The New Yorker articles from January 2007

The New Yorker archives from January 2007

POP NOTES.(Sound recording review)
January 8, 2007... INSTANT REPLAY -- Here are some records released in the past year that deserve a second listen: Babyshambles, "The Blinding EP" (Regal)--The London musician Pete Doherty has interrupted a series of arrests to release an E.P., which will...

GOTHAMITIS.(The Talk of the Town)
January 8, 2007... It is a sign of the times--which, a Greenwich Village bard once told us, change--that two former mayors of New York may run for President next year, and no one thinks that either candidacy is even slightly a joke. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani...

WHEELS OF JUSTICE.(The Talk of the Town)
January 8, 2007... Like the nanny scandals of the early nineties, several recent public disgraces have counted in common a menial theme--that of the professional driver. There was Yoko Ono's chauffeur, who either tried to extort money from his boss or was the...

RAP MAP.(The Talk of the Town)
January 8, 2007... From water pipes to porn shops, cartographers have charted almost every aspect of local urban life, giving rise to a sort of cottage industry: the New York City specialty map. The latest--and one you are not likely to see unless you run in...

OXFORD ON THE HUDSON.(The Talk of the Town)
January 8, 2007... The name of Robert Rosenkranz, the businessman and philanthropist, is not universally recognized, even on Park Avenue. "I know a variety of Rosen-kranz-es--which one is he?" asked Robert Albertson, a principal at Sandler O'Neill, as he mingled...

SYNERGY WITH THE DEVIL.(The Talk of the Town)
January 8, 2007... A year ago, progressive activists and policy wonks descended upon Caracas, Venezuela, for the World Social Forum, a kind of Davos conference for the global left. People packed into the Caracas Hilton to listen to panel discussions on the evils...

THE UNBEAUTIFUL GAME.
January 8, 2007... Joe Namath is late. Promised for a twelve-thirty press "availability" in the lounge of the press box at Giants Stadium, in East Rutherford, New Jersey--that vital place where the fulcrum of the First Amendment, free food, is celebrated by...

OPEN SECRETS.
January 8, 2007... On the afternoon of October 23, 2006, Jeffrey Skilling sat at a table at the front of a federal courtroom in Houston, Texas. He was wearing a navy-blue suit and a tie. He was fifty-two years old, but looked older. Huddled around him were eight...

BIG PICTURES.
January 8, 2007... The device was as elegant as an old cigarette case and not much larger than a child's palm. I was holding a video iPod, poised at the frontier of a new digital age, a new platform for movies, a new convenience that will annihilate old...

NIGHTS AT THE OPERA.
January 8, 2007... Lorenzo Da Ponte, who wrote the librettos for "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "Cosi Fan Tutte," has been a troubling item for Mozart scholars. Almost everyone agrees that Da Ponte supplied Mozart with better texts than the...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
January 8, 2007... Arlington Park, by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $23). Cusk's sixth novel portrays the lives of contemporary middle- and upper-middle-class English mothers living in a placid, prestigious London suburb "where women drank coffee all day...

STONE OPERA.
January 8, 2007... Scenes of the Near and Far East have unfolded thousands of times on the Metropolitan Opera stage, courtesy of "Madama Butterfly," "Turandot," "Aida," and other masterpieces of Orientalism. This season, with the premiere performances of Tan...

INTELLIGENTSIA.
January 8, 2007... History as distinct from destiny: that is what the Czech-born playwright Tom Stoppard shows us near the start of "Voyage," the first play of "The Coast of Utopia," his alternately reckless, romantic, boring, and exhilarating trilogy on the...

CLASSICAL NOTES.
January 15, 2007... BEST OF 2006 -- Louis Andriessen, "Writing to Vermeer" (Nonesuch)--The setting of the brilliantly eclectic Dutch composer's recent opera (with a libretto by Peter Greenaway) alternates between the quotidian serenity of the painter's household...

DESOLATION ROWS.(The Talk of the Town)
January 15, 2007... The hanging of Saddam Hussein was meant to be, by the depraved standards of the Iraq war, something of a feel-good moment. President Bush saw it that way, or claimed to. A statement issued in his name stressed that Saddam's execution had been...

