The New Yorker articles from July 2006

The New Yorker archives from July 2006

TABLES FOR TWO.
July 3, 2006... PRE:POST -- 547 W. 27th St. (212-695-7270)--Even before the meatpacking district became hell, there was a respite from it, at Florent, the regenerative twenty-four-hour bistro. Not so in West Chelsea, the night-club vortex up the avenue, where...

COMMENT.(The Talk of the Town)
July 3, 2006... Thanks to Justice Brandeis (who lifted the phrase from Lord Bryce, the British scholar-diplomat and author of "The American Commonwealth"), the legislatures of the several states are often styled, not least by their own members, "laboratories...

HISTORY GIRLS.(The Talk of the Town)
July 3, 2006... Susan Schulz is the editor-in-chief of CosmoGirl, which she describes as the magazine for "the generation that is born to lead." If such a characterization does raise a logistical question--when everyone is a leader, who is to be led?--the...

FRED WILLARD, TOURIST.(The Talk of the Town)
July 3, 2006... Fred Willard has long put his hearty, game-show-host manner to use playing characters who are gloriously out of their depth. Willard improvises his lines, spouting poppycock with absolute self-assurance; in the film "Best in Show" his...

BARBARA EPSTEIN.(The Talk of the Town)
July 3, 2006... American magazines, including this one, do not begin fully formed. They start out, depending on the times, with high spirits or with a stern sense of mission, but the idea itself, the complete set of ingredients that might make a magazine...

UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITY.
July 3, 2006... On the steps in front of the Brauhaus Hibernia, a cheerful pub on the main square in Gelsenkirchen, a coal town in the Ruhr Valley, one woozy rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" followed another. Captain America was there in full regalia,...

THE DEEPEST CUT.
July 3, 2006... At nine o'clock on July 28th last year, Wendy Nissley carried her two-year-old daughter, Lacy, into O.R. 12 at Johns Hopkins Hospital to have half of her brain removed. Lacy suffers from a rare malformation of the brain, known as...

THE HIDDEN POWER.
July 3, 2006... On December 18th, Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State, joined other prominent Washington figures at FedEx Field, the Redskins' stadium, in a skybox belonging to the team's owner. During the game, between the Redskins and the Dallas...

LIFE OF THE PARTY.
July 3, 2006... When Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians" was published, in 1918, it included, in addition to the portraits of his leading characters, cameos of almost all the other famous Victorians: Cardinal Newman is alongside Cardinal Manning in...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
July 3, 2006... Old Filth, by Jane Gardam (Europa; $14.95). This mordantly funny novel examines the life of Sir Edward Feathers, a desiccated barrister known to colleagues and friends as Old Filth (the nickname stands for "Failed in London Try Hong Kong")....

FAREWELL SYMPHONY.(Daniel Barenboim ends tenure as music director of the Chicago Symphony)
July 3, 2006... On June 17th, Daniel Barenboim ended his decade-and-a-half run as the music director of the Chicago Symphony with a gritty, impassioned performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Before launching into the work, Barenboim delivered a speech in...

WESTWARD HO!(Etoile Polaire)(The Red Violin)(Evenfall)(New York City Ballet stages its Diamond Project)(Dance review)
July 3, 2006... Every few years, New York City Ballet stages its Diamond Project, which just means that the company commissions a handful of new ballets in the hope of coming up with something interesting or, failing that, of pepping up the dancers, who are...

KINGS AND MONSTERS.(King Lear)(The House in Town)(Theater review)
July 3, 2006... The radicalism of Alvin Epstein's portrayal of the title character in "King Lear" (an Actors' Shakespeare Project production at the La MaMa E.T.C. Annex) has as much to do with Epstein's body as with his mind. Traditionally, directors have...

KRYPTOLOGY.(Superman Returns)(Movie review)
July 3, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File A passing demographer, faced with a crowd lining up to watch "Superman Returns," will find much cause for reflection. There, in heady profusion, will be the flower of American youth, all of them...

TABLES FOR TWO.(BG on seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman)(Restaurant review)
July 10, 2006... BG -- 754 Fifth Ave., between 57th and 58th Sts., 7th fl. (212-872-8977)--This lovely, creamily comforting room on the seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman, is sure to evoke in many women--and this is a place of women, almost exclusively--memories...

