The New Yorker articles from June 2007

The New Yorker archives from June 2007

Mercat.(Restaurant review)
June 4, 2007... This new tapas restaurant suffered a delay prior to its debut, so, on a recent evening, not long after its doors finally opened, it seemed like a celebration in the packed dining room. A slim young man, dressed in a sharp suit with his shirt...

Heard in the Street.(The Conversation)(Movie review)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... Between "The Godfather" (1972) and "The Godfather, Part II" (1974), Francis Ford Coppola wrote and directed a small-scale thriller, "The Conversation," which, like Hitchcock's "Rear Window," is an authentic American classic of voyeurism and...

Family Guy.(The Talk of the Town)(Tony Soprano of The Sopranos)(Television program review)
June 4, 2007... In the pilot episode of "The Sopranos," which Home Box Office first aired on January 10, 1999, a thickening son of Essex County, New Jersey, reluctantly visits Jennifer Melfi, a psychiatrist, at her office in Montclair. His name is Anthony...

A Thousand Words.(The Talk of the Town)(photograph by Jahangir Razmi)
June 4, 2007... Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, keeps four prize-winning photographs on the wall above his desk. One is of Babe Ruth's farewell, at Yankee Stadium; another shows Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower walking together at Camp...

Prama.(The Talk of the Town)(Drama during prom season)
June 4, 2007... Not long ago, Steven Cox, one half of the eccentric menswear label Duckie Brown, was checking the e-mail account he shares with his partner, Daniel Silver. He came across a message titled "A Not So Ridiculous Proposition": My name is...

Your Name Here.(The Talk of the Town)
June 4, 2007... In 2001, Barnaby Harris, as he put it recently, "got married to a beautiful woman who was extremely passionate about her yoga practice." Not long after, he decided to have a special T-shirt made for her birthday. It was white with blue...

Creature Feature.(The Talk of the Town)(Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns, and Mermaids)
June 4, 2007... The American Museum of Natural History is putting on a big new show of creatures that don't actually exist, "Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns, and Mermaids," and two first graders, expert in all things imagined, went to see it last week. The...

Party Unfaithful.(conservatives blame Karl Rove for the Republican Party's problems)
June 4, 2007... The West Wing of the White House tends to have a funereal stillness, even in the best of times, which these are not. The President's aides walk the narrow corridors with pensive expressions and vigilantly modulated voices. By contrast, Karl...

The Man in the Hut.(Travel narrative)
June 4, 2007... A single road runs through our village in Normandy, and, depending on which direction you come from, either the first or the last thing you pass is a one-story house--a quonset hut, really--made of concrete blocks. The roof is covered with...

When I'm Sixty-four.
June 4, 2007... Paul McCartney's music-publishing business occupies three stories in an elegant eighteenth-century building on Soho Square, in London. His office is on the third floor and is reached by a small elevator off the lobby or by a narrow staircase,...

Men at Sea.(Movie review)
June 4, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File What relation does Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up" bear to his previous movie, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin"? It is not a sequel, though some of the same actors return for second helpings. Nor is it a companion...

Lies.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 4, 2007... After a boating accident in a Guatemalan backwater, Isabel, a Spanish anthropologist researching indigenous funeral rites, finds that one of the victims has been misidentified as her. She is strangely reluctant to return to her grieving...

Ghostwalk.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 4, 2007... Drawing on alchemy, neurology, animal-rights activism, and supernatural visitations, this debut novel is an ambitious, learned thriller. A Cambridge historian dies under suspicious circumstances, leaving behind the nearly completed manuscript...

Reclaiming History.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 4, 2007... This weighty book (its pages number sixteen hundred and twelve) claims to be the final word on the assassination of President Kennedy. It is as if Bugliosi, who prosecuted the Manson murders, intended to overwhelm with sheer, footnoted bulk....

Chance and Circumstance.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 4, 2007... Carolyn Brown's clear-eyed, unsentimental memoir of twenty years as a principal dancer with Merce Cunningham's company is something rare--an eyewitness account of an artistic revolution. She joined the company in 1953, the year it was formed,...

The Aesthete.(Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero)(Book review)
June 4, 2007... Michael Ondaatje's new novel, "Divisadero" (Knopf; $25), is named for a street in San Francisco where one of the book's characters, Anna, once lived. None of the action takes place there, and the street is mentioned only twice, in passing....

