The New Yorker articles from December 2007

The New Yorker archives from December 2007

Gould Standard.(Sound recording review)
December 3, 2007... Opera fanatics have Maria Callas; everyone else has Glenn Gould. For listeners, the endless stream of reissues is justified by these artists' incandescent talents--and for EMI and Sony Classical, who, respectively, control most of their...

Stonehome Wine Bar.
December 3, 2007... The ever-popular wine bar poses something of a categorical conundrum. Many wine bars relegate their foodstuffs to the side--a composed cheese plate here, slender panini there--and seem to be little more than pretentious watering holes. The...

Huckabee?(The Talk of the Town)(Mike Huckabee)
December 3, 2007... Huckabee. Funny, improbable name; funny, improbable candidate. How funny? Well, have a look at the first Huckabee for President campaign commercial, aired last week in Iowa and now ubiquitous on the Web. In it, the former governor of Arkansas...

Where's Manny?(The Talk of the Town)(Manuel Miranda)
December 3, 2007... One of the lesser mysteries in Washington, D.C., in recent years concerned Manuel Miranda. For a time, he achieved a kind of ubiquity in the capital's political and legal culture, but, shortly after the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, he...

The Pigeon Police.(The Talk of the Town)(Simcha Felder)(Interview)
December 3, 2007... Pity the New York City pigeon. He finds a place where natural predators are few, and where bread crumbs--note that stooped woman clutching a plastic bag--are bountiful, and yet his life expectancy is just three to four years, compared with...

Strike Two.(The Talk of the Town)(writers strike and Broadway stagehands walkout)
December 3, 2007... The twin strikes that shut down the entertainment industry this month--walkouts by Broadway stagehands and by movie and television writers--have had, for the most part, separate spheres of fallout. Around the theatre district, chorus girls,...

Pio's Ride.(The Talk of the Town)(Padre Pio's 1959 Mercedes Benz 190D)
December 3, 2007... Thousands of people made the pilgrimage to the northern Italian university town of Padua several weekends ago for the Auto e Moto d'Epoca, one of Europe's premier car shows. Everything from sparkplugs to Ferraris was on exhibit at the Fiera di...

Come One, Come All.(megachurches)(Brief biography)
December 3, 2007... At the turnoff to the New Milford town green, Route 7, the two-lane road that winds through the narrow, forested valley of the Housatonic River, linking rural northwestern Connecticut with Danbury and the suburbanized south, abruptly opens out...

Art and Commerce.(art galleries)
December 3, 2007... Not so very long ago, while making my way through a droll little house museum in the South of France, I mistook a well-appointed drawing room for the gift shop. So, in what I thought was the tabletop department, I picked up a Louis the...

Darwin's Surprise.(role of endogenous retrovirus in human evolution)
December 3, 2007... Thierry Heidmann's office, adjacent to the laboratory he runs at the Institut Gustave Roussy, on the southern edge of Paris, could pass for a museum of genetic catastrophe. Files devoted to the world's most horrifying infectious diseases fill...

The Book of Exodus.(Sarajevo Haggadah)
December 3, 2007... When the Axis powers conquered and divided Yugoslavia, in the spring of 1941, Sarajevo did not fare well. The city cradled by mountains that Rebecca West once described as like "an opening flower" suddenly found itself absorbed into the Nazi...

Red, White, and Bleu.(eating meat)
December 3, 2007... Is it possible that meat is now openly enjoying a renaissance--that it's finally cool to be a carnivore? If so, it has been a long time coming. Meat-eaters, having already ceded the moral ground to vegetarians (no one has ever really come up...

Zeroville.(making a movie from film splices)(Brief article)
December 3, 2007... A giddily paranoid conceit propels this Hollywood novel: a film editor discovers that one subliminal frame has been hidden inside every movie in history. Obsessed with splicing together these occult images, he obtains the original reels of...

Matrimony.(Joshua Henkin's Matrimony)(Brief article)
December 3, 2007... Toward the end of Henkin's second novel, Julian, who has just arrived at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, finds that the other students do not like his work. "The story was quiet; all his work was," Henkin writes. "He had nothing against muscular...

