The New Yorker articles from December 2005

The New Yorker archives from December 2005

FLOOR WAR.(The Talk of the Town)(Jean Schmidt, the Member of the House of Representatives)
December 5, 2005... A hoary tradition of the Congress of the United States, inherited from the Mother of Parliaments across the sea, is the maiden speech. The most recent such speech was delivered by Jean Schmidt, who, on September 6th, became the Member of the...

POPPY, SHOPPING.(The Talk of the Town)(Hongqiao Market, situated in southern Beijing)
December 5, 2005... Once upon a time, the Great Wall was an obligatory stop on any state visit to the People's Republic. Foreign leaders stood on the structure, shook hands with Communist Party cadres, and took photographs. But that was before the rise of the...

GIBBONS.(The Talk of the Town)
December 5, 2005... Billy F. Gibbons, the lead guitarist of the Texas trio ZZ Top, prefers to sleep on the floor when he stays in a hotel. Before he dozes off, he listens on his laptop to old radio programs, such as "The Saint" or "The Whistler." "These antiquated...

WALING.(The Talk of the Town)(Corduroy Appreciation Club)
December 5, 2005... Several years ago, Miles Rohan was out of work and feeling lonely. He thought it might be nice to belong to a social club, like the Elks or the Shriners, and, in the absence of any invitations, decided to start his own. He noticed that he'd...

MOB APPEAL.(The Talk of the Town)(Gianrico Carofiglio)
December 5, 2005... "It was May 14, 2002. I was in my office with two policemen," Gianrico Carofiglio, an Italian anti-Mafia prosecutor, began. "And then my phone rang. The two guys that were in my room look at me because my face was--how can I say?--strange. They...

POSTSCRIPT.(The Talk of the Town)(Cecille Shawn, editor)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
December 5, 2005... A letter arrived the other day bearing the news that Cecille Shawn, the wife of William Shawn, who was the editor of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987, had passed away. The letter was from one of the Shawns' three children, the composer Allen...

UP IN THE AIR.(troop reduction in Iraq)
December 5, 2005... In recent weeks, there has been widespread speculation that President George W. Bush, confronted by diminishing approval ratings and dissent within his own party, will begin pulling American troops out of Iraq next year. The Administration's...

MAN OF LETTERS.(Matthew Carter, type designer)
December 5, 2005... Matthew Carter is often described as the most widely read man in the world. Carter designs typefaces. He is universally acknowledged as the most significant designer of type in America, and as having only one or two peers in Europe. A well...

DARWIN IN THE DOCK.(Charles Darwin)
December 5, 2005... Courtroom battles about the teaching of evolution rarely have devoted much discussion to the science of evolution. This is partly because few working scientists have been willing to testify against evolutionary theory, and partly because judges...

BLEAK HOUSE.(Mr. Marmalade)(The Ruby Sunrise)(Theater Review)
December 5, 2005... In the theatrical game of hide-and-seek, one of the most exciting things to see flushed out into the open is the unconscious life of Homo sapiens. It's a hard thing to represent onstage, which is why playwrights often resort to conveying it...

IN THE MOOD.(Gerhard Richter's paintings at Marian Goodman Gallery)
December 5, 2005... The great and sly German artist Gerhard Richter has inserted a rare note of political provocation into a large show of recent mostly abstract works at the Marian Goodman Gallery. It comes in a photograph of his well-known painting of Second...

GLOBAL WARNING.(Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1997, global warming)
December 12, 2005... The Kilinailau Islands--also known as the Tulun Islands, or the Carteret Atoll--which lie four hundred miles from the coast of Papua New Guinea, are tiny, low, and impoverished. Their fate, thanks to global warming, has long been a foregone...

QUEUE-JUMPING.(The Talk of the Town)(Verified Identity Pass Inc.)
December 12, 2005... This time of year, the newspapers come full of terrifying pictures: travellers camped out on grubby airport carpeting; epic traffic jams; deranged hordes descending on shopping malls (and trampling slowpokes). Long lines have a way of bringing...

