The New Yorker articles from February 2008

The New Yorker archives from February 2008

Omido.(restaurant)(Restaurant review)
February 4, 2008... Set amid the restaurant equivalents of garishly bloated Broadway musicals, Omido appears more akin to an Off Broadway production of Beckett. (Or, given its proximity to the Ed Sullivan Theatre, more David Letterman than Jay Leno.) Its...

The Minsky Moment.(The Talk of the Town)(Hyman P. Minsky)
February 4, 2008... Twenty-five years ago, when most economists were extolling the virtues of financial deregulation and innovation, a maverick named Hyman P. Minsky maintained a more negative view of Wall Street; in fact, he noted that bankers, traders, and other...

Aces.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama plays poker)
February 4, 2008... Before his recent loss in the Nevada caucus, Barack Obama took heat (from the Clinton camp and from casino executives) for his history of opposing the expansion of legal gambling. His campaign people never pointed out, in his defense, that...

The Red Phone.(The Talk of the Town)(ordinary New Yorkers talk with ordinary Iranians)
February 4, 2008... On a blustery recent Saturday morning, a small group of volunteers gathered at the entrance to City Hall Park. They set up a folding table and laid out four old-fashioned red telephones, which were marked with the numbers one through four. They...

Hail To The Chief.(The Talk of the Town)(Stephen Yeboah)
February 4, 2008... Not long ago, Stephen Yeboah, who has been a doorman for the past twenty-seven years at Chatham Towers, two adjacent high-rises in Chinatown, was holding the door when a new tenant paused on his way into the building. "He looked at me and said,...

Real Naked Ladies.(The Talk of the Town)('Fifty Nude Women: A Musical Montage')
February 4, 2008... How do you get a bunch of normal chicks to strip and say cheese, assuming you're not a Mardi Gras regular or a Seven Sisters posture photographer? That was the dilemma facing Margot Roth, a first-time filmmaker, as she attempted to recruit...

Beppe's Inferno.(Beppe Grillo)(Interview)
February 4, 2008... On September 8th, two million people in two hundred and twenty cities across Italy celebrated V-Day, an unofficial new national holiday, the "V" signifying victory, vendetta, and, especially, "Vaffanculo" ("Fuck off"). The event had been...

Death In Georgia.(Brian Nichols' murder case )
February 4, 2008... On the morning of March 11, 2005, Brian Nichols embarked on one of the most notorious crime sprees in recent American history. Nichols, a thirty-three-year-old African-American, was being retried on rape charges in Atlanta and was in custody at...

The Color of Politics.(Cory Booker)
February 4, 2008... One evening this past fall, Barack Obama's Presidential campaign went to Newark, bringing together the two leading figures of what might be called the Oprah Winfrey wing of the Democratic Party. At a downtown rally, the task of firing up the...

The Boxing Rebellion.(Chinese amateur boxer Zou Shiming)
February 4, 2008... On a cold night in November, Zou Shiming, the captain of China's national boxing team, arrived early for a banquet in his honor at a Chinese restaurant in a mall in Chicago, where the amateur world championships were being held. Zou is...

A Better Place.(David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215)(Critical essay)
February 4, 2008... In 610 A.D., Muhammad ibn Abdallah, a forty-year-old man from a prosperous merchant family in Mecca, repaired to a cave on nearby Mt. Hira to meditate--a retreat he had made many times. That year, though, his experience was different. An angel...

When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 4, 2008... This impressive debut is narrated by Nitido Aman, a high-school teacher born in Guatemala but brought up in America. Reading about the atrocities of the nineteen-eighties warfare in his homeland, Aman returns there, in order, he says, "to fill...

The Expeditions.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 4, 2008... Iagnemma, a research scientist whose short stories have reflected on the adventurous, even romantic, nature of scientific work, explores these themes at greater length in the tale of Elisha Stone, a sixteen-year-old runaway and amateur...

The Anatomist.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 4, 2008... Hayes's history of the illustrated medical text "Gray's Anatomy" coincides with the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of its first publication. Fascinated by the fact that little was known about the famous book's genesis, Hayes combed through...

The Moscow Yiddish Theater.(Brief article)
February 4, 2008... The Moscow Yiddish Theater came into being, with state support, in 1919 and was liquidated by the Soviets in 1948. In the interim, it fostered some of the most daring theatrical innovations of the day, including productions that dispensed with...

Welling Up.(Jonny Greenwood's musical score in 'There Will Be Blood')(Movie review)
February 4, 2008... There may be no scarcer commodity in modern Hollywood than a distinctive and original film score. Most soundtracks lean so heavily on a few preprocessed musical devices--those synthetic swells of strings and cymbals, urging us to swoon in...

Patients, Patients.('In Treatment')(Television program review)
February 4, 2008... To say that the new HBO drama "In Treatment" is boring doesn't really get at what's wrong with the show; the problem, to a great extent, is that the show isn't boring enough. It's a half-hour drama centered on the therapy sessions of a...

Desperate Housewife.('Come Back, Little Sheba')(Theater review)
February 4, 2008... William Inge was sixty years old when he committed suicide, in Los Angeles, on June 10, 1973. For the first half of his life, Inge, who was born in Independence, Kansas, had stayed true to his Bible Belt roots and put off becoming an artist....