POP NOTES.(music group Be Your Own Pet)(Brief article)
July 10, 2006... PET SOUNDS -- We go to songs for the truth, to hear timeless verities that we do not express in our day-to-day lives. For example: "We all have holes in our socks, and Bad Brains totally rocks." Cautious, well-dressed adults might hesitate...

NATTERING NABOBS.(The Talk of the Town)(rhetorical style of Spiro Agnew considered against the media coverage of current day issues)
July 10, 2006... In the fall of 1969, Richard Nixon surveyed his domestic enemies and appointed Spiro T. Agnew, his Vice-President, to the post of White House Torquemada. There would come a day, not far off, when Agnew would have to plead nolo contendere to a...

GIVING AWAY MY FORTUNE.(The Talk of the Town;satire on Warren Buffett's donation to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)
July 10, 2006... In case you haven't heard, I recently caused a stir by announcing that I would be giving away eighty-five per cent of my personal fortune, an amount that, according to my most recent SavingsPlus™ statement, adds up to $6,327.83. This...

READY, SET, RAMPLE.(The Talk of the Town)(Charlotte Rampling)(Interview)
July 10, 2006... If you had an hour in a hotel suite, alone with Charlotte Rampling, to talk about sex, what would you ask her? For forty years, the British actress, whose name has become a verb ("to rample"--ensorcell with an enigmatic gaze) and the title of a...

BAREFOOTIN'.(Mike Wallace on his retirement from 60 Minutes)(Interview)
July 10, 2006... This spring, Mike Wallace's retirement from "60 Minutes" was marked by a spate of tributes, which, while celebrating his august career, inadvertently showcased his more free-spirited side. There he was, on the front page of the Times, perched...

TOO MUCH INFORMATION.(Ben Bernanke on his goals as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board)
July 10, 2006... When Ben Bernanke took over from Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, five months ago, one of his goals was to make the Fed a more open institution. Whereas Greenspan specialized in tortuously oblique sentences parsable only...

LAST STAND.(change in U.S. foreign policy re. Iran and uranium enrichment )
July 10, 2006... On May 31st, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced what appeared to be a major change in U.S. foreign policy. The Bush Administration, she said, would be willing to join Russia, China, and its European allies in direct talks with Iran...

WHERE HIP-HOP LIVES.(violence and rappers associated with West Village radio station WQHT, otherwise known as Hot 97)
July 10, 2006... On the last Wednesday in April, a former drug dealer named Jamal Woolard, from the Lafayette Garden housing projects, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was preparing for his big break. Woolard, whose hip-hop name is Gravy and whose songs include "Drugs,...

THE AGENT.
July 10, 2006... On October 12, 2000, in the deep-water port of Aden, Yemen, the U.S.S. Cole, a guided-missile destroyer weighing eighty-three hundred tons, was docked at a fuelling buoy. The Cole, which cost a billion dollars to build, was one of the most...

BLUE-COLLAR GOLD.
July 10, 2006... As midnight neared on a brisk February evening in Nashville, America's most popular comedians were celebrating at the bar of the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel. They had just brought their Blue Collar Comedy Tour to 18,183 people at the Gaylord...

DRESSED TO KILL.
July 10, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File In "The Devil Wears Prada," Meryl Streep, as the invincible New York fashion editor Miranda Priestly, never raises her voice. To snarl or shout would imply that some resistance to her authority exists, and...

FIGHTING FAITHS.
July 10, 2006... A few weeks after John Kerry's defeat in the 2004 election, Peter Beinart published an essay in The New Republic, the magazine he then edited, called "A Fighting Faith." The phrase originated with Whitman and was lifted from Arthur Schlesinger,...

GOING LONG.
July 10, 2006... A quick test of your pop-culture knowledge: How many of the twenty-five best-selling albums in American history can you name, and what proportion of them were recorded in this century? If your first thought was Michael Jackson and your...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
July 10, 2006... Lost Hearts in Italy, by Andrea Lee (Random House; $23.95). The fall from innocence of Americans abroad is a Jamesian theme, but here the Grand Tour has been replaced by international finance and the naifs are married Harvard grads, posted to...

SECRETS.
July 10, 2006... Diana Vishneva, a principal dancer at the Kirov Ballet and at American Ballet Theatre, once told Francis Mason, of Ballet Review, that in any ballet she always tried to find "a particular thing that allows me to know what I am doing with the...

UNSEXED.
July 10, 2006... The evil that men do is nothing without an audience to witness it. The dictator works the crowd in order to see his power in action. The rapist gets off on the panic in his victim's eyes. For the smilers with knives, there is no "I" without the...

