The New Yorker articles from June 2006

The New Yorker archives from June 2006

CITIZENS.(The Talk of the Town)
June 5, 2006... In a world amply populated with angry young Muslims, it is a question of some interest why a small number choose to become suicide bombers. President Bush addresses the matter in starkly religious language, consigning it to an eternal contest...

THE ROOM.(The Talk of the Town)
June 5, 2006... It's customary for graduate schools to steep their students in the cold realities of their future careers. Medical schools introduce pupils to sleep-deprived snacking; law schools equip them to brave articulate ridicule; business schools cull...

MEG AND JASON.(The Talk of the Town)
June 5, 2006... About six years ago, this reporter was advised by a friend who happened to be an Internet entrepreneur about a curious new activity that was being taken up among his circle of acquaintances. "It's called blogging," the friend said. "You should...

HEADPHONE JUNGLE.(The Talk of the Town)(Phil Collins)(Interview)
June 5, 2006... The other day, at a recording session for the cast album of "Tarzan," Disney's new Broadway musical, Phil Collins, the drummer and singer who wrote the show's songs, walked across the floor of a recording studio in midtown. The studio was...

ETON ON THE F.D.R.(The Talk of the Town)
June 5, 2006... In Great Britain this week, schoolchildren are off--free to veg in front of the telly or to terrorise their mums and governesses. Then it's back to class ("half term" is the occasion for breaking), with lessons in penmanship and geography...

LIFE LESSONS.
June 5, 2006... One afternoon, in a small, hot conference room in San Miguel de Allende, a town in central Mexico, a dozen social workers were arguing about what should happen to Rocio, a sixteen-year-old girl. Rocio was the heroine of a radio soap-opera...

STRINGER'S WAY.(Sir Howard Stringer)(Interview)
June 5, 2006... In an era of brazen executive overcompensation, Sir Howard Stringer, the chairman and chief executive of Sony Corporation, does all right for himself yet manages to lag tastefully behind most other C.E.O.s. So it appears, anyway. The tradition...

THE AGITATOR.(Oriana Fallaci)(Interview)
June 5, 2006... "Yesterday, I was hysterical," the Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci said. She was telling me a story about a local dog owner and the liberties he'd allowed his animal to take in front of Fallaci's town house, on the Upper East...

HEADLESS HORSEMAN.
June 5, 2006... Revisionism in history knows no boundaries. Just in the past few years, we have been told that that comet may have glanced right off the dinosaurs, prodding a few toward flight and feathers; that the German blitzkrieg barely meandered across...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
June 5, 2006... The Man of My Dreams, by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House; $22.95). Sittenfeld's second novel features a heroine, Hannah, much like the one in her widely praised debut, "Prep": an outsider who casts a critical eye on her peers. Here, though, the...

BLIGHTED.(Ben Greenman)(Interview)
June 5, 2006... Sasha Frere-Jones talks with Ben Greenman about why British pop doesn't always thrive on this side of the pond. If you have a song in your heart and can't get onto "American Idol," think about buying a plane ticket. In the...

ALL IN THE GAME.(Mad Money)(Television program review)
June 5, 2006... People have very definite opinions of Jim Cramer's bonkers CNBC show "Mad Money," just as they do of professional wrestling, which Cramer's show resembles, though he's the only contestant on the screen, shouting, gesticulating, pacing,...

VIOLENT TIMES.(X-Men: The Last Stand)(Movie review)
June 5, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Once you've seen, in the third "X-Men" movie, Hugh Jackman hurling through the air and smashing into a tree, or Halle Berry spinning like a top as she ascends to nowhere, you don't need to see it again....

CLASSICAL NOTES.
June 12, 2006... WITH THIS RING -- For decades, Wagner fans have assumed that, first, Georg Solti's Decca recording of "Der Ring des Nibelungen" (made in Vienna from 1958 to 1966) was the finest one available, and, second, that it was the first set ever to be...

JUST WATCHING.(The Talk of the Town)(Darfur)
June 12, 2006... In a reflective moment shortly before Memorial Day, President Bush told reporters that he had come to regret the "tough talk" he used when taking the country to war. He rued tagging Osama bin Laden with the phrase "wanted dead or alive" and...

