The New Yorker articles from January 2009

The New Yorker archives from January 2009

Doing It.(Alex Comfort)(Critical essay)
January 5, 2009... In 1961, the British scientist and physician Alex Comfort wrote a novel (his fifth) called "Come Out to Play," in which his alter ego, Dr. George Goggins, opens a clinic with his girlfriend to teach patients advanced sexual techniques. There he...

Music Quickens Time.(Daniel Barenboim)(Brief article)
January 5, 2009... For Barenboim, the conductor and pianist, music is a school for life, and its main lesson is duality--the way that a secondary voice in a Bach fugue is no less important than its main subject, or that Mozart's music constantly balances the...

The Century Club.(Elliott Cook Carter, Jr.)
January 5, 2009... The last emperor of China had just assumed his throne. William Howard Taft, the President-elect of the United States, was meeting with Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. A deranged veteran of the Philippine war terrorized Edgewater, New...

Private Wars.(Nazi films)
January 5, 2009... Of the many historical questions raised by "Valkyrie," the most pressing is this: if General Erich Fellgiebel, the head of the German Army Signal Corps, really had looked and behaved like Eddie Izzard, just how grave a threat would the Nazis...

Cafe Select.(Restaurant review)
January 12, 2009... Oyster Bar aside, the anticipation of delicious food and pleasing ambience is not usually accompanied by thinking, "Ah, the train station." Yet in Switzerland, from Bern to Basel to Zurich, some popular restaurants have been housed in der...

Homelands.(African Americans in politics)
January 12, 2009... Slaves--men of West African origin branded with Christian monikers like Tom, Peter, Ben, Harry, and Daniel--helped build the White House. Three were on loan from its chief architect, James Hoban. Construction began in 1792, and slaves worked as...

Correcting Caroline.(Caroline Kennedy's speech customs and public speaking)
January 12, 2009... In 2001, shortly after being sworn into the Senate, Hillary Clinton gave a press conference to address questions related to her husband's Presidential pardons. The Times observed that she used the word "disappointed" ten times, in reference to...

Family Jewels.(CIRCA, and the Madoff scandal)
January 12, 2009... Last week, with family vacations to St. Bart's and Aspen cancelled, the Upper East Side was swarming with kids. The McDonald's at Eighty-fifth and Third was packed--and, to most of the younger patrons, if not the sunken-eyed parents, an...

Tweed Wars.(committee members of th State Department quarrel over the documentary Foreign Relations of the United States)
January 12, 2009... As anyone who has lived through the past eight years can attest, disputes about the foreign relations of the United States frequently deteriorate into shouting matches. Not so with disputes about the "Foreign Relations of the United...

Greening the Ghetto.(Van Jones)
January 12, 2009... A few months ago, Van Jones, the founder and president of a group called Green for All, went to visit New Bedford, Massachusetts. His first stop of the day was the public library, where someone had assembled an audience of about thirty...

Strange Stones.(Short story)
January 12, 2009... All along Highway 110 we saw signs for Strange Stones. They first appeared in Hebei Province, where the landscape was desolate and the only color came from the advertising banners posted beside the road. They were red and had big characters...

Barney's Great Adventure.(Barney Frank)
January 12, 2009... Of the four hundred and thirty-five members of the House of Representatives, Barney Frank is the only one whose public remarks have been collected in a book of quotations ("Frank Talk: The Wit and Wisdom of Barney Frank," published in 2006). He...

The Speech.(Presidents of the United States inaugural addresses)
January 12, 2009... Barack Obama has been studying up, reading Abraham Lincoln's speeches, raising everyone's expectations for what just might be the most eagerly awaited Inaugural Address ever. Presidential eloquence doesn't get much better than the argument of...

Beware of Pity.(war criminals and victims as portrayed by Slavenka Drakulic)
January 12, 2009... In 1999, the Croatian novelist Slavenka Drakulic[acute accent] visited The Hague to observe the trials for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. Among the defendants was Goran Jelisic[acute accent], a thirty-year-old Serb from Bosnia,...

Girl Meets Boy.(Ovid's Metamorphoses' modern adaptation)(Brief article)
January 12, 2009... In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Iphis is brought up as a boy and, on the eve of her wedding to another girl, saved from disaster when an obliging goddess agrees to change her gender. Such obvious transformation is absent from Smith's modern retelling,...

Tinkers.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 12, 2009... This compact, adamantine debut dips in and out of the consciousness of a New England patriarch named George Washington Crosby as he lies dying on a hospital bed in his living room, "right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its...

Reading Dance.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 12, 2009... This sweeping anthology of dance writing weighs in at more than thirteen hundred pages. In his introduction, Gottlieb, the editor of myriad books on dance and the former editor of this magazine, acknowledges that no anthology is ideal. This one...

Paracelsus.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 12, 2009... In the first major consideration in fifty years of the Renaissance doctor, alchemist, and theologian, Webster draws on nonscientific writings by Paracelsus that have been made widely available only in the past few decades. Born in Sweden in...

