The New Yorker articles from July 2008

The New Yorker archives from July 2008

Ago.(Restaurant review)
July 7, 2008... It might seem like piling on to knock Ago, since Frank Bruni, writing in the Times, recounted being subjected to "the 'Poseidon Adventure' of wine spills," and Alan Richman offered his compliments, on his GQ blog, "to the chef--if there is...

Obama's Iraq Problem.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama)
July 7, 2008... In February, 2007, when Barack Obama declared that he was running for President, violence in Iraq had reached apocalyptic levels, and he based his candidacy, in part, on a bold promise to begin a rapid withdrawal of American forces upon taking...

By A Nose.(The Talk of the Town)(Janet Hamlin)
July 7, 2008... When Janet Hamlin first went to Guantanamo Bay to work as a courtroom sketch artist, in April of 2006, she was forbidden to draw the faces of detainees in any detail, as part of the Pentagon's efforts to comply with the Geneva Conventions. By...

The Chill.(The Talk of the Town)(Chip Taylor)
July 7, 2008... If you had stumbled into Banjo Jim's, in the East Village, on a recent Wednesday night and encountered a sixty-something guy leading a band through a fervent rendition of "Wild Thing," for an audience of two dozen or so, you might have...

Nothing Doing.(The Talk of the Town)(New York Yankees)
July 7, 2008... With the Yankees' pitching in a perpetual flummox and the distraction of a home All-Star Game looming into view in the last summer of baseball up at the Stadium, this is a good time to bring up a vivid, semi-obscure Yankee team record that...

Oily Speculations.(The Talk of the Town)(blaming the commodity speculators)
July 7, 2008... When bad things happen, it's always nice to have a scapegoat. So, with Americans furious about soaring oil prices, Congress has gone in search of someone to blame. There are a number of usual suspects to choose from, depending on your...

Romeo, Romeo.(Mark Morris Dance Group's 'Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare')
July 7, 2008... "Ladies," Mark Morris says to his female ensemble, "you're getting pussified. Like, 'I'm an adorable My Little Pony.' I don't want girly--I want womany. Smack your skirts. It drives men wild." In a large studio at the top of the Brooklyn...

The Back of the World.(G.K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday')
July 7, 2008... This year is the hundredth anniversary of G. K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday," and it has come out in at least two new editions on the occasion. "The Man Who Was Thursday" is one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the...

Preparing the Battlefield.(Iran's nuclear program)
July 7, 2008... L ate last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the...

Symphony of Millions.(classical music)
July 7, 2008... In March, Chen Qigang, a Chinesecomposer who is supervising the music program for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics, received a National Spirit Achievers Award at a press event in Beijing. He was one of ten artists and...

Cloudy Trophies.('Posthumous Keats')
July 7, 2008... In July, 1820, John Keats published his third and final book, "Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems." He had no reason to expect that it would be a success, with either the public or the critics: in his short career, the...

The Garden of Last Days.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 7, 2008... Dubus's follow-up to "House of Sand and Fog" is inspired by the rumored visit of 9/11 hijackers to a strip club shortly before their attacks. In the fictional Puma Club, in Sarasota, Florida, a twenty-six-year-old named Bassam al-Jizani watches...

Breath.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 7, 2008... Bruce Pike, a middle-aged paramedic, is adept at distinguishing a suicide from an error in judgment; his own turbulent adolescence accounts for this grim bit of wisdom. Growing up in a conservative Australian mill town not far from the coast,...

Kafka Comes to America.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 7, 2008... Wax, the head of the Oregon Federal Public Defenders' office, writes that when he volunteered to represent inmates at Guantanamo Bay he didn't know if his clients "would be terrorists or innocents." At least one, Adel Hamad, a Sudanese aid...

Collections of Nothing.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 7, 2008... King, a professor at Santa Barbara, has spent decades collecting things that nobody else would want: food packages and labels (he has about eighteen thousand), illustrations snipped from old dictionaries (seven thousand), linings of "security"...

Spokespeople.('Palace of the End')(Theater review)
July 7, 2008... One hesitates to call the Canadian playwright Judith Thompson's "Palace of the End" (an Epic Theatre Ensemble production, at Playwrights Horizons) a lyrical work, given its subject. Political pundits might be alienated by the idea of a...

Desperate Men.('Hancock', 'Tell No One')(Movie review)
July 7, 2008... After "Speed Racer," "Iron Man," "Indiana Jones," "The Incredible Hulk," and "Get Smart" (which is so innocuous that you forget the jokes before you hit the street), it seemed clear that this year's big summer movies, however spectacular, had...

