The New Yorker articles from March 2008

The New Yorker archives from March 2008

Fiamma.(restaurant)(Restaurant review)
March 3, 2008... With its high prices, ambitious cuisine, and faltering service, Fiamma has a bewildering, bubble's-end air. Mishandled decadence can seem cautionary. The knowledge that Fiamma is part of a restaurant company called B. R. Guest prompts...

Fidel's Farewell.(The Talk of the Town)(Fidel Castro)
March 3, 2008... And that it should end so ingloriously! No fighting to the last man at the battlements, no martyr's surrender to an assassin's bullet, only a creaking, shuffling exit through the ward's doors, hospital gown flapping. We are less than a year...

When in Pyongyang.(The Talk of the Town)(Lorin Maazel)(Interview)
March 3, 2008... With the New York Philharmonic slated to make its Pyongyang debut this week, Lorin Maazel, the music director, confessed to some trepidation about the visit. ("I wrote an opera called '1984.' Can that be clearer?") But, some weeks ago, with...

Powder Room 101.(The Talk of the Town)(Harvey Molotch's 'The Urban Toilet' course)
March 3, 2008... Professor Harvey Molotch arrived for class last Wednesday fresh from a meeting with architects and N.Y.U. administrators about the design for a new home for the school's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. He was pleased to report that...

Have Gun.(The Talk of the Town)(Dana Shafman's taser party)
March 3, 2008... Dana Shafman was at home in Arizona, preparing to visit her cousin Robin Beitman, in Fairfield, Connecticut, when she experienced an anxious moment. Shafman--a dealer in Taser stun guns--was packing up her wares to send ahead, when it hit her...

Dislodging F.S.G.(The Talk of the Town)(Farrar, Straus & Giroux's new office )
March 3, 2008... Joy Isenberg, who has worked at Farrar, Straus & Giroux for thirty-eight years, says that one of the things she is most looking forward to when the company moves this week out of its storied offices, at 19 Union Square West, is the prospect of...

The Color of Blood.(Daniel Cicciaro Jr.'s death)
March 3, 2008... What happened at the foot of the driveway at 40 Independence Way that hot August night in 2006 took less than three minutes. The police later managed to time it precisely, using a surveillance camera that points directly at the street from a...

Numbers Guy.(Stanislas Dehaene)(Interview)
March 3, 2008... One morning in September, 1989, a former sales representative in his mid-forties entered an examination room with Stanislas Dehaene, a young neuroscientist based in Paris. Three years earlier, the man, whom researchers came to refer to as Mr....

The Bishop's Daughter.(Essay)
March 3, 2008... It is Easter, and in the darkness of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine the singing soars in descant, the Gothic ceiling multiplying the clamor. Now, as if a great storm had ceased, there is no music, and in the silence held by three thousand...

The Lost Children.(T. Don Hutto Residential Center)
March 3, 2008... In the summer of 1995, an Iranian man named Majid Yourdkhani allowed a friend to photocopy pages from "The Satanic Verses," the Salman Rushdie novel, at the small print shop that he owned in Tehran. Government agents arrested the friend and...

Amy'S Circus.(Amy Winehouse's 'Back to Black' album)(Sound recording review)
March 3, 2008... Is there anything surprising about Amy Winehouse's being awarded five Grammys this month? A cynic might say that her ability to stay alive is startling, but Winehouse's worrying series of relapses and collapses could simply be a trick of the...

Notes from Underground.('His Illegal Self' and 'My Revolutions')(Book review)
March 3, 2008... Ever since the attack on the World Trade Center, we have all heard a lot about "the Professor," the chilling anarchist in Conrad's "The Secret Agent," who walks around with a bomb strapped to himself and one hand on the detonator. Far more...

A Person of Interest.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 3, 2008... Choi's dazzling third novel follows the pattern established by her second, that of imagining a character on the sidelines of real historical events--in this case, the hunt for a Unabomber-like terrorist. Lee is a surly Asian-American...

