The New Yorker articles from December 2006

The New Yorker archives from December 2006

MOTHER OF ALL STORIES.
December 4, 2006... Nothing starts a fight like a new slant on old-time religion, and Jean-Luc Godard's "Hail Mary" (New Yorker Video), which transplanted the story of the Virgin Birth to modern-day Switzerland (with Mary working at her father's gas station and...

IT'S HIS BIPARTY.(The Talk of the Town)
December 4, 2006... According to the "Backwards Bush" countdown clock, available on the Web and in key-chain and desk-accessory form at selected novelty and toy stores around the nation, the sitting Administration in Washington will, as of this writing, be in...

STILL MODERN.(The Talk of the Town)
December 4, 2006... Philip Johnson's Glass House, which is actually a compound of fourteen structures on a rolling hillside in New Canaan, Connecticut, is one of the most photographed pieces of twentieth-century architecture. But when the new executive director of...

THE GHOSTWRITER.(The Talk of the Town)
December 4, 2006... In 1994, Pablo Fenjves lived in a house about sixty yards away from Nicole Brown Simpson's residence, at 875 South Bundy Drive, in Brentwood. Fenjves was a screenwriter, and on the night of June 12th of that year he was working on a script...

MARCH OF PROGRESS.(The Talk of the Town)
December 4, 2006... Surf cams, which started appearing on the Web in the nineteen-nineties, seemed destined to improve productivity among those surfers with lives and without ocean views. No more slogging to the beach at dawn to see what the waves were doing. No...

IN PRAISE OF THIRD PLACE.(The Talk of the Town)
December 4, 2006... Fifteen years ago, the video-game industry was ruled by one player, Nintendo. The company had machines in a third of American homes, and it was Japan's most profitable electronics company. The title of a 1993 book summed up the situation: "Game...

KILLING HABEAS CORPUS.
December 4, 2006... President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in Maryland on April 27, 1861, two weeks after the Confederate attack on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter. "Lincoln could look out his window at the White House and see Robert E. Lee's...

VOICE OF THE CABAL.
December 4, 2006... Any night but Thursday, Bob Fass likes to wait until after twelve o'clock, after his wife, Lynnie, has gone to sleep, and then drive his banged-up old Chrysler from his house, in Staten Island, to Manhattan, where he bombs up and down the...

MAD AS HELL.
December 4, 2006... Regular viewers of "Lou Dobbs Tonight," on CNN, might be surprised at the venue that Dobbs chose for lunch not long ago: the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, a midtown bastion of the very same political and business "elites" that he denounces...

LITTLE HOTTIES.
December 4, 2006... Barbie is forty-seven years old, and forty-seven years is a long time to have been the alpha doll. Over the decades, many competitors have been sent out into the world to get what Mattel's doll had: hugely profitable sovereignty over the...

GOODNIGHT MUSH.
December 4, 2006... If, as Joan Didion famously put it, "we tell ourselves stories in order to live," why do we tell stories to our children? In my experience, mostly it is to get them to shut up. A book read to a toddler who, after running around the house all...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
December 4, 2006... The Book of Dave, by Will Self (Bloomsbury; $24.95). In this tale of an embittered taxi-driver whose psychotic rantings become the creed of a blighted people hundreds of years after his death, Self unleashes his apparently boundless misanthropy...

FROCKS AND BLOCKS.
December 4, 2006... The fashion world is commonly accused of taking itself too seriously. An ambitious show that opened last week at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art suggests that it may not be taking itself seriously enough. "Skin + Bones: Parallel...

STRING THEORY.
December 4, 2006... The cover of Joanna Newsom's new album, "Ys," is an oil painting by the California artist Benjamin Vierling. Newsom is depicted with plaited blond hair, wearing a billowing blouse and a garland of flowers. She is seated at a window on a...

HOLD THE MOZART.
December 4, 2006... When, in October of last year, John Adams unveiled "Doctor Atomic," his opera of nuclear hubris and fear, he might have been expected to take a week or two off, or, at least, a day. Instead, on the afternoon following the premiere, in San...

