The New Yorker articles from July 2007

The New Yorker archives from July 2007

Provence.(Restaurant review)
July 2, 2007... When Michel Jean opened this homage to his native region, in 1986, it became a neighborhood institution, and, until it closed, a year ago, made its quiet corner of SoHo seem like a piece of French sovereign soil, with its Bastille Day petanque...

The Tender Trap.
July 2, 2007... If you had completely forgotten that Andre 3000 of OutKast was a rapper, don't feel bad--for a while, he did, too. On the last two OutKast albums, Mr. 3000 spent more time singing loopy meditations on love than he did rhyming; in OutKast's 2006...

Mr. Independent.(The Talk of the Town)(Michael Bloomberg )
July 2, 2007... In the quaint and yet periodically relevant terms of the Gilded Age, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a captain of industry who turned into a Mugwump. With Bloomberg L.P., his empire of "financial information services," he has become the forty-fourth...

Hedge Clipping.
July 2, 2007... In 2000, Harry Kat got a call from a corporate headhunter who asked whether he would be interested in joining a financial firm that invested in hedge funds--a so-called fund of funds. Kat, a forty-three-year-old Dutch economist, had recently...

Promises, Promises.
July 2, 2007... March was not the best of months for Richard F. Zannino, the C.E.O. of the Dow Jones Company, which owns the Wall Street Journal. Zannino joined the company six and a half years ago, after a career in the apparel industry, and his tailored...

Duped.
July 2, 2007... The most egregious liar I ever knew was someone I never suspected until the day that, suddenly and irrevocably, I did. Twelve years ago, a young man named Stephen Glass began writing for The New Republic, where I was an editor. He quickly...

Waugh Stories.
July 2, 2007... Alexander Waugh, the grandson of Evelyn, has written a book, "Fathers and Sons" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; $27.50), about the father-son relationships--dramas, often, of mutual incomprehension and dismay--in five successive generations of his...

Last One In.(Brief article)
July 2, 2007... Kulish launches his clever, affecting novel as a fish-out-of-water narrative: a New York gossip columnist is sent to cover the Iraq war (that, or get fired for a libellous mistake) and is embedded with the Marines. Jimmy Stephens, the reporter,...

Inglorious.(Brief article)
July 2, 2007... "You're depressed," a doctor tells Rosa, the thirty-five-year-old heroine of this debut novel. It is one of many simplistic diagnoses offered by Rosa's acquaintances, who are shocked when, months after her mother's death, she quits her job as...

Contested Waters.(Brief article)
July 2, 2007... The first public swimming pools in the United States were "large community bath tubs"--indoors, relatively small, and intended to encourage good hygiene among the poor. By the nineteen-twenties, pools had become elaborate "public amusements,"...

Mingering Mike.(Mike Stevens)(Brief article)
July 2, 2007... In the late nineteen-sixties, Mike Stevens, a teen-aged ghetto daydreamer in Washington, D.C., imagined a fabulous existence as Mingering Mike, a soul-music superstar, and he hand-painted a series of colorfully exuberant record-album jackets...

His Dark Materials.(Critical essay)
July 2, 2007... "An obsession with pigmentation is even now the curse of our race," says the narrator of Stephen L. Carter's celebrated first novel, "The Emperor of Ocean Park," published in 2002. The line could serve as an epigraph for Carter's new, equally...

Laissez-faire Is More.
July 2, 2007... As the generations that experienced the Great Depression, even the youngest of them, die off, the period passes into the care of historians. There is a danger, at this remove in time, of Depression nostalgia. T. H. Watkins's "The Great...

Unbound.
July 2, 2007... In 2002, the R. & B. singer and songwriter R. Kelly was indicted on twenty-one counts of child pornography, after police in Chicago obtained a copy of a videotape showing a man, allegedly Kelly, having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl. Two...

Gods and Dolls.(Eurydice play)(Theater review)
July 2, 2007... At the theatre these days, we are rarely asked to play. Producers, who live or die on the accuracy of their reading of the public mood, have registered the current climate of fear and exploited our need for succor. The glut of...