Young and Restless.('How She Move' and 'The Witnesses')(Movie review)
February 4, 2008... Watching some of the popular dance movie musicals of recent decades--including "Flashdance," "Footloose," "The Cotton Club," "Strictly Ballroom," and "Chicago"--I've been astonished that audiences could endure and even applaud the bizarre way...

Torch and Twang.('Just A Little Lovin' and 'Watershed')(Sound recording review)
February 11, 2008... When the British singer Dusty Springfield went to American Studios in Memphis, in 1968, to work with the producers Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin and the engineer Tom Dowd, the hope was that they could do for Springfield what they did for Aretha...

Dell'Anima.(Restaurant review)
February 11, 2008... Early in the evening, the back door of this tiny enoteca is often left ajar, to reveal the red neon sign of the Corner Bistro across the street. Inside, youthful attitude and precocity abound. The executive chef, Gabe Thompson, previously...

The Spat.(The Talk of the Town)(Democratic Party's presidential candidates)
February 11, 2008... Correction appended. During the four or five weeks leading up to February 5th--"Tsunami Tuesday," when voters in states with half the nation's population participate in a not quite national primary--the emotional texture of the...

Five On Five.(The Talk of the Town)(Mitt Romney's sons; blogs)
February 11, 2008... Fraternal pride has led to the establishment of many an enterprise: ask the Lehmans, the Warners, the Marxes, or the Jonases. Several months after Mitt Romney announced his intention to run for President, his sons--Tagg (thirty-seven), Matt...

How 'Bout Them Economy.(The Talk of the Town)(economic condition of the United States)
February 11, 2008... Nobody knows anything, although some know-nothings know more than others. The economy is a stalwart, a shambles, or some combination of the two. The pronouncements and analogies fly: we've reached the end of a sixty-year cycle, or a...

Black Hole.(The Talk of the Town)(Empire State Building; interference)
February 11, 2008... There are real differences between the original Bermuda Triangle (between Bermuda, Florida, and Puerto Rico) and the one that, as the News reported last week, plagues a five-block radius around the Empire State Building. The first affects...

Bonds Unbound.(The Talk of the Town)(monoline insurers)
February 11, 2008... If the ongoing turmoil in the world's financial markets has made anything clear, it's that the list of things that can go wrong in those markets is a very long one. Month after month, it seems, another potentially disastrous problem rises to...

A Strike in the Dark.(Israel's air bombing over Syria)
February 11, 2008... Sometime after midnight on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq...

Eerily Composed.(composer Nico Muhly's 'Mothertongue')(Critical essay)
February 11, 2008... Nico Muhly, a composer, was bounding through Chinatown, his hands thrust into the pockets of a black jacket, and a too small Icelandic knitted cap pulled halfway down over his ears, heading for the market under the Manhattan Bridge. Muhly, who...

Call Me Loyd.(nicknames)(Essay)
February 11, 2008... My nickname when I was in junior high and high school, in Kansas City, was Loyd, my father's name. It was given to me inadvertently, in 1967, by my seventh-grade math teacher, who had taught my father thirty years earlier and sometimes forgot...

The Birthday Party.(Blackstone Group's Stephen A. Schwarzman)
February 11, 2008... On June 18, 2007, Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, and his driver approached the Fifth Avenue entrance of the New York Public Library. Schwarzman, a member of the library's board, was being...

True Crime.(murder case of Dariusz Janiszewski)
February 11, 2008... In the southwest corner of Poland, far from any town or city, the Oder River curls sharply, creating a tiny inlet. The banks are matted with wild grass and shrouded by towering pine and oak trees. The only people who regularly trek to the area...

Living Pains.(Mary J. Blige; 'Growing Pains')(Brief biography)
February 11, 2008... Mary J. Blige's eighth studio album, "Growing Pains," defies the conventional wisdom that aging works against female entertainers. Blige has a robust, dark voice, and she moves around melodies in a pleasingly unruly way. She can irrigate a song...

Back-chat, Funny Cracks.(Irish writer Flann O'Brien)(Critical essay)
February 11, 2008... Begob, and the truth would not be played false were a frank man to say that Flann O'Brien, born Brian O'Nolan in Strabane, Ulster, in 1911, and known as Myles na gCopaleen to the readers of his long-standing column "Cruiskeen Lawn" in the Irish...

A Golden Age.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 11, 2008... In this striking debut novel, set in the nineteen-seventies, a young widow and her children become caught up in Bangladesh's war for independence. Rehana exists on the edge of things: a native of Calcutta, she was resettled in Dhaka by her...

People of the Book.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 11, 2008... When an Australian rare-book conservator named Hanna Heath finds a butterfly wing, a salt crystal, a white hair, and bloodstains in the recently rediscovered Sarajevo Haggadah, a late-medieval illuminated codex of uncertain provenance, she sets...

Lucia.(Brief article)
February 11, 2008... Drawing on the letters of his great-great-great-great-grandmother Lucia Mocenigo, a Venetian aristocrat, di Robilant paints a vivacious picture of the Napoleonic age. The fifteen-year-old Lucia's correspondence with her new fiance, the nobleman...