HANDS UP.(The Talk of the Town)
December 12, 2005... The packing guidelines in the Official Minuteman Civil Defense Corps Volunteer Training Manual fall into three categories. First, there's the essential "Minuteman Duffle," which should include sturdy shoes, clean socks, cellular phone,...

SARBOXED IN?(Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002)
December 12, 2005... In the summer of 2002, with the stock market tumbling and fraud at Enron and WorldCom dominating the headlines, there was immense political pressure on Washington to restore investor confidence by doing something about corporate crime....

YOUNG OSAMA.(Osama bin Laden)
December 12, 2005... Osama bin Laden's old school--the Al Thagher Model School--sits on several dozen arid acres lined by eucalyptus trees, whose branches have been twisted by winds from the Red Sea. The campus spreads north from the Old Mecca Road, near downtown...

YOUR MOVE.(Chrilly Donninger's Hydra, computer chess program)
December 12, 2005... Chrilly Donninger prefers to watch from a distance when Hydra, his computer chess program, competes, because he is camera-shy, but also because he rarely understands what Hydra is doing, and the uncertainty makes him nervous. During Hydra's...

HOGS WILD.
December 12, 2005... Of all the domesticated animals, none become feral more readily, or survive better in the wild, than the hog. Of all the larger animals, none reproduce as quickly and abundantly as the hog. The combination of the first fact with the second...

THE GENE HUNTERS.(Alzheimer's disease, Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain)
December 12, 2005... One morning last May in the Dominican Republic, two white S.U.V.s left the parking garage at the Gran Almirante Hotel and Casino, in Santiago, just as the gamblers and prostitutes were calling it a night, and headed half an hour north, to the...

BEHIND THE MASK.(Dancing in the Dark)(Stepin Fetchit)(Shuffling to Ignominy)(Book Review)
December 12, 2005... Backstage in a Detroit vaudeville house sometime in 1896, a mild-mannered West Indian gentleman named Egbert Williams dipped his hands into a supply of oily black burnt cork and rubbed it over his face until his features all but disappeared....

For Kids.(A Room with a Zoo, The Clouds Above, The Bear and the People, The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature)(Children's Review)(Book Review)
December 12, 2005... A Room with a Zoo, by Jules Feiffer (Michael Di Capua; $16.95). Julie, the nine-year-old narrator of this novel for children (whose father happens to be a cartoonist named Jules), has an urgent desire to own a Chihuahua. Instead, she winds up...

L.A. OUTLAWS.(Sleeper Cell)(Television Program Review)
December 12, 2005... In the ten-hour Showtime miniseries "Sleeper Cell," which began on Sunday and will finish up on December 18th (with frequent reruns along the way), viewers will get to know five members of a Muslim terrorist cell in Los Angeles who are planning...

LONERS.(Sally Silvers and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, choreographers)
December 12, 2005... Sally Silvers got her start in the nineteen-eighties, but she was never afflicted with the postmodern concerns of that decade: the irony, the obsession with style. Always, she has been a straight-out modernist--an abstractionist, a...

ARTIFICIAL RESPIRATION.(The Color Purple)(Theater Review)
December 12, 2005... In 1973, Alice Walker made a pilgrimage to Eatonville, Florida, to place a tombstone on the unmarked grave of the African-American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Walker's 1982 novel, "The Color Purple," has now been made into a...

NEW FRONTIERS.(Brokeback Mountain)(Movie Review)
December 12, 2005... From 1997, the Annie Proulx story that inspired the film. Movie Listings The Film File The new Ang Lee film, "Brokeback Mountain," is a love story that starts in 1963 and never ends. The first scene is a master class in the dusty...

POP NOTES.(Young Jeezy has)(Brief Article)
December 19, 2005... THE SNOWMAN COMETH, STAYETH -- Hip-hop is a lot like high school, where consensus rules: it is painfully clear who the cool kids are. And for most of 2005 the twenty-eight-year-old Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy has been the coolest kid, important...

