The New Yorker articles from March 2009

The New Yorker archives from March 2009

Matthew Williamson.(fashion designer's collection)(Brief article)
March 2, 2009... What recession? At the opening-night party for the British designer Matthew Williamson's three-thousand-square-foot boutique full of optimistically hued frocks, throngs dressed in New York black waited their turns to squeeze inside--except,...

Nice Work If You Can Get It.(recessions, wages,a nd unemployment)
March 2, 2009... This is the Age of the Incredible Shrinking Everything. Home prices, the stock market, G.D.P., corporate profits, employment: they're all a fraction of what they once were. Yet amid this carnage there is one thing that, surprisingly, has...

Voter, Beware.(voting rights and voting patterns in relation with the recent presidential elections)
March 2, 2009... The Voting Rights Act, which passed in 1965, stands as one of the great monuments to civil rights in American history. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, purported to give Americans the right to vote regardless of "race, color, or...

Paper Chase.(ledgers from Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities discovered)
March 2, 2009... For the past few weeks, forty-six cardboard boxes sat moldering on the waterfront in Long Island City, not far from where workers were reassembling the seventy-two-year-old neon Pepsi sign. The boxes were on Fifth Street, which dead-ends in...

Notes From Beyond.(auditions for the play Blithe Spirit and the paranormal activity of its writer Noel Coward)
March 2, 2009... "We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?" Noel Coward wrote in his 1941 comedy "Blithe Spirit." The play will soon be revived at the Shubert, with Angela Lansbury starring as a...

The Gatekeeper.(Rahm Emanuel)(Interview)
March 2, 2009... Rahm Emanuel's office, which is no more than a three-second walk from the Oval Office, is as neat as a Marine barracks. On his desk, the files and documents, including leatherbound folders from the National Security Council, are precisely...

Lesbian Nation.(Lamar Van Dyke)
March 2, 2009... There was a time, briefly, when women ruled the world. Well, their world, anyway. In the late nineteen-seventies, several thousand women in North America decided not to concern themselves with equal pay for equal work, or getting their husbands...

The Back Channel.
March 2, 2009... Two years ago, Pervez Musharraf, who was then Pakistan's President and Army chief, summoned his most senior generals and two Foreign Ministry officials to a series of meetings at his military office in Rawalpindi. There, they reviewed the...

The Actress.(Natalie Dessay)(Interview)
March 2, 2009... Natalie Dessay, the soprano, descended a staircase into the rehearsal room at the Metropolitan Opera with the poise of a countess entering a ballroom, dressed in skinny black pants, high heels, and a belted black jacket, her eyes shielded by...

Talk It Up.(Damon Runyon)(Interview)
March 2, 2009... Popular fiction is supposed to be essentially story-driven; the proof that it works is the sound of the pages turning. But a few of the great pop writers were stylists, above all, and their success is measured by a different sound, that of the...

The Women.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 2, 2009... Boyle's latest novel takes on the architect Frank Lloyd Wright by examining his notoriously tumultuous relationships with four women, each unique in her own histrionic way. Narrated in reverse chronological order by a fictional Japanese...

The Way Through Doors.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 2, 2009... In an inversion of the Scheherazade legend, the hero of this dizzyingly circuitous novel must tell stories all night to a beautiful amnesiac, to keep her awake and alive. He begins by explaining himself: he writes pamphlets (sample title: "An...

What Comes Naturally.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 2, 2009... This compelling history of the United States miscegenation law demonstrates its centrality to maintaining white supremacy in the century following the Civil War. Pascoe, broadening her focus beyond black-white relations, considers Western...

Street Gang.(Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 2, 2009... In this history of "Sesame Street," Davis writes that when the show debuted, in 1969, the goal of its creators was nothing short of righting "the inequities in our society" through the education of lower-class preschoolers. Such populist...

Life During Wartime.(Ruined)(Theater review)
March 2, 2009... Chief among the many astonishments that the new Presidency brings to American culture is the fact that, with a strong black woman co-presiding over the White House, black femininity may break free, once and for all, from the notion of...

