The New Yorker articles from June 2008

The New Yorker archives from June 2008

Easy Being Green.(Al Green's new album 'Lay It Down')(Sound recording review)
June 2, 2008... The seminal hip-hop group Public Enemy, still going strong after twenty years, recently released an album titled "How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul?" The new Al Green album, "Lay It Down" (Blue Note), addresses the same...

Cafe Katja.
June 2, 2008... Johannes Kepler used the figure panis quadragesimalis--the Lenten pretzel--to illustrate the knotty path certain planets would have to take to circle the Earth, but supposing the pretzel, not the sun, is the center of the universe, then Erwin...

Memory Lapse.(The Talk of the Town)(election primaries)
June 2, 2008... The precise origins of Memorial Day are a little fuzzy. According to one version, it was first celebrated in 1865, a few weeks after Lee surrendered to Grant; freed slaves and black and white Union soldiers marched to the site of a Confederate...

Huddle.(The Talk of the Town)(Generation Obama)
June 2, 2008... Last week, members of the steering committee for Generation Obama--a grassroots group that organizes young professionals--held an after-work meeting in a conference room at a marketing firm on Third Avenue. The theme was reaching out. "The name...

Satire, Iranian.(The Talk of the Town)(Iranian satirist Ardeshir Mohassess)
June 2, 2008... "I would say I've been an art lover all my life," Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General, and international ambulance chaser, now eighty, said last week, before leaving his apartment in the Village to head uptown for the opening of a...

On A Limb.(The Talk of the Town)(University of California, Berkeley)
June 2, 2008... Calum Wright did not go to Berkeley--that's Berserkley, to those who remember the sixties--to be an activist. He is a law-and-order type, reared among conservatives in London, and a member of the crew team, whose tastes run to khakis and polo...

Wanna Buy A Book?(The Talk of the Town)(Brazen Head Books)
June 2, 2008... Michael Seidenberg has a beard with deckled edges, a boyish face with only minor wear, a spine in fine shape, a mint mind, and a Brooklyn provenance, circa early nineteen-fifties. He also has a used-book shop, but mum's the word. Brazen Head...

Non-Lethal Force.
June 2, 2008... A judgment sometimes applied by professionals to a non-lethal weapon is that if the weapon is any good--if it reliably protects someone from being attacked or subdues a person without causing harm--criminals will use it. Absent a small number...

The Rebellion Within.(Al Qaeda)
June 2, 2008... Last May, a fax arrived at the London office of the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al Awsat from a shadowy figure in the radical Islamist movement who went by many names. Born Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, he was the former leader of the Egyptian terrorist...

The Dirty Trickster.(political consultant and lobbyist Roger Stone)(Biography)
June 2, 2008... A sign inside the front door of Miami Velvet, a night club of sorts in a warehouse-style building a few minutes from the airport, states, "If sexual activity offends you in any way, do not enter the premises." At first glance, though, the scene...

Out of the Blocks.(Beijing's National Stadium and National Aquatics Center)
June 2, 2008... To understand just how important the Beijing Olympics are to China, you have only to look at where the Olympic Green has been built. During Beijing's first building boom--six hundred years before the current one--the city was laid out...

Return to Paradise.(English poet John Milton)(Critical essay)
June 2, 2008... Sometime in 1638, John Milton visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. The great astronomer was old and blind and under house arrest, confined by order of the Inquisition, which had forced him to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the...

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 2, 2008... Adam Kellas is a shambolic Scottish thirtysomething loser, unlucky in love and prone to inappropriate temper tantrums, who becomes a war correspondent, because he "wasn't brave enough to be thought a coward." When he is sent to Afghanistan to...

The Answer Is Always Yes.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 2, 2008... In Ferrell's debut novel, Matthew Acciaccatura, a bullied nerd from Teaneck, New Jersey, in his freshman year at N.Y.U. and hungry to be cool, is spotted by a Manhattan night-club owner and given the chance to become a promoter. Ferrell...

Sitting Bull.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 2, 2008... In the early eighteen-seventies, General Philip Sheridan, preparing to move into the Black Hills, in blatant violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie, began hearing about an Indian named Sitting Bull. The stories, vague and portentous, caused...

Apples and Oranges.(Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 2, 2008... In this elegiac memoir, the author, a reporter, applies the same investigative skills that led to her exposes of the tobacco industry and Enron to a more intimate subject: her contentious relationship with her late brother, Carl. From an...