Blue Ribbon Downing Street Bar.(Restaurant review)
July 21, 2008... On a recent night at this West Village spot, a young woman--blond hair, petite, ebulliently extolling her recent wine-tasting course--sampled a glass of red. "Is it a Californian Syrah?" she asked her companion. The bartender began to offer a...

Flip-Flop Flap.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama)
July 21, 2008... One of the World Wide Web's most distinguished organs of fake news, the Borowitz Report, leads its current issue with this flash: The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win...

H-bloo On A-rod.(The Talk of the Town)(Alex Rodriguez, Madonna)
July 21, 2008... Shortly before his regular teatime, one day last week, the Yale literature professor Harold Bloom found an occasion to consider the plight of his beloved Yankees, as they approached the All Star break in third place, and of their star third...

Isn't It Romantic?(The Talk of the Town)('The Romantics')
July 21, 2008... The plot of "The Romantics," a new novel by Galt Niederhoffer, unfolds during the weekend wedding of Lila Hayes, a blond, beautiful, witty, and wealthy Yale graduate, and her former classmate Tom McDevon, a handsome, charming, social-climbing...

Shape-shifter.(The Talk of the Town)(David Fisher, 'dynamic architecture')
July 21, 2008... Architects don't usually hold elaborate press conferences to announce their new designs. But David Fisher is not a typical architect, and not only because he goes by the honorific "Dr." Fisher, who was born in Tel Aviv fifty-nine years ago, is...

Fish Story.(The Talk of the Town)(Larry Saul, blacktip reef shark)
July 21, 2008... How seldom the native of this, the most vertical of cities, actually turns his head skyward. New Yorkers tend to stare straight ahead or peer downward, the better to avoid strollers, puddles, dog droppings, and panhandlers. For the past few...

Surfing the Universe.(Garrett Lisi, 'An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything',)
July 21, 2008... In June, 2007, a thirty-nine-year-old unemployed physicist named Garrett Lisi arrived at a professional conference in Morelia, Mexico, to give a twenty-minute talk. The conference was attended by all the top researchers in a field called loop...

Buy Shanghai!(City overview)
July 21, 2008... New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn't even sit down, and not just because there is no room. Things move fast in this town which is both new and old, Western and Eastern, Adidas and Adidos, Adadis, Admimas, Daiads, and...

Making It.(Barack Obama)
July 21, 2008... One day in 1995, Barack Obama went to see his alderman, an influential politician named Toni Preckwinkle, on Chicago's South Side, where politics had been upended by scandal. Mel Reynolds, a local congressman, was facing charges of sexual...

The Lion and the Mouse.(Anne Carroll Moore, E.B. White)
July 21, 2008... Anne Carroll Moore was born long ago but not so far away, in Limerick, Maine, in 1871. She had a horse named Pocahontas, a father who read to her from Aesop's Fables, and a grandmother with no small fondness for "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Annie,...

Turf War.
July 21, 2008... In 1841, Andrew Jackson Downing published the first landscape-gardening book aimed at an American audience. At the time, Downing was twenty-five years old and living in Newburgh, New York. He owned a nursery, which he had inherited from his...

City of Thieves.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 21, 2008... In the six years since his critically praised debut, "The 25th Hour," Benioff has produced a story collection and a handful of screenplays, including the blockbuster "Troy." The imprint of his film work is evident in this novel, a finely honed...

The Sister.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 21, 2008... This suspenseful first novel is set in a crumbling Dorset mansion and features two aging sisters, reunited after a separation of nearly fifty years. Virginia is the sensible older sister who stayed, carrying on the family tradition of...

Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 21, 2008... At the height of his fame, in the nineteen-twenties, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was arguably the leading figure in Soviet art. Perhaps only Walt Whitman--whom Mayakovsky passionately admired--wrote with similar breadth and exhilaration. This...

Bordeaux/Burgundy.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 21, 2008... Pitte, a specialist in wine geographies, relates a long and fierce oenophile war in this charming history. Although Bordeaux wine has been an engine of innovation in the world of viticulture--British and Dutch merchants began marketing it in...

Infernal Opera.('Die Soldaten')(Opera review)
July 21, 2008... When Mozart placed a loud, dark, bone-chilling chord of D minor in the first bars of "Don Giovanni," he set a new precedent for operatic curtain-raisers: instead of charming his listeners into paying attention, he would stun them into...

The Road to Baghdad.('Generation Kill')(Television program review)
July 21, 2008... "Generation Kill," a new miniseries on HBO, is based on a 2004 book by Evan Wright, which is an expanded version of a three-part series that was published in Rolling Stone, in 2003, about the time Wright spent embedded with a Marine battalion...