Do No Harm.(movies "Sicko" and "Evening")(Movie review)
July 2, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File Michael Moore has teased and bullied his way to some brilliant highs in his career as a political entertainer, but he scrapes bottom in his new documentary, "Sicko." The movie is an attack on the American...

Perilla.(Perilla Restaurant)(Restaurant review)
July 9, 2007... Yes, Harold Dieterle, a co-owner of Perilla, won the reality-television cooking competition "Top Chef." Smoke and lights, though, aren't much in evidence at Perilla, which melds American and Asian influences to an effect low-key enough to...

Deadly Unserious.(Sound recording review)
July 9, 2007... Randy Newman once defined success as a songwriter as the absence of a big decline: it's not that you have to get better as you get older so much as that you have to avoid getting worse. By that standard, Loudon Wainwright III is a huge success....

Birdnap.(The Talk of the Town)(abduction of birds)
July 9, 2007... Last month, the National Audubon Society issued a paper documenting a decline in the populations of many common American birds, including bobwhites, whip-poor-wills, grackles, and grosbeaks. The study did not list the feral domestic pigeon as a...

What The--?(The Talk of the Town)(swearing and explicit language)
July 9, 2007... Trickle-down behaviorists, beware: if George W. Bush can use a popular synonym for dung, as he did when talking to Tony Blair at last year's G-8 summit, and if Dick Cheney, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, can deploy a word usually meant to...

Spa Man.(The Talk of the Town)(Steve Case and his Miraval spa)
July 9, 2007... The most convoluted philosophical thinking outside of academe was taking place recently at the Global Spa Summit at the Waldorf-Astoria, with the purpose of fostering "thought leadership" in the forty-billion-dollar-a-year spa industry. One of...

The Science of Success.(The Talk of the Town)(media prediction)
July 9, 2007... Last month, the publisher Simon & Schuster announced a partnership with a Web site called MediaPredict, which would use the collective judgment of readers to evaluate book proposals. The deal drew scorn from many, who saw it as evidence that...

This Old House.(Chapel Hill, North Carolina)(Essay)
July 9, 2007... When it came to decorating her home, my mother was nothing if not practical. She learned early on that children will destroy whatever you put in front of them, so for most of my youth our furniture was chosen for its durability rather than for...

Forbidden Fare.(Istanbul street foods)
July 9, 2007... It was a cold afternoon in Istanbul, in January, 1964. I was standing just outside a buffet restaurant that occupied the ground floor of a Greek apartment building in a corner of Taksim Square (which was much smaller and more run-down then,...

The Taliban's Opium War.(eradication of opium poppies in Afghanistan)
July 9, 2007... In the main square in Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan Province, in central Afghanistan, a large billboard shows a human skeleton being hanged. The rope is not a normal gallows rope but the stem of an opium poppy. Aside from this jarring...

On Impact.(meteorite)
July 9, 2007... People get excited when strange objects fall from the sky. We seek portents and meanings, we venerate the object, and we horripilate at the uncanny scent of our beginnings, or end. Even wised up by science as we are, we tend to freak. Here in...

Fractured Franchise.(voter participation)(Critical essay)
July 9, 2007... Why should anyone bother to vote? The chance that one vote will change the outcome of an election is virtually nil, and going to the polls involves a significant cost in time and opportunity. Presidential elections, in which more than a hundred...

Out Stealing Horses.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 9, 2007... In this quiet but compelling novel, Trond Sander, a widower nearing seventy, moves to a bare house in remote eastern Norway, seeking the life of quiet contemplation that he has always longed for. A chance encounter with a neighbor--the brother,...

The Interloper.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 9, 2007... Owen, the narrator of this taut debut novel, is a newlywed and a writer of software manuals--"a solid B," in his own estimation. This happy sense of stable mediocrity is demolished during his honeymoon, when his wife's brother is murdered, and...