Surfin'.(Usher's album 'Confessions' and 'Here I Stand')(Sound recording review)
June 2, 2008... Usher's 2004 album, "Confessions," may turn out to have been the last true blockbuster in pop music. Since 2000, only five albums have sold more copies--nine and a half million. "Confessions" sold 1.1 million in its first week, and contained...

Men at Work.(comedic drama 'The Weir')(Theater review)
June 2, 2008... For the male characters in "The Weir," Conor McPherson's 1997 comedic drama, the spirit world is readily accessible, especially after the consumption of spirits. In a tavern in rural Ireland, a young barman serves lager and whiskey to three...

Mia Dona.(Restaurant review)
June 9, 2008... Mia Dona's failures are minor, but the accretion of them can feel major. The staff seems perpetually harried; one night, the hostess couldn't find a waiting party and exclaimed, when the impatient group approached to check on the status of its...

Struggles.(The Talk of the Town)(Zimbabwe)
June 9, 2008... A t first glance, the photograph flashed on news reports around the world--an image of a man burning in South Africa, necklaced with a rubber tire that had been doused in gasoline and set aflame--looked like a relic from the days of apartheid....

Goombah 101.(The Talk of the Town)(The Sopranos: A Wake)
June 9, 2008... Over Memorial Day weekend, fittingly, Fordham University hosted a conference called "The Sopranos: A Wake." Among the papers were "'Blabbermouth Cunts': 'The Sopranos' and the Feminist Dilemma," "A 'Finook' in the Crew: Vito Spatafore, 'The...

Lucky People.(The Talk of the Town)(Big Brown)
June 9, 2008... It can be disconcerting to see people go nuts over a euthanized racehorse when the world is falling to pieces and human beings are dying in droves, but a living racehorse--a thriving champion, a supercolt in his prime--is another thing, as good...

Digging.(The Talk of the Town)(Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull)
June 9, 2008... Last week's news that "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" had won one of Hollywood's most coveted prizes--the Memorial Day-weekend box-office--sent shivers through the offices of Archaeology, a magazine of the Archaeological...

All Together Now?(The Talk of the Town)(CBS-CNET Networks merger)
June 9, 2008... These aren't great times for CBS. It's no longer the network ratings champ; its radio business is dragging; and a recessionary economy is bad news for a company dependent on advertising revenue. So it isn't exactly surprising that the company...

Communion.
June 9, 2008... It was one of those rainy, miserable days in Nairobi. Since I had skipped morning Mass at Hekima College, the Jesuit school of theology where I was studying, I had to get out my umbrella and walk to Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, near Adams...

Dymaxion Man.(Buckminster Fuller)(Brief biography)
June 9, 2008... One of Buckminster Fuller's earliest inventions was a car shaped like a blimp. The car had three wheels--two up front, one in the back--and a periscope instead of a rear window. Owing to its unusual design, it could be maneuvered into a parking...

Winter Light.(Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light)
June 9, 2008... One night in Oxford, in the winter of 1970, a friend dropped by my room to see if I wanted to take in a movie. Rob was English, some years younger than I, nearing his last term. I was twenty-five, but only a second-year undergraduate, playing...

The Running Novelist.(Haruki Murakami)
June 9, 2008... A long time has passed since I started running on an everyday basis. Specifically, it was the fall of 1982. I was thirty-three then. Not long before that, I was the owner of a small jazz club in Tokyo, near Sendagaya Station. Soon after...

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Counting Pages.(Yom Kippur)
June 9, 2008... As a young girl, I spent more time outside synagogues than in them. Services were long, and I always found some excuse to get away. I remember the Quonset hut where my family went to services when we first moved to Honolulu. The building looked...

Carrie.(Sex and the City)(Movie review)
June 9, 2008... Secrecy has clouded "Sex and the City" since it was first announced. When would the film appear? Who would find a husband? Would one of the main characters die? If so, would she commit suicide by self-pity (a constant threat), or would a...

The Book of Getting Even.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 9, 2008... Gabriel Geismar, the embattled protagonist of Taylor's excellent second novel, is the son of a domineering rabbi growing up in nineteen-fifties New Orleans. Homosexual, suffering from a physical deformity (he has a supernumerary thumb), and...

The Lost Daughter.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 9, 2008... In this brutally frank novel of maternal ambivalence, the narrator, a forty-seven-year-old divorcee summering alone on the Ionian coast, becomes obsessed with a beautiful young mother who seems ill at ease with her husband's rowdy, slightly...

