The New Yorker articles from March 2006

The New Yorker archives from March 2006

COUNT 'EM.(The Talk of the Town)(presidential elections and constitutional amendments)
March 6, 2006... Last Thursday morning, in one of the smaller function rooms at the National Press Club, in Washington, an ad-hoc bunch of amateurs, once-weres, might-bes, and goo-goos floated an initiative that, with a little luck, could enable our ramshackle...

BRUCE AND EDDIE'S DAY OUT.(The Talk of the Town)
March 6, 2006... Last Friday, Counsellor Bruce Cutler needed to talk to Counsellor Edward Hayes. Never mind that Cutler had eaten dinner--osso buco and a couple of vodka shots--the night before at Hayes's house. It had been hard to get any privacy, Cutler said,...

THE MARBLE FAUN.(The Talk of the Town)(Jerry Torre)(Biography)
March 6, 2006... One afternoon last year, a woman got into a taxi lugging a video camera and a tripod. The driver, a stocky middle-aged man with close-cropped hair and a goatee, asked her if she was in the film business and if she had ever seen the movie "Grey...

CONSULAT D'INFLUENCE.(The Talk of the Town)(New Orleans)
March 6, 2006... At the corner of Prytania and First Street, in New Orleans, stands a brick mansion with a French tricolor drooping from the gable. Eleven days after the levees failed, last August, heavily armed federal agents were banging on doors all over the...

ASBESTOS, INC.(The Talk of the Town)
March 6, 2006... In the first half of the twentieth century, asbestos was known as the "magic mineral." Its strength and durability made it ubiquitous in the industrial world, as a flame retardant, insulator, and adhesive. In the United States alone, it was...

DRAWING THE LINE.(congressional districts)
March 6, 2006... For three days in October of 2003, Tom DeLay left his duties as majority leader of the House of Representatives and worked out of the Texas state capitol, in Austin. During the previous year, DeLay had led his Republican colleagues there in an...

A MIND IN CONNEMARA.(Martin McDonagh)(Biography)
March 6, 2006... As a child, the playwright Martin McDonagh spent nearly every summer with his parents and older brother in Connemara, a rugged region on Ireland's west coast. Once, when he was six, his family boarded a curragh--a long rowboat made of slatted...

EXILES.(Reza Pahlavi, Shahriar Ahy)
March 6, 2006... On a snowy mid-December day, Reza Pahlavi, the forty-five-year-old son of the deposed Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was seated at a table by the fire at a popular country-French restaurant in Georgetown, enjoying a bowl of cassoulet and...

OTHER DIMENSIONS.(David Smith, sculptor)
March 6, 2006... At its best, the David Smith retrospective at the Guggenheim is a pas de deux of sculpture and architecture, each showing the other off to maximum advantage in a rapture of complementary passions. It is beautiful, powerful, and fragile in the...

MEDAL MANIA.(American performance in the Winter Olympics)
March 6, 2006... On February 11th, the first day of competition in the Winter Olympics in Turin, snow in the Eastern United States competed in the accumulation event, winning a gold medal the next day in a number of places, including New York City, where 26.9...

UNDER SIEGE.(A Writer at War)(Book review)
March 6, 2006... In the terrible winter of 1938, just before the last of the Moscow show trials, the Soviet secret police arrested a woman named Olga Guber for having failed to denounce her anti-Soviet husband. It was an error. The husband she was to have...

Culture and Society.(Us and Them, David Berreby's new book)(Book review)
March 6, 2006... Us and Them, by David Berreby (Little, Brown; $26.95). Berreby's aim is to demonstrate how greatly what he calls our "tribal" nature--the tendency to judge others according to categories, such as Muslims, lawyers, whites--governs our lives....

MODERNISMO.(flamenco dancing)
March 6, 2006... Of all the forms of ethnic dance that have made their way from the campsite to the concert stage, the most glamorous and the most beloved is surely flamenco. It is also the one with the longest history of going commercial. By the mid-nineteenth...

BOOM AND DOOM.(The Pajama Game)(Theater review)
March 6, 2006... I went to see "The Pajama Game" in 1954, at the invitation of my godfather, Eddie Foy, Jr., who played Hines, the perennially jealous, stopwatch-toting time-study man at the Sleep Tite pajama factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the musical's...

CANDID CAMERAS.(Cory Booker, Sharpe James)
March 6, 2006... Like rival gladiators whose pride won't let them ignore a taunt, two Newark pols are about to go at it again. Just a couple of weeks ago, Cory Booker, a thirty-six-year-old lawyer and former city councilman, kicked off his second campaign for...