VIETNAM, 1966.(Column)
June 12, 2006... In early 1966, I was catching a ride on a helicopter out to a battle on the central coast of South Vietnam. Once there, I intended to hook up with an infantry battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division that was going into action. Both of the pilots...

NEW YORK, 1967.(Column)
June 12, 2006... By October of 1965, I could watch the opposition to the war in Vietnam forming up outside my bedroom window. Nearly a thousand American troops had already died in the faraway fighting, which looked so close on our TV screens every night, and...

THE FINANCIAL PAGE.(The Talk of the Town)(Marathon Oil)
June 12, 2006... At first glance, there's nothing unusual about the refinery that Marathon Oil owns in Garyville, Louisiana. Like most refineries, it is in a small town near a port. It can refine two hundred and forty-five thousand barrels of oil a day, which...

MEETING E.P.(Ezra Pound)(Column)
June 12, 2006... Anacostia was a bitch to go into, back in the early fifties when I flew there. It wasn't the strip itself that was the problem; it was long enough for any plane I was likely to fly, and there were no obstacles--no tall chimneys, no power lines...

YUGOSLAVIA, 1991.(Column)
June 12, 2006... In February, 1991, I got an editorial job with the magazine Na?i Dani (Our Days), and instantly left my parents' house, where I had, embarrassingly, lived until the age of twenty-seven. I rented a place in the Sarajevo neighborhood of Kova?i...

IRAQ, 2004.
June 12, 2006... The hotel's elevator shaft was next to my room, and when the elevator hit the ground floor it made a muffled echo boom that sounded exactly like a bomb. The elevator sounded like a bomb; thunder sounded like a bomb; construction clangs sounded...

THE BIG SLEAZY.(Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long)(Book review)
June 12, 2006... On the night of September 3, 1930, a group of law-enforcement officials--members of the newly formed Louisiana Bureau of Criminal Identification--stormed into a room at Shreveport's Gardner Hotel, where a man named Sam Irby was sleeping. Irby...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
June 12, 2006... The Secret River, by Kate Grenville (Canongate; $24). On his first night in New South Wales, in 1806, William Thornhill--Thames boatman, thief, banished convict--gazes despairingly into the forest outside his flimsy hut. A spear-wielding...

DIVA PARADE.(Metropolitan Opera)(Concert review)
June 12, 2006... The Metropolitan Opera season lumbered to a close with a gala in honor of Joseph Volpe, who is completing his term as the general manager of the house. With its mixture of bedazzling vocalism and befuddling lapses of taste, the event captured...

DEAD ON.(Deadwood)(Television program review)
June 12, 2006... It has been many years since Westerns were essentially black-and-white, cut-and-dried stories of good versus evil: morality tales with lots of horses and guns and one of everything else--a sheriff, an outlaw, an embattled hero, a town drunk, a...

TUNING IN.(A Prairie Home Companion)(Movie review)
June 12, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Robert Altman, the protean and ageless movie director, and Garrison Keillor, the creator of and chief performer on the incomparable publicradio variety show "A Prairie Home Companion," have collaborated on...

DISTRACTION.(The Talk of the Town)
June 19, 2006... For five days last week, the White House and its Capitol Hill allies did urgent battle against what they perceive, or say they perceive, as an attack on the institution of marriage. It's a strange sort of attack, to be sure: a wonderfully...

THE TERRORIST.
June 19, 2006... Among those quietly celebrating the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last week, no doubt, were Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leaders of Al Qaeda, who have watched their nominal ally wreck the standing of their organization among...

THE NEW BAZOOKA JOE.(The Talk of the Town)
June 19, 2006... Last fall, a couple of candy men took a lunchtime stroll around South Street Seaport. The younger of the two was Paul Cherrie, a confectioner who had recently tripled the sales of Dubble Bubble and sold the company to Tootsie Roll Industries...