FDR.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 9, 2007... As Franklin Roosevelt approached the stage at the 1936 Democratic Convention, the steel braces on his useless legs and the support of his son's arm allowing him, in great pain, to simulate walking, he was jostled, and he crashed to the ground,...

A Mirror Garden.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 9, 2007... Born in Iran (then still Persia) in 1924, Farmanfarmaian grew up in a large mercantile family whose holdings included vast pistachio orchards outside the ancient city of Qazvin. Her graceful memoir maps an intrepid trajectory: a talent for...

The Insurgent.(Giuseppe Garibaldi)(Biography)
July 9, 2007... Suddenly you are looking in his eyes. Officially, they're brown, but for you they'll always be blue. He is speaking in a soft, seductive voice. Glory if you follow, eternal shame if you don't. Rome or Death. In a moment, your destiny shifts....

Girl Talk.(John Van Druten's Old Acquaintance)(Theater review)
July 9, 2007... New York--that "savage's romance," as the poet Marianne Moore described it--occupies such a peculiar, powerful place in the world's imagination that one marvels at those writers who are brave enough to take it on as a subject. But there it is,...

Battle Scars.(Michael Bay's Transfomers)(Movie review)
July 9, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File The opening scene of Michael Bay's "Transformers" takes place in deep space. Out of the darkness comes a voice that is deeper still. It makes Barry White sound like a countertenor, and this is what it...

Casellula.(Restaurant review)
July 23, 2007... On a recent evening, a waiter took it upon himself to explain the restaurant's name: "It comes from the Latin diminutive for house, and it kind of sounds like the word for cheese, so we like to think of it as 'the little house of cheese.' "...

To Be a Clown.
July 23, 2007... Eddie Murphy, who claimed Jerry Lewis's comic mantle with his remake of "The Nutty Professor," borrowed Lewis's inflections and genial-nebbish persona for the title role of "Norbit" (DreamWorks), a mild-mannered orphan, but he cuts loose as...

Sick and Twisted.(The Talk of the Town)(Michael Moore's Sicko)
July 23, 2007... The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has more than a few insufferable traits. He is manipulative, smug, and self-righteous. He has no interest in complexity. And he mocks the weak as well as the powerful. (Recall his derision, in "Roger and...

Fuel for Thought.(The Talk of the Town)(environmental policies and safety regulations affect the automobile industry)
July 23, 2007... In the auto industry, there's one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster. In the nineteen-twenties, Alfred Sloan, the president of General Motors, insisted that the...

Ghostly.(The Talk of the Town)(Goya's Ghosts)
July 23, 2007... When Milos Forman was a student in Prague, more than fifty years ago, he read a book about the Spanish Inquisition that gave him an idea for a film. Great idea, just one teensy problem: the Inquisition part. "In Czechoslovakia the same things...

In the Zone.(The Talk of the Town)(Hawaiian Tropic Zone)
July 23, 2007... When, a couple of months ago, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Smith Barney revised their expense-account policies so that employees were forbidden to entertain clients at Hawaiian Tropic Zone, a Times Square restaurant featuring waitresses...

Revisiting "The Prairie".(The Talk of the Town)(Lukas Foss attends the Brooklyn Philharmonic's rehearsal)
July 23, 2007... Lukas Foss, the composer, turns eighty-five in August, and his hearing is not what it used to be, but when he attended a rehearsal the other day by the Brooklyn Philharmonic of his choral work "The Prairie" he listened attentively, sitting very...

Days of Rage.(protests of lawyers, Muttehida Majlis-e-Amal, Inter-Services Intelligence against President Pervez Musharraf)
July 23, 2007... In the white glare of a hot summer's noon, the broad avenues of Islamabad, Pakistan's modern capital, are usually empty. But on a sweltering day this May the streets were crowded with noisily chanting protesters, all of them demonstrating...

The Tycoon.(Mortimer B. Zuckerman)(Interview)(Biography)
July 23, 2007... Shortly before turning seventy, last month, Mortimer B. Zuckerman decided that it was time for him finally to take up the task of writing a memoir. He already had in mind a title ("Backstory") and a first line, "I have never worked a day in my...