VEEP DOO-DOO.(The Talk of the Town)(Vice-President of the United States)
March 13, 2006... According to a CBS News poll released last Monday, the "favorability" rating of Vice-President Dick Cheney has sunk to a new low. How low a low? Well, that evening, Jon Stewart, as part of the buildup to the "Daily Show" star's going global on...

THE POUR.(The Talk of the Town)(Barnaby Furnas)(Interview)
March 13, 2006... At five o'clock on a recent Monday afternoon, the artist Barnaby Furnas was in his Brooklyn studio, getting ready to start what he called "the pour" on a very large painting. Twenty-seven feet long by eleven and a half feet wide, propped...

LOCALS.(The Talk of the Town)(trading cards)
March 13, 2006... In 1646, the townspeople of New Haven, Connecticut, feeling squeezed by the neighboring settlements of Boston, to the north, and New Amsterdam, to the south, sent a ship full of their finest wares and personages to England, to assert their...

PARTY ON?(The Talk of the Town)(Kofi Annan)
March 13, 2006... Each February, the Islamic Republic of Iran's Permanent Mission to the United Nations is obliged, by diplomatic etiquette, to throw a cocktail party in celebration of the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This year, it couldn't...

LAST BOHEMIANS.(The Talk of the Town)(Harriet Sohmers Zwerling)
March 13, 2006... "My life's an open book," Harriet Sohmers Zwerling declared the other night. She was wearing a maroon bustier and Pharaonic blond bangs, and was leaning on a cane. Zwerling, the writer and grande horizontale, has been a sort of den mother--she...

GREEN GOLD.(Ted Breaux and absinthe)
March 13, 2006... By Ted Breaux's estimate, there are only a few dozen people alive who have had the opportunity to taste authentic absinthe, the drink whose notoriety defined the Belle Epoque and which has been banned in many countries for almost a century. It...

HOW AMERICAN IS IT?(Whitney Museum)
March 13, 2006... Will the Whitney Museum ever get it right? Having devoted itself for seventy-five years to nurturing and celebrating American art, the museum is now willing--or almost willing--to concede that there is no such thing. Belief in a native American...

POLITICAL SCIENCE.(Merck & Co applies for human papillovirus vaccine license)
March 13, 2006... On December 1st, Merck & Company applied to the Food and Drug Administration for a license to sell a vaccine that it has developed to protect women against the human papillomavirus. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the...

THE ART OF TESTIFYING.(judicial nominees)
March 13, 2006... On the second day of David Souter's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in September, 1990, Gordon Humphrey, a Republican senator from New Hampshire, with something of the manner of a boarding-school headmaster in a satiric novel,...

THE TERROR LAST TIME.(Haymarket Affair, 1886)
March 13, 2006... In William Dean Howells's 1890 novel "A Hazard of New Fortunes," an old German socialist named Lindau rails against capitalism so bitterly that he upsets a friend. Lindau apologizes, saying that his bark is worse than his bite--or, in Howells's...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Last of Her Kind, Sigrid Nunez's new novel)(Book review)
March 13, 2006... The Last of Her Kind, by Sigrid Nunez (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25). Nunez's ruthlessly observed portrait of countercultural America in the sixties and seventies opens in 1968, when two girls meet as roommates at Barnard College. Ann is rich...

MODERN MAN.(Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul)
March 13, 2006... When he was seven years old, in 1870 or 1871, Edvard Munch used a lump of coal to draw a sprawling procession of blind men across the floor of his home in Kristiania--as Swedish-ruled Oslo was then named--one in a series of squalid flats taken...

BLOOD SIMPLE.(The Lieutenant of Inishmore)(Theater review)
March 13, 2006... The grotesque is a formidable literary strategy. Flannery O'Connor explained it this way: ""To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures." The louts and lunatics who inhabit Martin McDonagh's...

TELLING TALES.(The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things)(Movie review)
March 13, 2006... A movie called "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things," directed by and starring Asia Argento, has been slouching around the festival circuit for a while. At last, it has earned a theatrical release, and, whether by design or by a thick slice...

CHILLING.(The Talk of the Town)(Antarctica shrinks)
March 20, 2006... I n March, 2002, NASA and the Deutsches Zentrum fur Luftund Raumfahrt, the German aerospace agency, launched a pair of satellites from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a former intercontinental-ballistic-missile site in northern Russia, to map changes...