A Passage to India.(alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and his new album Kinsmen)
March 2, 2009... Jazz musicians have two fundamental goals: creating music that keeps listeners wondering what's next, and finding a novel context within which to explore old truths. (There are no new truths.) Whenever a musician achieves this synthesis,...

Whedon's World.(Dollhouse)(Television program review)
March 2, 2009... Joss Whedon, the creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," its spinoff "Angel" (which was co-created with David Greenwalt), "Firefly," and a new Friday-night show on Fox called "Dollhouse," has a fan following that is probably more clamorously...

Parallel Worlds.(Katy?, Coraline, and The International)(Movie review)
March 2, 2009... I have been to Poland just once, briefly, in 1978, to talk about movies, but I kept meeting people there who wanted to talk about something else--the Soviet betrayal of their country. In particular, they were obsessed with a single event: the...

Eastwood Ho!(Clint Eastwood)
March 9, 2009... Clint Eastwood's overlooked historical drama "Changeling" (Universal), which was greeted by mixed reviews in October, was a well-timed lesson in democratic revolt. Set in Los Angeles in 1928, it tells the true story of Christine Collins...

L'Artusi.(Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well)(Restaurant review)
March 9, 2009... In 1891, Pellegrino Artusi, at the age of seventy-one, having retired from the silk trade, published an exhaustive, droll cookbook spanning every region of his newly unified Italy, "Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well"--an Italian...

Taking the Job.(President Barack Obama and his economic policy evaluated)
March 9, 2009... A politician ascending to the pinnacle of American power receives custody of the Presidency and its powers on January 20th, but he becomes President over time, through a testing procession of civic rituals and occurrences planned and unplanned:...

Roid Warriors.(The Talk of the Town)(Teri Thompson )
March 9, 2009... For Alex Rodriguez, we now know, the early years of this decade, when he was pumping himself full of Primobolan, seemed like a "different culture," a mini sixties revival without much oversight. "It was such a loosey-goosey era," he said in his...

Listening Party.(The Talk of the Town)(Van Morrison)
March 9, 2009... Lakeside Lounge, on Avenue B, is known for many things: close quarters, cheap drinks, a photo booth, but most of all for its jukebox, which is full of raw R. & B., country, and early rock and roll. Last Monday afternoon, a short man in his...

Vernacular.(The Talk of the Town)(movie terminologies )
March 9, 2009... Movie speak: the way people talk on the sets of movies. As in "Get me an apple" (apple box: a box used to support a prop, a light, or a diminutive actor). Tony Bill: the producer of "The Sting" and the director of "Five Corners" and "Flyboys,"...

Ladies' Night.(The Talk of the Town)(women's rights)
March 9, 2009... A few weeks ago at McSorley's, the tavern in the East Village, a party of a dozen or so came in and settled at a pocked oak table. They exchanged pleasantries and business cards. Soon, ale appeared. After a few minutes, a woman with thick gray...

Not Quite Cricket.(Robert Allen Stanford)
March 9, 2009... The largest prize that two sports teams have ever played for was twenty million dollars, in a cricket match held last November on a field by the airport in Antigua. The contestants were the English national team and the Stanford Superstars, a...

Flashing Lights.(English singer Lily Allen )
March 9, 2009... In February, the twenty-three-year-old English singer Lily Allen visited New York to promote her second album, "It's Not Me, It's You." Allen is an almost daily presence in the English tabloids, and her best song, "The Fear," is one of the few...

Lost.(Iceland's economic situation)
March 9, 2009... On an afternoon in December that ended in a disturbance that fell short of a riot, a few hundred demonstrators met on a bleak grassy hill in the center of Reykjavik, in Iceland. A cold wind blew in from the sea. It had been two months since the...