Into the Woods.(Justin Vernon's For Emma, Forever Ago)
January 12, 2009... Justin Vernon, a twenty-seven-year-old native of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, is six feet three, big but not heavy, bearded, and often seen in boots and a thick plaid shirt. In February, he became one of the most discussed musicians of 2008 when the...

Survivors.(Movie review)
January 12, 2009... In Edward Zwick's "Defiance," the beautiful light--a little dryer than life--has obviously been digitally altered. Yet apart from this minor shading there's not much in the film that could not have been done forty years ago. Zwick's film, a...

Transitioning.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama's presidential transition)
January 19, 2009... Barack Obama's campaign for President, which was as much about old-fashioned grassroots politicking as it was about high-tech dazzle, was big on paraphernalia--lawn signs, T-shirts, baseball caps, bumper stickers, and, of course, buttons. It...

Cuz.(The Talk of the Town)(cousins in politics)
January 19, 2009... Cousins: for politicians, like the rest of us, they have a way of turning up. Last week, Domenico Panetta, a former mayor of the Italian town of Siderno, historically a Mafia stronghold, surfaced to comment on the appointment of his cousin Leon...

Hack Attack.(The Talk of the Town)(hacking online communities)
January 19, 2009... Late last Tuesday night, Pam Spaulding tried to post an entry on her blog, Pam's House Blend, from her home in Durham, North Carolina. There was a technical glitch, and she couldn't publish her post. To find the source of the problem, Spaulding...

Slowdown.(The Talk of the Town)(financial crisis)
January 19, 2009... A few months back, as the modern financial system was revealing itself to be a hyper-stimulated and under-funded wreck, some unfamiliar merchandise turned up in midtown, along with a pitch: "This might be just the thing for jittery Wall Street...

Spreading the Word.(2008 Big Apple Scrabble Tournament )
January 19, 2009... The 2008 Big Apple Scrabble Tournament took place on a weekend in early October. Meg Wolitzer, the novelist, had signed up for the three-day event with her son, Charlie Panek, a thirteen-year-old eighth grader who was competing in Division 4,...

Baby Food.(breast milk feeding)
January 19, 2009... There are some new rules governing what used to be called "mother's milk," or "breast milk," including one about what to call it when it's no longer in a mother's breast. A term, then, nomenclatural: "expressed human milk" is milk that has...

The Cobra.(Oliver Stone's "W.")
January 19, 2009... One night in mid-October, as the movie executive Tim Palen looked on with panoramic vigilance, a roar from jostling photographers seemed to freeze Josh Brolin's grin in place. Brolin plays George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's "W.," a Lionsgate film...

Che's Way.(Steven Soderbergh film, "Che" )
January 19, 2009... The new Steven Soderbergh film, "Che," begins with a pair of boots. More than four hours later, that is pretty much how it ends, too. The first boots belong to Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro), who is wearing them, together with his trademark...

The Art Instinct.(Brief article)
January 19, 2009... Dutton, an aesthetic philosopher best known as the curator of the Web site Arts & Letters Daily, sets out to do for art what Steven Pinker and others have done for psychology, language, and religion: consider it from a Darwinian standpoint....

History's Greatest Heist.(Bolsheviks' civil war )(Brief article)
January 19, 2009... After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks were enmeshed in a civil war and desperate for funds for everything from guns and boots for soldiers to a luxury car for Lenin. In theory, they had at their disposal the riches of the deposed Tsar,...

Land of Marvels.(John Somerville on relics in Iraq)(Brief article)
January 19, 2009... It is 1914, and, after three years in the deserts of Mesopotamia, the British archeologist John Somerville believes he is on the brink of a great discovery. Before he can uncover what he thinks was the residence of the last Assyrian king,...

Disquiet.(Disquiet by Julia Leigh)(Brief article)(Book review)
January 19, 2009... Leigh's first novel was a miracle of compression, a swift, muscular tale of a hunter tracking a near-mythic beast. Here she attempts the same radical economy of language with a more gothic, cluttered story, involving a woman on the run from her...

There Was Blood.(Ludlow massacre)
January 19, 2009... In the spring of 1914, members of the Colorado National Guard machine-gunned and set fire to tents in Ludlow, Colorado, where striking miners were living with their families. Five miners, two miners' wives, and twelve children died, most of...

Altered States.(Television program review)
January 19, 2009... Showtime's two creepy-guy series, "Californication" (sex addict) and "Dexter" (serial killer), finished their seasons in December, making way for a trio of troubled-women shows--a new series and new seasons of two existing series--that begin...

Dirt Candy.(vegetarian restaurant)
January 26, 2009... The new vegetarian restaurant Dirt Candy (not to be confused with the X-rated movie "Dirty Candy") deserves a better name. According to the owner and chef, Amanda Cohen, vegetables are like candy from the dirt. Maybe, but there is nothing...