Black Mass.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 3, 2007... "Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion," Gray, a British philosopher, insists in this outspoken attack on utopianism and the "faith-based violence" it has inspired. History, Gray writes, offers no new dawns or sharp breaks,...

Cavalier.(William Cavendish becomes Duke of Newcastle)(Brief article)
December 3, 2007... William Cavendish, poet, ladies' man, and espouser of all things chivalrous and romantic, was a Royalist general during the English Civil War, endured sixteen years of exile in Antwerp, and, returning to England in 1660, became the first Duke...

Nan, American Man.(Book review)
December 3, 2007... A critic cannot but be impressed by the courage and intellect of the Chinese-American writer Ha Jin. Born in 1956 of parents who were both military doctors, he volunteered for the People's Liberation Army at the age of fourteen and served five...

In Search of Lost Times.(Theater review)
December 3, 2007... Mrs. K. (Elizabeth Franz) is an elderly widow whose powerful, selective memory is cluttered to the rafters. And since she is, for the most part, the central force in Julia Cho's well-written "The Piano Teacher" (at the Vineyard), we have to...

The Out-of-Towners.(Berlin in Lights)(Concert review)
December 3, 2007... Berlin in Lights, a gloriously omnivorous music-and-arts festival that recently unfolded in and around Carnegie Hall, took its title from Kurt Weill's 1928 song "Berlin im Licht." In a concert devoted to the nineteen-twenties music of Weill and...

High Fliers.(Movie review)
December 3, 2007... Most filmmakers regard subjects like illness and despair as dangerous traps--mawkish sentimentality lying on one side of the high road of art, pleasureless suffering on the other--but the challenge of an impossible subject can bring out the...

Kyo Ya.(Japanese restaurant)(Restaurant review)
December 10, 2007... Kyo Ya specializes in kaiseki, a form of cuisine said to have originated in sixteenth-century Kyoto, initially as an accompaniment to the tea ceremony. To eat the full, ten-course meal at Kyo Ya, you have to book a day or two in advance, since...

Follow the Leaders.(The Talk of the Town)(George W. Bush)
December 10, 2007... Regime change was one of the stated goals of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Unlike cleansing the place of weapons of mass destruction and breaking up the alleged Baghdad-Al Qaeda nexus, it was a reality-based goal; and, unlike the other...

Ninja Hunt.(The Talk of the Town)(burglar in Staten Island, New York)
December 10, 2007... In retrospect, it figures that a serial "ninja burglar" would turn up on Staten Island, a borough whose biggest cultural export, the Wu-Tang Clan, long ago nicknamed the place Shaolin, in honor of kung-fu movies. This particular bandit, who is...

Face-lift.(The Talk of the Town)(Eldridge Street Synagogue)
December 10, 2007... The last time this department looked into the Eldridge Street Synagogue, down in Ben Shahn country, near the Manhattan Bridge, was almost twenty years ago, when the restoration of the synagogue--the first and the grandest of the temples built...

Emoticons During Wartime.(The Talk of the Town)(Brief article)
December 10, 2007... :-) No new attacks reported today. :-( New attack reported today. =|:-)= This e-mail is being monitored by Uncle Sam for your protection. :-x I'd rather not say in an e-mail that's...

Reading My Father.(William Styron's 'Sophie's Choice')
December 10, 2007... In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. , --"Sophie's Choice." The first time I read that line, the opening of "Sophie's Choice," I was thirteen years old. My father's...

A Death in the Forest.(hemlocks)
December 10, 2007... In 1911, a woman named Sallie Dooley established a Japanese garden at Maymont, her estate in Richmond, Virginia. She planted bamboo, built a gazebo and a waterfall, and, according to her husband, James Dooley, a financier, "purchased the most...

The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer.
December 10, 2007... New York State's notorious resistance to efficient governance owes a lot to geography. The state is vast, by Eastern standards, and its cities are far-flung. Seen one way, it is a rural state, with a right-angled corridor of denser settlement...

