country, accused of heading a multibillion-dollar smuggling ring. This account, by a former Beijing...

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit.(The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World)(Brief article)(Book review)
August 6, 2007... This memoir of an Egyptian Jewish family's gradual ruin is told without melodrama by its youngest survivor, now a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Lagnado's story hinges on her father, "the Captain," who cut a dashing figure in mid-century...

Towers of Babble.(offices of Times and News Publishing Co. and Bloomberg L.P.)
August 6, 2007... In 1999, when Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the chairman of the Times, was laying plans for a new headquarters, it was becoming nearly impossible to produce a newspaper in the rambling headquarters on Forty-third Street. The building was originally...

Still Small Voice.(Robert Walser and his works)
August 6, 2007... In "Jakob von Gunten," the 1909 novel by the German-speaking Swiss writer Robert Walser, the hero adopts the motto "To be small and to stay small." The words apply just as well to Walser himself, whose life and work played out as a relentless...

War Wounds.(The Bourne Ultimatum)(Movie review)
August 6, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File Matt Damon, at least in the "Bourne" series, looks like a bullet. He has short hair, no stubble to speak of, and a blunt nose. In violent scenes, his eyes go dead, and he has a strong, compact body, which...

Modern Love.(Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara & Gerald Murphy)
August 6, 2007... "Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara & Gerald Murphy," at the Williams College Museum of Art, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is an immensely satisfying show about fine, complicated people who loved life in exemplary ways, in superb...

15 East.(15 East Restaurant)(Restaurant review)
August 13, 2007... There's barely time to settle in at 15 East's sushi counter before a fellow-diner leans over and whispers, "Did you follow him here, too?" The "him" is Masato Shimizu, formerly of Jewel Bako, thirty-two and improbably boyish, with a surfer's...

Read All About It.(The Talk of the Town)(Rupert Murdoch)
August 13, 2007... When there's big news, the main story on the Wall Street Journal's front page usually starts with a short, ringing sentence, such as the one that appeared last Wednesday: "A century of Bancroft-family ownership at Dow Jones & Co. is over." On...

Home at Carnegie Hall.(The Carnegie Hall Studio Towers)
August 13, 2007... For twenty-two years, the photographer Josef Astor (no relation) has had a studio above the stage at Carnegie Hall. It's on the eighth floor, although technically the eighth is below the seventh; to get to it you take an elevator to six and...

Botanists on Park.(The Talk of the Town)(American Fern Society)
August 13, 2007... There is no end to the odd things that New Yorkers do on Saturday mornings. This, at least, is what drivers must have thought recently when they had to slow down to avoid a line of a dozen people flattened against the enormous embankment of the...

Rent-Seekers.(The Talk of the Town)(student loans)
August 13, 2007... When Americans think of college these days, the first word that often comes to mind is "debt." And from "debt" it's just a short hop to other unpleasant words, like "payola," "kickback," and "bribery." At least, that's how it's been since this...

The Possessed.(Lesch-Nyhan syndrome)
August 13, 2007... One day in September, 1962, a woman who here will be called Deborah Morlen showed up at the pediatric emergency room of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, carrying her four-and-a-half-year-old son, Matthew. He was spastic, and couldn't...

Slippery Business.(olive oil fraud)
August 13, 2007... On August 10, 1991, a rusty tanker called the Mazal II docked at the industrial port of Ordu, in Turkey, and pumped twenty-two hundred tons of hazelnut oil into its hold. The ship then embarked on a meandering voyage through the Mediterranean...

THE BLACK SITES.
August 13, 2007... In the war on terror, one historian says, the C.I.A. "didn't just bring back the old psychological techniques--they perfected them."

Falling.(skydiving)
August 13, 2007... Somewhere around sixty-three thousand feet above the earth, our body fluids begin to boil. They do this not because the temperature is so high but because the atmosphere is so thin. Water, kept liquid by air pressure on earth, turns to gas as...

