The New Yorker articles from January 2008

The New Yorker archives from January 2008

Round Two.(sound recordings)(Sound recording review)
January 7, 2008... Here are some records released in the past year that deserve a second listen: Nicole Atkins, "Neptune City" (Columbia)--Atkins's debut album pays tribute to her New Jersey home town with a sound that can only be described as high chamber...

Round One.(The Talk of the Town)(Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney)
January 7, 2008... Out in Iowa, with the bell at last ringing and the combatants charging out of their corners, the Republican card has come down to the Maulin' Mormon versus the Battlin' Baptist. Would the Framers be pleased? Doesn't seem likely, somehow. The...

Son of a Clown.(The Talk of the Town)(James Thierree)(Interview)
January 7, 2008... James Thierree, the thirty-three-year-old creator and star of "Au Revoir Parapluie"--a surrealistic mime-acrobatic-dance piece that just finished a run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music--was notably not breathless one recent night after the...

Request Line.(The Talk of the Town)(Neil Young at the Christ United Church's Palace Cathedral)(Concert review)
January 7, 2008... The Christ United Church's Palace Cathedral, a gilded Moorish-rococo fortress in Washington Heights, started life, in 1930, as a movie house but found fame and longevity under the dominion of the Right Reverend Dr. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter,...

Night Out.(The Talk of the Town)
January 7, 2008... One afternoon in the week before Christmas, the Christian Cultural Center, a megachurch in Canarsie, Brooklyn, hosted what was billed as a holiday concert for the homeless: one that would not merely raise money for some of New York's more...

Old Habits.(Rudy Giuliani)
January 7, 2008... Though he is not especially funny, Rudy Giuliani likes to begin with a joke. "Did you know that I'm running for President of the United States?" he asked at a recent house party in Windham, New Hampshire. "Did I tell you that?" His hosts, Al...

Guinea-pigging.(clinical trials)
January 7, 2008... On September 11, 2001, James Rockwell was camped out in a clinical-research unit on the eleventh floor of a Philadelphia hospital, where he had enrolled as a subject in a high-paying drug study. As a rule, studies that involve invasive medical...

The Envoy.(Vieira de Mello)
January 7, 2008... On April 9, 2003, when a U.S. Marine tank helped topple the towering statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square, many officials at the headquarters of the United Nations, in New York, averted their eyes from the celebratory images...

Mystery on Pearl Street.(Short story)
January 7, 2008... This one begins, like a dime detective novel from the nineteen-thirties, in a dingy bar in lower Manhattan. And, like a lot of New York stories, though it may touch on history and backroom politics, sex and the supernatural, though it throws...

Prophet Motive.(Khalil Gibran)(Biography)
January 7, 2008... Shakespeare, we are told, is the best-selling poet of all time. Second is Lao-tzu. Third is Kahlil Gibran, who owes his place on that list to one book, "The Prophet," a collection of twenty-six prose poems, delivered as sermons by a fictional...

Laura Warholic.('Laura Warholic: or The Sexual Intellectual ')(Brief article)(Book review)
January 7, 2008... Theroux's first novel to appear in twenty years concerns the reclusive Eugene Eyestones, a sex columnist for the magazine Quink, who becomes entangled with his corpulent, eructating boss's equally repulsive ex-wife--the titular Laura Warholic,...

Guantanamo.('Guantanamo: A Novel')(Brief article)(Book review)
January 7, 2008... Rashid, a German-Indian Muslim and aspiring shopkeeper, is the malleable protagonist of this alarming novel. His hapless, curiosity-driven attendance at an anti-American protest in Pakistan--to which he totes not a Koran but a Lonely Planet...

The Jewel House.('The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution')(Brief article)(Book review)
January 7, 2008... In this exploration of Elizabethan London's burgeoning scientific community, Harkness demonstrates how an assortment of barber-surgeons, midwives, and alchemists who, along with hundreds of laymen and women, took a "vernacular approach to...

A Vineyard in Tuscany.('A Vineyard in Tuscany: A Wine Lover's Dream')(Book review)
January 7, 2008... In muscular prose, the author details how he lucked into a ruined estate in Montalcino, hired masons, transplanted mature trees, analyzed soil, operated heavy machinery (sometimes to disastrous effect), chose clones, planted rootstock, tended...