Paintings for Now.(Neo Rauch's Para)
June 4, 2007... Abounding critical and commercial success has earned Neo Rauch a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, of fourteen typically virtuosic and befuddling paintings, all made this year. Rauch may be barely known outside the art world, but fame...

Autumn in New York.(Hank Jones and Joe Lovano's performance at the Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola )(Biography)
June 4, 2007... In mid-May, Hank Jones, slim and dapper, accepted a hand-up to the stage at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola and approached the piano with regal but nimble bearing. His first chords, close and luminous, were reassuring, and, in the circumstances, this...

Ed's Lobster Bar.(Restaurant review)
June 11, 2007... Pearl Oyster Bar, in the West Village, is the matriarch of downtown seafood shacks: in 2001, it spawned Mary's Fish Camp (Mary Redding was once a partner at Pearl), and, this spring, Ed's Lobster Bar (Ed McFarland cooked at Pearl for many...

Back-seat Betty.(Betty Davis)
June 11, 2007... If you were to draw a diagram of funk music in the early seventies, Betty Davis would be dead center. Born Betty Mabry, she was married to Miles Davis long enough to turn him on to funk-rock, was acquainted with both Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone,...

History Boys.(The Talk of the Town)(Frost/Nixon)(Theater review)
June 11, 2007... The crucial moment of Peter Morgan's new play on Broadway, "Frost/Nixon," about the four ninety-minute interviews that David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon in 1977, comes not during the famous final session, on Watergate, but the night...

Saintly.(The Talk of the Town)(painting of St. Dominic)
June 11, 2007... Earlier this spring, Mary Carter, a professor of art education at Ball State University, in Indiana, came to New York for a conference. During a break in her schedule, she visited the Met with a friend. Carter is partial to the Renaissance, so...

Transplant.(The Talk of the Town)(Steve Earle)
June 11, 2007... When the teen-age Steve Earle left San Antonio, Texas, where he was raised, for Greenwich Village, in 1974, he had an image in his mind: the cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," showing Dylan and his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, strolling through...

Fixer-upper.(The Talk of the Town)(West Village town house for sale)(house renovation)
June 11, 2007... Many New York City residences contain stacks of old newspapers, but most of these papers do not include reports on the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic, or the death of King George VI, as did those (from 1865,...

Be Our Guest!(The Talk of the Town)(welcoming immigrants)
June 11, 2007... Give the Senate some credit: in shaping the current immigration-reform bill, it has come up with one idea that almost everybody hates. That's the plan to create a new class of "guest workers"--immigrants who would be allowed to work in the...

Final Destination.(literary papers' trip to archives)
June 11, 2007... The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of...

Commando.(games based on scenes from action movies)
June 11, 2007... To the untrained eye, the ravines near Lake Michigan really did look a little like a Central American jungle. In August, with the Midwest's tropical humidity and a little suspension of disbelief, those dense forests could pass for Nicaragua--at...

Ice Cream and Ashes.
June 11, 2007... Summer movies aren't about summer and they don't have to open during the summer movie-theatre doldrums. For me, they're the movies that come up in conversation at night with friends on the porch or during a long drive, or even late in bed when...

Walkabout.(watching a movie in the summer)
June 11, 2007... Odd, in a way, that we should have something called "the summer movie." The temperature-controlled timelessness of movie theatres should argue against seasonal categories. Back in the days of drive-ins, with the car window down to admit the...

Summer of '42.(movie)
June 11, 2007... As a kid, I rarely went to the movies. My one memory of a summer movie is of a movie about somebody else's summer, a nostalgic look back--way back!--to the "Summer of '42." I believe the movie is famous for a funny scene about buying condoms,...

Five Skies.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 11, 2007... A notable exponent of that difficult literary technique the happy ending, Carlson, who has been writing short stories for decades, brings a gentle sense of decency to his third novel, a tale of the mountain West. High in the desert plains of...

Zoology.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 11, 2007... Dolnick sets his debut novel in the Central Park Children's Zoo, where he briefly worked, and where his protagonist, Henry, finds employment, after flunking out of college. The zoo, a rich seam of metaphor, serves as the backdrop to Henry's...

