The New Yorker articles from February 2009

The New Yorker archives from February 2009

Out of the Past.(Italian movie director Roberto Rossellini)
February 2, 2009... For the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, there was no essential difference between his neorealist war stories, his romantic melodramas starring his wife at the time, Ingrid Bergman, and the meticulous bio-pics of historical figures (many...

Braeburn.(Restaurant review)
February 2, 2009... The Braeburn apple sprang from a chance seedling, but the Braeburn in the West Village exudes careful cultivation. The restaurant's lines are both modern and rustic--sleek teardrop light fixtures appeal to the urbanite, alder-wood branches in...

The President'S Hero.(The Talk of the Town)(John R. Lewis)
February 2, 2009... A couple of decades ago, when Barack Obama was on a break from Harvard Law School and visiting friends in Chicago, he carried around a copy of "Parting the Waters," the first volume of Taylor Branch's magnificent trilogy about Martin Luther...

Step On It.(The Talk of the Town)(Sophia Lear drove in Barack Obama's motorcade)
February 2, 2009... Two Fridays before the Inauguration, Sophia Lear, a twenty-three-year-old editorial assistant at The New Republic, was at her friend Isaac Chotiner's apartment in Dupont Circle, watching the movie "Cocktail," when she got a text message from a...

Third-string Rummy.(The Talk of the Town)(former third-string quarterback Donald H. Rumsfeld during the Ivy Football Association Dinner)
February 2, 2009... By last Thursday night, with the changing of the guard in Washington complete, some star power had returned to New York, and there, in the grand ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria, sat an assortment of media and political figures in tuxedos, such...

The Wizard.(Booker T. Washington)(Essay)
February 2, 2009... Booker T. Washington was already a celebrity--a self-made man, and the spokesman for black America--when he arrived at the White House on October 16, 1901, for a dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt. They had plenty to talk about:...

The Rationalist.(Mohammad Tabibian)(Essay)
February 2, 2009... Not long ago, I visited the office of a financial consulting firm on a quiet dead-end street just north of the commercial center of Tehran. Several flights up, amid bare but light-filled rooms with worn nineteen-fifties-era office furniture, I...

Ms. Kennedy Regrets.(Caroline Kennedy's withdrawal from consideration for the Senate seat)(Essay)
February 2, 2009... Last Tuesday, Caroline Kennedy attended the Presidential Inauguration. The sun was shining on the Capitol, the sky was blue, the Marine Band was playing. Barack Obama, for whom she had campaigned ardently for nearly a year, believing him to be...

A Place Called Hope.(Barack Obama's inauguration)
February 2, 2009... T he Inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth President of the United States had much to interest those whose attention may not have been held by the historical and global import of the occasion. The trains, birthdays, weather,...

Brothers.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 2, 2009... Yu Hua's impressive fifth novel, a family history documenting four decades of profound social and cultural transformation in China, begins on a toilet. In a sleepy rural outpost known as Liu Town, fourteen-year-old Baldy Li is caught peeping at...

Lark and Termite.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 2, 2009... This poetic novel alternates between the last hours of Robert Leavitt, a corporal in the U.S. Army, pinned down in a tunnel in South Korea, in 1950, and the story of his disabled son, Termite, who, nine years later, is living with his half...

The Invention of Air.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 2, 2009... The author of "Everything Bad Is Good for You" provides an entertaining account of the eighteenth-century scientist and radical Joseph Priestley's monumental discovery that plants restore "something fundamental"--what we now know as oxygen--to...

Thames.(Thames: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd)(Brief article)(Book review)
February 2, 2009... This lavishly produced volume is Ackroyd's omnivorous paean to "the shortest river in the world to acquire such a famous history." Eschewing standard organization, Ackroyd jumps from today's posh London banks to Roger Bacon's observatory at...

Heroes and Zeroes.(Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed)(Book review)
February 2, 2009... As a child, I was frightened of A.T.M.s. Specifically, I was frightened of the first A.T.M. I ever saw, the one outside the imposing headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, at 1 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong. This would have been...

Center Stage.(Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts)
February 2, 2009... Alice Tully Hall, and the Juilliard School complex of which it is a part, were the last elements of Lincoln Center to be built, and when they opened, in 1969, they seemed like an ambitious attempt to bring cutting-edge brutalism to the place....

Smother Love.(The American Plan)(Theater review)
February 2, 2009... Did you come of age in those sweet summers of the early nineteen-sixties, when the airwaves were full of rock and roll's doo-wop promise of joy and the nation was full of J.F.K.'s eloquent promise of a New Frontier? I did. Life seemed to be...

Cheap Seats.(price of classical music concert tickets)(Essay)
February 2, 2009... The image of the classical concert hall as a playground for the rich is planted deep in the cultural psyche. When Hollywood filmmakers set a scene at the symphony, twits in evening wear fill the frame, their jaws tight and their noses held...