The Unfinished.(Critical essay)
March 9, 2009... The writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th of last year. His wife, Karen Green, came home to find that he had hanged himself on the patio of their house, in Claremont, California. For many months, Wallace had been in a...

Trust.(The Yankee Years)(Critical essay)
March 9, 2009... Joe Torre will be back in town on Tuesday, July 7th, reassuringly on view behind the batting cage at Citi Field as he prepares his Los Angeles Dodgers for a three-game series against the Mets. Last year, he took the Dodgers into the National...

A Comrade Lost and Found.(A Comrade Lost and Found: A Beijing Story)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 9, 2009... In 1972, Wong, a Montreal teen-ager giddy with Maoism, managed to enroll at Beijing University. Trying to keep up with her Red Guard classmates, she denounced a fellow-student named Yin, who had told her that she dreamed of going to America....

Passing Strange.(Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 9, 2009... This post-Civil War history examines the boundaries of race through the remarkable story of Clarence King, a celebrated scientist of the Gilded Age who crossed the color line in reverse. Shortly after becoming famous for surveying the Western...

Cutting for Stone.(Cutting for Stone: A Novel)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 9, 2009... Blood is thicker than water, and more copious, in this expansive novel about identical twin boys born in Addis Ababa in 1954 and instantly orphaned--their mother dies, their father flees. Raised by doctors at the hospital, Shiva and Marion soon...

The Manual of Detection.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 9, 2009... From the classic tropes of the detective procedural, this debut novel weaves the kind of mannered fantasy that might result if Wes Anderson were to adapt Kafka. Charles Unwin, a meek detective-agency clerk, is set on the trail of a legendary...

Basically Decent.(Cheever: A Life)(Critical essay)
March 9, 2009... On the one hand, Blake Bailey's biography "Cheever: A Life" (Knopf; $35) is a triumph of thorough research and unblinkered appraisal--a seven-hundred-and-seventy-page labor of, if not love, faithful adherence. John Cheever, the author of five...

Taking a Toll.(Martin Kippenberger)
March 9, 2009... "Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective" is the Museum of Modern Art's aptly titled retrospective of a German artist whose work is nothing if not purposely troublesome. Kippenberger died, of liver cancer, in 1997, at the age of...

Broadway Boogie-Woogie.(Guys and Dolls)(Theater review)
March 9, 2009... With all due respect to Nathan Detroit, the palooka who regularly runs a craps game behind the Biltmore garage in "Guys and Dolls" (in revival at the Nederlander), the oldest established permanent floating craps game in New York is actually the...

Toddlin' Town.(Daniel Burnham)
March 9, 2009... In the mid-eighteen-nineties, Daniel Burnham, then the most prominent architect in Chicago, met with a young architect named Frank Lloyd Wright. Burnham had been impressed by Wright's talent but felt that he could use some seasoning. He offered...

Dark Visions.(Watchmen)(Movie review)
March 9, 2009... The world of the graphic novel is a curious one. For every masterwork, such as "Persepolis" or "Maus," there seem to be shelves of cod mythology and rainy dystopias, patrolled by rock-jawed heroes and their melon-breasted sidekicks. Fans of the...

Harder Times.(The Talk of the Town)(economic recovery programs)(Column)
March 16, 2009... As an exercise in political symbolism, the release of the White House's $3.6-trillion budget for 2010 was an important moment. President Obama, by putting some numbers behind his plans to reform health care, limit carbon emissions, and tackle...

How Do You Feel About That?(The Talk of the Town)(a confused man in the meeting of shrinks)(Essay)
March 16, 2009... A man arrives in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. He has been invited by the American Psychoanalytic Association to "Drinks with Shrinks," a party to "meet and mingle--with a number of APsaA's leading members," who are in the city for their...

Is It Art?(The Talk of the Town)(artist Frank Stella and BMW's 'Stella')(Column)
March 16, 2009... The marriage of art and business has multiple offspring, but perhaps none are more enduring than BMW's art cars. In 1975, the German automaker persuaded Alexander Calder to design a paint job for one of its racing models, and then promptly...

