The New Yorker articles from February 2006

The New Yorker archives from February 2006

MONEYMAN.(The Talk of the Town)(Alan Greenspan)
February 6, 2006... Alan Greenspan, who retires this week after serving four and a half terms as chairman of the Federal Reserve, is arguably the most skillful bureaucratic survivor the nation's capital has seen since J. Edgar Hoover. But unlike the late,...

WATCHING HAMAS.(The Talk of the Town)
February 6, 2006... Shalom Harari is a former Israeli Military Intelligence officer who has been following the rise of Hamas--the Islamic Resistance Movement--for almost a quarter century. An awkward, voluble man of nearly sixty, Harari gained a measure of fame in...

ENRON MULTIPLE CHOICE.(The Talk of the Town)
February 6, 2006... Do you watch "The Apprentice"? Have you recently renewed your subscription to Martha Stewart Living? Do you think Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski was misunderstood? If so--and if you live in the greater Houston area--then Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling,...

TAB SCARE.(The Talk of the Town)(soft drink)
February 6, 2006... As if the mainstream media were not beleaguered enough, now comes word that the Coca-Cola Company is about to release a new drink called Tab Energy. The plan is to capitalize on the popularity of the Red Bull genre while trading on the retro...

DIVO'S DIVAS.(The Talk of the Town)(Il Divo, musical group)
February 6, 2006... Groupies are traditionally on the vulnerable end of the exchange between their crushes and themselves: naifs with ponytails and jelly knees, passing phone numbers and flashing breasts, at the mercy of their chosen idol. The followers of the...

TROUBLEMAKERS.(pit bulls)
February 6, 2006... One afternoon last February, Guy Clairoux picked up his two-and-a half-year-old son, Jayden, from day care and walked him back to their house in the west end of Ottawa, Ontario. They were almost home. Jayden was straggling behind, and, as his...

THE RED DEVIL.(Malcolm Glazer)(Biography)
February 6, 2006... Malcolm Glazer, the seventy-seven-year-old owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team, is short and stout, with a craggy face, a bald crown, and a straggly red beard. Some Bucs fans refer to Glazer as "the leprechaun," but he isn't Irish....

SWAMP NURSE.(Nurse-Family Partnership, program to help teenage mothers, destitute babies)
February 6, 2006... In the swamps of Louisiana, late autumn marks the end of the hurricane and the sugarcane seasons--a time for removing plywood from windows and burning residues of harvest in the fields. Then begins the season of crayfish and, nine months having...

FORGIVENESS.(Nazi cemeteries, German leaders, Joseph Ratzinger )
February 6, 2006... In the spring of 2004, Joseph Ratzinger went to France as the personal representative of Pope John Paul II, who had asked him to deliver papal blessings at the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy....

GREAT FUGUE.(Ludwig van Beethoven's manuscript)
February 6, 2006... Last summer, a librarian at the Palmer Theological Seminary, outside Philadelphia, reached onto the bottom shelf of a basement cabinet and pulled out a lost manuscript by Beethoven. It was a draft of an arrangement for piano, four hands, of the...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Inheritance of Loss)(The Thin Place)(The Worst Hard Time)(American Vertigo)(Book Review)
February 6, 2006... The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly Press; $24). Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states--Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and...

CODE-BREAKER.(The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer)(Book Review)
February 6, 2006... On June 8, 1954, Alan Turing, a forty-one-year-old research scientist at Manchester University, was found dead by his housekeeper. Before getting into bed the night before, he had taken a few bites out of an apple that was, apparently, laced...

THE EARTHQUAKE.(The Good Life)(Book Review)
February 6, 2006... Corrine, the heroine of Jay McInerney's new novel, "The Good Life" (Knopf; $25), is an attractive, fortyish woman who lives with her husband, Russell, a book editor, and their young twins in a loft in Tribeca. They spend the summers in...

THE MIRROR CRACKED.(Elaine Stritch: At Home at the Carlyle)(Sexual Perversity in Chicago)(Theater Review)
February 6, 2006... The brilliant Elaine Stritch--actress, singer, raconteur--has a face that was made for cinema. Not for the hearts-and-flowers sentiment and blinding movie-star teeth that pass for cinema these days: Stritch's face, with its deadpan allure, the...

JOB DISCRIMINATION.(The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada)(Manderlay)(Movie Review)
February 6, 2006... What happened to Tommy Lee Jones? I don't mean that he has vanished from our sight, although some of his recent performances have felt pale and perfunctory. ("Man of the House": that's one to wipe from the C.V. with a high-pressure hose.) I...

