The New Yorker articles from December 2008

The New Yorker archives from December 2008

Petal to the Metal.(Chinese Democracy)(Sound recording review)
December 1, 2008... Remember September, 1991? It was the month of Tailhook and of Tajik independence. Arkansas's little-known governor, Bill Clinton, was about to announce his candidacy for the Presidency. And the rock band Guns N' Roses, led by the...

Libertine.(Restaurant review)
December 1, 2008... "The French, they say, live to eat," Martin Amis writes in "Money," his novel about the excesses of the nineteen-eighties. "The English, on the other hand, eat to die." New York adores the heart-clogging fare of the British pub, and, in the...

Eight Is Enough.(The Talk of the Town)
December 1, 2008... Changes California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry. Provides that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California., --Ballot summary, Proposition 8. You might think that an...

Dicin' And Slicin'.(The Talk of the Town)(Mike Huckabee)
December 1, 2008... The former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who won eight states and more than four million votes in the Republican Presidential primaries, spent Election Night at home in Little Rock. Eating takeout in the den with his family and a few...

Swing Science.(The Talk of the Town)
December 1, 2008... When Harold Varmus, the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, gives a lecture, he usually talks to a scientific audience about health, or government policy, or the discovery that won him a Nobel Prize (with J. Michael Bishop), in...

Wheeling.(The Talk of the Town)
December 1, 2008... It's possible for a New Yorker to go weeks without glimpsing a river or a harbor, and to lose track of the fact that Manhattan is both an island and a seaport. This misapprehension is inconceivable, however, for a user of the Waterfront...

Four Eyes.(The Talk of the Town)
December 1, 2008... One day in 1995, a few years after joining the Design Department of the Metropolitan Museum, Daniel Kershaw was standing in a stairwell off the Tapestry Hall when he noticed a strange protrusion in the wall. "It was a slight circular bulge,...

Special Treatment.
December 1, 2008... Just before dawn one morning in June, Howard Samuels, the executive director of the Wonderland Center--a private alcohol-and-drug rehab facility in West Hollywood, California--was standing in the spacious foyer of his Craftsman-style house,...

Anatomy of a Meltdown.
December 1, 2008... Some are born radical. Some are made radical. And some have radicalism thrust upon them. That is the way with Ben Bernanke, as he struggles to rescue the American financial system from collapse. Early every morning, weekends included, Bernanke...

True Love.("Milk" and "Twilight")(Movie review)
December 1, 2008... At the beginning of Gus Van Sant's vibrantly entertaining bio-pic "Milk," Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) picks up a much younger man in the New York subway. Physically, the two are far from equals: Penn's Milk is forty and short, with a big schnoz and...

Wounder And Wounded.
December 1, 2008... The public snob, the grand bastard, was much in evidence when I interviewed V. S. Naipaul in 1994, and this was exactly as expected. A pale woman, his secretary, showed me in to the sitting room of his London flat. Naipaul looked warily at...

Serena.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Set in 1929, in the rugged mountains of North Carolina, Rash's novel is a tightly knit tale of industrial development, greed, and betrayal. George Pemberton and his new bride, Serena, maintain a close watch over a burgeoning logging empire,...

Driftless.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... This genial, if meandering, novel marks the author's return after a thirty-year absence; after he published three well-received novels, a motorcycle accident left him partially paralyzed. Set in a rural Wisconsin town, the book presents a...

Hitler's Private Library.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Hitler was a voracious reader, finishing a book every night, either at his desk or in his armchair, always with a cup of tea in his hand. His library at one time contained more than sixteen thousand books, of which some twelve hundred survive...

The Secret Life of Words.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... This historical tour of the English lexicon considers words as etymological "fossils of past dreams and traumas," revealing the preoccupations of the ages that produced them. The nineteenth century's "cult of fine feelings" gave currency to...

Heavy Water.(Steven Ellison)
December 1, 2008... Steven Ellison is a tall, soft-spoken twenty-five-year-old who works under the name Flying Lotus. As part of a peer network, with outposts in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Glasgow, Ellison is helping to lead a small group of producers toward a new...