The Age of Shiva.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 3, 2008... Coming of age in Delhi in the fifties, Meera takes her father's atheism and progressive attitudes for granted, but she keenly resents the tyrannies of her favored older sister, who forces Meera to play the go-between in her romance with the...

Charlatan.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 3, 2008... In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, John R. Brinkley was one of the most famous, and richest, medical men in America, with advocates including Vice-President Charles Curtis. The basis of his empire was an impotence cure that entailed crudely...

African American National Biography.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 3, 2008... The editors preface their presentation of forty-one hundred biographies in eight volumes by noting that, until recently, the Dictionary of American Biography included just a hundred and twenty African-Americans, while black biographical...

Taking Action.('Definitely, Maybe,' 'The Counterfeiters,' and 'Vantage Point')(Movie review)
March 3, 2008... One of the things that moviemakers dream of is the excitement of capturing the sheer flux of life, the interaction of many motions, large and small--say, a mass of people surging forward (in war, revolution, or just getting to work), and,...

Park Avenue Winter.(restaurant)(Restaurant review)
March 10, 2008... In recent years, the resolutely sedate Park Avenue Cafe tried and failed to recruit younger diners with gimmicks like Pay Your Age; last year, it closed. The owners have since remade the place as an ode to the four seasons, with the...

Smoke on the Water.(The Talk of the Town)(Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev)
March 10, 2008... Alexander II, before liberating the serfs, liberated the smokers. (To indulge his own habit, he lifted the imperial ban on tobacco.) Alexander III played the French horn. Nicholas II was a photography buff. Catherine the Great was a passionate...

Dream On.(The Talk of the Town)(IdreamofHillaryIdreamofBarack.com)
March 10, 2008... The interpretation of dreams, according to Freud, is meant to teach us about individual dreamers' states of mind, not about the people and things that populate our fantasy lives; those are symbols. Teeth, swimming pools, nuns--they stand in for...

Beautiful Minds.(The Talk of the Town)(Brian Grazer looks for new cultural attache)
March 10, 2008... Bored at work? Victim of a hiring freeze? In the past few weeks, word has been circulating, among the post-collegiate cubicle crowd, about an exciting new job opportunity. The rumor, according to one (unofficial) e-mail: "Oscar-winning producer...

Secret Skin.(superheroes, escapism and realism)
March 10, 2008... When I was a boy, I had a religious-school teacher named Mr. Spector, whose job was to confront us with the peril we presented to ourselves. Jewish Ethics was the name of the class. We must have been eight or nine. Mr. Spector used a...

It Takes Two.(Ruben and Isabel Toledo)(Interview)
March 10, 2008... There are some clothes, like cars, that pique your curiosity, and you just have to know (or, if you are a child of the quiz-show era, to show off by guessing) their make and model. About ten years ago, I startled a grande dame by asking her if...

Keeping It Real.(Michelle Obama)
March 10, 2008... One January afternoon at the University of South Carolina's Children's Center, in Columbia, Michelle Obama scrunched her five-eleven frame into a small white wooden rocking chair. The state's Democratic primary, which her husband, Barack,...

Elegant Monsters.(Rick Owens)(Interview)
March 10, 2008... One Friday morning last September, Valentine, a tall blond Dutch model, arrived at the studio of Rick Owens, the American fashion designer, who lives and works in a five-story mansion on the Place du Palais Bourbon, in central Paris. It was two...

Advanced Placement.('Gossip Girl' books)(Book review)
March 10, 2008... As Lolita and Humbert drive past a horrible accident, which has left a shoe lying in the ditch beside a blood-spattered car, the nymphet remarks, "That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store." This is...

Scents and Sensibility.('Perfumes: The Guide')(Book review)
March 10, 2008... For years, ever since I started taking an interest in wine, I've been annoyed by the word "grainy." It's a word that mavens use in relation to red wines, and refers to certain types of tannin--the chemical that cures leather, is present in tea,...