WAR AND WORDS.(The Talk of the Town)
February 13, 2006... A President is well advised to choose his words carefully. This is something the incumbent, left to his own devices, is not always capable of doing. A State of the Union speech finesses that difficulty. The speaker speaks off the teleprompter,...

TRUMP V. TRUMP.(The Talk of the Town)
February 13, 2006... Never having met Timothy O'Brien, the Times reporter who finds himself on the receiving end of a five-billion-dollar libel-and-defamation suit from Donald Trump, I don't presume to know whether he's having fun yet. But I doubt that I'm alone...

PAJAMA CONNECTION.(The Talk of the Town)(Transcript)
February 13, 2006... The actors Harry Connick, Jr., and Michael McKean and the director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall were hanging out the other night in the lobby of the American Airlines Theatre, just before dressing for a preview of the Roundabout's new...

POSTSCRIPT.(The Talk of the Town)
February 13, 2006... Wendy Wasserstein, who died last week at only fifty-five, was one of the few Pulitzer Prize winners to be recognizable by her first name. If you said "Wendy," theatregoers, and everyone else in the theatre community, knew instantly whom you...

OVERCOMPENSATING.(The Talk of the Town)
February 13, 2006... Markets thrive on information. The more investors know about a company, the more likely they are to figure out what that company is really worth. So when the Securities and Exchange Commission recently proposed a new set of rules requiring...

THE BELIEVER.
February 13, 2006... The Judson Welliver Society is a bipartisan, sporadically serious, and generally impious club of ex-White House speechwriters. Its founder and president-for-life is the former Times columnist William Safire, who once wrote speeches for Spiro...

LITTLE WING.
February 13, 2006... On a bright, breezy Saturday not long ago, Sedona Murphy gave her homing pigeons away. Earlier that morning, the birds had flown around the neighborhood, looping over the shaggy old trees and the peaked rooftops of South Boston before returning...

HUTONG KARMA.
February 13, 2006... For the past five years, I've lived about a mile north of the Forbidden City, in an apartment building off a tiny alleyway in downtown Beijing. My alley, which has no official name, begins in the west, passes through three ninety-degree turns,...

SERIAL MONOGAMY.
February 13, 2006... My mother gave me my first cookbook. It was 1962, and I began my New York life with her gift of "The Gourmet Cookbook" (Volume I) and several sets of sheets and pillowcases (white, with scallops). "The Gourmet Cookbook" was enormous, a tome,...

MILLION-DOLLAR MURRAY.
February 13, 2006... Murray Barr was a bear of a man, an ex-marine, six feet tall and heavyset, and when he fell down--which he did nearly every day--it could take two or three grown men to pick him up. He had straight black hair and olive skin. On the street, they...

THE OPERA LOVER.
February 13, 2006... On the evening of May 26th last year, the financier Alberto Vilar attended an Internet conference, sponsored by Goldman Sachs, at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino, in Las Vegas. During a presentation by Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, he...

THE STAND-OFF.
February 13, 2006... THE ATTACK At about eleven-thirty on the morning of December 13, 2001, a white Ambassador with tinted glass and a flashing red light on top--the distinctive car of Indian officialdom--arrived at Parliament House in New Delhi. Five men were...

THE SAINTLY SINNER.
February 13, 2006... The Catholic Church presumably has enough on its hands right now without worrying about popular fiction, but the Holy See cannot have failed to notice that Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," a novel claiming that Jesus was married, has been on...

SHINING TREE OF LIFE.
February 13, 2006... Weary old faiths make art while hot young sects make only trouble. Insincerity, or at least familiarity, seems to be a precondition of a great religious art--the wheezing and worldly Renaissance Papacy produced the Sistine ceiling, while the...

POSITIVE ATTITUDE.(Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
February 13, 2006... In July of 2004, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a rock trio from New York City, opened for Devo, the new-wave group, in a show at the band shell in Central Park. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 2003 debut album, "Fever to Tell," had gone gold, a considerable...

BAUER POWER.(24)(Video Recording Review)
February 13, 2006... When "24" debuted, on Fox, in November of 2001, it was seen as a risky venture; no one had a clue whether the show would hold viewers' interest for a whole season-- a season of twenty-four episodes, in which events unfold in real time over the...

HOME AND ABROAD.(Bubble)(Neil Young: Heart of Gold)(Movie Review)
February 13, 2006... Steven Soderbergh is one director who says out loud what other Hollywood directors may be saying under their breath--that the studio system of making movies is broken and should be rethought, that there has to be another business model for...