A Fine Romance.(romantic love)
July 23, 2007... His beard is haphazard and unintentional, and he dresses in sweats, or in shorts and a T-shirt, or with his shirt hanging out like the tongue of a Labrador retriever. He's about thirty, though he may be younger, and he spends a lot of time with...

There She Blew.(Leviathan)(Book review)
July 23, 2007... If, under the spell of "Moby-Dick," you decided to run away to the modern equivalent of whaling, where would you go? Because petroleum displaced whale oil as a source of light and lubrication more than a century ago, it might seem logical to...

Spook Country.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 23, 2007... As in his previous novel, Gibson abandons the futuristic dystopias that have sustained most of his career, picturing instead a dystopic present--specifically, a post-9/11 America, which, in thrall to ubiquitous media and vague threats of...

Bangkok Haunts.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 23, 2007... Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the hero of Burdett's Bangkok-based thrillers, is a unique police detective. A Buddhist as closely attuned to karma as to crime, Sonchai is profoundly aware that the latter is only an expression of the former, and,...

Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 23, 2007... This debut novel views corruption at Wall Street's highest levels through the eyes of two outsiders. Gil, who immigrated to New York from Sao Paulo as a child and retains a Portuguese-flavored grammar, overhears tales of life on the trading...

A Much Married Man.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 23, 2007... Anthony Anscombe is the scion of an English banking family and the inheritor of an estate that includes a small Cotswold village. Decent to the point of passivity, he goes through three marriages (and an extramarital liaison), each seemingly...

Chasing The Muse.(Xanadu)(The Last Year in the Life of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as Devised by Waterwell: A Rock Operetta)(Theater review)
July 23, 2007... "Xanadu" (at the Helen Hayes) is so ridiculously brilliant, so lavish and sublime a confection that any set of adjectives you might come up with after a single viewing will more than likely be replaced by another set of ineffectual adjectives...

Dangerous Liaisons.
July 23, 2007... Glenn Close is an actress whom people respect but don't give their love to, the way they do to, say, the living national treasure Meryl Streep, who is roughly Close's age peer and one of the few other American actresses who have some degree of...

Dream On.(Hairspray; Ratatouille)(Movie review)
July 23, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File The movie version of the hit Broadway musical "Hairspray" is perfectly pleasant--I smiled to myself all the way through it--but it's not as exhilarating as the show. For a subject like this--old dance...

Legends.(Josephs Legende)(Opera review)(Brief article)
July 30, 2007... "Josephs Legende" (1914) is the ultimate Richard Strauss sleeper. The only German composer to be commissioned by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Strauss composed a lush sixty-five-minute orchestral tableau illustrating the Biblical tale of Joseph...

Flatbush Farm & the Farm on Adderley.(Restaurant review)
July 30, 2007... In these increasingly urban times, restaurateurs seem to be leading a back-to-the-land revival. Greenmarket produce and locally sourced meats have become so commonplace that it's nearly impossible to simply enjoy a tomato without considering...

Reversals.(The Talk of the Town)(Supreme Court's decision on the case of racial discrimination in community schools)
July 30, 2007... George W. Bush, whose father was often accused of being too cautious and incremental by conservatives, came into office six years ago with an ambition to remake nearly everything about American government. In some cases, like Social Security...

Head Count.(The Talk of the Town)(steam pipe explosion left Hudson News Co.'s)
July 30, 2007... After September 11, 2001, New York City businesses were forced to revitalize their disaster evacuation plans. Cubicle workers volunteered as in-house fire wardens; interns began xeroxing phone trees. A few weeks ago, the employees of the three...

End Times.(The Talk of the Town)(Olde Good Things' usage of salvages )
July 30, 2007... A walk last week through the denuded ex-headquarters of the Times, on West Forty-third Street, was kind of spooky for a citizen already in an apocalyptic frame of mind. The paper's empty offices, mid-gutting, suggested the twin desolations of...