JOHN Q. GOTHAM.(lif of average New Yorker)
December 19, 2005... According to Kevin O'Keefe, whose new book, "The Average American," chronicles his hunt for the most statistically typical person in the United States, the average American drives a car (eight years old, no vanity plates) and owns a home...

HEADLINES FROM THE BAGHDAD DAILY BUGLE.(The Talk of the Town)(Brief Article)
December 19, 2005... 26 Million Iraqis Unhurt In Latest Terror Blast Few Changes Needed To Turn Abu Ghraib Into An applebee's Voting Machines For Upcoming Elections Donated by Florida New Automatic Citizenship Law Turns U.S. Forces Into Crack Iraqi...

CYBER CITY.(The Talk of the Town)(True Crime: New York City video game)
December 19, 2005... Typically, video games are set in places with names like Myst, Zanarkand, and, slightly less fantastically, Vice City. True Crime: New York City, which was released last month by Activision and is being advertised on billboards around town, is...

ODYSSEY 2005.(The Talk of the Town)(Saturday Night Fever dance floor for sale)
December 19, 2005... Earlier this year, a memorabilia company called Profiles in History offered for auction the dance floor used in "Saturday Night Fever." Profiles, which is based in Beverly Hills, has handled plenty of major sales--Al Pacino's fedora from "The...

BECOMING MARY POPPINS.
December 19, 2005... The 1964 world premiere of "Mary Poppins" was held at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and it was the kind of spectacle for which the Disney organization had become famous. Throngs of screaming fans were greeted by Mickey Mouse, Goofy,...

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE, SHOES.
December 19, 2005... It's time to buy! The shopwindows around town are all a-sheen, and the shelves are stocked. Sales associates are primed to tip us off that the ripped-on-purpose bolero we are trying on--the last of its kind--will almost certainly be snapped up...

AMERICAN VICEROY.(Zalmay Khalilzad)
December 19, 2005... One afternoon in mid-October, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American Ambassador to Iraq, received a visitor in his office at the United States Embassy in Baghdad. The Embassy, housed in Saddam Hussein's old Republican Palace, is a warren of...

THE INHERITANCE.(Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.)(New York Times Co.)
December 19, 2005... Last month at the Chelsea Piers sports complex, a group that included corporate leaders, bankers, and teachers held a black-tie benefit dinner to celebrate Outward Bound, and to honor the winner of the award named for its founder, Kurt Hahn....

THE DEEP END.(D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider)(Book Review)
December 19, 2005... If, as Oscar Wilde said, when critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself, then D. H. Lawrence must count as one of the most harmonious writers of all time. People talking about Lawrence sound like his own quarrelsome couples: they...

BOOKS FROM OUR PAGES.
December 19, 2005... NONFICTION Gone to New York, by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $22). The Golden West, by Daniel Fuchs (Black Sparrow; $24.95). Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown; $25.95). The Substance of Things Heard, by Paul...

WEASEL WORDS.(Harold Pinter )(Eugene O'Neill)
December 19, 2005... "The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories," the photographer Diane Arbus wrote. Her words came back to me as I watched the drama of identity taking shape in a fascinating Harold Pinter double bill (well directed by...

QUE CALIENTE.
December 19, 2005... Sales of Latin music rose twelve per cent over the past year--the only pop category to experience an uptick. Latin music, the industry term for Spanish-language records, owes much of its commercial vitality to three very different phenomena:...

TRIANGULATION.(Norman Foster, architect)
December 19, 2005... Norman Foster is the Mozart of modernism. He is nimble and prolific, and his buildings are marked by lightness and grace. He works very hard, but his designs don't show the effort. He brings an air of unnerving aplomb to everything he...

BEASTS AND BEAUTIES.(King Kong)(Memoirs of a Geisha)(Movie Review)
December 19, 2005... The big guy is back: the same chocolate-doughnut nose, seriously mashed, as if he'd been sleeping face down in the jungle for decades; the matted hair, worn natural as always; the eyes both fierce and plaintive; the heavy-limbed body, though...