BOY DETECTIVE.
July 10, 2006... Now, more than ever, Friday night is behavior-disorder night on the USA Network. For the past four years, there's been "Monk," whose main character, Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub), is a brilliant detective who has been on leave from the San...

TABLES FOR TWO.(THE GOOD FORK )(Restaurant review)
July 24, 2006... THE GOOD FORK -- 391 Van Brunt St., Brooklyn (718-643-6636)--This pleasant little spot on the Van Brunt strip in Red Hook (halfway between the pioneering 360 and the brand-new Fairway, a surprisingly vibrant area, given that it sits well off...

NO MOJO.(The Talk of the Town)(Joseph Lieberman's quest for Senate nomination)
July 24, 2006... Why, you may ask, is Joseph Lieberman having such a tough time with the simple task of getting himself renominated for the Senate seat he has held for the past seventeen years? Theories abound. One of them, popular on the right, is that Senator...

CAN WE FORGIVE HIM?(The Talk of the Town)(soccer player Zinedine Zidane's response to insulting Italian during World Cup game)
July 24, 2006... "And why? And why?" the French announcer moaned in some mixture of bafflement and misery last week, after the great Zidane walked away, paused, thought better, or worse, of it, and then went back and rammed his forehead into Materazzi's blue...

CHERYL LIVES!(The Talk of the Town)(Manhattan copywriter Cheryl Horsfall holds own wake after being mistakenly declared dead)
July 24, 2006... Cheryl Horsfall is a freelance copywriter in Manhattan. She is partial to ideas of the afterlife. A few years ago, she wrote a screenplay called "Parlor Tricks," about a young woman who moves into an apartment above a funeral home. The woman...

BIRD.(The Talk of the Town)(14-year-old alto saxophone player Elijah Shiffer)
July 24, 2006... The Creative Jazz Organization, which was founded in the early nineteen-seventies by music buffs associated with the Rochdale Village Community Center, in Queens, holds jam sessions on Wednesday nights at Manhattan Proper, a bar and restaurant...

DR. ESTHER.(The Talk of the Town)
July 24, 2006... Twenty-odd couples, plus a handful of stags, out for a few hours on a summer evening. At going rates, that's nine hundred dollars' worth of babysitting, which is presumably about what it would cost for three hour-long sessions with Dr. Esther...

THE PREECLAMPSIA PUZZLE.
July 24, 2006... In June, 2000, Ananth Karumanchi, a thirty-one-year-old kidney specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, read an article in Nature about preeclampsia, a poorly understood disorder that affects about five per cent of...

"YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE".
July 24, 2006... Come to my neighborhood--the Upper East Side of Manhattan--any weekend this summer and you might think that the neutron bomb had been dropped. The streets are so empty that I have sometimes toyed with the idea of buying a car just so that I can...

HOLLYWOOD ENDING.
July 24, 2006... Bertram Fields, who has a reputation as the most feared lawyer in Hollywood, does not often do lunch. He prefers to be driven in his Bentley Arnage from his law office, in Century City, to his Cape Cod-style home, in Malibu, where he prepares a...

THE TENTH PLANET.
July 24, 2006... There are nine planets in our solar system. Or there are eight. Or there are ten, or maybe even twenty-three. No one knows. A planet is an arbitrary thing, a notion. In a matter of weeks, however, the International Astronomical Union, meeting...

THE STORM OF STYLE.(Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart considered)
July 24, 2006... Listen to Alex Ross follow musical threads from Mozart and Salieri to Bob Dylan Wolfgang Amade Mozart, as he usually spelled his name, was a small man with a plain, pockmarked face, whose most striking feature was a pair of intense...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
July 24, 2006... The Whole World Over, by Julia Glass (Pantheon; $25.95). Greenie Duquette loves her cozy life in the West Village, her work as a pastry chef, and her precocious young son. But she is fed up with her husband, Alan, an underemployed...

LOVESTRUCK.
July 24, 2006... If you walk into an American bar and ask for Scritti Politti, the bartender will probably put on the British band's 1985 hit "Perfect Way." The song is similar to music of the period by New York club artists like Madonna: very loud snare drums...

GOLDEN GIRL.
July 24, 2006... "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907), by Gustav Klimt, is a showboat painting that, last month, fetched a showboat price: a hundred and thirty-five million dollars, the most on record for a work of art. The cosmetics magnate and collector Ronald S....