HIGH HOPES.
December 4, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File According to the Book of Genesis, the Tree of Life was in the Garden of Eden. Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain," an altogether more useful guide, gives precise directions. You go to the middle of Central...

HOT AND COLD.(The Talk of the Town)
December 11, 2006... Thirty-six years ago this month, President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in a ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. The act--the product of a bipartisan effort extraordinary even for a day when bipartisanship was...

FIFTY SHOTS.(The Talk of the Town)
December 11, 2006... Al Sharpton learned of Sean Bell's death while riding in a town car to his office. It was nine-forty-five in the morning on what was to be Bell's wedding day, or about six hours after Bell and his friends had left the Kalua Cabaret, in Jamaica,...

JIMMY CARTER ALOFT.(The Talk of the Town)
December 11, 2006... Unlike Bill Clinton, a serial moocher of private jets, Jimmy Carter flies commercial. He shambles through airports, towing a wheelie bag. He and his retinue of Secret Service men bypass security, board the plane before the other passengers, and...

ONLY A DAY AWAY.(The Talk of the Town)
December 11, 2006... Maybe far away, or maybe real nearby, there are girls who still love "Annie." On a Sunday morning earlier this year, twenty-four such girls assembled at a rehearsal studio in Chelsea to audition for the thirtieth-anniversary tour of the show,...

SWIFT.(The Talk of the Town)
December 11, 2006... A selection of writings by Trow George W. S. Trow, whose utterly original voice and astringent sensibility were defining features of The New Yorker for three decades, died at the end of November, in Naples, Italy, a city that had been his...

NEW IN TOWN.
December 11, 2006... On a misty autumn morning in south-central Maine, a small group of Somali women--Seynab Ali, Hawa Ibrahim, Habiba Nor--are harvesting or-ganic vegetables in fields near the town of Lewiston. There are orders from a couple of high-end...

SANTA SECRETS.
December 11, 2006... With luck and a fake case of chicken pox, the desperate writer can finesse a deadline extension. For anyone struggling to overcome shopper's block during the holiday season, however, there can be no hope of getting Jesus Christ's birthday...

WONDERFUL WORLD.
December 11, 2006... The weather was kind to Anaheim, California, on July 17, 1955. So kind, in fact, that the heels of women's shoes got stuck in the warm asphalt. Anything other than sunshine would have been an insult to the opening of America's latest...

THE MIND'S EYE.
December 11, 2006... The artist Jasper Johns lives alone in a large gray fieldstone house in northwestern Connecticut. Built in the nineteenth century, the house stands on a hillside overlooking a hundred and thirty acres of meadows and woods and a distant lake,...

THE PAPER CHASE.
December 11, 2006... If Samuel Beckett were still around, his plays might begin on the late shift. "An office. An unattended PC glows under strong fluorescent light. Front left, a copying machine. Front right, a document shredder. Back, in near-darkness, a lounge...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
December 11, 2006... Redemption, by Frederick Turner (Harcourt; $24). Turner's slow, humid tale, punctuated by indescribable violence, sexual and otherwise, unrolls in 1913, along the streets of Storyville, New Orleans. Every night, Francis Muldoon, a.k.a...

WALLED OFF.
December 11, 2006... Burma stood out in my childhood as the place about which there were no stories. My parents moved there in March, 1963, when I was just over a year old. We spent six months in Rangoon, and for that entire period we were under house arrest. The...

SOUR BALL.(Theater review)
December 11, 2006... When Stephen Sondheim's "Company" debuted, in 1970, it was immediately acknowledged as a kind of musical watershed: no characters, no linear story, no happy ending. In the late fifties, Sondheim had written about everything coming up roses; now...

WHAT IF?
December 11, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Africa breaks your heart--that's the simplest and most persistent emotion that bursts out of such recent films as "Hotel Rwanda," "The Constant Gardener," "The Last King of Scotland," and, now, "Blood...

DVD NOTES.
December 18, 2006... The Current Cinema The Film File Movie Listings THE WAR AT HOME -- Gary Cooper's diffident strength made him the ideal actor to play the reluctant hero. It was the role in which America had cast itself in the Great War, and, in...