Blood Kin.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 10, 2008... In this elegantly structured debut novel, the deposed president of an unnamed country is imprisoned in his residence with, among others, his chef, his barber, and his portraitist. These three servants, awaiting their fate, reveal, in...

The Match.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 10, 2008... Beginning and ending with cricket matches, Gunesekera's fourth novel might seem to bear the hallmarks of familiar post-colonial fare, but its preoccupations are revelatory and unique. Sunny Fernando, uprooted from Colombo as a child by his...

Wallace Stegner and the American West.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 10, 2008... Stegner, born in Iowa in 1909 and brought up on a Saskatchewan dirt farm, may have been our last frontier writer. As Fradkin notes in this astute biography, it was a miracle that he didn't write pulp Westerns. Instead, Stegner took as his...

The Race Card.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 10, 2008... Ford, a professor of law at Stanford, argues that ubiquitous accusations of discrimination in the United States frequently distract from serious racial injustices, which, in the ambivalent aftermath of the civil-rights era, "stem from...

Class Acts.(Movie review)
March 10, 2008... In September, 1971, a group of stumblebum thieves tunnelled their way into a branch of the Lloyds Bank in the Marylebone section of London and cleaned out the vault. While the robbery was in progress, a ham-radio operator, randomly spinning the...

Smith's.(Restaurant review)
March 17, 2008... Occupying a space between Caffe Dante and the New York Rifle Club that formerly housed a halfhearted Italian trattoria, Smith's successfully, if slightly self-consciously, presents itself as a cozy little discovery. The central room--a narrow...

Condiment.(The Talk of the Town)(Condoleezza Rice for vice president post)
March 17, 2008... Last Tuesday night, after Vermont, Rhode Island, Ohio, and Texas gave John S. McCain the delegates he needed to clinch his party's Presidential nomination, good-fellowship reigned--among Republicans, that is. "Senator McCain has run an...

Fronting.(The Talk of the Town)(street slang for showing off )
March 17, 2008... The sixth day of the Sean Bell trial, which is under way in Kew Gardens, turned on sorting the real from the imaginary, or the imagined, in the muddle of events that claimed Bell's life in the early hours of November 25, 2006, and upon which...

Just Like Us!(The Talk of the Town)(celebrities)
March 17, 2008... Back in 2005--the era of Britney's marriage to Kevin Federline and Lindsay's turn in "Herbie Fully Loaded"--Janice Min, the editor of Us Weekly, argued that even smart, well-informed people need a "safe place," free from hard news. But in...

Last Lecture.(The Talk of the Town)(Rosamond Bernier's lectures on art and culture)
March 17, 2008... Rosamond Bernier, the world's most glamorous lecturer on art and high culture, makes her farewell appearance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 13th, and end-of-era emotions are running high. Bernier, with her long gowns and her...

What Microloans Miss.(The Talk of the Town)(small-to-medium-sized enterprises)
March 17, 2008... Editors' Note appended. Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have an economic innovation that has become not just popular but downright chic. The...

The Iron Lady.(Hillary Clinton)
March 17, 2008... To watch Hillary Clinton during the final two weeks of the Ohio and Texas primary campaigns, as she defiantly ignored the pronouncements of her political demise and pounded away at her opponent in one more interview, at one more rally, was to...

Ghost Writer.(Pat Barker )
March 17, 2008... As a little girl, the novelist Pat Barker felt quite at home in the company of ghosts. She was taught to treat them politely. She grew up in a gritty industrial town in northeast England, in a family that practiced Spiritualism as their...

The Real Work.(doing magic tricks)
March 17, 2008... On a long plane ride home to New York from Las Vegas, a man and a boy are playing with cards. Only their hands are visible to the people sitting near them, so that, as they shuffle and reshuffle and fan and deal, they seem to be engaged in a...