CZECHS AND BALANCES.
July 24, 2006... "Hail, hail, rock 'n' roll / Deliver me from the days of old," Chuck Berry sang in the late fifties. From the outset, the rollicking beat of rock music was seen as transformative. The sound cast an irresistible spell over the imaginations of...

MEN AT SEA.(Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest)(Edmond)(Movie review)
July 24, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File In order to understand what's happening in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," it helps to have seen the first installment, "The Curse of the Black Pearl." But it doesn't help that much. The new...

VENDER VIGILANTE.(The Talk of the Town)
July 31, 2006... When Councilman Alan Gerson walks the streets of his district, which covers most of downtown Manhattan below Houston, he hardly notices the pleasant cafes, cast-iron buildings, and hip boutiques. He sees "vending anarchy": peddlers everywhere,...

DANGER LEVELS.(The Talk of the Town)
July 31, 2006... Just four months ago, following the incapacitation of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert was elected Prime Minister of Israel. The hopeful narrative of his campaign was that of a career hard-liner who, like the great majority of Israelis, had finally...

CHANGE OF PLANS.(The Talk of the Town)
July 31, 2006... In "The Chronicles of Narnia," the four Pevensie children are evacuated from London during the Blitz and sent to stay with an elderly professor in a house in the countryside. Last Wednesday evening, in an old Ottoman villa in West Beirut,...

FIFTEEN BOXES.(The Talk of the Town)
July 31, 2006... Roy Goodman had some boxes to give away. Last fall, he and his wife, Sarah Berger, moved from a one-bedroom apartment in the Garment District to a somewhat larger onebedroom in Boerum Hill, in order to accommodate their new son, Noah. So...

THE FATAL-FLAW MYTH.(The Talk of the Town)
July 31, 2006... Every other summer, the aerospace industry gathers in Farnborough, England, for a big trade show. At Farnborough last week, there was one thing on everyone's mind: the plummeting fortunes of Airbus, the European aerospace giant. Airbus is...

HOLY TOLEDO.
July 31, 2006... Pastor Rod Parsley stood on a flag-bedecked dais on the steps of Ohio's Statehouse last October and, amid cheers from the crowd below, proclaimed the launch of "the largest evangelical campaign ever attempted in any state in America." A...

KNOW IT ALL.
July 31, 2006... On March 1st, Wikipedia, the online interactive encyclopedia, hit the million-articles mark, with an entry on Jordanhill, a railway station in suburban Glasgow. Its author, Ewan MacDonald, posted a single sentence about the station at 11 P.M.,...

THE LOBSTERMAN.
July 31, 2006... A historical ecologist studies man's effect on a past landscape. The discipline requires an aptitude for science but also the ability to imagine things differently from the way they appear, which is not an ordinary habit of mind. Typically, a...

EXTENDED PERFORMANCE.
July 31, 2006... The Kenyan novelist, playwright, journalist, and academic Ngugi wa Thiong'o has written provocatively, in his book of essays "Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams" (1998), about "performance"--not merely theatrical action, as in the performance of...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
July 31, 2006... Night Bus, by Giampiero Rigosi, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Bitter Lemon; $14.95). Francesco is a gambling-addicted bus driver in Bologna, with a thuggish debt collector on his trail; Leila is a smart dame with a great pair of...

AMERICAN ABSTRACT.
July 31, 2006... Half a century ago, on August 11, 1956, an Oldsmobile convertible driven by Jackson Pollock, who was drunk, hit a tree in the Springs, killing the artist and a passenger. It's a dismal enough anniversary--marked with scant attention by the...

UNCONVENTIONAL.
July 31, 2006... Convention centers are supposed to revive cities by bringing in revenue from out-of-town visitors and creating local jobs. But the more gargantuan they become the less happily they fit into the places they are intended to benefit. In terms of...

HOT AND BOTHERED.
July 31, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File With a flap of pink-flamingo wings, a whoosh of speedboats in the bay, and the rear-swinging amble of burnished girls in bikinis, the TV series "Miami Vice" launched itself week after week as a thoroughly...

Know It All.
July 31, 2006... Editors' Note appended. On March 1st, Wikipedia, the online interactive encyclopedia, hit the million-articles mark, with an entry on Jordanhill, a railway station in suburban Glasgow. Its author, Ewan MacDonald, posted a single sentence...