Maestra.(Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's Marin Alsop)
January 7, 2008... "DON'T LET HISTORY PASS YOU BY!" proclaims a banner hanging outside Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, in Baltimore. The history in question belongs to Marin Alsop, who took over as the music director of the Baltimore Symphony last September,...

Rock of Ages.('The Bucket List,' 'Honeydripper,' 'Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,' and 'Starting Out in the Evening')(Movie review)
January 7, 2008... The holidays are over, and it's time to sweep up the sticky pine needles, cracked ornaments, and occasional twirled bits of pretty ribbon that have gathered under the tree. "The Bucket List," a comedy about two terminalcancer patients living it...

Best of 2007.(sound recordings)(Sound recording review)
January 14, 2008... Ruby Braff and the Flying Pizzarellis, "C'est Magnifique" (Arbors)--Guitars always brought out the best in the cornettist, who died in 2003, and on this, his final studio recording, he was joined by both Bucky and John Pizzarelli. Braff's warm,...

Wealth of Nations.(The Talk of the Town)(Michael Bloomberg)
January 14, 2008... After two thousand five hundred and thirty-nine days of the failed and benighted Administration led by George W. Bush, the victory of Barack Obama in Iowa last Thursday night--and the embracing speech he delivered in Des Moines to...

Mammoths.(The Talk of the Town)(Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at the Iowa caucuses)
January 14, 2008... For reasons not yet revealed, Hillary Clinton held her final Iowa campaign rally in a museum. The event, on the eve of the caucuses, opened to the sounds of the Canadian band Bachman-Turner Overdrive's 1973 classic "Takin' Care of Business"...

Fraud Alert.(The Talk of the Town)(electoral fraud)
January 14, 2008... Explicit racism has disappeared from mainstream political discourse in the United States. Jesse Helms made his long career in Washington by muttering about "bloc votes," but he's been gone from the Senate since 2003, and he has no similarly...

Search and Destroy.(Google Inc.)(Company overview)
January 14, 2008... In June, 2006, Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, went to Washington, D.C., hoping to create a little good will. Google was something of a Washington oddity then. Although it was a multibillion-dollar company, with enormous power,...

Chateau Scientology.
January 14, 2008... Franklin Avenue, skimming past the mouths of Hollywood's eastern canyons, at the disappearing far-north edge of city maps, forms a halfhearted high street for the apartment dwellers clustered on its banks. Public life happens in the Mayfair...

AMERICAN SCRAP.
January 14, 2008... "If anyone asks, I didn't hear about the big beef recall."

Foreigners.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 14, 2008... This uneven but compelling book, which is structured as a triptych and interweaves fiction and history, spans centuries and characters but remains in one place: a starkly racist England. In the first section, Francis Barber, the Jamaican slave...

Remembering the Bones.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 14, 2008... On the way to a party for Queen Elizabeth II, Georgie Witley, an Anglophile Canadian born the same day, crashes and is thrown from the driver's seat of her car. Lying on her back, like a beetle, at the bottom of a ravine, Georgie dutifully...

Staring Back.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 14, 2008... A French auteur so elusive he makes Godard seem like a publicity hound, the eighty-six-year-old Marker creates dazzling films that combine documentary footage and fictional narrative to survey history, politics, current events, and his own...

Descents of Memory.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 14, 2008... The first comprehensive biography of John Cowper Powys, the author of "Wolf Solent" and "Porius," reveals a man who saw himself as a magician and manipulator, to the occasional consternation of the family members and lovers who found themselves...

Full Exposure.(Kate Nash and MySpace)
January 14, 2008... In early 2006, Kate Nash, an eighteen-year-old London resident, fell down a flight of stairs at her home and broke her foot. Earlier that day, she had learned that she had not been admitted to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, a prestigious...

Dangerous Games.('The Orphanage')(Movie review)
January 14, 2008... The New Year begins in fear and trembling. That, at least, will be the salutary experience of anyone who sees "The Orphanage," the first film from the young Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona. He devotes himself to his small, shuddering tale...

Toloache.(Restaurant review)
January 21, 2008... The first thing to know about this ambitious theatre-district Mexican bistro is that its name signifies, as a waiter will eagerly explain, "a flowering plant famed in Mexico for its use in love potions."("Loco weed" to American cowboys, it is a...