The Checklist.(intensive care units and Peter Pronovost's medical care checklist)
December 10, 2007... The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning, bombing, a burst blood vessel in the brain, a ruptured colon, a massive heart attack, rampaging infection. These conditions had once been...

Wonder Woman.(Chan Marshall's 'Jukebox')(Sound recording review)
December 10, 2007... The singer and songwriter Chan Marshall performs under an alias--Cat Power--with superhero connotations, but she sometimes struggles simply to get through a concert. She was born Charlyn Marie Marshall, in Georgia, and began appearing in clubs...

Woke Up This Morning.(diaries and diarists)(Excerpt)
December 10, 2007... Eventually, our species will die out and a new race will arrive to inhabit the planet. This race will have a giant mess to clean up--all the stuff that human beings accumulated in pursuit of pleasure and profit, but for which these new beings...

Orpheus Lost.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 10, 2007... When Leela-May Magnolia Moore, a graduate student studying the mathematics of music, hears Mishka Bartok playing his violin in the Harvard Square station, she follows him up the stairs to the crowded street and loses her heart. Previously,...

How to Be Perfect.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 10, 2007... Padgett's plainspoken, wry poems deliver their wisdom through a kind of connoisseurship of absurdity. He writes, "Everything I think about is a cartoon something / because anything cartoon is immortal / in its own funny little way." Yet these...

Richard M. Nixon.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 10, 2007... In the thousand and fifty pages of this biography by a fallen media baron of a fallen President, few events are neglected and many are well told. But Black, attempting a reconsideration of his subject, merely provides an exculpatory gloss for...

The Murder of Regilla.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 10, 2007... In Athens in 160 A.D., Regilla, a Roman aristocrat who was eight months pregnant, died after being kicked in the abdomen. Her husband, Herodes, a wealthy and powerful Athenian orator, was tried for the killing but cleared, thanks to the...

Mad, Bad, and Rad.('Cymbeline,' 'Rebel Voices,' and 'A Hard Heart')(Theater review)
December 10, 2007... Toward the end of Shakespeare's 1610 romance "Cymbeline" (at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont, under the direction of Mark Lamos), while plot points ricochet around the stage as in some truly desperate episode of "Desperate Housewives,"...

Conflicting Stories.('Atonement')(Movie review)
December 10, 2007... Almost the first sound we hear in Joe Wright's "Atonement" is the tap of typewriter keys. Soon, the tapping becomes regular, like drumbeats, and it sets the tempo for the music that comes surging in. Later in the film, it rings out as loudly as...

Back Forty.(Restaurant review)
December 17, 2007... Traditionally, the "back forty" is the most far-flung parcel of land on a farm, where, out of sight, it's easy to be up to no good. At this recently opened East Village spot, however, the phrase has a more innocent connotation: it refers to the...

The Biblical Sense.('Superbad')(Movie review)
December 17, 2007... "Superbad" (Sony), a comedy set in the milieu of graduating seniors at a suburban high school, begins with pornography. The loud, large, and ribald Seth (Jonah Hill) calls his best friend, the slight, circumspect Evan (Michael Cera), to discuss...

Bombs.(The Talk of the Town)(National Intelligence Estimates and Iran's nuclear programs)
December 17, 2007... Last week, the Bush Administration released declassified extracts from a new National Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear program. The passages landed in Washington like a religious scroll; they radiated revelation. The N.I.E. drew upon...

Dial-a-Rabbi.(The Talk of the Town)(Aish HaTorah)
December 17, 2007... Rabbi Stuart Shiff, one of six New York rabbis employed by Aish HaTorah, a nonprofit Jewish-education organization, carries two pieces of equipment: a BlackBerry and a book of the Torah. Weekdays, he treks to businesses around the city on...

Playlist.(The Talk of the Town)(Rufus Sewell )(Interview)
December 17, 2007... Everyone has a music life, or a life in music. Rufus Sewell's goes something like this: "Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers, Elvis, Beatles, Stones, David Bowie, Crass, Killing Joke, Elvis again, bebop, never country and Western, except as a...