Brother Act.("Assassins" and "Company")(Theater review)
December 1, 2008... No one wants to leave a Stephen Sondheim show feeling like a dummy, but sometimes people do. It's a sign of inestimable chic to claim to "get" the composer's dense, perverse, and demanding work on first hearing, but it's also an intellectual...

Char No. 4.(Restaurant review)
December 8, 2008... Char No. 4, in Cobble Hill, belongs to the lately fashionable Southern genus. Witness the pervasive campfire scent from the basement smoker, the Texan chef (Matt Greco), and the service--as unhurried and welcoming as a drawl. But taxonomists...

Car Talk.(The Talk of the Town)(automotive industry)
December 8, 2008... The Secretary of Transportation's report to Congress begins on a dark note. "Over the past year, the domestic auto industry has experienced sharply reduced sales and profitability, large indefinite layoffs, and increased market penetration by...

The Pits.(The Talk of the Town)(construction pits)
December 8, 2008... Walking or riding along the avenues, you can imagine the storefronts without tenants. Bank branches, juice bars, shops selling electronics and scarves: all of them gone, unable to make the rent, and the landlords, verging on default, unable to...

From Russia.(The Talk of the Town)(Laurie Carr; hockey enthusiast)
December 8, 2008... Jaromir Jagr has gone to Siberia, for a wagonload of petrodollars. Jagr, a Czech, was the captain and leading scorer last season of the New York Rangers, Manhattan's most exalted hockey team. Now he wears No. 68 for the team Avangard Omsk, a...

Enter, Pursued by a Bear.(The Talk of the Town)(Wall Street; Timothy Geithner nominated as Treasury Secretary)
December 8, 2008... When news broke that Timothy Geithner was Barack Obama's pick for Secretary of the Treasury, the stock market jumped more than six per cent in the space of an hour. Obviously, this was a good thing, but there was also something weird about the...

The Price Is Right.(Viewpoint essay)
December 8, 2008... O.K., so you're trying your best to scrimp. You dilute your bottled water with tap water. You give up premium cable for shadow puppetry. You switch from hard-boiled eggs to soft-boiled to save five minutes' worth of carbon debits. You quit your...

Outside Agitator.(Naomi Klein)(Brief biography)
December 8, 2008... The marquee outside the Bloor Cinema, in Toronto, advertised "The Last Mistress" at four, "Naomi Klein--the Shock Doctrine" at seven, and "Little Shop of Horrors" at nine-thirty. It was a warmish night. The falafel shop next door was doing a...

The Rap.(Styles Security and Executive Protection's Derrick Parker)(Brief biography)
December 8, 2008... Derrick Parker is the hip-hop cop. Although he no longer serves on the police force--he retired from the New York Police Department in 2002, as a twenty-year veteran with the rank of detective, first grade--that is still how people think of...

Man of Fetters.(Samuel Johnson )(Critical essay)
December 8, 2008... The historian who sets out to write a new biography of Samuel Johnson is in more or less the same position as someone who sets out to write a day-by-day account of the life of Samuel Pepys. Although the promise is to see the thing from a new...

Rimbaud.(Arthur Rimbaud)(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... Yeats once said that the writer must decide between the life or the work, but Arthur Rimbaud--teen-age prodigy, archetypal rebel, African adventurer--chose both. Although White notes that "a biographer of Rimbaud could fill his pages with...

The Man Who Believed He Was King of France.(The Man Who Believed He Was King of France: A True Medieval Tale)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 8, 2008... In 1354, during the Hundred Years' War, a Sienese merchant named Giannino di Guccio became convinced that he was actually King Jean I--the rightful heir to the Capetian crown, who was thought to have died in infancy. Over the following years,...

I See You Everywhere.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 8, 2008... This quietly powerful family history is the author's third novel; her debut, "Three Junes," won the National Book Award. At the center of the story are two sisters: Louisa is four years older than Clement, and "also nearly four inches shorter...

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 8, 2008... A cacophony of voices fills this novel, whose putative plot concerns the murder of a man known as the Gladiator in an apartment building in Rome. One by one, the neighbors offer their querulous, seemingly tangential testimony: an Iranian...