Second Those Emotions.(The Talk of the Town)(presidential candidates)
January 21, 2008... By the eve of the New Hampshire primary last week, the candidates for President, especially the ones with a realistic shot at their party's nomination, were tired--very, very tired. They had been campaigning hard for a year or more, flat out...

The Egyptians.(The Talk of the Town)(squash competition)
January 21, 2008... A good professional squash match is like a divorce. It brings out the worst in everybody. It requires intercession. As the rancor mounts on court, the combatants aren't supposed to talk to each other. Instead, when a grievance arises--a plea...

Finishing the Hat.(The Talk of the Town)(Georges Seurat's 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte' and the play 'Sunday in the Park with George')
January 21, 2008... Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell, who star in the Roundabout's upcoming revival of "Sunday in the Park with George," at Studio 54, were exhausted one recent Wednesday after rehearsing a song called, fittingly, "Putting It Together" ("Art isn't...

Mayor-in-Chief.(The Talk of the Town)(Michael Bloomberg)
January 21, 2008... Among the events hosted recently by Mayor Michael Bloomberg was an information-sharing lunch at City Hall for newly elected mayors. The guests included leaders of the kinds of communities that, were he to run for President, Bloomberg would need...

Running Numbers.(The Talk of the Town)(employment)
January 21, 2008... American investors began 2008 with a simple New Year's resolution: sell. The result was the worst start of a year in the S. & P. 500's history, with the index falling more than five per cent over the first five days of trading. Explaining...

Minority Reports.(primaries, and the presidential candidates' campaign)
January 21, 2008... The brief interregnum between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary may be remembered as a time when it appeared that the magical qualities ascribed to Barack Obama included an ability to suspend all the ordinary rules of politics....

Friend Game.(Megan Meier's suicide)
January 21, 2008... Just past suppertime on a starry night in November, several unfamiliar cars pulled up outside 251 Waterford Crystal Drive, in Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, where news vans had been parked for weeks to cover a tragedy that came to be known, in the...

The Spymaster.(Michael McConnell)
January 21, 2008... Last May, the director of National Intelligence, a soft-spoken South Carolinian named Mike McConnell, learned that three U.S. soldiers had been captured by Sunni insurgents in central Iraq. As a search team of six thousand American and Iraqi...

The Roving Eye.('The Art of Lee Miller')(Book review)
January 21, 2008... The American model and photographer Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, a century ago, but spent most of her life seeking adventure in Europe and the Middle East. Last September, a retrospective of her work in front of and behind a...

In the Mourning Store.('This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War')(Book review)
January 21, 2008... In the spring of 1863, Lord & Taylor in New York, down on Ladies' Mile, opened a "mourning store," where the new widows of the Civil War could dress their grief in suitable fashion. Some idea of what they shopped for is apparent from the...

Beginner's Greek.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 21, 2008... In this unabashedly romantic debut novel by a former business journalist, the hero and the heroine meet cute (on a plane), fall in love (while discussing Thomas Mann), and are immediately torn asunder (he loses her phone number). Cut to a few...

An Ordinary Spy.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 21, 2008... A C.I.A. operative on his first mission abroad becomes intimately involved with a potential source; quickly returned to the U.S. and summarily fired, he continues to be fascinated by another case gone awry, a few years earlier. A mysterious...

Day of Empire.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 21, 2008... This history of world domination argues that although military might, prosperity, and technological prowess all contribute to imperial power, the key to becoming an unrivalled "hyperpower" and staying that way is tolerance--"letting very...

Alfred Kazin.('Alfred Kazin: A Biography')(Brief article)(Book review)
January 21, 2008... Growing up with a stutter in nineteen-twenties Brownsville, Alfred Kazin eschewed both gangs and "movements" in favor of reading and writing, a preference for the literary over the polemical that fuelled a singular, sixty-year career in...

Everybody Loves Jane.(Jane Austen)(Television program review)
January 21, 2008... You remember Jane Austen--she was one of People's "25 Most Intriguing People of 1995." That honor, which is not handed out to every early-nineteenth-century writer--the magazine is not Regency People, after all--was, of course, an amusingly...

Majestic Moor.('Othello')(Theater review)
January 21, 2008... At the end of "Othello," as Desdemona lies smothered on the conjugal bed, the warrior Moor turns to his assembled officers with the full knowledge that the deeds of valor which won him fame as a general for the Venetian state will forever be...