Americans at Large.(Taken)(Movie review)
February 2, 2009... On August 25, 2006, a Romanian named Cristian Nemescu was killed in a car crash at the age of twenty-seven. He was returning from an editing suite, where he had been working on a cut of "California Dreamin'." This was Nemescu's first feature as...

Back in the Fold.('New York Days' and 'Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street')(Sound recording review)
February 9, 2009... The ECM record label, the brainchild of the production auteur Manfred Eicher, engenders deep loyalty from its artists--Keith Jarrett, for instance, has been with the company for nearly forty years. And the exit door permits reentry: a pair of...

John Updike.(The Talk of the Town)(In memoriam)
February 9, 2009... John Updike (1932-2009) once said that his first publication and nearly sixty-year-long relationship with this magazine was the great professional event of his life--no, he called it the ecstatic event of his professional life--and he never...

The Fadeaway.(The Talk of the Town)(John Updike)(In memoriam)
February 9, 2009... Colleagues for more than half a century, writer-editor partners for more than half that time, John Updike and I were close at a fixed distance--he at home north of Boston, I in my New Yorker office near Bryant Park--but spoke voluminously by...

Hazardous Materials?(The Talk of the Town)(concept of moral hazard)
February 9, 2009... In the course of the ongoing financial crisis, we've been ceaselessly reminded of the dangers of moral hazard--the idea that if people are insulated from the negative effects of their gambles they are more likely to act rashly. When Bear...

That Buzzing Sound.(Tinnitus)
February 9, 2009... I noticed the sound one evening about a year ago. At first, I thought an alarm had been set off. Then I realized that the noise--a high-pitched drone--was mainly in my right ear. It has been with me ever since. The tone varies, from a soft...

The Promised Land.(Guangzhou's Canaan market)
February 9, 2009... Joseph Nwaosu, a Nigerian exporter, has yet to acclimate to the winter damp of Guangzhou, on China's southern coast. Over a button-down shirt he usually adds a heavy brown turtleneck sweater and a rumpled tan parka; when necessary, he wears a...

The Ponzi State.(real-estate market of Florida and the economic crisis)
February 9, 2009... All along State Road 54 in Pasco County, Florida--forty-five minutes northeast of Tampa--the pine trees and palmettos and orange groves have been cleared to make way for new developments. Over the past few years, these inland subdivisions,...

The Queen.(Beyonce Knowles in today's music industry)
February 9, 2009... Bruce Springsteen is the de-facto governor of New Jersey, and if America were Europe Aretha Franklin would have a duchy, so both obviously belonged at the joyous Obamathon. But what about Beyonce Knowles, the twenty-seven-year-old who was...

Blonde Roots.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 9, 2009... This dizzying satire imagines a counterfactual history in which the roles of Africans and Europeans in the slave trade are reversed. Doris Scagglethorpe, the daughter of English farmers, is one day snatched up from her countryside cottage by...

The Housekeeper and the Professor.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 9, 2009... This novel is narrated by a woman who works for a housekeeping agency in a small Japanese city. Temperate by nature, she is assigned a difficult client, a former mathematics professor who, because of an automobile accident, has only eighty...

The Bard.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 9, 2009... Robert Burns died an exciseman (tracking down smugglers in the port of Dumfries), but he lived, loved, and versified as an outlaw. Incapable of keeping his "guid weely-willy p--le" in his pants, he produced an impressive number of bastards, as...

The Fires of Vesuvius.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 9, 2009... The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. preserved a uniquely rich sample of Roman life. Buried among the ruins of Pompeii are frescoes, graffiti ("Atimetus got me pregnant"), campaign ads, and housewares; the victims themselves left hollows in...

Hedda, Get Your Gun.(Hedda Gabler)(Theater review)
February 9, 2009... "Hedda"--a name that means "strife"--was Henrik Ibsen's working title for his 1890 masterpiece (now in revival at the American Airlines, in a new adaptation by Christopher Shinn). To the first name, Ibsen added the surname of his character's...

Local Hero.(Symphony in Three Movements)(Dance review)
February 9, 2009... When the curtain came down on the opening number of Miami City Ballet's season at City Center late last month, the applause fairly rocked the hall. The dancers, taking their bows, were visibly surprised. I thought some of them were going to...

Curious Cases.(Academy Awards nominees)(Movie review)
February 9, 2009... Is it the seamlessly blended amber and caramel colors, the slowly gliding camera work? Or is it the sentiments that fall like flakes of wet snow into the dialogue? Many elements join to make the beautifully crafted "Curious Case of Benjamin...