Namesake.(The Talk of the Town)(Felsenfeld Movement)
July 30, 2007... The Felsenfeld Movement was well under way when Michael Chabon arrived at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, to work on a novel, in February of 2004. By that time, four novelists at the colony had already created fictional characters...

When in Venice.(The Talk of the Town)(Column)
July 30, 2007... Dear Miss Manners, Not to be rude, but enough already with the finger bowls and no-white-shoes-after-Labor Day. Shouldn't a proper conversationalist change the subject every few decades? In the hope of saving Miss Manners from...

The Apostate.(Avraham Burg's apostasy)
July 30, 2007... The self-regard of Israelis is built, in no small part, around a sense of sang-froid, and yet few would deny that the past year was deeply unnerving. Last July, Israel launched an aerial attack on Lebanon designed to destroy the arsenal of the...

Muscle Memory.(research on prostheses)
July 30, 2007... In May of 2004, a twenty-three-year-old former Marine named Claudia Mitchell went for a ride on the back of a friend's motorcycle along State Highway 71, in western Arkansas, near where she had grown up. Soon they were going faster than she was...

Swingers.(Republic of Congo's bonobos)
July 30, 2007... On a Saturday evening a few months ago, a fund-raiser was held in a downtown Manhattan yoga studio to benefit the bonobo, a species of African ape that is very similar to--but, some say, far nicer than--the chimpanzee. A flyer for the event...

Dean of Death Row.(San Quentin State Prison's spokesman, Vernell Crittendon)
July 30, 2007... Though Lieutenant Vernell Crittendon had been reading Michael Morales's mail and listening to his telephone calls for four months, he hadn't formed much of an opinion of him by the evening of Morales's scheduled execution. Crittendon, who had...

High-wire Act.(Damon Albarn's work in the opera, Monkey)
July 30, 2007... It was a clear and cool Friday evening in Manchester, England, the streets still full of summer light at twenty minutes past seven. In front of me, in an orderly queue that stretched down the pavement in front of the Palace Theatre, were two...

Painting by Numbers.(The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture)(Book review)
July 30, 2007... "I painted the picture so that it would be refused. I have succeeded. That way it will bring me some money," Gustave Courbet remarked of a large painting of drunken clerics, "The Return from the Conference," which he had sent to the Paris Salon...

A Day at the Beach.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 30, 2007... On September 11, 2001, the fifty-five-year-old German choreographer Gerhard Falktopf is doing the same thing he's been doing for weeks--pacing about his Village loft and ranting about the loss of his dance company--while his former muse,...

The Scandal of the Season.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 30, 2007... "My office is to charm those who charm the world," Alexander Pope declares at the start of this lively novel, based on events that inspired "The Rape of the Lock." In the elaborately narrow world of early-eighteenth-century London society, the...

The Long March.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 30, 2007... In 1934, surrounded by Chiang Kai-shek's forces in the south, Mao's Red Army marched more than eight thousand miles to a new base, in the northwest. The march, completed by only a fifth of the original army, was a defeat in all ways but one: it...

Prophet of Innovation.(Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction)(Brief article)(Book review)
July 30, 2007... In 1939, the economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote that "the history of capitalism is studded with violent bursts and catastrophes" that, while ultimately bettering society, seem "like a series of explosions." He called this process "creative...

Body Count.(The Exception)(Book review)
July 30, 2007... The last century produced an enormous trove of literature about mass murder, no doubt because there was so much of it. Novelists, historians, and psychologists are still fascinated by the conduct of average people who were able to kill their...

Looking-glass Opera.(Alice in Wonderland)(Opera review)
July 30, 2007... The labyrinthine fantasy of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" begins in deceptively lulling tones, with the idyllic phrase "All in the golden afternoon." Unsuk Chin's opera "Alice in Wonderland," which recently had its...

Hot Stuff.
July 30, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File Climate change is coming, and it's serious. None of the traditional folk remedies--switching to a Prius, recycling your eggshells, or taping the Bon Jovi set from the Live Earth concert--will avail you...