BAH HUMBUG.(The Talk of the Town)(war on Christmas)
December 26, 2005... Chestnuts are roasting on an open fire, with Jack Frost nipping at your nose and folks dressed up like Eskimos--or, to update the line for political correctness, with tots in boots just like Aleuts. It's that magical season when lights twinkle...

BAGHDAD TO SWARTHMORE.(The Talk of the Town)(Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, War News Radio)
December 26, 2005... A group of enterprising students at Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, has some advice for the politically disaffected: If you find the media's Iraq coverage unsatisfactory, pick up the phone. Don't call the Times, or CNN, or Rupert Murdoch;...

STARDUST.(The Talk of the Town)(Rod Stewart, Hollywood Walk of Fame)
December 26, 2005... In October, when Rod Stewart made an appearance on Hollywood Boulevard to unveil his star on the Walk of Fame, perhaps no one was prouder than Marcy Braunstein, a fifty-two-year-old woman from Pittsburgh. Braunstein is the ultimate Rod Stewart...

MAGNUM P.I.S.(The Talk of the Town)(illegal guns in New York, James Mintz Group)
December 26, 2005... West Nile fever and bedbugs behind us, the city was rife last week, after the back-to-back murders of the policemen Dillon Stewart and Daniel Enchautegui, with talk of another plague: illegal guns. Twenty thousand uniformed officers showed up...

BLACKBERRY PICKING.(The Talk of the Town)
December 26, 2005... Since it was introduced, in 1999, the BlackBerry, a handheld device that provides wireless e-mail access, has become not only an enormous financial success--nearly three million Americans now use one--but also the quintessential symbol of...

FAR FROM NARNIA.(Philip Pullman)
December 26, 2005... Every year at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, a guest is invited to speak on the subject of religion and education. Sometimes, a prominent bishop is asked to deliver a lecture, but, as a rule, the event isn't exactly a big...

IN FROM THE COLD.(Knut Hamsun, Norwegian writer)
December 26, 2005... I lived for a time in Copenhagen, trying to learn Danish, and that's when I discovered the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, whose career was one of the strangest of the last century. Hamsun is not so well known in America--perhaps the curse of a...

ALL THAT GLITTERS.(The Economy of Prestige)(Book Review)
December 26, 2005... In 1987, "Paco's Story," by Larry Heinemann, won the National Book Award for Fiction. The acclaim that greeted this selection was less than universal, and the reason--no fault of Heinemann's--is that 1987 was also the year of Toni Morrison's...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, Hidden Camera, The Poems of Catullus and Proust's English)(Book Review)
December 26, 2005... The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, by Han Bangqing, translated from the Mandarin and the Wu by Eileen Chang and revised and edited by Eva Hung (Columbia; $29.50). This huge novel about life in the brothels of fin-de-siecle Shanghai, published in...

SHANGHAI SURPRISE.(Xintiandi)
December 26, 2005... Modern Shanghai combines the soul of Houston with the body of Las Vegas. In Pudong, the city's booming financial district, flashing trails of colored lights race up and down the shafts of office towers, as if they were casinos. One freshly...

OPERA HOT.
December 26, 2005... Joseph Volpe, whose sixteen-year tenure as the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera ends this season, may be remembered as a man who stayed true to his title: he managed. Performances went off with maximum efficiency, seven each week....

THE OTHER.(Munich)(Hidden)(Movie Review)
December 26, 2005... The first minutes of "Munich" unfold at speed. Eight Palestinians scale the fence of the Olympic Village, enter the quarters of the Israeli athletes, and take them hostage. We know the consequence, and the director, Steven Spielberg, tells it...

DVD NOTES.(Where the Sidewalk Ends)(House by the River)(Video Recording Review)
December 26, 2005... NOIR AND AGAIN -- The American film noir of the postwar era resulted largely from the unleashing of the hyper-expressive filmmaking styles of immigrant German-speaking directors. Two new DVDs reveal the differences and similarities between two...