Fixer-Upper.(The Talk of the Town)(Gowanus watershed)
December 17, 2007... "Not every water body can support a bathing situation," a representative of the state Department of Environmental Conservation said last week, in a classic instance of bureaucratic understatement. He was speaking at a forum dedicated to the...

Paulson's Plan.(The Talk of the Town)(Hank Paulson)
December 17, 2007... In late October, 1907, the American financial system appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The trouble had begun with a seemingly minor event--a failed attempt at stock-market speculation by a bank owner named F. A. Heinze--but it spread...

Return of the Nativist.(John McCain)
December 17, 2007... Once upon a time, John McCain was favored to win the Republican nomination. His straight-talking appeal and his cultivation of the Republican Party's right wing put him first--at least in the early conventional wisdom. Then, last summer, his...

Journey Into Night.(the author writes about his air travel and grief)
December 17, 2007... The night flight to Paris leaves J.F.K. at 7 P.M. and arrives at de Gaulle the next day at about 8:45 A.M. French time. Between takeoff and landing, there's a brief parody of an evening: dinner is served, the trays are cleared, and four hours...

Treasure Hunt.(Marion True)(Interview)
December 17, 2007... One afternoon in April, 1998, Marion True, the curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, took a flight from Athens to Rome. When she got off the plane, a carabinieri officer was waiting for her. "He actually picked me...

None of the Above.('What is Intelligence?')(Book review)
December 17, 2007... Correction appended. One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of...

Books from our Pages.(List)
December 17, 2007... NONFICTION Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, by Joan Acocella (Pantheon; $30). Mere Anarchy, by Woody Allen (Random House; $21.95). Foreskin's Lament, by Shalom Auslander (Riverhead; $24.95). Nobodies, by John Bowe (Random...

Devil May Care.('The Seafarer' and 'Is He Dead?')(Theater review)
December 17, 2007... "I'm Irish. We think sideways," the professional zany Spike Milligan said. "The Seafarer" (splendidly written and directed by Conor McPherson, at the Booth) is proof of Milligan's point. The play opens in darkness and ends in brightness. It...

Tubular.(the CNN/ YouTube Republican debate)
December 17, 2007... In the early moments of the CNN/ YouTube Republican debate on November 28th--the follow-up to the CNN/ YouTube Democratic debate last July--the often useful phrase "the minutes seemed like hours" suddenly felt inadequate. The phrase lacked an...

Reformers.(Lucas Cranach's art exhibit)
December 17, 2007... Is it just me, or have the Old Masters got younger lately? If so, it may be because present anxieties about the state and the fate of Western civilization echo past ones, when artists were energized around big issues, such as clashes of...

Hard Life.('The Kite Runner,' 'Juno,' and 'There Will Be Blood')(Movie review)
December 17, 2007... Early in "There Will Be Blood," an enthralling and powerfully eccentric American epic (opening on December 26th), Daniel Plainview climbs down a ladder at his small silver mine. A rung breaks, and Daniel (Daniel Day-Lewis) falls to the base of...

Barfry.(Restaurant review)
December 24, 2007... At BarFry, the gleaming white tiles, metallic accents, numerous mirrors, and faint oleaginous odor can give one the sensation of being immersed in a giant cooking vat. The name is a play on "barfly": the first half of it is apparent in the...

Testing the Climate.(The Talk of the Town)(Al Gore's Nobel Prize)
December 24, 2007... Last week, Al Gore, at the start of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, took note of a curious coincidence. Almost exactly seven years earlier--on December 12, 2000--the United States Supreme Court had called a halt to the Florida recount,...

Who's Scrooge?(The Talk of the Town)(Henry Kravis and the 'War on Green' )
December 24, 2007... The holiday season often arrives with a movie villain, and this year, in the tradition of "It's a Wonderful Life" (Old Man Potter) and "Bad Santa," comes "War on Greed," a series of Internet shorts whose first installment focusses on the...