HOMELAND HOMEWORK.(The Talk of the Town)(humorous take on Long Island University's offering online master's program in Homeland Security Management)
June 19, 2006... Dear Admissions Officer: As soon as I read in the Post that Long Island University would be offering an online master's program in Homeland Security Management, I knew I had to apply. But then, this month, New York City's antiterrorism...

WEDDING TIME TRAVEL.(The Talk of the Town)(Association of Bridal Consultants)
June 19, 2006... When Toni DeLisi got married, in 1986, her wedding met the standard criteria of the day among Italian families in New Jersey. "My hair was big; my dress was pouffy; I had a band that I hated," she said the other day, with fond reminiscence. "It...

THE INJUSTICE COLLECTOR.
June 19, 2006... June 16th marks the hundred-and-second anniversary of Bloomsday, the date on which the events in James Joyce's "Ulysses" take place. There will be the customary commemorative celebrations surrounding Leopold Bloom's famous walk through Dublin:...

THE CAMERAMAN.(William Wyler )
June 19, 2006... Flashback: 1936, Hollywoodland. An ambitious young director named William Wyler has made his way from Alsace to Southern California, where he plans to contribute a few new frames to the collective American dream--the movies. Already,...

WATCHING THE WATERFRONT.(Global Terminal, Bayonne, New Jersey)
June 19, 2006... Global Terminal, in Bayonne, New Jersey, has one clear advantage over most of its competitors for container-ship business in New York Harbor: it's a straight shot from the Narrows, the harbor's entrance. From Global's wharf to Ambrose Seabuoy,...

STEREO SUE.(Stereoscopic vision)
June 19, 2006... When Galen, in the second century, and Leonardo, thirteen centuries later, observed that the images received by the two eyes were slightly different, neither of them appreciated the full significance of these differences. It was not until the...

AMERICAN SUBLIME.(Morton Feldman)(Narrative biography)
June 19, 2006... Morton Feldman was a big, brusque Jewish guy from Woodside, Queens--the son of a manufacturer of children's coats. He worked in the family business until he was forty-four years old, and he later became a professor of music at the State...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
June 19, 2006... Short Stories Now You See It . . ., by Bathsheba Monk (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $22). Monk, who grew up in Pennsylvania coal-and-steel country, sets her stories in the fictional town of Cokesville, where gardens grow through slag heaps,...

BLOOD UNDER THE BRIDGE.(Some Girl(s))(Theater review)
June 19, 2006... "I've got a little list--I've got a little list," Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner in "The Mikado," sings. "Of society offenders who might well be underground." To the annals of perverse theatrical list-makers we must now add Guy, the...

SPANISH LESSONS.
June 19, 2006... Pablo Picasso is having a tough summer in Madrid. He can handle it, though with nothing like his usual insolent panache--you can feel him sweat. The occasion--"Picasso: Tradition and Avant-Garde," a double exhibition at the glorious Prado and...

ENGINE TROUBLE.(Cars)(Movie review)
June 19, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File If movie studios run on a blend of gamble and caution, then Pixar has been one of the few, in recent years, to get the mixture right. The aesthetic dazzle of "Toy Story" and "Monsters, Inc." was, in a way,...

DVD NOTES.(The John Ford Film Collection)(John Wayne: John Ford Film Collection)(Video recording review)
June 26, 2006... WHY OUT WEST? -- When John Ford directed "Stagecoach" (1939), he launched the modern Western and made John Wayne a star. If Ford's name is synonymous with the Western, two colossal new boxed sets, "The John Ford Film Collection" and "The John...

NAME THAT TONE.(The Talk of the Town)(new cell-phone ring tone can't be heard by people over the age of twenty)
June 26, 2006... There is a new cell-phone ring tone that can't be heard by most people over the age of twenty, according to an NPR report. The tone is derived from something called the Mosquito, a device invented by a Welsh security firm for the noble purpose...

BILLBOARD CITY.(The Talk of the Town)(new outdoor structures)
June 26, 2006... In another era, a reference to New York's "street furniture" might have conjured images of mildewed orange sofas, three-legged coffee tables, and mangled desk lamps. But this is Michael Bloomberg's New York, where trash pickup never falters,...