The Strong Man.(The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 9, 2008... After Richard Nixon lost the gubernatorial race in California, in 1962, he moved to New York to practice law and fell in with John Mitchell, a self-assured municipal-bond lawyer, who went on to run Nixon's 1968 Presidential campaign and serve...

Palestinian Walks.(Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 9, 2008... A work of passionate polemic, journeying, history, and autobiography, this highly original consideration of the Palestinian-Israeli issue is structured around a series of vigorous, attentive hikes through the occupied territories. Shehadeh, a...

Holiday in Hellmouth.('God's Problem')
June 9, 2008... Nietzsche said that if a human being put his ear to the heart chamber of the world and heard the roar of existence, the "innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe," he would surely break into pieces. But a newspaper, pumping its inky current of...

The Pound Error.('Ezra Pound Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work')
June 9, 2008... Ezra Pound turns up five times in Peter Gay's big survey of the modern movement in literature and the arts, "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy"--once in connection with T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (which Pound edited), once as the author of an...

The Gerbil's Revenge.(auto-tune)
June 9, 2008... Tourists black out reflective retinas in snapshots before printing them, and millions of people refer to strangers they've never spoken to as friends, because they've connected through a social-networking platform. The transition from living in...

Funhouse.(Koons retrospective at Museum of Contemporary Art)
June 9, 2008... There is something nightmarish about Jeff Koons. The fifty-three-year-old American enchanter and provocateur is a major artist, in the old sense of one who edits the past and sketches the future of an art--in this case, sculpture. (Koons's...

That Seventies Show.(Swingtown)(Television program review)
June 9, 2008... "Swingtown," a new summer drama on CBS, is set squarely and pointedly in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, the year that America--having left Vietnam, having lanced the boil that was Richard Nixon and not yet become annoyed by the President...

Bar Boulud.(Restaurant review)
June 23, 2008... An affectionate homage to the cuisine of Daniel Boulud's native Lyons, Bar Boulud presents the earthy glories of French terroir in a setting reminiscent of a SoHo store or--with its long bar and swooping, swanlike decanters--a laboratory. The...

Exhillaration.(The Talk of the Town)(Hillary Clinton)
June 23, 2008... The Presidential flight of Hillary Rodham Clinton, which had been aloft for nearly a year, began its descent stage on January 3, 2008, somewhere over Iowa. Five months later to the day, she piloted it to a smooth touchdown, though not without...

Citizen Mayhill.(The Talk of the Town)(Huffington Post's Mayhill Fowler)
June 23, 2008... Mayhill Fowler, at present the most famous "citizen journalist" on earth, recently spent a full week at home, in Oakland, after leaving Milbank, South Dakota, with her second major scoop of the campaign season: a three-minute audio clip of Bill...

The Way They Move.(The Talk of the Town)(John McCain, Hillary Clinton)
June 23, 2008... There's been plenty of (metaphorical) eye-rolling, and head-shaking, over the pronouncements of "body-language experts" who have turned up on TV this election season to parse the candidates' fist bumps and grimaces. Finger-pointing, according...

Water, Water.(The Talk of the Town)(The New York City Waterfalls)
June 23, 2008... Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic installation artist, whose work has been on view this spring at both the Museum of Modern Art and its Queens affiliate, P.S. 1, is about to take over a large stretch of the East River. "The New York City...

Tim Russert.(The Talk of the Town)(In memoriam)
June 23, 2008... Our colleague Calvin Trillin once referred to the televised weekend bloviators from Washington as the "Sabbath Gasbags." Which was fair up to a point. Countless cubic feet of hot, polluted air are regularly unleashed into the national...

One Angry Man.(Keith Olbermann)
June 23, 2008... It was nearly midnight before Keith Olbermann left the NBC News election studio on May 13th, having spent five hours on the air, co-anchoring coverage of the West Virginia Democratic primary. Olbermann had a short ride home from Rockefeller...

Hello, Hal.(talking computers)
June 23, 2008... Not long ago, a caller dialled the toll-free number of an energy company to inquire about his bill. He reached an interactive-voice-response system, or I.V.R.--the automated service you get whenever you dial a utility or an airline or any other...

Fidel's Heir.(Hugo Chavez)
June 23, 2008... A few years ago, when Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, said that he wanted a new jet to replace the nearly thirty-year-old Boeing bequeathed to him by his predecessor, his critics raised an outcry. But Chavez went ahead with his plans....