Past Shock.('The Dark Knight', 'Wall-E')(Movie review)
July 21, 2008... In the new Batman film, "The Dark Knight," many things go boom. Cars explode, jails and hospitals are blown up, bombs are put in people's mouths and sewn into their stomachs. There's a chase scene in which cars pile up and climb over other...

Adour.(Restaurant review)
July 28, 2008... There are people, a dwindling lot, who are secure in their mortgages and to whom the spectre of five-dollar-a-gallon gas presents more a challenge than a threat. These people eat at Adour. The restaurant opened in the St. Regis several months...

Loan Rangers.(The Talk of the Town)(Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac)
July 28, 2008... Just before the start of last week's All-Star Game, Jim Bunning, a Major League Hall of Fame pitcher and, for the past decade, Kentucky's junior Republican senator, served up a high inside fastball to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was...

Scooped.(The Talk of the Town)('New York's Poop Scoop Law: Dogs, the Dirt, and Due Process')
July 28, 2008... Michael Brandow, a freelance dogwalker in the Village, hadn't had much luck interesting publishers in a nonfiction manuscript that he'd been working on for the past eight years. In 2006, in the course of his research, he called Alan Beck, a...

First Timer.(The Talk of the Town)(Dennis Shulman)
July 28, 2008... Throughout American history, the number of blind rabbis serving in Congress has remained steady at zero. In a cluttered campaign office next to the Naturoll sushi takeout in Haworth, New Jersey, Dennis Shulman is trying to change that. Shulman,...

Sponsoring Recklessness.(The Talk of the Town)(Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac)
July 28, 2008... When do the words "not guaranteed" actually mean "guaranteed"? Whenever the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are involved. The two companies have long been required to tell investors that their securities are not guaranteed by the...

Angry Youth.('2008 China Stand Up!')
July 28, 2008... On the morning of April 15th, a short video entitled "2008 China Stand Up!" appeared on Sina, a Chinese Web site. The video's origin was a mystery: unlike the usual YouTube-style clips, it had no host, no narrator, and no signature except the...

The Eureka Hunt.(insight experience, )
July 28, 2008... The summer of 1949 was long and dry in Montana. On the afternoon of August 5th--the hottest day ever recorded in the state--a lightning fire was spotted in a remote area of pine forest. A parachute brigade of fifteen firefighters known as smoke...

Dr. Kush.(marijuana, Proposition 215, Senate Bill 420)
July 28, 2008... The Tibetan prayer flags suspended on a string over the sleeping body of Captain Blue rose and fell in fluttering counterpoint to the wheezy rhythm of his breath. Lifted by a gentle breeze off the Pacific Ocean, each swatch of red, white,...

All the Answers.(Charles Van Doren, 'Twenty One')(Personal account)
July 28, 2008... For fourteen weeks in the winter and spring of 1956-57, I came into millions of American homes, stood in a supposedly soundproof booth, and answered difficult questions. I was considered well spoken, well educated, handsome--the very image of a...

Euro Visions.('Mamma Mia!', 'Journey to the Center of the Earth')(Movie review)
July 28, 2008... Like many people, I was under the impression that the new Meryl Streep film was called "Mamma Mia." The correct title is, in fact, "Mamma Mia!," and, in one keystroke, the exclamation mark tells you all you need to know about the movie. Billy...

Paradise Lost.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 28, 2008... In September, 1922, after the Turkish forces of Mustafa Kemal defeated a Greek army that had recklessly occupied the Anatolian city of Smyrna, members of Smyrna's Greek, Armenian, and expatriate communities were killed, raped, and robbed. Soon,...

Why I Came West.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 28, 2008... The title of this memoir is somewhat misleading: despite early chapters on Bass's journey from his childhood home, in Texas, and his years as an oil geologist in Mississippi, much of the book is a lament over the relentless development of the...

Cost.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 28, 2008... Robinson's fourth novel is an engrossing tale of a patrician family's unravelling during a summer in Maine. Julia Lambert is a divorced artist, trying to entertain her oppressive, former neurosurgeon father (he points out everything that's...

To This Day.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 28, 2008... Published in 1952 and now translated into English for the first time, Agnon's final novel presents an eccentric tour through First World War Berlin. The narrator, a Galician-born Jew from Palestine, is stranded in Germany, passing his days in...

The Unforgotten.('The Accordion')
July 28, 2008... In Joseph Roth's novel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, "The Radetzky March," there is an extraordinary scene in which the varied soldiers of that vast, improbable portmanteau parade in Vienna before the Hapsburg emperor, Franz Joseph. Uniformed...