The New Yorker articles from June 2009

The New Yorker archives from June 2009

Socarrat.(Restaurant review)
June 1, 2009... The Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, beginning in 711 A.D., brought to the inhabitants of the region, which its conquerors renamed Al Andalus, many things: a new religion, Arabic numbers, calligraphy, rice. According to "The Oxford...

To Be the King.(Alexander Korda's films)(Movie review)
June 1, 2009... A pair of films in the boxed set "Alexander Korda's Private Lives" (Criterion Eclipse) prove that the producer-director Korda and the idiosyncratic star Charles Laughton were, in their prime, as formidable a filmmaking team as John Ford and...

Two Speeches.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama's and Dick Cheney's speech)
June 1, 2009... It's tempting to see last week's speech-making duel between Barack Obama and Dick Cheney as a mismatch, with the eloquence of the admired incumbent set against the snarl of the discredited predecessor. Certainly, there was no contest in terms...

Why Not?(The Talk of the Town)(Interview)
June 1, 2009... Larry King has a new book out, an autobiography called "My Remarkable Journey." In it, he talks about a lot of things: growing up in Brooklyn (stickball, potato kugel), doing odd jobs (U.P.S., Borden's milk), moving to Florida (where he changed...

Art Attack.(The Talk of the Town)(Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian)(Movie review)
June 1, 2009... Bleary-eyed parents, packed in alongside their children at the new sequel "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian"--the tale of an Egyptian tchotchke that brings a museum's exhibits to life every night--may sit up one touch less...

Hell'S Kitchen.(The Talk of the Town)(on Roberto Benigni)
June 1, 2009... For the record, the Italian actor Roberto Benigni does not believe that New Yorkers are going to Hell. "I hope they go to Paradise, every one of them," he said last Thursday, in the back seat of a taxi, blinking against the swish and roar of...

Board Stiff.(The Talk of the Town)
June 1, 2009... When Citigroup and Bank of America held their annual meetings last month, shareholders were in an understandably surly mood. Even as the companies' C.E.O.s apologized for past failures and vowed to do better, shareholders blasted the executives...

It's Spreading.(parrot fever)
June 1, 2009... On December 14, 1929, during a holiday shopping season darkened by the greatest stock-market crash in American history, Simon S. Martin bought a parrot for his wife, Lillian, at a pet shop on North Eutaw Street, in Baltimore. It was not, as it...

Western Disturbances.(on Bruce Nauman and Susan Rothenberg)
June 1, 2009... Bruce Nauman and Susan Rothenberg have lived for the past twenty years on seven hundred acres of open, windswept land near Galisteo, New Mexico, south of Santa Fe. Rothenberg, a painter whose imagery hovers between abstraction and figuration,...

Rough Stuff.(Francis Bacon)(Biography)
June 1, 2009... Francis Bacon has long been my least favorite great painter of the twentieth century. My notes from a visit to the new Bacon retrospective, which is very handsomely installed at the Metropolitan Museum, seethe with indignation, which I will now...

Brooklyn.(The Master)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 1, 2009... Toibin's brief novel, following his bravura rendering of the life of Henry James in "The Master," seems modest at first. A diligent young woman with few opportunities in nineteen-fifties Ireland is packed off by her family to Brooklyn, where...

The Brother Gardeners.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 1, 2009... In Wulf's engaging account, the origin of the English country garden appears as a matter of friendship as much as of flowers--a collaborative effort between two men and two countries. In 1733, a humble American farmer, John Bartram, sent seeds...

Beaumarchais.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 1, 2009... Best known as the author of the comedies that became Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" and Rossini's "The Barber of Seville," Beaumarchais was a high-spirited adventurer for whom writing plays was only an "honest relaxation." This erudite and...

Catnip.(Grasses of a Thousand Colors)(Theater review)
June 1, 2009... London's Royal Court Theatre has made this spring a Wallace Shawn season. In addition to showing Shawn's cult movies "My Dinner with Andre" (1981) and "Vanya on 42nd Street" (1994), the theatre has staged his 1990 one-man show, "The Fever"...

Fighting to Survive.(Terminator movie sequels)
June 1, 2009... If you arrived late for "Terminator Salvation" and missed the name of the director, at what moment would you realize that you were not watching a Mike Leigh film? I would nominate the scene in which a rusty tow truck, armed with a wrecking...

Night at the Museum.(Archives, vol. 1: 1963-1972)(Video recording review)
June 8, 2009... It's been thirty years since Neil Young first sang "Hey hey, my my / Rock and roll can never die," and he's certainly done his part to preserve the form, remaining a vital and even controversial artist well into his sixties. But he's also...

Gottino and Wilfie & Nell.(Restaurant review)
June 8, 2009... The other evening at Gottino, Jody Williams's West Village enoteca, as patrons stacked up in the cramped space between the barstools and the wall, the manager got to work: "We'll have seating in the garden in about an hour," he explained....