Life on Mars.(The Talk of the Town)(Bad Plus)(Concert review)
December 24, 2007... Standing in line for tickets the other night at the Carnegie Hall box office, one could not be faulted for wondering: Why do so many observers of the cultural scene fret about older subscription audiences when tonight, for example, the lobby...

The Frog at Forty-five.(The Talk of the Town)(La Grenouille)(Restaurant review)
December 24, 2007... Walking past 3 East Fifty-second Street early on a Monday morning, a stranger in town might get the idea that La Grenouille is a high-end flower shop. All that is visible through the window is a vast tangle of blooms and buds, berries and...

A Buyer's Christmas.(The Talk of the Town)
December 24, 2007... 'Tis the season to buy. Of course, for Americans it's always the season to buy, but there is something special about the spending frenzy we engage in at holiday time. The Christmas shopping season can account for as much as forty per cent of a...

Demolition Man.(Harold Pinter)(Interview)
December 24, 2007... On a grisly London evening last October, as the Victorian street lamps of Holland Park were flickering in the twilight, I arrived too early for an appointment at Harold Pinter's handsome town house. Pinter, who is seventy-seven, and who, for...

I Hit Hamlet.(the author on John Barrymore's apartment, the 'I Hate Hamlet' play, and Nicol Williamson)
December 24, 2007... The ad in the Times real-estate listings said "medieval duplex," which was intriguing, unless "medieval" referred to the plumbing. It was 1987 and I was apartment hunting, so I arranged to meet the broker at a brownstone just off Washington...

Stairway to Here.(Led Zeppelin at the O Arena in London, United Kingdom)(Concert review)
December 24, 2007... Last Monday, in London, Led Zeppelin played its first full live set since 1980, at the O Arena--formerly the Millennium Dome--which seats twenty-two thousand and was built in 1999, during the early, optimistic days of Tony Blair's tenure. (The...

Family Planning.('The Farnsworth Invention' and 'August: Osage County')(Theater review)
December 24, 2007... In much of his work, the forty-two-year-old Oklahoman playwright Tracy Letts beautifully captures the puritan streak in the American grain. Like the filmmaker Sam Peckinpah and the Southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor,...

Twilight of the Books.('Proust and the Squid')(Book review)
December 24, 2007... In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found...

Squall Lines.('Diary of a Bad Year')(Book review)
December 24, 2007... There are people who think of J. M. Coetzee as a cold writer, and he might agree, or pretend to agree. "If he were a warmer person he would no doubt find it all easier: life, love, poetry," he writes of himself in his memoir "Youth." "But...

Visual Trophies.('The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978')(Book review)
December 24, 2007... Among the homely staples of twentieth-century life that have been unceremoniously retired by the microchip revolution--the typewriter, the pressed-wax record, the card catalogue--the camera loaded with film has met a swift and stealthy end....

The Complete Stories.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 24, 2007... Malouf often sets the brutality of his native Australia against its exquisite natural beauty, and in these stories violence stalks his characters from the mangrove swamps of the Gulf country--"sheet after sheet of brimming water, all lit with...

Like You'd Understand Anyway.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 24, 2007... Many of these exquisite, multifaceted tales take outlandish historical occurrences--a father and son who rode out the largest tidal wave in recorded history in a fishing vessel; nineteenth-century explorers who lugged a whaleboat through a...

Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 24, 2007... The narrators of Brown's second book of stories are mostly watchers--witnesses to sordid events in the fictional town of Vaughn, Maine. Through their eyes, the familiar routines of small-town life are transmogrified into emblematic ugliness....

Vanilla Bright Like Eminem.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 24, 2007... Faber, the author of the vast novel "The Crimson Petal and the White," made his name with a prize-winning volume of short stories. In the current collection, he mines the mundane for the unexpected, even the surreal, with impressive assurance....

Settling Scores.('Persepolis,' 'Sweeney Todd,' and 'Charlie Wilson's War')(Movie review)
December 24, 2007... The new Mike Nichols film, "Charlie Wilson's War," is ninety-seven minutes long. Into that time, it packs political machination, helicopter gunships, single-malt whiskey, Las Vegas, Islamabad, naked butts, and eight years of war. The film,...