The New Yorker articles from January 2006

The New Yorker archives from January 2006

UP CLOSE AND NOT PERSONAL.(The Talk of the Town)(professional ball players)
January 9, 2006... With the bowl games at hand, the N.B.A. and N.H.L. seasons in full flow, the N.F.L. playoffs just ahead, and pitchers-and-catchers a bare six weeks away, sports fans may be wondering once again why all this repletion isn't more satisfying....

THE LATTE CLASS.(The Talk of the Town)(Starbucks Corp. coffe shops)
January 9, 2006... On the train up from Philadelphia the other day, Bryant Simon, a professor of history at Temple University, overheard two conversations about Starbucks. When he reached Penn Station, he made a pit stop at the Starbucks at Thirty-fifth Street...

LUNCH WITH TOMMY LEE.(The Talk of the Town)(Tommy Lee Jones)(Interview)
January 9, 2006... Tommy Lee Jones, actor, producer, and first-time big-screen director, was having lunch the other day at The Players club, in Gramercy Park. Jones appears in his new movie, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," as a gray-bearded, sun-fried...

EMIGRES.(The Talk of the Town)(emigrants, Brooklyn, New York)
January 9, 2006... One recent Saturday afternoon, some three hundred and sixty years after Dutch settlers chartered the town of Breuckelen, representatives of a more recent migration were milling around the back patio of one of the borough's newer bars. They had...

GETTING WHERE?(The Talk of the Town)(transit strike, New York City)
January 9, 2006... And on the second day spam arrived. It read, "New Meditation CDs Equip Professionals Around the World to Conquer Daily Tasks with Zeal and Confidence." Glad to hear it, but this did not address the problem of getting to and from work. If...

BUTTERFLY LESSONS.(Polygonia c-album)
January 9, 2006... Polygonia c-album, generally known as the comma butterfly, spends most of its life pretending to be something else. In its larval, or caterpillar, stage, it has a chalky stripe down its back which makes it look uncannily like a bird dropping....

THE POWER OF HAIR.(hair transplantation)
January 9, 2006... Ali Amin sat in a small mahogany panelled room in Beverly Hills, his chin in his hand. He was contemplating the seven degrees of hair loss. On a low table in front of him, a chart showed a sequence of line drawings of a man's head, turned in...

DELUGED.(New Orleans)
January 9, 2006... Tim Bruneau discovered New Orleans in 1997, when, as a twenty-three-year-old soldier at Fort Polk, Louisiana, he was close enough to the city to hit Bourbon Street on weekends. He'd spent two years in Panama as a military policeman, and New...

A FAMOUS MAN.(James Agee)(Critical Essay)
January 9, 2006... In July of 1936, James Agee, a writer for Fortune and an avid Greenwich Village partygoer, drinker, and talker, found himself in the house of a taciturn Alabama family he called the Gudgers. Henry Luce's business magazine was then in its early,...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Get a Life)(The People's Act of Love)(A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York)(Two Lives)(Book Review)
January 9, 2006... Get a Life, by Nadine Gordimer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $21). At first, the title of this novel--a glib phrase, usually followed by an exclamation point--seems slightly off-key for Gordimer, a Nobel laureate and an activist. But Gordimer has...

ANIMAL ATTRACTION.(Henri Rousseau, Tate Modern, exhibition)(Critical Essay)
January 9, 2006... "The hungry lion throws itself on the antelope, devours him. . . . Birds of prey have each torn a strip of flesh from the poor animal that is shedding a tear! The sun sets." So wrote Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) of his large painting "The Hungry...

GAME PLAYING.(Match Point)(Casanova)(Movie Review)
January 9, 2006... You could say that Woody Allen, by shifting his milieu from New York's Upper East Side to London's elegant Belgravia, has not so much re-invented himself (as some have suggested) as gone back to the motherland of the Wasp good taste he's always...

ABRAMOFFED.(Jack Abramoff's conspiration for bribe, political lobbying scandal)
January 16, 2006... If present trends continue, and if ordinary Americans follow the inspiring example set last week by their elected leaders, 2006 should be a record year for charitable giving. President Bush himself led the way with a six-thousand-dollar...