Greatness.(The Talk of the Town)(presidents of the United States)
January 26, 2009... In American politics, the ultimate contest is trying to get elected President. But the very few people who manage to win that contest then enter another, less visible game, with even longer odds: the race to become one of the handful of...

Thief or Crook?(The Talk of the Town)(Bernard Madoff)
January 26, 2009... As anyone in New York can attest, there are multiple Bernie Madoff trials in the works, in addition to the bankruptcy case and the criminal one. "The Talmud makes a distinction between a thief and a crook," Rabbi David Gaffney said last week,...

A Lonesome Death.(The Talk of the Town)(Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll)
January 26, 2009... In February of 1963, twenty-four-year-old William Zantzinger, armed with a toy carnival cane and wrecked on whiskey, made a spectacle of himself at the Spinsters' Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. He was a drunken country mouse in the big...

Smart Power.(The Talk of the Town)(United States diplomatic relations)
January 26, 2009... During the late campaign, various excitable conservatives warned that the next Administration, if it turned out to be a Democratic one, would be guided by what one of them referred to as "Marxist tendencies." We won't know for sure about that...

A Smarter Stimulus.(The Talk of the Town)(economic stimulus plan)
January 26, 2009... Cutting taxes is usually a surefire political winner. Yet Barack Obama's plan to include more than a hundred billion dollars in individual tax rebates in his stimulus package has earned him criticism from both ends of the political spectrum....

Getting There from Here.(comment on the United States health care system)(Essay)
January 26, 2009... In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty. The Canadians had stories like the 1946 Toronto Globe and Mail report of a woman in labor who was refused help by three successive...

Balanchine Said.(George Balanchine's quotations)
January 26, 2009... Balanchine was much quoted. He had a typically Russian penchant for philosophizing and a verbal wit that, in his unpolished English, came off as folk wisdom. When he stopped his class to talk or when he gave an interview, he always had...

The Dystopians.(writer James Howard Kunstler's views on the United States economy)
January 26, 2009... A year and a half ago, with real-estate prices falling, Dmitry Orlov, a forty-six-year-old software engineer from Leningrad, sold his apartment in the Brighton section of Boston, along with most of its contents, and bought a sailboat--an old...

Man and Beast.(interview with American painter Walton Ford)(Interview)
January 26, 2009... The Tasmanian wolf, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was neither a wolf nor a tiger. It was a thylacine, a marsupial cousin to kangaroos and wallabies, which evolved over several million years, in the forests of Australia and New Guinea, into...

Back Issues.(history of newspaper publishing in the United States)(Essay)
January 26, 2009... The newspaper is dead. You can read all about it online, blog by blog, where the digital gloom over the death of an industry often veils, if thinly, a pallid glee. The Newspaper Death Watch, a Web site, even has a column titled "R.I.P." Or,...

The Piano Teacher.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 26, 2009... This cinematic tale of two love affairs in mid-century Hong Kong shows colonial pretensions tainted by wartime truths. Will Truesdale, a rootless, handsome Briton, arrives in the colony in 1941, and is swept up by Trudy Liang, the blithe and...

The Impostor.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 26, 2009... Set in post-apartheid South Africa, this gripping novel explores the seamier aspects of reconciliation. Adam, adrift after losing his job to a young black candidate, moves to an isolated town to write poetry. Boredom sets in, relieved only by...

So Damn Much Money.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 26, 2009... Lobbying, Kaiser writes, is a business of "huge numbers and vague standards," forever reorienting itself in an effort to skate just inside the limits of legality. Kaiser follows the career of Gerald S. J. Cassidy, a kid from a poor family who...

The Magician's Book.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 26, 2009... In this powerful meditation on "the schism between childhood and adult reading," Miller recounts her tumultuous relationship with the favorite books of her youth, C. S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia." Filled from an early age with a distrust...

Logic of Excess.(Kevin Barnes, singer of the rock band Of Montreal; Skeletal Lamping)(Critical essay)
January 26, 2009... Kevin Barnes, of Of Montreal, has written, performed, and recorded many of its songs alone, but these days he is joined onstage by an increasing number of unpantsed musicians and painted performers. Since the band formed, eleven years ago, in...

By the Skin of Our Teeth.(Young Jean Lee's works)
January 26, 2009... One generally hesitates before identifying a new trend in the American theatre, largely because language has a tendency to fix and limit the joy one feels at witnessing the stops and starts, the moments of grace, and the moments of awkwardness...

Guitar Hero.(Bill Frisell)
January 26, 2009... The fearless and adaptable guitarist Bill Frisell, whose varied endeavors have drawn him into free-form extemporizations, symphonic collaborations, hard and soft rock, country, and accompaniments for Buster Keaton silent films, is primarily...

Brief Lives.
January 26, 2009... Christopher Wallace, who became known as the rapper Biggie Smalls, or the Notorious B.I.G., was born in 1972 and was brought up in Bedford-Stuyvesant by his mother, Voletta Wallace, a middle-class woman from Jamaica. When Chris dropped out of...