Moral Landscapes.('Still Life' and 'Cassandra's Dream')(Movie review)
January 21, 2008... In 2004, the Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke made a strange, poky but fascinating movie, "The World," set in a Beijing theme park outfitted with sizable replicas of St. Peter's, the Taj Mahal, and the World Trade Center, all of them moldering in...

Love And Politics.(The Talk of the Town)
January 28, 2008... Earlier this month, France was disrupted by the image of a woman both sexually alive and politically relevant--defiant and proud and threatening. And while that was going on the President of the country was canoodling with a former model. The...

The King of Reading.(The Talk of the Town)(Art Garfunkel)
January 28, 2008... Candidates for political office, and the reporters who cover them, like to believe that a reading list reveals a great deal. In recent years, the cherished-book list has become as compulsory a component of the Presidential campaign as a church...

Step on It.(The Talk of the Town)(Valera Global)
January 28, 2008... How about a little appreciation, in this strike-altered season, for those awards ceremonies that are proceeding as planned, guilt-free and full of glitz? The limousine company Valera Global's eighth annual banquet, for instance, took place...

Splitting Threads.(The Talk of the Town)(April White's fraud case vs. Bed, Bath & Beyond)
January 28, 2008... Who, speaking last week, made the following statement: "Enough is enough. More people need to be willing to step up and say, 'Let's do something about this.' That's how change will get made"? (a) Senator Hillary Clinton (b) Senator...

The Tata Invasion.(The Talk of the Town)(Tata Motors)
January 28, 2008... Americans are used to foreign cars--nearly half of us, after all, drive one--but no American has yet seen a vehicle bearing the brand name Tata Motors tooling along the highway. So when, a few weeks ago, news broke that this same Tata Motors,...

The Choice.(Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama)
January 28, 2008... In the fall of 1971, a Yale Law School student named Greg Craig sublet his apartment, on Edgewood Avenue, in New Haven, to his classmate Hillary Rodham and her boyfriend, Bill Clinton, for seventy-five dollars a month. Over the following...

Buying a Cure.(Kathy Giusti's Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation)
January 28, 2008... Last May, Kathy Giusti was in midtown Manhattan pitching her current venture to an audience of potential investors. Giusti, a forty-eight-year-old Harvard Business School graduate and former pharmaceutical executive, believes that medical...

Time Bomb.(Benazir Bhutto's death)(Correction notice)
January 28, 2008... Correction appended. At around noon on December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto arrived at a fourth-floor suite in the Serena Hotel in Islamabad to meet with Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan. She "was in a very good mood," Karzai told...

Lifting the Veil.(John Currin)(Interview)
January 28, 2008... The painting shows three young women standing close together in a room. The woman in the middle faces us directly, head held high; her dress is falling open, and her bra has been pulled down to expose both breasts. On either side of her, the...

The Creed.('The Way to Wealth')(Book review)
January 28, 2008... Benjamin Franklin's genius gave him no rest. A discontented man finds no easy chair. On April 4, 1757, he left Philadelphia by carriage, and reached New York just four days later, ready to sail for London. But one delay piled upon another, like...

All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 28, 2008... Burt Hecker, a.k.a. Eckbert Attquiet, is a medieval reenactor and misfit from upstate New York, whose nose is a dead ringer for that of the rhinophyma victim in Ghirlandaio's "Portrait of an Elderly Man with His Son," a miniature copy of which...

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 28, 2008... In the mid-nineteen-twenties, under the editor Joseph (Cap) Shaw, the magazine Black Mask turned to stories favoring character and atmosphere over intricate puzzle-plotting. Led by Dashiell Hammett, the monthly's roster of cynical, hardboiled...

Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?(Brief article)(Book review)
January 28, 2008... Sheehan, a historian at Stanford, describes how, in the past half century, Europeans have lost their taste and talent for war. In his telling, the First and Second World Wars formed a sort of one-two punch that knocked the love of a good fight...

The Exchange Artist.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 28, 2008... Though all but unheard of today, the banker and real-estate speculator Andrew Dexter, Jr., was widely known--and reviled--in early-nineteenth-century America, especially in Boston, where he oversaw the construction of the Exchange Coffee House,...

Presidential Pratfalls.('November')(Theater review)
January 28, 2008... A professional skeptic and an inspired word jockey, David Mamet can lay claim to the same connoisseurship of human folly as H. L. Mencken, who once observed that, in America, "only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to...