Surreal Life.
March 17, 2008... When the playwright Sarah Ruhl works at home, she sits at a desk in her young daughter Anna's bedroom, beside a window overlooking a paddletennis court amid a red brick apartment maze on the East Side of Manhattan. A white gate, like a picket...

Sharp Teeth.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 17, 2008... In a cheeky nod to epic poetry, Barlow's debut novel is written entirely in free verse and concerns a metamorphosis, of humans into wolves, in Los Angeles. No slaves to the moon, these postmodern lycanthropes do a thousand situps at a time and...

Johnny One-Eye.(Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 17, 2008... Set on Manhattan Island during the Revolutionary War, this leisurely picaresque concerns the adventures of an orphan reared in a brothel who loses an eye when he follows Benedict Arnold into battle. Johnny is a man of both nations; he joins up...

Ravens in the Storm.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 17, 2008... Writing this memoir, Oglesby was able to draw on more than four thousand pages of government intelligence about himself, gathered in the nineteen-sixties during his time as the president of the protest group Students for a Democratic Society. A...

The Wagner Clan.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 17, 2008... A hundred and twenty-five years after Richard Wagner's death, his descendants still control the annual festival he founded to stage his works. In this engaging group biography, Carr casts the Wagner family business as a "matchless mirror" of...

Gale Force.(Peter Grimes)(Opera review)
March 17, 2008... Few operas are as rooted in one place as Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes," which has rumbled back to the Metropolitan Opera, in a new production by John Doyle. The title character, a dark-souled fisherman who goes mad after his apprentices...

Lessness.
March 17, 2008... This year's Whitney Biennial, the most poetic I can remember, feels mildly unhappy and restlessly alert. If it were a sound, it would be the muttering of a cast awaiting the inexplicably delayed rise of a curtain. The show confirms impressions...

Love and Disaster.(Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)(Theater review)
March 17, 2008... The real star of the latest production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof " (at the Broadhurst, directed by Debbie Allen) is the play itself. Listening to Tennessee Williams's rare poetry, which grounds his characters' lush speech in the exaggeratedly...

The Divider.(HBO's mini series, John Adams)
March 17, 2008... The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other," John Adams grumbled, in 1790, when Benjamin Franklin was on his deathbed. "The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth...

Recurring Nightmare.(Michael Haneke's Funny Games)
March 17, 2008... Be warned. Sitting down to watch the new Michael Haneke movie, "Funny Games," may induce a chronic attack of deja vu, and no wonder. This is a scene-for-scene remake of an old Michael Haneke movie, also called "Funny Games," released here a...

Chop Suey.
March 24, 2008... Chop Suey is not a Chinese restaurant. That's fitting, since the dish it is named after was invented in America. The food served here is, instead, vaguely Korean, as filtered through the mind and the taste buds of Chop Suey's consulting chef,...

Falling.(The Talk of the Town)(Eliot Spitzer)
March 24, 2008... For a country that Europeans like to patronize as hopelessly prissy (they think we're "inhibited, puritanical, and immature," Die Zeit reported last week), our ex-colonial republic has a talent for turning out politicians with exciting sex...

First Wives.(The Talk of the Town)(United Nations Delegation's Women's Club)
March 24, 2008... Correction appended. Last week, the United Nations Delegation's Women's Club (sometimes known as the U.N. Wives Club) held a "Women for Peace" event, timed to celebrate International Women's Day. At a party afterward at the Turkish...

Hoodwinked.(The Talk of the Town)(Eliot Spitzer)
March 24, 2008... Should we be surprised that the most prescient pre-hooker assessments of Eliot Spitzer may have come from Joe Bruno, whose tart appraisals were often thought, not without justification, to be distorted by desperation and self-interest? Bruno,...

Y'all Torture Me Home.(The Talk of the Town)(washboarding of prisoners)
March 24, 2008... I was overjoyed that Congress refused to override President Bush's veto of a bill outlawing the washboarding of prisoners, a technique that some have described as torture--a ridiculous notion if I've ever heard one. We're involved in a war...