Gehry at Eighty.(The Talk of the Town)(architect Frank Gehry celebrates his 80th birthday)(Column)
March 16, 2009... When Frank Gehry turned an old warehouse in downtown Los Angeles into a museum, in 1983, he wasn't looking for a place to celebrate his eightieth birthday, which was then twenty-six years away. The idea was just to give the Museum of...

House Of Cards.(The Talk of the Town)(credit card companies and consumers who are unable to pay their bills)(Column)
March 16, 2009... In tough times, businesses will do nearly anything to get new customers--look at the big markdowns at retailers and the cheap financing at auto dealerships. But there is an exception to the rule: these days, credit-card companies are trying to...

Man on the Street.(photographer Bill Cunningham)
March 16, 2009... A few summers ago, on upper Fifth Avenue, Bill Cunningham spied a remarkable creature: a woman, in her seventies, with a corona of blue hair--not the muzzy pastel hue associated with bad dye jobs but the irradiant one of Slurpees and laundry...

Nowhere Woman.(Yasmina Reza )
March 16, 2009... In 2006, Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then the Interior Minister of France, agreed to let the playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza follow him, as part of his inner circle, while he campaigned for the Presidency. The proposal came without any...

Made in U.S.A.(outsourcing and domestically manufactured goods in the United States)(Essay)
March 16, 2009... The production of this paragraph was not outsourced to the Philippines or Mexico. It was written, punctuated, and fact-checked in the U.S.A. It was, however, composed on a laptop computer that was manufactured by Lenovo, a company in which the...

Ladies' Man.(fashion designer Alber Elbaz)
March 16, 2009... People still have money. Some people, that is, have some money. And if they are female people they probably want to look sophisticated and attractive, but not flashy or aggressively sexy--although they may well have wanted to look that way a...

Twister.
March 16, 2009... It is a warm afternoon in the historic center of Rome, near Piazza Margana, and the film crew of "Duplicity," a romantic spy caper, is doing repeated takes of a fifteen-second shot. The movie's director, Tony Gilroy, who also wrote the...

Baring Arms.(Michelle Obama's athletic arms)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... When the history of this White House and its East Wing occupant comes to be written, it will be impossible to ignore the role played by fashion. Because of Michelle Obama's affection for independent designers with their own eccentric vision,...

The Winds.(Middle Cyclone)(Sound recording review)
March 16, 2009... The title of Neko Case's new album, "Middle Cyclone," is a reference to "mesocyclone," the core rotational structure of a thunderstorm, which can produce a tornado. This was not my interpretation of the phrase, which I took as a commentary on...

In the Blood.(vampires in popular culture)
March 16, 2009... "Unclean, unclean!" Mina Harker screams, gathering her bloodied nightgown around her. In Chapter 21 of Bram Stoker's "Dracula," Mina's friend John Seward, a psychiatrist in Purfleet, near London, tells how he and a colleague, warned that Mina...

The Vagrants.(The Vagrants: A Novel)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 16, 2009... Li's searing debut begins and ends with an execution, in 1979, in a small city in China, where democratic reform movements are beginning to ripple through the nation. Gu Shan is a former Red Guard leader turned counter-revolutionary, whose...

The Fire Gospel.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 16, 2009... In Faber's novel, a Canadian linguist is visiting an Iraqi museum when the place blows up. A bas-relief cracks open, revealing nine papyrus scrolls, which turn out to be the Gospel of Malchus, a man mentioned only once in the New Testament,...

The Big Rich.(The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 16, 2009... When a huge oil reserve was discovered at Spindletop, in southeast Texas, in 1901, the state was an inward-looking "hell with cows" built around lumber, cotton, and cattle. In this riveting history, Burrough charts the decades-long rush that...

Down at the Docks.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 16, 2009... Nugent, whose previous books took him to India and the Congo, describes his sometime home of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Long famous for whaling--Melville set sail from there--the city remains a major fishing port and produces the most valuable...