FROG TALE.(Bloomberg L.P.'s services)
January 16, 2006... A rumor came around recently that the employees at Bloomberg LP, the financial-information company that Michael Bloomberg founded and still owns, have adopted, as an unofficial corporate mascot, an albino frog. Word had it that the frog is a...

WANNA BUY A BRIDGE?(The Talk of the Town)(Willis Avenue Bridge, New York City)
January 16, 2006... Hi, Mr. Vandemark? Are you there? . . . Can you pick up? . . . I guess you're not there. O.K., this is the Talk of the Town Realty Office. I'm still working on apartments for you and Mrs. Vandemark, but something else just came up that I...

MUNICIPAL VELVET.(The Talk of the Town)(horse-drawn carriage driving)
January 16, 2006... What's black, brown, or white and guaranteed, by local law, an accommodation with a nine-foot-high ceiling, along with free access to a bucket of water and mineralized red salt? A carriage horse, of course, any one of the two hundred and four...

LIFERS.(The Talk of the Town)(job insecurity)
January 16, 2006... In the summer of 2004, at the Republican National Convention, President Bush declared that the rules of the American job market had changed for good. "The workers of our parents' generation typically had one job, one skill, one career, often...

NAME THAT SOURCE.(government secrets leak)
January 16, 2006... On December 16th, the Times, citing anonymous government officials, reported that the National Security Agency has engaged in extensive, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in a secret program authorized by President Bush in 2002. At a...

HERE BELOW.(Fictional Work)
January 16, 2006... On a spring Sunday three years ago, my wife, Carol, and I drove out to the Palisades Cemetery, which I hadn't visited in forty years. The place was harder to find than I'd expected, and we had to ask for help at the back door of one of a row of...

PRAIRIE FIRE.(Brandenn Bremmer)
January 16, 2006... Last May, Patti and Martin Bremmer promised each other that they would get through the second Sunday of the month without mentioning that it was Mother's Day. Brandenn, their son, had committed suicide in March, at the age of fourteen, and...

COOL HEART.(Bunkerd Faphimai)(Biography)
January 16, 2006... Bunkerd Faphimai, a three-time world champion in Muay Thai, or Thai boxing, has a gym called Fight and Fitness, on Bryant Street in San Francisco, across from Dad's "No Collateral OK" Bail Bonds, on the tail end of bail-bond row. In the...

EAT AND RUN.(obesity)
January 16, 2006... On January 20, 2003, the English journalist William Leith decides he has to lose weight. That's the day he gets on the bathroom scale and finds that it's "the fattest day of my life": he's just over six feet tall and he weighs two hundred and...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Brooklyn Follies, The Wit in the Dungeon, Jejuri, Time Was Soft There)(Book Review)
January 16, 2006... The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster (Henry Holt; $24). After a "sad and ridiculous life" in the suburbs, Nathan Glass retires, gets divorced, and moves to Brooklyn to die. To pass the time, he decides to write an account of mishaps and...

HELLO, AGAIN.(Neil Diamond's songs )
January 16, 2006... During a performance at Madison Square Garden last August, the sixty-four-year-old singer and songwriter Neil Diamond asked everyone in the audience to turn to a neighbor and say, "I love you very much." Several thousand people, many of them...

AMERICAN IDIOTS.(animated television shows)
January 16, 2006... Animated television shows and the economy of the United States have something in common--they both depend on a precious natural resource. But, while the oil the country relies on will run out someday, the fuel that keeps TV cartoons going,...

CHILL.(movies )
January 16, 2006... If you were out of the country, or out of your mind, for the past year, you may wish to know what you missed. One glance at the titles of the most admired films, and you will wonder what the hell was going on. "Brokeback Mountain," "Broken...

TABLES FOR TWO.(202)(Restaurant Review)
January 23, 2006... 202 -- 75 Ninth Ave., at 15th St. (646-638-1173)--Occupying a commodious space on the ground floor of Chelsea Market, 202 suggests an epicure's version of the old parlor game Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?--Restaurant, Bar, Boutique? "Everything...

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS.(The Talk of the Town)(judges, judgments, politics)
January 23, 2006... Richard A. Posner, the Chicago judge and conservative polymath, recently made a revealing confession in the pages of the Harvard Law Review. Of the 2004-05 Supreme Court term, he wrote, "Almost a quarter century as a federal appellate judge has...