ROACH!(The Talk of the Town)
January 15, 2007... It is a common misunderstanding, propagated by the movies, that a grizzly bear, when it stands on its hind legs, is preparing to attack. In fact, it is just rising up for a better look. So remain calm. Don't run, shoot, climb a tree, or curl...

THE CHAPPAQUA THREE.(The Talk of the Town)
January 15, 2007... The adult American suburban male, Northeastern division, marks the onset of maturity with the display of certain physical attributes (bathrobe, hard shoes, London Fog outerwear) and behaviors (mowing grass, drinking on commuter trains). This...

WEST SIDE COUP.(The Talk of the Town)
January 15, 2007... Hell's Kitchen today bears little resemblance to the world of "West Side Story" and dock wallopers. The old Tenth Avenue saloons frequented by members of the sadistic Westies mob have been replaced by sports bars and brunch spots, and most of...

SHREDDING PARTY.(The Talk of the Town)
January 15, 2007... A lot of stuff was shredded when Shred Across America, a seventeen-city document-shredding tour, stopped in Union Square recently. People who had heard about what Staples, the tour's sponsor, was calling "a mobile shredding event" brought over...

PLAYOFFS.
January 15, 2007... When I was a child, my parents and teachers told me about a man who was very strong. They told me that he could lift mountains. They told me that he could part the sea. They told me that it was important to keep this man happy: when we obeyed...

EXPECTATIONS.
January 15, 2007... Like most juniors at Manual High School, in the impoverished northeast quarter of Denver, Colorado, Norberto Felix-Cruz was Mexican, multiply pierced, and laden with chains. Although he was quiet by nature, he clanked when he walked. On his way...

AN ACQUIRING EYE.
January 15, 2007... The Neue Galerie, a museum at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street that is dedicated to Austrian and German art, occupies the former home of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III, and is the kind of place that is usually described as a jewel box:...

GOD'S UNDERTAKER.
January 15, 2007... One Sunday morning in the middle of the nineteenth century, at a church in the Dorset village of Stinsford, a boy named Thomas Hardy had an experience that, more than sixty years later, he remembered as causing him "much mental distress." As...

BOMBAY NOIR.
January 15, 2007... In Vikram Chandra's new novel, "Sacred Games" (HarperCollins; $27.95), Ganesh Gaitonde, a sort of Bombay Al Capone, expresses his contempt for the English-speaking classes, people oblivious of the rampant criminality underpinning their serene...

PRISONERS.
January 15, 2007... Martin Amis's recent book "Koba the Dread" (2002), a denunciation of Stalin's regime, was itself denounced by some critics. Why, they asked, had it taken Amis so long, until he was in his fifties, to realize that Stalin's Soviet Union was not a...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
January 15, 2007... Returning to Earth, by Jim Harrison (Grove; $24). In this moving meditation on life and afterlife, a northern Michigan family confronts devastating illness and death. Donald, suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease and disinclined to lose any more...

POWER PLAY.
January 15, 2007... HBO has become hostage to its own success. We now expect its dramas not only to make us feel--a trick that any scriptwriter can perform by giving a tot a limp or a dog--but, rarest of joys, to make us think. The corpse-eating pigs and baroquely...

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES.
January 15, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File Humbert Humbert, the debonair lovesick scoundrel who narrates Nabokov's "Lolita," tries mightily to convince us of his essential sanity. And Barbara Covett, the predatory aging schoolteacher who narrates...

JAZZ NOTES.
January 22, 2007... BEST OF 2006 -- Michael Carvin, "Marsalis Music Honors Michael Carvin" (Marsalis Music)--A mainstream horn-plus-rhythm quartet let loose on standards. Do you feel the dust settling already? Not on this sharp set, led by an under-recorded...

TABLES FOR TWO.
January 22, 2007... BLT BURGER -- 470 Sixth Ave., between 11th and 12th Sts. (212-243-8226)--BLT, as most New Yorkers have come to learn, stands not for the bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich (memorably cited, along with Baked Alaska and lobster thermidor, as...

THE PLANNER.(The Talk of the Town)
January 22, 2007... Watching George Bush's televised speech last week, when he revealed what he called "the main elements" of his plan to rescue Iraq, was like watching a slightly nervous lieutenant colonel read PowerPoint slides. There was an unmistakable...