STUDIES SAY.(The Talk of the Town)
December 18, 2006... Moments after the report of the Iraq Study Group descended on George W. Bush like a safe from a penthouse, its ten members fanned out in bipartisan squads to assure the world that they weren't blaming anybody. "In our report we say we are not...

JOYRIDE.(The Talk of the Town)
December 18, 2006... Among the things that, with only a day's notice, evidently can't be procured in New York--not, anyway, at a price that bleeding-heart-liberal mortals would be inclined to pay--is a for-rent luxury convertible sedan. This truth was revealed...

PROLIFIC.(The Talk of the Town)
December 18, 2006... Eva Zeisel, the ceramicist and industrial designer, doesn't like to call herself an artist, even though it has been sixty years since the Museum of Modern Art gave her a solo exhibition--a first for a creator of mass-produced housewares. "I am...

COME HERE OFTEN?(The Talk of the Town)
December 18, 2006... One recent evening, in the barrens of the Financial District, the hotelier Andre Balazs was throwing a party for an imaginary friend. His name was William Beaver, in reference to the downtown intersection upon which Balazs is building William...

CHARACTER ACTOR.(The Talk of the Town)
December 18, 2006... The character actor comes down from Canada. Various handlers--Fisher, Jeremy, Judy, Cara, Nicole--pack his schedule tight. He stays in a suite at the Waldorf Towers, has a few French fries, changes his clothes, and goes on forays to midtown...

THE RIGHT TO A TRIAL.
December 18, 2006... In 2002, Kianna Karnes, a forty-one-year-old nurse and mother of four in Brownsburg, Indiana, was given a diagnosis of kidney cancer. She had surgery to remove the tumor, but a year later the cancer spread to her bones. Karnes's doctors treated...

THE GOOD BOOK BUSINESS.
December 18, 2006... In a sixth-floor conference room of an office building near Nashville International Airport, Rodney Hatfield's BlackBerry buzzed with an incoming e-mail: "The Lord placed a vision on our hearts of a skaters' Bible. We really love the N.K.J.V....

KNOWING THE ENEMY.
December 18, 2006... In 1993, a young captain in the Australian Army named David Kilcullen was living among villagers in West Java, as part of an immersion program in the Indonesian language. One day, he visited a local military museum that contained a display...

THE PLAYHOUSE.
December 18, 2006... From an upstairs window, I see my father walking away down his snowy lawn. He moves uncertainly, his hands cupped around his eyes like an Arctic explorer in a whiteout. It takes a moment to realize that he is peering through my mother's old...

THE MASTER OF MALGUDI.
December 18, 2006... When R. K. Narayan died, in the spring of 2001 at the age of ninety-four, his legacy seemed assured. Over seven decades of literary activity, he had produced fourteen novels, countless essays, and dozens of stories, the majority of his fiction...

FIRST BITE.
December 18, 2006... The new Thomas Harris novel goes by the title of "Hannibal Rising" (Delacorte; $27.95). This has the effect of making Dr. Hannibal Lecter sound like a souffle, a fever chart, or a storm--all comparisons that the good doctor, who prides himself...

BOOKS FROM OUR PAGES.
December 18, 2006... NONFICTION Let Me Finish, by Roger Angell (Harcourt; $25). The Afterlife, by Donald Antrim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $21). Heat, by Bill Buford (Knopf; $25.95). Operation Homecoming, edited by Andrew Carroll (Random House;...

POCKET-PICKING.
December 18, 2006... "All classes are criminal, we live in an age of equality": Joe Orton's subversive mot came to mind as I listened to the craven upper-middle-class palaver of Harley Granville-Barker's 1905 play "The Voysey Inheritance" (directed by David...

FIGHTING MEN.
December 18, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Everybody knows that Berlin, in the immediate wake of the Second World War, was a city in fragments. It was split into four zones--the American, the British, the French, and the Russian--but the divisions...

TABLES FOR TWO.
December 25, 2006... THE RUSSIAN TEA ROOM -- 150 W. 57th St. (212-581-7100)--As anyone with a passing knowledge of New York City real-estate lore or the oeuvre of Dustin Hoffman knows, the Russian Tea Room ought to feel like someplace special. Never has this seemed...