Nails Never Fails.(Lenny Dykstra)(Interview)
March 24, 2008... The first time I met Lenny Dykstra, the former Mets and Phillies star, he nearly stood me up for lunch at the St. Regis Hotel, in New York. Dykstra is a luxury-hotel junkie--a self-proclaimed "robes-and-room-service kind of guy." When I finally...

April & Paris.(Growing Up Camel, giant house spider)(Viewpoint essay)
March 24, 2008... While watching TV one recent evening, I stumbled upon a nature program devoted to the subject of making nature programs. The cameraman's job was to catch a bird of paradise in full display, so he dug himself a hole, covered it with branches,...

Chef on the Edge.(David Chang)(Brief biography)
March 24, 2008... So Pete, let's just fucking bang out these recipes," Chang said. "We'll get fish in tomorrow and start playing around," Serpico said. "Fish is easy. I know you don't want to, but you can use the buttermilk with the stabilizer and whip...

Oprah's World.(Television program review)
March 24, 2008... "Oprah's Big Give": it's the name of Oprah Winfrey's new Sunday-night prime-time show--a reality show in which contestants are challenged to give money away in creative ways--but, beyond that, it's a neat three-word summation of what Winfrey...

The Book of Dahlia.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 24, 2008... Dahlia Finger, the heroine of this debut novel, is a sarcastic, self-absorbed Jewish American Princess, twenty-nine years old and living in a desirable bungalow in Venice, California, bought for her by her lawyer father. She's also, thanks to...

The Soul Thief.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 24, 2008... Opening in gritty, nineteen-seventies Buffalo, Baxter's suspenseful fifth novel concerns a mildmannered graduate student, Nathaniel, who falls under the spell of a cerebral but affected outsider, the aptly named Coolberg. Drawn to Coolberg's...

The Age of American Unreason.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 24, 2008... Identifying herself as a "cultural conservationist" (but by no means a cultural conservative), Jacoby laments the decline of middlebrow American culture and presents a cogent defense of intellectualism. America, she believes, faces a "crisis of...

The Reluctant Communist.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 24, 2008... In January, 1965, Jenkins was a U.S. Army sergeant stationed in South Korea. Sure that he was about to be sent to Vietnam, he drank ten beers, abandoned his patrol, and crossed into North Korea. He spent the next four decades in a country that...

Just the Facts, Ma'Am.(history and novel)
March 24, 2008... What makes a book a history? In the eighteenth century, novelists called their books "histories," smack on the title page. No one was more brash about this than Henry Fielding, who, in his 1749 "History of Tom Jones, a Foundling," included a...

Servants of Art.(Theater review)
March 24, 2008... Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was one of Russia's great chroniclers of social circumstances. Unlike Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, he saw his Russia--a place of bitter strivers, too trusting provincial women, and a mostly absent nobility--with a...

Faraway Places.(Movie review)
March 24, 2008... Asia Argento writes stories and novels, directs music videos, documentaries, and feature films, and appears in movies, sometimes with her clothes on. In Olivier Assayas's new international thriller, "Boarding Gate," she plays Sandra, a very...

Tough Acts.(Movie review)
March 31, 2008... "Bonnie and Clyde" (Warner Bros.) opens with Faye Dunaway sashaying naked in an upstairs bedroom as she catches a glimpse of Warren Beatty in the street below. Within minutes, the two are engaging in lascivious banter, but he wants her as his...

Cello Love.(Sound recording review)
March 31, 2008... The violin has more glamour, the viola more soul, the bass more thundering power. But the cello remains the most versatile member of the string family, and there could hardly be a more inviting introduction to its charms than "My Tunes" (Sony...

Native Son.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama, Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. )
March 31, 2008... The first time that Barack Obama met the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., at Trinity United Church of Christ, on the South Side of Chicago, in the late nineteen-eighties, the young community organizer tried to make a point about the growing...