European Tour.(Metropolitan Museum)
February 11, 2008... "If this were four years ago, we would be standing in thin air," Gary Tinterow said in one of the Metropolitan Museum's ten new galleries--making a total of thirty-one, spanning nearly forty thousand square feet--for nineteenth- and...

Killing Joke.(Joel and Ethan Coen)
February 25, 2008... The Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men" casts an ominous and mournful spell from the first shot. Over scenes of a desolate West Texas landscape, an aging sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), ruminating on the new viciousness of crime, says that he's...

Always in Fashion.(Roxy Music's 'The Thrill of It All')(Brief article)(Video recording review)
February 25, 2008... Bands like Fall Out Boy are comfortable wearing eyeliner, but who is man enough now to wear blue eyeshadow and a short-waisted jacket that looks like an enormous silver pompom? In 1973, that long-haired man was Brian Eno, then merely the...

The Smith.(Restaurant review)
February 25, 2008... The two-way, four-lane, Jane Jacobs-hostile stretch of Third Avenue just below Fourteenth Street is flanked by the likes of Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, and seems to be a staging ground for a shock-and-awe campaign against the arteries. Last fall,...

Juice.(The Talk of the Town)(Roger Clemen's drug use case)
February 25, 2008... The last time Major League Baseball players appeared before Congress, three years ago, a Talk of the Town reporter sitting in the back of the room vowed never to return. The customary congressional self-seriousness, combined with an...

Say It All in Six Words.(The Talk of the Town)('Not Quite What I Was Planning')(Book review)
February 25, 2008... Brevity: a good thing in writing. Exploited by texters, gossip columnists, haikuists. Not associated with the biography genre. But then--why shouldn't it be? Life expectancies rise; attention spans shrink. Six words can tell a story. That's a...

The Stimulus Strategy.(The Talk of the Town)(Keynesian economics)
February 25, 2008... When President Bush signed into law last week a fiscal stimulus package of income-tax rebates and business tax breaks, it was the first good news for American consumers in a while. The plan will give many families a twelve-hundred-dollar...

On the Bus.(John McCain's Straight Talk Express)
February 25, 2008... John McCain's campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, has had many incarnations. In 2000, when McCain competed against George W. Bush for the Republican Presidential nomination, the bus was a stage for his around-the-clock monologues with the...

Big Foot.(Tesco and climate change )
February 25, 2008... A little more than a year ago, Sir Terry Leahy, who is the chief executive of the Tesco chain of supermarkets, Britain's largest retailer, delivered a speech to a group called the Forum for the Future, about the implications of climate change....

East Side Story.(Louis Auchincloss)(Biography)
February 25, 2008... It was November on Park Avenue, two in the afternoon, a little brisk, a little damp, the sky the color of gray stone. A car drew up at a building on the east side of the street to collect Louis Auchincloss for an appointment....

The Commoner.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 25, 2008... In 1959, the Crown Prince of Japan broke with centuries of tradition by taking a commoner as his wife. Schwartz's novel imagines the perspective of the bride, who gives up "the jumbled, striving, visceral world" for a life of airless ritual....

Beautiful Children.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 25, 2008... In this ambitious debut novel, set on the seedy streets of Las Vegas, an adolescent boy vanishes, his parents' marriage begins to unravel, a comic-book artist contemplates three-dimensional tattoos, and a stripper seeks refuge in imagining her...

The Next Justice.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 25, 2008... What do we want in a Supreme Court Justice, and how should we get it? Eisgruber, a former Supreme Court clerk, argues that the first step is to do away with the idea that the process can or should be entirely divorced from politics. It's not...

The Lodger Shakespeare.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 25, 2008... This entertaining biographical study of Shakespeare takes as its starting point a tantalizing document: the transcript of a 1612 lawsuit, involving his former landlord and a contested dowry, in which Shakespeare testified. Shakespeare...

What Was I Thinking?('Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions')(Book review)
February 25, 2008... A couple of months ago, I went on-line to order a book. The book had a list price of twenty-four dollars; Amazon was offering it for eighteen. I clicked to add it to my "shopping cart" and a message popped up on the screen. "Wait!" it...

Three Sisters.('Crimes of the Heart')(Theater review)
February 25, 2008... The playwright Beth Henley was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1952, and she has been working steadily since the late nineteen-seventies. In play after play, and in several film scripts (she co-authored the musician David Byrne's 1986...

Gunpowder Plots.(Cai Guo-Qiang's exhibit at the Guggenheim museum)
February 25, 2008... Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese installation and pyrotechnic artist, recently told me that as a child he had a recurrent dream of a fireworks display in Tiananmen Square at which no one was present--no crew, no audience--except him. Keep that in...

Inextinguishable.('The Inextinguishable')(Sound recording review)
February 25, 2008... The great Danish composer Carl Nielsen once imagined that music had a voice, and that it spoke in these terms: "I live tenfold more intensely than any living thing, and die a thousandfold deeper. I love the vast surface of silence; and it is my...