TABLES FOR TWO.(Yakitori Totto)(Restaurant Review)
February 27, 2006... YAKITORI TOTTO -- 251 W. 55th St. (212-245-4555)--With bird flu inching toward us and more than a million Americans falling victim to salmonella each year, this might not seem like the smartest time to eat raw chicken. Still, unless this...

IMAGES.(The Talk of the Town)(Christian-Muslim relations)
February 27, 2006... Last week, with Muslims rioting, and dying, because of twelve cartoons about the Prophet published in a Copenhagen newspaper nearly five months earlier, Italy's blithely oblivious Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, compared himself (and not for...

NEW MAN.(The Talk of the Town)(Unknown White Male)(Movie review)
February 27, 2006... At 9 a.m. on July 3, 2003, Doug Bruce woke up on the F train near Coney Island. He had no idea who or where he was. There was a swimsuit in his knapsack, but it was cool and rainy out. He knew what cars were, but he could not identify specific...

GO, DOG, GO!(The Talk of the Town)(dog shows)
February 27, 2006... A couple of years ago, on a snowy December weekend in Chicago, Liz Hansen slipped and broke an ankle while crossing the street. She was on her way to a dog show, where she'd planned to enter her standard schnauzer, Seasar. She told the...

ARTISTS IN THEIR YOUTH.(The Talk of the Town)(art exhibitions)
February 27, 2006... "School Days," a new group exhibition featuring the work of nineteen graduate art students at Hunter, Columbia, and Yale, definitely qualifies as an art-world event. Granted, the frenzied search for new talent has had dealers and collectors...

THE MEMO.(Alberto J. Mora)
February 27, 2006... One night this January, in a ceremony at the Officers' Club at Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia, which sits on a hill with a commanding view across the Potomac River to the Washington Monument, Alberto J. Mora, the outgoing general counsel of...

SUITABLE FOR FRAMING.(North Carolina Museum of Art)(Column)
February 27, 2006... Before it was moved out near the fairgrounds, the North Carolina Museum of Art was located in downtown Raleigh, and often, when we were young, my sister Gretchen and I would cut out of church and spend an hour looking at the paintings. The...

WATERMARK.(Leeville, Louisiana)
February 27, 2006... Once the Mississippi River's main outlet, Bayou Lafourche--pronounced "la-foosh"--is now a channel barely wide enough to accommodate two shrimp boats heading in opposite directions. Its waters are slack and brown and salty, so much so that...

THE DEMOCRACY GAME.(West Bank)
February 27, 2006... Every Friday, just before midday prayers, thousands of men and women in the West Bank town of Dura stop to gossip and shop in the market stalls that lead to the steps of the Grand Mosque. I visited Dura on the first Friday after Hamas had swept...

PURSUING HAPPINESS.(The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)(Book review)
February 27, 2006... It is the year 100,000 B.C., and two hunter-gatherers are out hunter-gathering. Let's call them Ig and Og. Ig comes across a new kind of bush, with bright-red berries. He is hungry, as most hunter-gatherers are most of the time, and the berries...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Kornwolf, Tristan Egolf's new novel)(Book review)
February 27, 2006... Kornwolf, by Tristan Egolf (Black Cat; $14). In the third novel by Egolf, who took his own life last year, a rough beast is slouching through the hills of rural Pennsylvania, with glowing eyes, a pompadour, and a strong resemblance to Richard...

PUCCINI REMIXED.(Berlin Philharmonic)(Concert review)
February 27, 2006... Concert life in New York has never been more vigorous than it is right now. Or so it seemed during a sustained delirium of musical events in late January and early February. The Berlin Philharmonic, under Simon Rattle, brought its dark-gold...

WHEN IN ROME.(Getty Museum, Malibu, California)
February 27, 2006... In the nineteen-seventies, the Getty Museum built itself a home in Malibu, California, in the form of an imitation Roman villa from the first century. There was something undeniably kitschy about the notion of putting a make-believe classical...

THRILLERS AND KILLERS.(Red Light Winter)(Theater review)
February 27, 2006... "All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others," Cyril Connolly wrote in "Enemies of Promise." Take, for instance, the sensational charmer Davis, who is the hypotenuse of the complex...

EVIL TOUCH.(Sophie Scholl: The Final Days)(Movie review)
February 27, 2006... The new German movie "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days" is as plain as its title. The film follows the last six days in the life of Scholl (Julia Jentsch), who, with her brother, Hans (Fabian Hinrichs), and a friend, Christoph Probst (Florian...