High and Mighty.(Dwayne Carter)(Biography)
August 13, 2007... Dwayne Carter, the twenty-four-year-old rapper from New Orleans known as Lil Wayne, hasn't released an album or a single in months, though he has appeared as a guest on songs by other artists. But he is indisputably the rapper of the year. He...

Man with a Plan.(Herbert Spencer)(Biography)
August 13, 2007... The great event of the New York cultural season of 1882 was the visit of the sixty-two-year-old English philosopher and social commentator Herbert Spencer. Nowhere did Spencer have a larger or more enthusiastic following than in the United...

Strawberry Fields.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 13, 2007... This affectionate follow-up to Lewycka's debut novel (about a Ukrainian family assimilating to contemporary Britain) plays out similar themes of immigrant struggle on a broader scale. A cast of itinerant characters realize that picking...

The Great Man.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 13, 2007... At the center of this snippy comedy of manners is a New York-based painter and philanderer, Oscar Feldman, whose oeuvre consists of boldly rendered female nudes. That Oscar has been dead for a few years barely matters to the constellation of...

Walled.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 13, 2007... In this survey of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (translated anonymously from the French), Cypel, an editor at Le Monde who spent twelve years in Israel, writes with the ardor of a believer and the critical eye of a distant observer,...

The World Without Us.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 13, 2007... Teasing out the consequences of a simple thought experiment--what would happen if the human species were suddenly extinguished--Weisman has written a sort of popscience ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted house. Among the...

Exit Wounds.(India's independence)
August 13, 2007... Sixty years ago, on the evening of August 14, 1947, a few hours before Britain's Indian Empire was formally divided into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, sat down in the viceregal mansion in...

Women's Work.(Lifetime channel)
August 13, 2007... On Lifetime, the channel that branded itself as "television for women," danger and looming death seem to be the unifying concept of the programming. In any given few days, you'll see shows such as those which were described in my onscreen TV...

Insieme.(Restaurant review)
August 20, 2007... Brad Pitt's most embarrassing job, he is fond of pointing out, was at El Pollo Loco, where he was made to dress as a giant chicken. Less famously, Jake Gyllenhaal, as a teen-ager, washed dishes for the chef Marco Canora, who was in the midst of...

The Enemy Within.(How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul???)(Sound recording review)
August 20, 2007... In the late eighties and early nineties, Public Enemy was the only band that mattered. It was, as these things always are, an unsustainable position. Since 1999, amid the reality TV and the radio shows, Chuck D and company have continued to put...

Sparring Partners.(The Talk of the Town)(Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama)
August 20, 2007... What might be called the Long Campaign has created a demand for news of political conflict, and thatdemand is being duly supplied. At this preposterously early date in the 2004 election cycle, the candidates for the Democratic Presidential...

Deathly Numbers.(The Talk of the Town)
August 20, 2007... Correction appended. Barry Bonds, the Lord Voldemort of baseball, has prevailed in the end, rapping the enchanted No. 756 and, for the moment, closing a complex tale that has held us too long and (here in Eastern Daylight Time, at least)...

The Shrum Curse.(The Talk of the Town)(Robert Shrum)(Interview)
August 20, 2007... Robert Shrum, who was for three decades among the most prominent Democratic political consultants in the country, never mastered the exigencies of everyday life. He grew up in Los Angeles but does not drive; he is best known as a speechwriter...

Fine Points.(The Talk of the Town)(Jerry Douglas' visit on a vintage-guitar store )
August 20, 2007... Devotees of "Antiques Roadshow," which, if nothing else, has exposed the financial folly of refinishing old furniture, know that a backstory adds value to any old thing: "Because it's a matter of public record that your grandfather did time in...

Tween Dream.(The Talk of the Town)(High School Musical)
August 20, 2007... At 6 A.M. one recent Thursday, a barista at a Times Square Starbucks was puzzled to see dozens of teen-age girls streaming past the window, many of them carrying homemade signs. They had come, a customer explained, to see the cast of "High...