First Impressions.(cave paintings in Europe)(Travel narrative)
June 23, 2008... During the Old Stone Age, between thirty-seven thousand and eleven thousand years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was etched or painted on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain. After a visit to Lascaux,...

Reluctant Diva.(Loverly)(Sound recording review)
June 23, 2008... In a world of niche audiences, the singer who refuses to go gently into a particular niche and stay there is at best a challenge and at worst a double agent. Cassandra Wilson, the willfully original jazz singer, has been puzzling her audiences...

She's Not Herself.('Atmospheric Disturbances')(Book review)
June 23, 2008... In 1835, Georg Buchner, a young sometime medical student, began to write "Lenz," a story that inhabits the schizophrenic breakdown of the eighteenth-century poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. It opens simply, like a Romantic stroll: "The 20th,...

An Upstate Saga.('America America')(Book review)
June 23, 2008... From the first pages of Ethan Canin's new novel, "America America" (Random House; $27), we feel in safe hands; the prospects are panoramic, and the prose, in the author's preferred first-person mode ("It's easier to write when you have a...

The Last Campaign.(The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 23, 2008... On March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for President. Eighty-two days later, on the night he won the California primary, he was shot dead. Clarke's book is a ride inside the spinning bubble of that frenzied, idealistic,...

McMafia.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 23, 2008... Citing estimates that the world's illicit economy accounts for nearly twenty per cent of worldwide turnover, Glenny tracks the spread of sophisticated transnational criminality. The collapse of Communism and the deregulation of financial...

Attachment.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 23, 2008... A cultured British couple who pride themselves on unconventionality decamp to an island in the Indian Ocean, intending to continue their careers (his, advertising; hers, a women's-health column) via the Internet. Then the wife opens a smutty...

The Sorrows of an American.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 23, 2008... "I'm lost," a patient tells her psychiatrist in Hustvedt's fourth novel. "I'm cold. I'm all alone." She might be speaking for all the characters in this sombre meditation on the isolation of urban professionals, in which daily routines are...

Double Story.(Concerto DSCH)(Dance review)
June 23, 2008... Alexei Ratmansky's new piece for New York City Ballet, "Concerto DSCH," to Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto (the initials are the composer's, in the German form), opens like a beach party, with dancers in swimsuitlike costumes doing sporty...

Seeing Is Believing.(The Pitmen Painters, Edward Albee's Occupant)(Theater review)
June 23, 2008... "Culture is for living, and art should be about taking part," Lee Hall writes in the introduction to his superb play "The Pitmen Painters" (well directed by Max Roberts, at the National's Cottesloe Theatre, in London). Set in hidebound prewar...

Bulges.(The Incredible Hulk, You Don't Mess with the Zohan)(Movie review)
June 23, 2008... "The Incredible Hulk" picks up the story of Bruce Banner--the guy with anger-management problems--some five years after the end of his tantrummy misadventures in "Hulk." As Bruce, Edward Norton has taken over for Eric Bana, and Louis Leterrier...

Way-Out West.('The Furies')(Video recording review)
June 30, 2008... The director Anthony Mann, an early master of the film noir, turned to the Western in midcareer, and his second, "The Furies" (Criterion), from 1950, is one of the greatest--in effect, a frontier noir with epic ambitions and Shakespearean...

BAR Q.(Restaurant review)
June 30, 2008... The middle "B" missing from Bar Q's name is a warning: you're not in hill country anymore. There's no tang of char in the air, no smoke pit seething in a back alley, no long-legged waitresses in denim cutoffs and cowboy boots. Those who come...

What's The Big Idea?(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama)
June 30, 2008... On October 7, 2002, in Cincinnati, Ohio, George W. Bush delivered the defining speech of his Presidency. In the face of "clear evidence of peril" from a regime harboring terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, he declared, "we cannot wait...

Smelly Trees.(The Talk of the Town)(ginkgo tree, anti-ginkgo tolerance group)
June 30, 2008... The ginkgo, a.k.a. the maidenhair tree, or the duck's-foot tree, is remarkable in many ways. It is a living fossil, dating to the early Permian era. It has no close relatives (classification: Plantae, Ginkgophyta, Ginkgoopsida, Ginkgoales,...

