The New Yorker articles from August 2008

The New Yorker archives from August 2008

Foreigners.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama's trip to Middle East and Europe)
August 4, 2008... Back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, candidates for President of the United States didn't have much truck with foreigners. They didn't vote, they lived on the other side of the ocean, and they spoke funny, most of 'em. (If a...

Loose Lemur.(The Talk of the Town)
August 4, 2008... Bill James, the Boston Red Sox senior adviser and resident skeptic, made his name by using statistics to debunk many of baseball's truisms--by showing that much of what we think we see on a ball field turns out to be little more than an...

Soup to Nettles.(The Talk of the Town)('A Gift to Young Housewives, or the Means of Lowering Household Expenses')
August 4, 2008... In 1861, the year Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs, Elena Molokhovets published her domestic bible, "A Gift to Young Housewives, or the Means of Lowering Household Expenses." She explained how to feed the servants, how to pick the freshest...

Kranking It.(The Talk of the Town)
August 4, 2008... First, there was krumping, the spasmic, freestyle hip-hop dance out of South Central L.A. You probably weren't much good at it. It went global anyway. You might have it confused with crunk. That's hip-hop, too. Southern, thumping, also fast....

The Cross-eyed Queen.(The Talk of the Town)(Queen Claude's prayer book)
August 4, 2008... In May, a tiny, exquisite volume went on display at the Morgan Library & Museum: a prayer book made for Queen Claude of France, who was born in the penultimate year of the fifteenth century. Claude, a near-contemporary of Anne Boleyn, who...

What He Knows for Sure.(Tavis Smiley)(Brief biography)
August 4, 2008... Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for twelve years, "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" came to a halt so that Tavis Smiley could hold forth. The show, which supplements R. & B. songs and comedy skits with listener call-ins and lots of...

A Soldier's Legacy.(Alan Rogers)
August 4, 2008... In a handwritten letter to himself, dated December 13, 1990, Specialist Alan Rogers, a twenty-three-year-old African-American chaplain's assistant, grappled with the issue of fear as he prepared for his first combat tour. Aboard Flight 104 from...

The Olympian.(Lang Lang)
August 4, 2008... Few citizens of the People's Republic stand to benefit more from this summer's Olympic Games, in Beijing, than a young man from the Manchurian city of Shenyang named Lang Lang. The son of a vice cop and a telephone operator, Lang Lang is no...

Her Own Society.(Emily Dickinson)
August 4, 2008... In April of 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote to a stranger, initiating a fervent twenty-four-year correspondence, in the course of which they managed to meet only twice. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, thirty-eight, was a man of letters, a clergyman, a...

Palace Council.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 4, 2008... Set primarily in the years between 1954 and 1974--what Carter calls the "two decades" of the sixties--this political thriller leaves virtually no important person or event unturned. Richard Nixon, Langston Hughes, and dissident groups all play...

On a Day Like This.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 4, 2008... The main characters in the novels of this Swiss writer can seem aloof to the point of being anesthetized, and their stories often begin with a moment of rupture. Andreas is a forty-something German teacher in Paris whose life consists of...

The Night of the Gun.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 4, 2008... "Every hangover begins with an inventory," Carr, a columnist for the Times, writes in this bracingly honest memoir. In sharp and sometimes poetic prose, the author takes a detailed inventory of his years of drug addiction, chronicling the slide...

Universe of Stone.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 4, 2008... In this lively biography of Chartres Cathedral, Ball explores the configuration of cultural and technological factors that enabled Europe to achieve a "liberation from gravity" in the twelfth century, including the rise of scholasticism,...

Feeling Blue.('After Nature')
August 4, 2008... "After Nature" is an important group show of twenty-six international artists, past and present, at the New Museum, which proposes a saturnine new direction in art. The catalogue is a foldout slipcover around a paperback of "After Nature," a...

La Vida No Loca.('Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends')(Sound recording review)
August 4, 2008... In a 2005 piece in the Times, Jon Pareles called the British rock group Coldplay "the most insufferable band of the decade," and he placed the blame on the band's front man and singer, Chris Martin, whom he called a "passive-aggressive...

Indie Love.('In Search of a Midnight Kiss')(Movie review)
August 4, 2008... Unless your name is Judas, a kiss is just a kiss. Nonetheless, filmmakers cling to the smooch in the hope, or the fond pretense, that it might mean something more. Despite everything, it remains the most trusted image that we have for the...