Sketchy Comedy.(Comedian Tina Fey)
December 8, 2008... Correction appended. Upon winning the second of three Emmy Awards at this year's ceremonies, in September, Tina Fey, the creator, star, and one of the executive producers and main writers of the sitcom "30 Rock"--and by then YouTubularly...

History in the Making.(Frost/Nixon and Australia)(Movie review)
December 8, 2008... In 1969, just after Richard Nixon was elected President, he gave a press conference in which he addressed the question of Soviet-American relations. His remarks were an entirely cogent and candid summing up of the state of affairs, and, among...

Secession.(Restaurant review)
December 15, 2008... Secession, David Bouley's French-Italian bistro, used to be Danube, David Bouley's formal Viennese dining room, which abutted Bouley, David Bouley's flagship restaurant, which is now Bouley Bakery & Market, David Bouley's gourmet grocery store....

Risk Factors.(The Talk of the Town)(terrorism in Pakistan and India)
December 15, 2008... A few days after well-armed men mowed down scores of helpless people in Mumbai, an American commission released a report on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. "World at Risk" is one of those conscientious, bipartisan efforts, its...

Team of Brainiacs.(The Talk of the Town)(government officials)
December 15, 2008... Last week wasn't such a boola one for the Ivy League: on Thursday, one of the cheerier items the Harvard Crimson could muster, as the university's administration announced that its endowment had lost nearly a quarter of its value, was that...

Pipes.(The Talk of the Town)(design of digital organ)
December 15, 2008... It is possible that some New Yorkers remain unaware that July, 2008, marked the beginning of the International Year of the Organ, the King of Instruments no longer exercising quite the royal prerogative it once did. Not so at Middle Collegiate...

Beefsteak.(The Talk of the Town)(Bernard Kerik)
December 15, 2008... At a banquet in Paterson, New Jersey, last week, a slide show ran quietly in the background as the guests--most of them men, thick-necked, and wearing their hair shaved, slicked, or buzzed--picked at their antipasto and penne. The slides showed...

Special Kaye.(The Talk of the Town)(Judith S. Kaye)
December 15, 2008... One day in 1993, shortly after Judith S. Kaye became chief judge of New York's highest court, she received a call from her daughter, who was on jury duty at the State Supreme Court, in Foley Square. "You know, Mom," she said, "this is a great...

Most Likely to Succeed.(Chase Daniel)
December 15, 2008... On the day of the big football game between the University of Missouri Tigers and the Cowboys of Oklahoma State, a football scout named Dan Shonka sat in his hotel, in Columbia, Missouri, with a portable DVD player. Shonka has worked for three...

Making Toast.(Amy Elizabeth Rosenblatt Solomon)(In memoriam)
December 15, 2008... The trick in foraging for a tooth lost in coffee grounds is not to be misled by the clumps. The only way to be sure is to rub each clump between your thumb and index finger, which makes a mess of your hands. For some twenty minutes this...

Atomic John.
December 15, 2008... The single, blinding release of pure energy over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, marked a startling and permanent break with our prior understandings of the visible world. Yet for more than sixty years the technology behind the explosion...

Marching Through Georgia.
December 15, 2008... Mikheil Saakashvili, the President of Georgia, keeps late hours. During and after Georgia's five-day war with Russia this August over the breakaway region of South Ossetia, he spent long days receiving Western dignitaries--Condoleezza Rice,...

The Legend of Lenny.(Leonard Bernstein )(In memoriam)
December 15, 2008... In 1984, when I was fifteen and living in Washington, D.C., I stopped by the National Cathedral to watch Leonard Bernstein conduct a rehearsal of Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony, the "Resurrection." Bernstein was preparing for a concert...

Like Men Betrayed.(Revolutionary Road)(Book review)
December 15, 2008... In April, 1951, Richard Yates sailed from New York to Paris. He had been there twice before, as a child and, later, as a soldier, but for him, as for so many American writers, it was less a place than a laurelled idea--the silvery and careless...

Ring Cycles.(The Wrestler)(Movie review)
December 15, 2008... For some years, Mickey Rourke was just about my favorite movie star. This was not an easy stance to take. The body of the man's work was dismayingly thin, and the body of good work, from "Rumble Fish" onward, could be counted on the knuckles of...