School Night.(The Talk of the Town)(Lance Stephenson, 'Gunnin' for That #1 Spot')
June 30, 2008... Lance Stephenson, the best high school basketball player in New York City, was in midtown one recent Monday night to watch an early cut of a new documentary in which he stars. The film, "Gunnin' for That #1 Spot," was directed by Adam (MCA)...

Space Dirt.(The Talk of the Town)(Mars, Honeybee Robotics)
June 30, 2008... Stephen Gorevan, a co-founder of Honeybee Robotics, has thick snow-white hair that seems to float above his head like a cloud, and he wears glasses with pronounced black frames. He greeted a recent visitor to Honeybee's offices, on...

Second Act.(The Talk of the Town)(Joan Blumberger Olden)
June 30, 2008... When friends and acquaintances of Joan Blumberger Olden, a former fashion executive in New York, received an invitation recently to a cocktail party honoring Francois Bozize, the President of the Central African Republic, it came as a surprise...

The New Evangelicals.
June 30, 2008... Just four years ago, during the last Presidential election, leaders on the religious right were the only white evangelicals whose voices were heard in the public arena. In their own gatherings, they proposed such things as the abolition of the...

Altered State.(Pennsylvania)(State overview)
June 30, 2008... When I hear the children hollering between hillsides, I suddenly get Pennsylvania back in my life. Late one May afternoon, my son stands in the garden of our house outside Turin and yells over to the American kids who have moved in across the...

The Brass Ring.(Sheldon Adelson)
June 30, 2008... Last October, Sheldon Adelson, the gaming multibillionaire, accompanied a group of Republican donors to the White House to meet with George W. Bush. They wanted to talk to the President about Israel. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was...

The Itch.
June 30, 2008... It was still shocking to M. how much a few wrong turns could change your life. She had graduated from Boston College with a degree in psychology, married at twenty-five, and had two children, a son and a daughter. She and her family settled in...

Tiananmen's Wake.('Beijing Coma: A Novel')
June 30, 2008... It is still not clear how many unarmed civilians the People's Liberation Army (P.L.A.) killed in Beijing on the night of June 3, 1989, as it sought to expel protestors from Tiananmen Square. The names of the victims, who were officially...

The Pact.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 30, 2008... The story of how Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich came close to secretly making a deal on Social Security by cutting out their respective political allies, only to be derailed by Clinton's philandering (and, to an extent, by Gingrich's), is far...

Austerity Britain.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 30, 2008... Drawing on a remarkable array of diaries, letters, memoirs, and surveys, Kynaston assembles a polyphonic history of a pivotal time. In July, 1945, Winston Churchill was swept from office in an electoral landslide, his wartime leadership already...

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 30, 2008... Set in rural nineteen-seventies Wisconsin, this loose retelling of Hamlet focusses on Edgar, a boy born mute and with a preternatural ability to commune with the dogs whose breeding and training is his family's business. Idyllic routine is...

Personal Days.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 30, 2008... This comic and creepy debut novel takes place in a Manhattan office depopulated by "the Firings," where one can "wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window." The downsized staff huddle like the crew of a doomed spaceship,...

Forbidden Cities.(Beijing, Chinese Central Television)
June 30, 2008... The city planner Edmund Bacon once described Beijing as "possibly the greatest single work of man on the face of the earth." When he was there, in the nineteen-thirties, you could still see that the city, from the walls surrounding it to the...

Indecision 2008.('Hamlet')(Theater review)
June 30, 2008... At the finale of "Hamlet," most of the main characters lie either poisoned or stabbed to death, scattered around the palace hall like so many toppled chairs. Horatio is left to tell the tale to the conquering Fortinbras, who enters upstage and...

Working Girl.(Secret Diary of a Call Girl)(Television program review)
June 30, 2008... As befits a show about a woman of the night, "Secret Diary of a Call Girl," an eight-episode blast of summer heat from Showtime that started last week, arrived with something of a reputation. The series was produced in England, and was...

Guy Stuff.('Rabbit and Rogue')(Dance review)
June 30, 2008... For the past two decades or so, Twyla Tharp has tended, in her new dances, to recycle features of her earlier successes, but in "Rabbit and Rogue," which just had its premiere at American Ballet Theatre, she seems to repeat every single thing...

Big Kills.('Wanted', 'The Happening')(Movie review)
June 30, 2008... What is it like being Timur Bekmambetov? No artist should be confused too closely with his creations, but anybody who sits through "Wanted," Bekmambetov's new movie, will be tempted to wonder if the life style of the characters might not...