Diverse Opinions.(The Talk of the Town)
June 8, 2009... In making nominations to the Supreme Court, Presidents care about diversity, which is a relatively new term for an idea that is nearly as old as the Court itself. In the early days of the republic, when regional disputes were the foremost...

Panther(s)!(The Talk of the Town)
June 8, 2009... The Palisades panther(s) first appeared on the morning of March 6th, in Snedens Landing, a hamlet on the Hudson, just over the New Jersey line. Jane Bernick glanced out her kitchen window and saw, lying in the grass about twenty yards away, a...

No School.(The Talk of the Town)(swine flu)
June 8, 2009... The borough of Queens is said to be home to people from more countries than any similarly sized place on earth; so it figures that when the world comes down with a sickness the city is going to feel it first in Queens. In the borough's far...

Change We Can't Believe In.(The Talk of the Town)(coin shortage)
June 8, 2009... As you walk into the Retiro train station in downtown Buenos Aires these days, you pass a long line of people snaking their way from the station's entrance to a single window. At first glance, this is unsurprising: what's more common than a...

Two Emmas.(The Garrick Year)(Book review)
June 8, 2009... Late on February nights when my circling mind returns to our summer cottage in Maine, it often fastens on the books stuffed into two narrow but tall bookshelves that face each other there on opposite sides of our ill-lit living room. Paperbacks...

The Age of Genius.(Bruno Schulz)
June 8, 2009... An afternoon in spring, Easter Sunday, 1933. Behind the reception desk of a small hotel in Warsaw stands Magdalena Gross. Gross is a sculptor, and her modest family hotel serves as a meeting place for writers and intellectuals. In the hotel...

The Magic Mountain.
June 8, 2009... My family used to have a cabin on the mountain called Jahorina, about twenty miles from Sarajevo. Jahorina had a ski resort, and my sister and I would spend our entire monthlong winter break there, skiing and partying. At that time of year, the...

The Book of Genesis.
June 8, 2009... The cover of R. Crumb's newest work, an illustrated version of "The Book of Genesis," contains a warning label: "ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS." Crumb says that he wanted to prevent people from thinking, Oh, a Bible comic book; I'll...

Naughty Nurse.(Nurse Jackie)(Television program review)
June 8, 2009... The new Showtime series "Nurse Jackie," which begins on Monday, June 8th, after the premiere of the fifth season of "Weeds," marks the welcome return to TV of Edie Falco, starring as Jackie Peyton, an emergency-room nurse in a New York City...

Show or Tell.(creative writing programs)
June 8, 2009... Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a...

Nobody Move.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 8, 2009... So noir it's almost pitch-black, this follow-up to Johnson's National Book Award-winning "Tree of Smoke" concerns a lovable loser named Luntz--barbershop-chorus member, Hawaiian-shirt wearer, and inveterate gambler--who is in debt to an...

Dark Places.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 8, 2009... Libby Day, the protagonist of Flynn's disturbing second novel, was, as a seven-year-old, the only survivor of her family's brutal murder by her older brother, an event dubbed by the media the "Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas." Twenty-five...

Admission.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 8, 2009... Portia Nathan is a thirty-eight-year-old admissions officer at Princeton University, a place so discriminating that it can afford to turn down applicants who are "excellent in all of the ordinary ways" in favor of the utterly...

The Long Fall.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 8, 2009... Leonid McGill, the black private eye at the center of Mosley's latest novel, is compellingly conflicted. A red-diaper baby and ex-boxer who lives a luxe New York life after years of shady work as a fixer for the Mob, he is a bruiser and a...

Serendipity.(Hypnotic Brass Ensemble)
June 8, 2009... The first time I encountered the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, I was walking through the Times Square subway station toward the No. 1 train. It was hard to miss the sound of eight men playing brass instruments--two trombones, four trumpets, one...

Endless Mahler.(Gustav Mahler)
June 8, 2009... "In a hundred years, there will be great folk festivals devoted to my symphonies, in gigantic halls seating twenty to thirty thousand people," Gustav Mahler once told the soprano Lilli Lehmann. He said those words more than a century ago, and...

Portrait of the Writer.(Thomas Lanier Williams III)
June 8, 2009... Born in Mississippi in 1911, Thomas Lanier Williams III--and his older sister, Rose--grew up, like many children they knew of their race and class, under the watchful eye of a black nurse. The woman, Ozzie, was, according to young Tom, "almost...

The Wanderers.(Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian)(Away We Go)(Up)(Movie review)
June 8, 2009... The recent animated features by the Pixar division of Disney--"The Incredibles," "Ratatouille," "WALL-E," and now "Up"--have amounted to a run of creative success that has few parallels in American popular culture. Yes, there was the classic...