The Dark Side.(lighting, illumination, and stargazing)(Essay)
August 20, 2007... In 1610, Galileo Galilei published a small book describing astronomical observations that he had made of the skies above Padua. His homemade telescopes had less magnifying and resolving power than most beginners' telescopes sold today, yet with...

Parallel Play.(experience about having Asperger syndrome)(Essay)
August 20, 2007... My second-grade teacher never liked me much, and one assignment I turned in annoyed her so extravagantly that the red pencil with which she scrawled "See me!" broke through the lined paper. Our class had been asked to write about a recent field...

Mayberry Man.(Rudolph Giuliani)(Biography)
August 20, 2007... The South Carolina State House, a grand, copper-domed structure in downtown Columbia, is a showplace for the state's long history of hellbent defiance. The most prominent feature on the grounds is a monument to fallen Confederate soldiers,...

Mushroom Rush.(Short story)
August 20, 2007... Two hours east of Eugene, Oregon, in the rain shadow of the southern Cascades, the forests begin to thin out. The volcanic peaks that loom above them are among the most active on the continent, and every so often one of them blows. The Klamath...

Teen Dreams.(Superbad and Delirious)(Movie review)
August 20, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File The twenty-three-year-old comic actor Jonah Hill has an aureole of electrified hair, a coarse whine, and plump hands, which he waves around like an unhinged conductor. Hill specializes in playing huffy...

Blows Against the Empire.(Philip K. Dick)
August 20, 2007... There's nothing more exciting to an adolescent reader than an unknown genre writer who speaks to your condition and has something great about him. The Ace paperback cover promises mere thrills, and the writing provides real meaning. The...

Be Near Me.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 20, 2007... David Anderton, a fifty-six-year-old English priest in a gritty Scottish town, comes from a long line of Catholic martyrs, but he himself has settled for quieter satisfactions: good Alsatian wines, Chopin Nocturnes, banter with his housekeeper...

The Assassin's Song.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 20, 2007... This resplendent novel traces the path of Karsan Dargawalla, who is brought up, as generations of his forefathers have been, to be the "gaadi-varas, the successor and avatar" of a seven-hundred-year-old Sufi shrine in Gujarat, a mausoleum of...

You Will Make Money in Your Sleep.(You Will Make Money in Your Sleep: The Story of Dana Giacchetto, Financial Adviser to the Stars)(Brief article)(Book review)
August 20, 2007... Dana Giacchetto, a young rocker turned investment banker, became a quintessential figure of the late nineties, managing investments for Leonardo DiCaprio, Phish, and other glitterati and attracting a large showbusiness and fashion clientele....

Shakespeare the Thinker.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 20, 2007... Nuttall, who died earlier this year, and who trained in both philosophy and literature, here traces ideas about motivation, identity, speech, and symbol in Shakespeare's plays. His study is rich in unexpected juxtapositions: Hippolyta, of "A...

MOZART MOVES.
August 20, 2007... In "Double," the company's women enter in long gauze skirts, like ghosts.

Beware Bailouts.(The Talk of the Town)(subprime loans and other assets stock in financial markets)
August 27, 2007... In August of 1998, disaster loomed for the U.S. economy. Panic among investors after Russia defaulted on its sovereign bonds led to plummeting stock prices and a freeze on global credit markets. The hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management saw...

Driving Drunks.(The Talk of the Town)(Wingmen Driving Service)
August 27, 2007... At twenty-five minutes after ten on a recent Thursday night, a man came bounding off the SeaStreak ferry in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. It had been an hour since he boarded the boat, at Pier 11 on Wall Street, and, judging from his erratic...

Skunked.(The Talk of the Town)(paranormal activities in Merchant's House)
August 27, 2007... There might be an appliance theme to the haunting of the Merchant's House, a nineteenth-century town house in the East Village that was owned by a single family until 1933, when it was turned into a museum. In the nineteen-seventies, someone...