STUDY BUDDY.(The Talk of the Town)(public libraries' homeworkNYC.org)
January 23, 2006... Whatever side you're on in the homework wars (more vs. less, phonics vs. "whole language"), a case can be made that study habits formed in grade school establish patterns for negotiating life as an adult. The kid whose mom builds his diorama...

MR. BERENDT'S PARTY.(The Talk of the Town)(John Berendt, author)
January 23, 2006... Mr. Berendt, like Mrs. Dalloway, said that he would buy the flowers himself. The vases were filled with white roses. It was quarter past seven. He arranged some slivers of cheese on a tray, then opened the refrigerator and pressed a palm to a...

DOG EAT DOG.(The Talk of the Town)(The Little Dog Laughed"'s Julie White)
January 23, 2006... The actress Julie White, who stars in the new play "The Little Dog Laughed," at the Second Stage Theatre, arrived at Orso for dinner one night last week with fingers black from signing autographs with an exploding Sharpie. After stopping in the...

POSTSCRIPT.(The Talk of the Town)(Harriet Walden, periodical editor)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
January 23, 2006... Harriet Walden, who died on January 7th, at the age of ninety-one, had a forty-year career at this magazine. She was hired in 1944, to replace Harold Ross's secretary--her husband, William Walden, who had joined the Army. Later, she managed a...

MORALES'S MISTAKE.(neoliberalism in Bolivia for economic reform)
January 23, 2006... Twenty years ago, a radical economic experiment began in Latin America. With economies beleaguered by foreign debt and runaway inflation, many of the region's politicians decided that salvation lay in a program of market-friendly reforms that...

THE MURROW DOCTRINE.(Edward R. Murrow)
January 23, 2006... There is a memorable entry in William Shirer's "Berlin Diary" in which he describes--as, in effect, something that happened at work one day--the birth of broadcast journalism. It was Sunday, March 13, 1938, the day after Nazi troops entered...

THE LOTTERY.(Green Card Lottery, migration to United States )
January 23, 2006... Raul Jara's grandfather tilled a rich man's land on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, until agrarian reform in the nineteen-sixties made four acres of it his. By the time Raul was born, in 1971, Lima had grown to surround the Jaras' compound, making...

THE GENERAL.(Ariel Sharon)
January 23, 2006... As far back as I can remember, I remember Arik Sharon. First, he was Arik of the Paratroopers, whose brutal acts of retaliation in the nineteen-fifties, after the War of Independence, exemplified the young Israeli state's reply to attacks by...

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.(vehicle pursuits, Los Angeles)
January 23, 2006... There was a brief historical period when the rest of America understood life in Los Angeles. It began at 5:56 P.M. Pacific time on June 17, 1994, and ended two hours and fifty-one minutes later. Maybe you missed it. That was the night that O....

BRIEFY NOTED.(Dog Days, State of War and Building Jerusalem )(Book Review)
January 23, 2006... Dog Days, by Ana Marie Cox (Riverhead; $23.95). This first novel, by a former writer of the political blog Wonkette, aims at being a satire of Washington mores but comes off as Beltway chick lit. Melanie Thorton, a campaign worker for a...

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.(Battlestar Galactica)(Television Program Review)
January 23, 2006... It's easy for people who aren't science- fiction enthusiasts to laugh at the genre--its earnestness, its lingo, its fans' awestruck romance with the idea that God is in the details of equipment and uniforms and security codes and how many moons...

GHOSTS AND HOSTS.(Beauty of the Father)(Theater Review)
January 23, 2006... In an era when writing dialogue comes more naturally to most authors than intellection does, Nilo Cruz is an anomaly. Unlike a number of his contemporaries--Neil LaBute, Richard Greenberg, Kathleen Tolan--the forty-two-year-old Cruz is not a...

BATTLE LINES.(Go for Zucker)(Why We Fight)(Movie Review)
January 23, 2006... Jaecki Zucker (Henry Hubchen), the hero of the German comedy "Go for Zucker," loses his family when the Berlin Wall goes up, in 1961. His mother and his brother, Samuel, leave East Berlin for Frankfurt and capitalism, while fourteen-year-old...