Funny Boy.(Eastbound & Down)(Television program review)
March 16, 2009... The six-part HBO comedy series "Eastbound & Down," now just past its halfway point, appears, on the face of it, to be another prefab house of laughs of the kind that's been extruded, over and over, in the past couple of years by the belching...

Sound Check.(Alice Tully Hall )
March 16, 2009... What makes a great concert hall isn't simply a matter of acoustics. Unpredictable variables come into play: the facade, the decor, the buzz of the crowd, the smile of a familiar usher, your memories of past concerts, your entire inner world as...

His Town.(Tennessee Williams)
March 16, 2009... In his memoir, Tennessee Williams, one of the greatest caricaturists this country has ever produced, recalls two meetings with his fellow-playwright Thornton Wilder. After "A Streetcar Named Desire" opened in New Haven, in 1947, Williams notes:...

Youthquake.(mumblecore movies)
March 16, 2009... You're about twenty-five years old, and you're no more than, shall we say, intermittently employed, so you spend a great deal of time talking with friends about trivial things or about love affairs that ended or never quite happened; and...

Buttermilk Channel.(Restaurant review)
March 23, 2009... This is a restaurant determined to be of and for its neighborhood. Its name refers to the stretch of water between Governors Island and Brooklyn (there's a helpful map on the back of the menu). The decor is simple--an unadorned brick wall,...

Not Insane.(The Talk of the Town)(government spending)(Essay)
March 23, 2009... On "Hardball" the other night, David Frum was complaining about the Republican Party--a popular activity at MSNBC, a cable news network whose prime-time hosts are non-Republicans, including "Hardball" 's Chris Matthews. Frum, however, is a...

The Dolor Of Money.(The Talk of the Town)(Bernard Madoff)
March 23, 2009... Until last week, the world had not heard from Bernard Madoff since before his arrest, on December 11th, or seen much of him. The footage of the appearance he made the week after his arrest has been replayed on TV many times; he's seen returning...

Goldless.(The Talk of the Town)(Chris Burden)
March 23, 2009... The Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Chris Burden is known for topicality. During the Vietnam War, he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22-calibre rifle. After Watergate, he bought airtime on local TV and, he says, "became the first...

Light Fight.(The Talk of the Town)(consultant Howard Brandston and the campaign against sodium lights)
March 23, 2009... The lighting designer Howard Brandston is one of the profession's leading practitioners. In his career, he estimates, he has "maybe been responsible for more sockets being installed than anyone else"; locally, his commissions include the New...

Tiny Bubbles.(The Talk of the Town)(Fan Yang's "Gazillion Bubble Show")
March 23, 2009... Criminal acts on Broadway are usually confined to the stage (see "Chicago" or "West Side Story") or the box office (ticket purchasers can feel like victims of highway robbery). What recently befell Fan Yang, the creator of "Gazillion Bubble...

Madoff and his Models.(Bernard L. Madoff)
March 23, 2009... In financial history, Ponzi schemes--the fraudulent enterprise of paying off old investors with money collected from new ones--are the most peculiar of crimes. Before they are detected, they seem exquisitely pleasing to perpetrators and victims...

The Replacement.(Roland Burris)
March 23, 2009... Roland Burris still occupies temporary office space in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, in a suite far from the floor of the United States Senate, so when the buzzer signalling an imminent vote interrupted his lunch the other day, he put...

The Accused.(murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya)(Report)
March 23, 2009... The first day I tried to attend the trial of the men accused of organizing and abetting the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, my papers weren't in order and I didn't get in. I walked across the street to a Starbucks and for the rest...

Spin Right and Shoot Left.(lacrosse)
March 23, 2009... You're on defense, zone defense. You pick up a loose ball and look for the outlet pass. You see it, throw it, and go down the middle on a fast break, taking the return pass. Now you're looking for a three-on-two or a two-on-one before they can...