Fred And Friends.(The Talk of the Town)(Fredric U. Dicker)
March 31, 2008... Day One of the David Paterson administration, in Albany, was dominated by exhalations of good will, not least from the Post's Fredric U. Dicker, who had been one of Eliot Spitzer's most persistent, then triumphant, critics (headline of a recent...

Screams.(The Talk of the Town)(More Old Jewish Comedians)
March 31, 2008... The Milton Berle Room at the Friars Club was the scene the other day of a party for Drew Friedman's "More Old Jewish Comedians," a sequel to "Old Jewish Comedians," collected caricatures of such revered icons, now gone, as Myron Cohen, Groucho,...

Cyclotron'S Last Stand.(The Talk of the Town)
March 31, 2008... One morning this month, George Hamawy, Columbia University's director of radiation safety, stood before a group of students crowded into a basement laboratory and delivered a eulogy for one of the university's most talked-about secrets: a...

Too Dumb To Fail.(The Talk of the Town)(Bear Stearns)
March 31, 2008... In 1984, Continental Illinois, then one of the country's largest banks, found itself on the verge of collapse, after billions of dollars' worth of its loans went bad. To avert a crisis, the government stepped in, purchasing $3.5 billion of the...

Out of Print.(state of the newspaper industry)
March 31, 2008... The American newspaper has been around for approximately three hundred years. Benjamin Harris's spirited Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick managed just one issue, in 1690, before the Massachusetts authorities closed it down....

Penny Dreadful.(US cent)
March 31, 2008... Several years ago, Walter Luhrman, a metallurgist in southern Ohio, discovered a copper deposit of tantalizing richness. North America's largest copper mine--a vast open-pit complex in Arizona--usually has to process a ton of ore in order to...

The Wonder Years.(Wei Ziqi)
March 31, 2008... Wei Ziqi's business career began with leeches. Other ideas had caught his eye, usually when he went to the city to see relatives. For a spell, he considered Amway, because a man on the street handed him a flyer, and he also thought about a...

Subprime Suspect.(E. Stanley O'Neal)(Brief biography)
March 31, 2008... On the morning of March 7th, E. Stanley O'Neal, the former C.E.O. of Merrill Lynch, the nation's biggest brokerage house, appeared before the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee for what Thomas Davis, the ranking...

Pomegranate Princess.(PomWonderful's Lynda Resnick)(Brief biography)
March 31, 2008... One Thursday morning last October, Lynda Resnick--who is perhaps best known as the marketing force behind PomWonderful, the pomegranate juice in the zaftig little bottle--was presiding over one of the company's weekly marketing meetings....

Monarch.(Sound recording review)
March 31, 2008... On a Monday evening in August of 1996, I went to see the Roots perform at the Knitting Factory, in downtown Manhattan. The band had come from Philadelphia for a three-night stand in support of their "illadelph halflife" album. At one point...

The Blue Star.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 31, 2008... In this sequel to "Jim the Boy," Earley continues his mid-century coming-of-age chronicle in the North Carolina cotton town of Aliceville. Jim is now in his final year of high school, and somnolent schoolyard scenes are quickly replaced with a...

Homecoming.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 31, 2008... As a youth in nineteen-fifties Germany, Peter Debauer finds fragments of a novel on scrap paper he is using for schoolwork. The book turns out to be a pulpy Second World War story modelled on the Odyssey and written by an author with Nazi...

American-Made.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 31, 2008... "The cure for unemployment is to find jobs," Herbert Hoover declared in 1929. But, with no federal assistance, Americans were left to their own devices: golfers in St. Louis donated plus fours to clothing drives, while a Communist rally in New...

On Speed.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 31, 2008... The German soldiers of the Blitzkrieg downed amphetamines, as did their counterparts in the R.A.F. And, since the creation of amphetamine, in 1929, the drug's effects have spurred both the achievements and the missteps of a multitude of...