SHERPA SLEEPOVER.(The Talk of the Town; staircase of Rubin Museum site of camp recreating summiting of Mount Everest for children)
June 26, 2006... "The weird thing," one of the guides was saying, "is that this feels and sounds exactly like base camp at Everest." She gestured around at the surprisingly noisy scene: the guides stowing their gear in the newly assembled mountain tents, the...

RUFUS AT CARNEGIE HALL.(The Talk of the Town)(Rufus Wainwright)(Concert review)
June 26, 2006... Not every single New Yorker was focussed on the Rufus Wainwright concert last Wednesday; a cabdriver from Cote d'Ivoire, who was taking one concertgoer to Carnegie Hall, was listening to a tape of a Mandinka-speaking Muslim preacher, which a...

THE FINANCIAL PAGE.(The Talk of the Town)(FIFA)(Viewpoint essay)
June 26, 2006... On the eve of this year's World Cup, Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the worldwide governing body for soccer, gave a speech in which he laid out his organization's lofty goals. "Universality is still our guiding force," he said; FIFA must...

BIG MAN.(Robert Mugabe)
June 26, 2006... One recent morning, accompanied by an employee of a local residents'-rights group, I drove my Opel Astra rental car about six miles south from the center of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, to a squatter camp that had sprung up last year: a...

WHAT I LEARNED.(at Princeton )
June 26, 2006... It's been interesting to walk around campus this afternoon, as when I went to Princeton things were completely different. This chapel, for instance--I remember when it was just a clearing, cordoned off with sharp sticks. Prayer was compulsory...

THE DESSERT LAB.(Room 4 Dessert)
June 26, 2006... On my third day at Will Goldfarb's new restaurant, on Cleveland Place, in SoHo, an assessor from the Tower Insurance Company of New York made an unannounced but utterly routine visit. The restaurant, called Room 4 Dessert, had been open for two...

REVERSING ROE.(Roe v. Wade; Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act challenges abortion law in South Dakota)
June 26, 2006... One Friday morning a few weeks ago, a young man named Justin Huck stood in the chilly shade just outside the county administration building in Sioux Falls, watching an older man climb stiffly from a pickup truck in the parking lot. The man was...

UTOPIA, THE BRONX.(Co-op City)
June 26, 2006... If you take I-95 North through the Bronx heading out of the city, Co-op City will be on your right. Its high-rise apartment buildings stand far enough from one another so that each appears distinct and impressive against the sky. In slow-motion...

ACID REDUX.(Timothy Leary)(Narrative biography)
June 26, 2006... The good Lord--or maybe it was natural selection, but, when you look at the outcome, how plausible is that, really?--gave us, in addition to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, the fantastic variety of fungi with which we share...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
June 26, 2006... Life Stories Song for My Fathers, by Tom Sancton (Other Press; $24.95). When Sancton's father, a former editor at The New Republic, returned to the South to write novels, he instilled in his son a passion for jazz, taking him along to...

YOUNG AT HEART.(Dada)
June 26, 2006... What was Dada? What it still is: a word--"hobbyhorse," in French. Baby talk. Supposedly plucked at random from a dictionary by a coterie of war-evading young writers and artists in Zurich in 1916, "dada" was a two-syllable nonsense poem and a...

FINE TUNING.(Radiohead)(Concert review)
June 26, 2006... Radiohead doesn't sell as many records as some other major rock groups, like Coldplay or U2, but it has hundreds of thousands of fans in the United States, who have stuck by the band for fourteen years--even though the spacious, colorfully...

TOPIC A.(Spring Awakening)(Theater review)
June 26, 2006... At one point in Michael Mayer's exciting musical reimagining of Frank Wedekind's 1891 play "Spring Awakening" (at the Atlantic Theatre Company), the fresh-faced teen-agers in a late-nineteenth-century provincial German town dream of the...

PRISONERS.(The Road to Guantanamo)(Nacho Libre)(Movie review)
June 26, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File "The Road to Guantanamo," Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross's film about three real-life British nationals who were held for two years at the American military prison, left me in a foul...