Rhong-Tiam.(Restaurant review)
August 11, 2008... It's easy to walk straight past this unassuming Thai eatery, which is set deep in the heart of the N.Y.U.-occupied Village and shares a commercial strip with a liquor store, a mailing center, and a Citibank. The co-owner, Andy Yang, and his...

Changing Lanes.(The Talk of the Town)(John McCain)
August 11, 2008... Late last month, Senator John McCain went up with a new television ad, titled "Pump." The ad begins no place in particular with a gasoline pump, circa 1965. "Gas prices--four dollars, five dollars," a female narrator intones, as the numbers on...

Purpose-driven Hype.(The Talk of the Town)(Rick Warren)
August 11, 2008... Go-betweens can attract as much attention as the factions they seek to reconcile: see Squanto (Pilgrims and Indians), Jimmy Carter (Egypt and Israel), Tookie Williams (Bloods and Crips), and the producers of the newly revived "Beverly Hills,...

Buddy Song.(The Talk of the Town)(campaign songs)
August 11, 2008... Several weeks ago, John McCain revealed his love for Abba, a confession that produced a campaign theme song ("Take a Chance on Me") and a number of parodies (one, on the Web site Jezebel, went "Gimme gimme gimme McCain after midnight"). The...

Hippie RocK.(The Talk of the Town)
August 11, 2008... James Rado has been spending a lot of time in Central Park lately, discovering that certain trees and the smell of hot dogs can be as evocative as an acid flashback. In 1967, Rado and his friend Gerome Ragni, both actors, wrote a musical, with...

The Permission Problem.(The Talk of the Town)(on patents and private property)
August 11, 2008... In the second decade of the twentieth century, it was almost impossible to build an airplane in the United States. That was the result of a chaotic legal battle among the dozens of companies--including one owned by Orville Wright--that held...

The Strawberry Girls.
August 11, 2008... One Sunday last February, a young woman named Kristen Smith left the parking lot of Bethany Baptist Church, in Plant City, Florida, and drove along a two-lane country road with a large gold crown on the seat beside her. The mossy pasturelands...

Superbugs.(Klebsiella)
August 11, 2008... In August, 2000, Dr. Roger Wetherbee, an infectious-disease expert at New York University's Tisch Hospital, received a disturbing call from the hospital's microbiology laboratory. At the time, Wetherbee was in charge of handling outbreaks of...

Running to Beijing.(Ryan Hall)
August 11, 2008... In the Grizzly Manor Cafe, a man with a broken right hand sat alone eating eggs. He had tired eyes and graying hair and a nose that looked deflated. The town of Big Bear Lake is small--fewer than seven thousand people--and athletes stand out....

Conflict of Interests.('The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures' and 'The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule')(Critical essay)
August 11, 2008... In a year saturated with political conversation, can there be any topic that has not yet been discussed? Well, here's one: 2008 is the centenary of a curious and mesmerizing book that was long considered the most important study of politics and...

The Delighted States.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 11, 2008... Ostensibly devoted to the problem of literary translation, this provocative treatise rambles through the Western canon from Cervantes to Bellow, treating novelists less as subjects than as characters in a sprawling intercontinental epic....

Spiral Jetta.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 11, 2008... Facing a midlife crisis of sorts, Hogan, a "recovering art historian," took a three-week trek in search of the American Sublime. Her destinations were "monuments of American land art," including Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty," a coil of...

Callas Kissed Me . . . Lenny Too!(Brief article)(Book review)
August 11, 2008... John Gruen, a Jewish refugee from Europe and former G.I., came to New York in 1949 looking for a way to achieve "some sort of stardom." This entertaining memoir, strewn with exclamation points, recounts his search, as he flings himself at...

USA Today.(Television program review)
August 11, 2008... USA has distinguished itself in recent years as the oddball network--home of the misfits and safe haven for the dysfunctional. And that's not just the viewers. The network's slogan is "Characters welcome," as in "That guy's a real character."...

Young Loves.(Vicky Cristina Barcelona)(Movie review)
August 11, 2008... Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" has a natural, flowing vitality to it, a sun-drenched splendor that never falters. Two young American women go to Barcelona for the summer--Vicky (Rebecca Hall), who is bright, skeptical, and cautious,...

Scarpetta.(Restaurant review)
August 25, 2008... In a town full of whiz-kid chefs, Scott Conant is an anomaly; at thirty-seven, he cooks like an older man--wisely, taking his time, knowing exactly what he's doing. Having established his mastery of Italian cuisine at L'Impero (where he pulled...

Boundary Issues.(The Talk of the Town)
August 25, 2008... On a bright September day in 1993, not long before he ended his two decades in exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a rare public address in Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein. Although Solzhenitsyn was energetic at the lectern, he was all...