Religious Freedom and the Constitution.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 11, 2007... The authors argue that the "wall of separation" between church and state is a clumsy metaphor that, in the past sixty years, has repeatedly led courts into "jurisprudential quicksand." In its place, they offer a principle that they call equal...

The Verneys.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 11, 2007... The letters of the Verney family survive as the largest and most continuous collection of personal correspondence from seventeenth-century Britain, and Tinniswood draws on them to produce a lively, almost novelistic account of an aristocratic...

The Lady Vanishes.(A Woman in Charge)(Book review)
June 11, 2007... In August, 1995, Carolyn Huber, an aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, was doing a little tidying up around the White House when, in the so-called book room, she noticed a sheaf of computer printouts lying on a table. Without looking at them too...

Fire Down Below.(Les Murray)
June 11, 2007... Poetry goes to the backwater to refresh itself as often as it goes to the mainstream, a fact that partly explains the appeal of Les Murray, the celebrated "bush bard" of Bunyah, New South Wales, Australia. The son of a poor farmer, Murray, who...

Well Suited.(blending of song writer Britt Daniel and the band Spoons)
June 11, 2007... The Texas singer-songwriter Britt Daniel has recorded only two songs that are more than five minutes long. He hardly ever plays guitar solos, is a terse interview subject, and would never be photographed wearing an untucked T-shirt. His band,...

Young American.(Passing Strange)(Theater review)
June 11, 2007... Not since Stephen Sondheim introduced a kind of Jewish skepticism and irony to the Broadway musical, in the nineteen-fifties, and Tony Kushner revolved his 2003 show, "Caroline, or Change," around the ways in which class intersects with race...

Industrial Strength.(sculptor Richard Serra)(Biography)
June 11, 2007... When I think of Richard Serra's work as art, or of art as what Richard Serra does, a bracing bleakness descends, like that of a stern northern region, where people live gladly, while under no illusion that it's the isle of Capri. Serra's mostly...

Bad Behavior.(Mr. Brooks)(Movie review)
June 11, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File Alfred Hitchcock used to complain about moviegoers who refused to yield to the pleasures of narrative. "The plausibles," he called them--viewers who, rather than enjoying one of his stories about two...

A Clash of Symbols.(video recordings; Howard Hawks)(Scarface; Land of the Pharaohs; Rio Bravo; El Dorado)(Video recording review)
June 25, 2007... The director Howard Hawks (1896-1977), the cinematic kin to his friend Ernest Hemingway, evoked with spare visual rhetoric the stern tests of valor that defined his romantic heroes. A spate of new DVD releases and reissues reveal how...

Palo Santo.(restaurant)(Product/service evaluation)
June 25, 2007... Tucked in the middle of a mostly residential block in Park Slope, this polished new restaurant feels so of a piece with its neighborhood it's as though it sprang up fully formed. An evening's meal, in its fresh simplicity, might have had its...

Five to Four.(The Talk of the Town)(United States Supreme Court)
June 25, 2007... As George W. Bush staggers toward the conclusion of his second term, he can point to at least one major and enduring project that has gone according to plan: the transformation of the Supreme Court. In the next week or so, the justices will...

Monument.(The Talk of the Town)(Zurab Tsereteli's "To the Struggle Against World Terrorism")
June 25, 2007... France gave us the Statue of Liberty. Now Russia has given us "To the Struggle Against World Terrorism," another XXL, in-a-class-of-its-own monument. If you have not seen it, that may be because you haven't recently approached New York City by...

Boy with Dog.(The Talk of the Town)(Dominic Scott Kay; "Saving Angelo" )
June 25, 2007... Dominic Scott Kay has made twenty-three movies since he started his career, seven years ago, at the age of four. He is gap-toothed, big-eyed, and less enfant terrible than James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree: he holds doors;...

Lights-out.(The Talk of the Town)("Take a Nap! Change Your Life", Workman Publishing )
June 25, 2007... Peter Workman, the founder and chief executive of Workman Publishing, is known among his employees as a stickler for traditional business hours: his editors are expected to be at their desks every morning at nine, an hour at which many in the...