CABLE GUY.(The Talk of the Town)
January 22, 2007... Passersby negotiating Columbus Circle during the next few weeks will be unable to help noticing an enormous square box floating in the lofty lobby of the Time Warner Center, lit from within like a Japanese lantern and looming disconcertingly...

E-VOTE.(The Talk of the Town)
January 22, 2007... Nothing excites an electoral conspiracy theorist like electronic voting machines. There's the latest foul-up in Florida (eighteen thousand votes lost in the Thirteenth District in November), or the Princeton professor--you can watch him on...

SAY CHEESE!(The Talk of the Town)
January 22, 2007... Now joining Sao Paulo fever and the Hong Kong flu is Paris syndrome, a form of psychiatric collapse prevalent in young Japanese tourists on their first visit to Paris. Each year, according to Dr. Hiroaki Ota, about a dozen vacationers suffer...

THE SKY-HIGH CLUB.(The Talk of the Town)
January 22, 2007... Even the most jaded observer of American corporate culture had to blink when, earlier this month, Home Depot's board of directors handed the company's C.E.O., Bob Nardelli, more than two hundred million dollars after pushing him out of his job....

MR. GREEN.
January 22, 2007... Amory Lovins's home, which also serves as his office and "bioshelter," is open for self-guided tours weekdays from nine o'clock in the morning until four in the afternoon. Built into a mountainside above Snowmass, Colorado, it has curved stone...

MADE IN THE SHADE.
January 22, 2007... You could say that Leslie Harrington owes much of her success to the rise of wasabi green. Harrington is a color consultant who helps manufacturers determine the palette of their products and packages. Her clients have included Crayola, Pottery...

AZZAM THE AMERICAN.
January 22, 2007... Adam Gadahn, the first American to be charged with treason in more than fifty years, was born in Oregon, grew up in rural California, and converted to Islam at the age of seventeen. He is now twenty-eight. No one who knew him before his...

DIGGING FOR DODOS.
January 22, 2007... Julian Hume, a British paleontologist, is one of the world's leading authorities on the dodo, the large, flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius--five hundred miles east of Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean--until its extinction, at...

VEGETABLE LOVE.(Interview)
January 22, 2007... During the great black-pudding controversies of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it was put about that Sir Isaac Newton abstained from this dish because of the Old Testament prohibition against eating blood. After his death,...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
January 22, 2007... Paula Spencer, by Roddy Doyle (Viking; $24.95). In this snappy, brilliant novel, Doyle revisits the life of Paula Spencer, the heroine of his 1996 book, "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors." A decade on, Paula has been off the bottle for four...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
January 22, 2007... The Virgin of Flames, by Chris Abani (Penguin; $14). The third novel by the Nigerian-born Abani centers on Black, an artist in East Los Angeles who inadvertently turns the building where he lives above a tattoo parlor into a shrine by appearing...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
January 22, 2007... Lover of Unreason, by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev (Carroll & Graf; $27.95). Assia Wevill, known as the woman who took Ted Hughes from Sylvia Plath, not only lived in Plath's apartment after her suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning but killed...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
January 22, 2007... Paris, by Andrew Hussey (Bloomsbury; $32.50). Hussey highlights the "marginal and subversive" in this entertaining cultural history. Chronicling the city's development "in space, in timeand on the street," he pays keen attention to traces of...

HOT TYPE.
January 22, 2007... Reality shows exploit dubious myths by turning them into contests--you really can lose thirty pounds, snow a billionaire into giving you a dream job, win the cheerleader's heart with a rose. Simply assemble the cast from a Benetton ad, serve...

A FAMILY AFFAIR.
January 22, 2007... Lillian Hellman's penultimate play, "Toys in the Attic" (now in revival at the Pearl Theatre Company), first produced in 1960, is as creaky as an old four-poster bed. Though it can be pleasant to rest for a moment in its carefully embroidered...

TABLES FOR TWO.
January 29, 2007... BAR MARTIGNETTI -- 406 Broome St. (212-680-5600)--Tom and Anthony Martignetti, brothers and owners of a club on Houston Street, have said that they intended, with this restaurant, to create an Odeon for Nolita's young and well-heeled. They have...

DVD NOTES.
January 29, 2007... MARTIAL ARTISTRY -- It's news when an American director makes a movie about Japanese soldiers in the Second World War, but Japanese filmmakers have been making them for decades. One of the classics, "Red Angel," by Yasuzo Masumura, from 1966,...