Hit Man.(The Talk of the Town)(Jerome R. Corsi)
August 25, 2008... Jerry Corsi, from New Jersey, picked up his phone in Room 2743 at the Hilton, on Sixth Avenue, last Wednesday afternoon, and said, "Oh, Lou, it's great to be back with you, Lou," as though he were talking to an old pal. He was speaking to Lou...

Bug Wars.(The Talk of the Town)
August 25, 2008... Kari Heliovaara is the head of forest entomology at the University of Helsinki and the co-author of a standard text, entitled "Insects and Pollution." A Finn, he has nonetheless spent a good deal of the past decade working in China. "Control...

Where's the Beef?(The Talk of the Town)
August 25, 2008... As our thoughts turn to Denver, it's tempting to imagine that the political stagecraft on view will be different this time--that after eight years of watching our leaders hunting quail and clearing brush in front of television cameras the...

You Say Tomato.(The Talk of the Town)(Amagansett Farmers Market)
August 25, 2008... The Amagansett Farmers Market used to be the sort of place where you bought tomatoes, not heirlooms, nothing was described as artisanal, and if you needed some Clorox or a newspaper you could find that, too. But last year Pat Struk, who started...

The Only Games in Town.(Olympic Games)
August 25, 2008... According to Pythagoras, there were three types of men, just as there were three types of visitors to the Olympic Games. First and lowest were those who came to sell. Next, halfway up, were the competitors. And last, at the top of the pile,...

Sonic Youth.
August 25, 2008... In 1972, several months after I completed one of my first musical compositions--"Heavy Metal," in which ambient sounds were melded, on magnetic tape, with the gurgling sequences of a primitive synthesizer--my new wife, Hawley, and I set off for...

Drowning.
August 25, 2008... When night falls in Rangoon, the city's spectacular decay--patches of black mold devouring the yellowed walls of colonial buildings, trees growing wildly into crumbling third-story terraces--nearly disappears from view. The tea shops fill up,...

A Greenwich of the Mind.
August 25, 2008... In the town of Greenwich, Connecticut, it is illegal for a real-estate agent to post a "For Sale" sign in front of a house or a tract of land. For many years, such an ordinance was unnecessary; those who needed to know knew, and those who did...

Hello, Columbus.(Gallery of Modern Art)
August 25, 2008... Huntington Hartford's old Gallery of Modern Art--the white marble bonbon that stood at 2 Columbus Circle from 1964 until a couple of years ago--was a hard building to love but became an even harder one to hate. Excoriated by critics when it...

Mark the Music.(Glimmerglass Opera)
August 25, 2008... William Shakespeare felt a certain ambivalence toward music as an art, if his words are any guide to his thoughts. The plays overflow with merry songs, sweet airs, and other healthy-minded sounds, but they also contain many instances of music...

The Forbidden World.
August 25, 2008... In 1600, Rome's Campo de' Fiori, now a nice plaza lined with cafes, was one of the city's execution grounds, and on Ash Wednesday of that year Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and former priest accused of heresy by the Inquisition, was taken there...

Black and White and Dead All Over.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 25, 2008... The assistant managing editor of the New York Globe, a broadsheet newspaper based in midtown Manhattan, is murdered in his office. Suspects include disgruntled beat reporters, ambitious editors, and conniving board members, and the only person...

Alfred and Emily.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 25, 2008... In the first half of this unusual blend of fact and fiction, Lessing imagines fulfilled lives for her parents, Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh, in an England untouched by the First World War. Emily becomes a nurse and an activist, and never has...

The Challenge.(Brief article)
August 25, 2008... In November, 2004, thirty minutes after a military commission convened at Guantanamo Bay to try Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, news came that halted the proceedings: Hamdan had won a lawsuit, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, brought on his...

Traffic.(Brief article)(Book review)
August 25, 2008... On the face of it, traffic is a simple problem: too many cars occupy too little asphalt. But why does creating new roads induce more people to drive? Why does removing signs and markings seem to make roads safer? And why do countries with...

The Fab Fortnight.
August 25, 2008... Watching the Beijing Olympics, for all the athletic and architectural spectacularity on display, has turned out to be more frustrating than I expected. What an opportunity this was--not, as is obvious, just for China but for the rest of the...

Vanity Cases.(Tropic Thunder)(Movie review)
August 25, 2008... Make sure that you take your seat for "Tropic Thunder" in good time, because all the best jokes are at the start. Before it gets under way, you have to sit through the usual slew of previews and commercials, and there is a delectable moment...