A Drug on the Market.(The Talk of the Town)(Avandia)
June 25, 2007... Last month, a fierce and costly battle erupted over the diabetes drug Avandia after an article in The New England Journal of Medicine suggested that the drug raised the risk of a heart attack by forty-three per cent. In the publicity storm that...

The House Across the Way.(fire at Ronald Ross's house)
June 25, 2007... The residents of Cedar Street, a thinly settled road on the island of Grand Manan, would not have considered Ronnie Ross an ideal neighbor even if they hadn't believed that he was running a crack house. Ross was a slim, sporadically belligerent...

French Blues.(Edith Piaf)(Biography)
June 25, 2007... A tiny creature possessed of a power disproportionate to its size, or to its significance in the hierarchy of creation, figures in folktales the world over. It is sometimes a cricket or a mouse. In the folklore of France, it is une piaf, the...

The General's Report.(Major General Antonio M. Taguba )
June 25, 2007... On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next...

The Anti-gravity Men.(Tate Modern)
June 25, 2007... The most striking feature of Tate Modern--the huge art museum in a converted power station on the south bank of the Thames, in London--is the Turbine Hall, a cathedral-like space five hundred feet long, seventy-five feet wide, and a hundred and...

The Naked and the Dead.(Princess Diana; The Royal Family)
June 25, 2007... At the time of her death, on August 31, 1997, Princess Diana had come to have no privacy whatsoever. Take this recording of a private phone conversation with James Gilbey. The lovers' chat featured the following exchange: GILBEY: I haven't...

Varieties of Disturbance.(book)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 25, 2007... Davis's whimsical, seemingly eventless fictions, with their looping motifs and love of obliquity, fall somewhere between prose poetry and Venn diagrams. In her new collection, Kafka agonizes over the menu for a dinner date ("One man fights at...

The Descendants.(book)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 25, 2007... The narrator of this audaciously comic debut novel, the scion of the last Hawaiian landowning clan, has floated through his privileged life: marriage to a model given to "speedboats, motorcycles, alcoholism"; children getting into trouble...

Nature's Engraver.(book; A Life of Thomas Bewick)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 25, 2007... In 1767, when fourteen-year-old Thomas Bewick became an engraver's apprentice in Newcastle, woodcutting was commonly deemed a crude art that could never rival pricey copperplate in detail. But Bewick perfected the craft with realistic yet...

Ace of Spades.(book)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 25, 2007... The son of a Zionist white mother and a Malcolm X-admiring black father, Matthews, in this memoir, is a boy without a race in a city, Baltimore, that requires him to choose one. The story of racial pinball is not entirely unfamiliar: the black...

On the Road.(orchestras)
June 25, 2007... On the Internet, the landscape of American orchestral life is visible as never before. Almost all professional orchestras have their own Web sites, where you can study schedules, listen to MP3s, admire pictures of the executive director with...

Dead in the Water.(HBO's John from Cincinnati)(Critical essay)
June 25, 2007... You know how when you use a big bill to buy a train ticket or stamps from a vending machine and unexpectedly get a handful of Susan B. Anthony dollars as change you think, Oh, come on, this is no good--why didn't the machine warn me? I'm never...

Old and New.("Romeo + Juliet"; ballet)
June 25, 2007... In the nineteen-nineties, Peter Martins produced cool, clipped versions of "The Sleeping Beauty" and "Swan Lake." With his "Romeo + Juliet," unveiled last month at New York City Ballet, he has put another famous old piece in his refrigerator....

Big Ideas.(Venice Biennale)
June 25, 2007... "Tranquila," a Spanish observer was heard to judge, with a warmth just short of enthusiasm, on the opening day of the keenly anticipated fifty-second edition of the Venice Biennale--the most venerable of international art shows--directed by the...

Hiding in Plain Sight.("In a Dark Dark House"; play)(Critical essay)
June 25, 2007... In the introduction to his most recent play, "In a Dark Dark House" (at the Lucille Lortel)--a drama about two estranged but rivalrous brothers coming to terms with their memories of the past, including those of an abusive father--Neil LaBute...

Discoveries.(Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart; Nancy Drew)
June 25, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File How do you solve a problem like Angelina? Ms. Jolie is now more of a brand than a person, and she comes in six flavors: 1. The celebrity. Angelina Jolie is so famous that when she looks in the mirror...