HARD CASES.(The Talk of the Town)
January 29, 2007... It's a good thing that you're unlikely to be approached by a small, inquisitive child who wants an explanation of the trial of Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice-President Cheney's former chief of staff, because what would you say? The trial has the...

RINGER.(The Talk of the Town)
January 29, 2007... Each spring, the White House Correspondents' Association hosts the President and other subsidiary potentates for an evening of obligatory conviviality and moderate drinking. Once every decade or so, someone mistakenly makes news at the...

WONDER BOYS.(The Talk of the Town)
January 29, 2007... The first meeting of the Athanasius Kircher Society, held in the CUNY Graduate Center, on Fifth Avenue, last Tuesday evening, was billed as a contemporary wonder cabinet. Not the least of wonders is the revival of interest in Kircher, a...

BAND OF BROTHERS.(The Talk of the Town)
January 29, 2007... Nat and Alex Wolff, the brothers in the Naked Brothers Band, have been working together for five years, since the evening they got out of the bathtub and began singing and jumping around. Eventually, they got dressed, picked up instruments,...

SAND MEN.(The Talk of the Town)
January 29, 2007... A couple of weeks ago, the Parks Department announced that the architect David Rockwell had designed an innovative playground to be constructed near the South Street Seaport. In the days that followed, the Times published five articles on the...

THE BIRDS.
January 29, 2007... The latest Kate Bush CD includes a song called "Aerial," and one spring afternoon Hugh sat down to listen to it. In the city, I'm forever nagging him about the volume. "The neighbors!" I say. But out in Normandy I have to admit that it's me...

KREMLIN INC.
January 29, 2007... Saturday, October 7th, was a marathon of disheartening tasks for Anna Politkovskaya. Two weeks earlier, her father, a retired diplomat, had died of a heart attack as he emerged from the Moscow Metro while on his way to visit Politkovskaya's...

WALKING AWAY.
January 29, 2007... On a Tuesday afternoon a few weeks ago, the New York Giants running back Tiki Barber shuffled to the door of his apartment, on East Sixty-ninth Street, and apologized for the mess inside. His two-year-old son, Chason, had a playdate, and Legos,...

BAD PRECEDENT.
January 29, 2007... By late 1814, it was clear that America was not winning the War of 1812. Washington, including the Capitol and the White House, was in ashes. New Englanders were so demoralized that they were considering secession. When British troops, hardened...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
January 29, 2007... "Surveillance," by Jonathan Raban "Chrysalis," by Kim Todd "City of Laughter," by Vic Gatrell Conjugal Love, by Alberto Moravia, translated from the Italian by Marina Harss (Other; $14). A wealthy, idle man with literary...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
January 29, 2007... "Surveillance," by Jonathan Raban "Conjugal Love," by Alberto Moravia "City of Laughter," by Vic Gatrell Chrysalis, by Kim Todd (Harcourt; $27). In this spellbinding biography, Todd interweaves the life of Maria Sibylla Merian, a...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
January 29, 2007... "Surveillance," by Jonathan Raban "Conjugal Love," by Alberto Moravia "Chrysalis," by Kim Todd City of Laughter, by Vic Gatrell (Walker; $45). During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Georgian England suffered a...

CLASSICS GALORE.
January 29, 2007... Jane Smiley's capacious new novel, "Ten Days in the Hills" (Knopf; $26), does not give the reader a warm welcome--the first chapter is cloying and confusing--but accommodates him amply enough so that at the end, four hundred and fifty pages...

MYSTERY TRAIN.
January 29, 2007... Martin Ramirez, a Mexican laborer who spent the last thirty-two of his sixty-eight years, until his death, in 1963, as an inmate of California mental hospitals, is my favorite outsider artist. Come to that, he's one of my favorite artists,...

COOL HEAT.
January 29, 2007... In 1983, Bob Hurwitz, who worked for a jazz and classical label called ECM, attended a performance at the Public Theatre, in New York, by the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso--his first show in America. "The audience was probably ninety per...

CRIME SCENES.
January 29, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File Here's one of the few rules in movies which matter: an actor won't last as a leading man unless he plays characters who want something passionately. Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster want power, and Buster...