Man with a Past.(Constantine Cavafy)(Critical essay)
March 23, 2009... Sometime before 1450 B.C. in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis, the pharaoh Thutmose III ordered a pair of obelisks. They were to be cut from red granite and erected at the Temple of the Rising Sun. Two hundred or so years later, Ramses II had...

The Kindly Ones.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 23, 2009... Littell opens his Second World War novel, told through the recollections of a German officer named Max Aue, with a breakdown of how many Germans, Soviets, and Jews died, minute by minute, in the conflict. As Aue travels to Stalingrad,...

The Siege.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 23, 2009... Albania's most distinguished novelist tells the story of fifteenth-century Ottoman invaders who lay siege to an Albanian fortress and find their assaults thwarted. Kadare mostly narrates from the Ottomans' perspective, but intersperses short,...

Freedom's Battle.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 23, 2009... This engaging history of nineteenth-century campaigns to stop atrocities in Greece, Syria, and Bulgaria is a corrective to the idea that humanitarian interventions are a product of the "dreamy interlude" between 1989 and 9/11. The compelling...

Flannery.(Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor )(Brief article)(Book review)
March 23, 2009... Drawing on recently unsealed letters and an impressive array of interviews, Gooch provides the first major biography of Flannery O'Connor since she died in 1964, at the age of thirty-nine. He presents a writer influenced by the early death of...

Home.(baseball stadiums)
March 23, 2009... In 1921, Colonel Jacob Ruppert, the co-owner of the New York Yankees, needed to get his team out from under the thumb of the New York Giants, his landlords at the Polo Grounds, in Harlem, and build his own stadium. Having looked at a plot...

Time Travel.(the plays '33 Variations' and 'Blithe Spirit')(Theater review)
March 23, 2009... In 1819, Ludwig van Beethoven, along with some fifty other composers, was asked to write a variation to an undistinguished waltz composed by his publisher, Anton Diabelli. Four years and forty ducats later, he produced Opus 120, not one but...

Lifelike.(puppet theater)
March 23, 2009... Japanese puppetry takes its great power from the fact that it is very realistic and very artificial at the same time. As was proved again by the Awaji Puppet Theatre Company's recent season at Japan Society--its first New York appearance in...

Need a Job?('Tokyo Sonata' and 'The Great Buck Howard')(Movie review)
March 23, 2009... There is no saying what manner of movies will be bred by the economic slump. If "Tokyo Sonata," directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is anything to go by, we could be in for some unnatural spawnings, for this is a most peculiar hybrid. Our hero is...

Corton.(Restaurant review)
March 30, 2009... In 2000, Paul Liebrandt, a consumptive-looking Brit who apprenticed under Marco Pierre White, Raymond Blanc, and Pierre Gagnaire, became the youngest chef, at the age of twenty-three, to earn three stars from the New York Times--and, along with...

More Satchmo.(The Complete Louis Armstrong Decca Sessions, 1935-1946)(Sound recording review)
March 30, 2009... After virtually inventing the lexicon for jazz soloists with his epochal Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, Louis Armstrong set up shop at Decca Records in the mid-thirties. The Armstrong Deccas have not fared as well as their forebears, having...

Economy vs. Environment.(The Talk of the Town)
March 30, 2009... The week before last, twenty-five hundred delegates, from more than seventy countries, met in Copenhagen to prepare for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will take place there in December and will produce a successor to the...

Axes and Arrows.(The Talk of the Town)(unusual crimes in New York, New York)
March 30, 2009... Every few days, the New York City Police Department sends around an internal memo detailing recent crimes that have elicited particular public interest. Last week, according to Paul Browne, a department spokesperson, these were "the arrow, when...

Brooklynhenge.(The Talk of the Town)(celebrating the vernal equinox in New York style)
March 30, 2009... Shortly before the vernal equinox last year, Trevor MacDermid, who lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, noticed an unusual bar of light next to his shower curtain. After some confusion, he concluded that the setting sun, hovering briefly...