Pop Notes.('Hold Time', 'Black John')(Sound recording review)
February 23, 2009... The singer-songwriter M. Ward established a loyal following in the course of the decade before his breakout album, last year. Somewhat confusingly, that effort was a side project, a duet album with the actress and singer Zooey Deschanel...

Txikito.(Restaurant review)
February 23, 2009... First, the obligatory name exegesis: it's pronounced "chee-kee-toe," meaning "little" in Euskara, the Basque language. People make a big deal over the tic-tac-toe phonetics--"All I ask is that you name the restaurant something that's a little...

Partisanship, by the Bye.(The Talk of the Town)
February 23, 2009... Throughout the fortnight-long Battle of the Stimulus Package--the Capitol Hill confrontation that culminates this week in a signing ceremony for a historically unprecedented piece of legislation that will inject more than three-quarters of a...

A Betting Woman.(The Talk of the Town)(Jean Kennedy Smith)
February 23, 2009... After Barack Obama won the Presidency, Jean Kennedy Smith--the eighth of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children, who had supported Obama, despite having served as Ambassador to Ireland under Bill Clinton--had some celebrating to do. She...

Rabbit Ears.(The Talk of the Town)(Antenna King owner Henry Langan)(Interview)
February 23, 2009... The handoff of the White House seemed like a piece of cake next to America's transition from analog to digital TV signal. With the White House, you switch residents but get a lot of the same stuff: podiums, helicopters, tour groups. With the...

Head Count.(The Talk of the Town)(Homeless Outreach Population Estimate)
February 23, 2009... Shortly before eleven the other night, a group of about a hundred volunteers shuffled into the overheated cafeteria of P.S. 191, on West Sixty-first Street, to gird themselves for a distinctive night on the town. They were about to set off to...

Naked City.(The Talk of the Town)(casting call seeking models to pose naked for an advertising campaign)
February 23, 2009... Back in January--the time of year when the flesh feels lumpiest, the hair dullest, the skin pastiest--the producers of Neil LaBute's "Reasons to Be Pretty," which moves to Broadway next month, held an open casting call, seeking "real people...

Opening Night.(Slumdog Millionaire)
February 23, 2009... Gautam Nagar is one of thirty-odd slums, comprising ninety thousand families, on land owned by the Airports Authority of India, in Mumbai. It is ten minutes by foot to the international terminal and is ringed by five of the city's smartest...

Shoot!(engineer and gunsmith Jerry Baber creates armed robots)
February 23, 2009... At the age of seventy-four, Jerry Baber has winnowed his primary interests in life to four subjects: shotguns, robots, women, and cars. When Baber is holding forth--his default mode of communication being the filibuster--his conversation tends...

The Hard Cases.(Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri)
February 23, 2009... The last "enemy combatant" being detained in America is incarcerated at the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina--a tan, low-slung building situated amid acres of grassy swampland. The prisoner, known internally as EC#2,...

The Background Hum.(Ian McEwan's novels)
February 23, 2009... All novelists are scholars of human behavior, but Ian McEwan pursues the matter with more scientific rigor than the job strictly requires. On a recent hike through the woods surrounding his new country house--a renovated seventeenth-century...

Saved from Drowning.(Donald Barthelme's "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" and other works)
February 23, 2009... In the spring of 1983, Donald Barthelme invited about twenty people to dinner at a restaurant in SoHo. The guest list included Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, William Gass, Kurt Vonnegut, Walter Abish,...

Drood.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 23, 2009... In this creepy intertextual tale of professional jealousy and possible madness, Wilkie Collins tells of his friendship and rivalry with Charles Dickens, and of the mysterious phantasm named Edwin Drood, who pursues them both. Drood, cadaverous...

The Sky Below.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 23, 2009... D'Erasmo's latest novel tells the story of a misanthropic obituary writer for a dying New York newspaper, who views his life through a series of memory boxes modelled on the assemblage art of Joseph Cornell. "I assiduously collected interesting...

Somewhere Towards the End.(Brief article)(Book review)
February 23, 2009... Athill spent more than fifty years editing writers including Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Jean Rhys, and V. S. Naipaul. In later life, she "had the luck to discover" that she could write; her book-world memoir, "Stet," appeared when she was...

Hope And Glory.(Shepard Fairey's Obama "Hope" poster)
February 23, 2009... It was only about a year ago, though it feels like half a lifetime, that Shepard Fairey created the most efficacious American political illustration since "Uncle Sam Wants You": the Obama "Hope" poster. In innumerable variants, the craning,...

Gritty Cities.('Gomorrah', 'Two Lovers')(Movie review)
February 23, 2009... The first thing you should know about "Gomorrah" is that no fewer than three members of its cast have been arrested on suspicion of illegal activities. There could be no more unimpeachable testament, surely, to the integrity of Matteo Garrone's...