ON AND OFF THE AVENUE.
December 25, 2006... THE NOKIA STORE -- 5 E. 57th St. (212-758-1980)--The Nokia Store makes the futuristic Apple Store look like Little House on the Prairie. The building's peacock-blue facade, one of the few parts of the store you cannot interface with, seems to...

HIS WAY.(The Talk of the Town)
December 25, 2006... All we wanted for Christmas was a plausible Iraq strategy. In the White House briefing room last week, George Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, explained why this was unrealistic. The President, he said, "is moving toward a decision on how to move...

BRITISH IMPORT.(The Talk of the Town)
December 25, 2006... Life is short, art long, and Russian art longer. Or so it seems. A couple of weeks ago, the Czech-born, Britain-residing, world-conquering playwright Tom Stoppard left behind a stack of largely rave reviews for the New York production of...

CHECKING IT TWICE.(The Talk of the Town)
December 25, 2006... Anyone wondering whether daily life in New York is getting more like passing through airport security (bag checks on the subway, getting "wanded" at the theatre) had only to stop by F.A.O. Schwarz this holiday season to know for sure. An...

JOINER.(The Talk of the Town)
December 25, 2006... In 1998, a local man, aged forty, requested a legal name change for reasons that he no longer cares to explain. Out with the old ("and you're not going to find out what it was," he said recently), and in with--say it slowly--Leftonred...

THE GIFT RIGHT OUT.(The Talk of the Town)
December 25, 2006... Christmas shopping in the U.S. has been a reliable source of anxiety and stress for well over a century. "As soon as the Thanksgiving turkey is eaten, the great question of buying Christmas presents begins to take the terrifying shape it has...

THE PAST CONDITIONAL.
December 25, 2006... I don't believe in God, but I miss Him. That's what I say when the question is put. I once asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my...

THE ART OF EXTINCTION.
December 25, 2006... In 1988, to commemorate Austria's annexation by Adolf Hitler fifty years earlier, a new play was commissioned from Thomas Bernhard. The author of eleven novels and more than twenty plays, Bernhard had a well-deserved reputation as the country's...

PRINCE OF SAINT-GERMAIN.
December 25, 2006... In 1946, Boris Vian--novelist, poet, playwright, songwriter, jazz trumpeter, screenwriter, actor, and general scourge of anyone failing to have enough fun in Paris in the postwar era--came to New York. He made the trip from France by submarine,...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
December 25, 2006... Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, by Vendela Vida (Ecco; $23.95). In this slim, dour novel, a twenty-eight-year-old editor of film subtitles discovers on her father's death that he is not her biological parent: her mother, who abandoned...

CITY LIGHTS.
December 25, 2006... Pina Bausch, the queen of European dance theatre, is a master of the excruciated-artist interview. One journalist, Valerie Lawson, of the Sydney Morning Herald, reported that Bausch never answers a direct question about her work. All you can...

LOST IN PARADISE.
December 25, 2006... Brethren, let us ponder Eden, at least what we know of it on Broadway. At its most whimsical--in, for instance, "The Begat," in Burton Lane and E. Y. Harburg's "Finian's Rainbow" (1947)--Eden was a sensational place, full of rousing wonder and...

COKE IS IT.
December 25, 2006... In September, the magazine W announced that cocaine is again a fashionable vice. In pop music, cocaine never went away. Even if some people cluck disapprovingly, most accept the tendency of pop stars to use drugs--to fuel creativity, calm...

TEMPTATIONS OF THE FAIR.
December 25, 2006... In contemporary art, this is the decade of the fair, as the nineties were the decade of the biennial. Collectors, with piles of money, have displaced curators, with institutional clout, as arbiters of how new art becomes known and rated, and...

BEST AND BRIGHTEST.
December 25, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Near the beginning of Bill Condon's movie adaptation of the musical "Dreamgirls," Jimmy Early (Eddie Murphy), a soul singer loosely based on James Brown, meets his three new backup singers: Effie (Jennifer...