MEET THE METS.(The Talk of the Town)(New York Metrs)
March 20, 2006... In a week, the Mets will have assembled in full at Port St. Lucie, back from representing their various native countries at the World Baseball Classic. Expectations are high. The last time fans were this optimistic was probably 1988. Those...

GLASS'S MASTER CLASS.(The Talk of the Town)(Philip Glass' music composition)
March 20, 2006... Toward the end of his life, Samuel Beckett wrote a dramatic monologue called "Company," in which an old man lies in a dark room, thinking despairingly back on his existence. As in other Beckett works, the feel-good message is that dying begins...

TAGGERS.(The Talk of the Town)(Mikey Sklar)
March 20, 2006... Mikey Sklar is twenty-eight. He is five feet six, with an oval face, a high forehead, dark eyes, and brown hair in dreadlocks that fall to the middle of his back. His appearance is post-modern. He has no tattoos, for example, or any desire to...

NET LOSSES.(The Talk of the Town)(internet apartheid)
March 20, 2006... In the first decades of the twentieth century, as a national telephone network spread across the United States, A.T. & T. adopted a policy of "tiered access" for businesses. Companies that paid an extra fee got better service: their customers'...

TO SHOP AND DRIVE IN L.A.(Los Angeles)
March 20, 2006... Please don't take this the wrong way, Los Angeles, but when we on the East Coast think of you, high fashion does not come to mind. You are jeans and tank tops; white leather jackets with fringe and rhinestones; velour tracksuits; enormous...

THE ALCHEMIST.(Tobias Meyer)(Interview)
March 20, 2006... Not long ago, Tobias Meyer, the chief auctioneer and worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby's, visited the Robert Rauschenberg exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. He was there to look at a painting that was, potentially, in play for a...

THE UTOPIANS.(Boykin Curry)(Biography)
March 20, 2006... A little more than a year ago, over the Christmas holidays, I descended in a small helicopter onto a stretch of pristine white sand. The beach, set against a striking coral cliff some ninety feet high, lay just east of a golf course--one of the...

PRETTY THINGS.(Hedi Slimane)(Interview)
March 20, 2006... Hedi Slimane sits alone in his room, in a pleasant but not very fashionable part of Paris, mooning over an album cover. He has just turned six. The year is 1974. The record, a birthday gift from a friend of his older sister, is "David...

THE RAID.(Biography)
March 20, 2006... Richard D. Parsons, who runs Time Warner, the world's largest media company, does not fit the C.E.O. stereotype. He has a scruffy beard. He is black. He hugs strangers, and believes that he can make just about anyone like him. So it was natural...

THE GIRLS NEXT DOOR.(The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds)(Book review)
March 20, 2006... Hugh Hefner, the founder and editor-in-chief of Playboy, always said that his ideal for the magazine's famous Playmate of the Month, the woman in the centerfold photo, was "the girl next door with her clothes off." In other words, he was trying...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Intuition, Allegra Goodman's new book)(Book review)
March 20, 2006... Intuition, by Allegra Goodman (Dial; $25). This intimate portrait of life in a research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, revolves around a scientific mystery: the groundbreaking, too-good-to-be-true discovery of a virus that fights...

MYSTERIOUS SKIN.(Allianz Arena, Munich)
March 20, 2006... Most sports stadiums that have been built in recent decades are hulking concrete monoliths or cute exercises in nostalgia, and they give the impression of having been crafted either by highway engineers or by theme-park designers. Jacques...

GHOST'S WORLD.(Fishscale)(Sound recording review)
March 20, 2006... I own only one piece of art depicting a musician. It's a photograph of an m.c. known as Ghostface Killah. He is smoking a cigarette and singing into an old-fashioned ribbon microphone. In his knit cap and sunglasses, he looks a bit like Frank...

STURM UND DRANG.(Hedda Gabler)(Theater review)
March 20, 2006... Cate Blanchett is a very beautiful woman. With her erect posture, almond-shaped eyes, and slim-hipped frame, the thirty-six-year-old Australian-born actress resembles a Nordic Galatea, or the regal figurehead at the prow of a ship. But, instead...

BLOWUP.(V for Vendetta)(Movie review)
March 20, 2006... "V for Vendetta," a dunderheaded pop fantasia that celebrates terrorism and destruction, is perhaps the ultimate example of how a project with modest origins becomes a media monster. The prehistory of the movie begins in England, in 1981, with...