Cafe St. Bart's.(Restaurant review)(Brief article)
August 27, 2007... Among the skyscrapers that dominate Park Avenue just north of Grand Central Terminal, the Byzantine Romanesque fantasy of St. Bartholomew's Church, with its dome, arches, and rose windows, looms as an unexpected outcrop of curves. A few years...

Rovian Ways.(The Talk of the Town)(Karl Rove)
August 27, 2007... Most politicians find the cult of the political consultant annoying, but George W. Bush always seemed to find it very annoying. When he began running for President, he insisted, as candidates rarely do, that all his top advisers work only for...

Posh Spices.(The Talk of the Town)(Tom Parker Bowles, son of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall)
August 27, 2007... The importance of eating seasonally and locally has become a guiding principle among the increasing number of Britons who take seriously the environmental impact and gustatory quality of their mealtimes; and it is reassuring to know that the...

Appalachian Autumn.(Aaron Copland's Pulitzer Prize-winning composition, Appalachian Spring)
August 27, 2007... On May 8, 1945, the streets of American cities filled with throngs celebrating the Allied victory over fascism in Europe. That week, Aaron Copland, a forty-four-year-old Brooklyn-born composer of Russian-Jewish descent, received a Pulitzer...

The Human Bomb.(Nicolas Sarkozy)
August 27, 2007... To understand Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been President of France for three intense months, it helps to know the story of the human bomb. "It was in 1993, when Sarkozy was the mayor of Neuilly," Philippe Labro, the novelist and talk-show host,...

He That Plays the King.(Sir Ian McKellen)
August 27, 2007... Strolling through Limehouse, in London's East End, you pass streets, like Shoulder of Mutton Alley, that still give off a whiff of Elizabethan hurly-burly, and ancient pubs like the Grapes, which has been serving ale from the same spot since...

Sowing for Apocalypse.(Essay)
August 27, 2007... A cold drizzle was falling over St. Petersburg last March, and the gray morning light filtered through the grimy windows of the ceremonial rooms of the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, one of the oldest seed banks--and the most...

Lone Sailors.(Michelangelo Antonioni's works and "Deep Water")
August 27, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File A man and a woman go for a walk in Turin. They have just made love in the afternoon, or, at any rate, spent time in a hotel room, talking about how difficult it is to find time to make love, or to talk....

DOLLAR DIPLOMACY.
August 27, 2007... A German poster from 1950 extols the benefits of American aid.

Avenging Angel.(Being Shelley)(Book review)
August 27, 2007... In the summer of 1812, as the half million soldiers of the Grande Armee marched across Europe in Napoleon's doomed Russian campaign, a nineteen-year-old in the Devonshire village of Lynmouth set out to change the history of Europe all on his...

African Psycho.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 27, 2007... No gesture is as simple as that of bringing someone's life to an end," the narrator declares at the start of this disturbing--and disturbingly funny--novel, the first to appear in English by Mabanckou, a French writer of Congolese descent. In...

Dog War.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 27, 2007... A Jamaican of Lebanese and Hungarian extraction, Winkler is best known for his satirical novel of Caribbean life "The Lunatic." Here he applies his wicked sensibility to immigrant experience in Florida. Newly widowed, Precious, an upstanding...

Phantom Shanghai.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 27, 2007... For decades after the Communist victory, in 1949, Shanghai remained largely intact, preserved by benign neglect, its architecture a rich legacy of the polyglot collision of Asian and Western cultures that formed the city. Since the nineties,...

Butchery on Bond Street.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 27, 2007... In January, 1857, Harvey Burdell, a dentist with a taste for lowlife, was found stabbed to death in his quarters, on Bond Street, igniting one of the most famous murder scandals in New York City's history. Suspicion immediately fell upon...

Past Perfect.(Robert A.M. Stern's design of 15 Central Park West)
August 27, 2007... In an essay titled "The Plight of the Prosperous," published in 1950 in this magazine, Lewis Mumford dismissed the living accommodations of upscale New Yorkers as little better than slums. "I sometimes wonder what self-hypnosis has led the...