The New Yorker articles from May 2007

The New Yorker archives from May 2007

Morandi.(Restaurant review)
May 7, 2007... Keith McNally, the progenitor and reigning monarch of the imitative brasserie (Odeon, Balthazar, Pastis), has long been a master calibrator of cultural appropriation. Synthetic Frenchness comes naturally to him. Now comes Morandi, his attempt...

Made in the Shades.(album review)(Sound recording review)
May 7, 2007... When Ian Hunter led Mott the Hoople, he and his band delivered a series of albums that raised the bar for noisy, heartfelt rock and roll; they sounded like the world's loudest Rolling Stones cover band trying to play Bob Dylan's "Blonde on...

Don't Drive, He Said.(The Talk of the Town)(Michael Bloomberg)
May 7, 2007... Michael Bloomberg has always favored grand schemes. Last week, on Earth Day, the Mayor stood in the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Ocean Life, beneath the blue whale, to lay out his vision for the city's future. In an expansive...

Icon.(The Talk of the Town)(Julie Christie)
May 7, 2007... Columbia Road, in the East End of London, is thronged on weekends. Every Sunday, it blooms into a flower market. Visit on a weekday, however, when the street is noiseless and half the shops are shut, and you may think you have strayed onto a...

Master's Voice.(The Talk of the Town)(Julian Schnabel)
May 7, 2007... The painter Julian Schnabel is not an early riser, and last Monday morning he was more than usually fatigued, having returned the day before from Paris, where for the past six months he has been making a film of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir...

Ring A Ding Ding.(The Talk of the Town)(reopening the bells of the MetLife Tower)
May 7, 2007... The bells in the tower of the MetLife Building used to be an everyday feature of life for several blocks around Madison Square, the Westminster chimes sounding on the quarter-hour, like Big Ben. Newcomers to the neighborhood assumed that they...

David Halberstam.(The Talk of the Town)
May 7, 2007... In 1963, the notion that a newspaper reporter might challenge the official story of generals and ambassadors in the middle of a war, essentially accusing them of lying, was so improbable that it could have occurred only to someone still in his...

The CSI Effect.(Crime Scene Investigation)
May 7, 2007... On the evening of March 10, 2003, two New York Police Department detectives, James V. Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews, were shot and killed in an unmarked police car while attempting an undercover purchase of a Tec-9 assault pistol on Staten...

The Magus.(Paulo Coelho)(Interview)
May 7, 2007... Paulo Coelho wrote "The Alchemist" in two weeks, in 1987. It is a story, told in "A Thousand and One Nights" and in Rumi's "Masnavi" and later adapted by Jorge Luis Borges--the version that Coelho, who is Brazilian, first read--of a man who...

THE CONCILIATOR.(Barack Obama)(Interview)
May 7, 2007... Begin in farm country, late last summer, no particular day. Carmi, Illinois--a town on the Little Wabash River, down in the southern tip of the state, twenty-five miles from Kentucky, population about fifty-five hundred. A group of twelve...

The Idol Thief.(Vaman Narayan Ghiya)
May 7, 2007... Early one morning in June, 2003, two dozen police officers drew their guns and prepared to raid a stately three-story brick-and-concrete home on a corner lot in Everest Colony, a quiet residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the Indian...

In the Territory.(Biography)
May 7, 2007... November 29, 1967, a tart, sunny day in Plainfield, Massachusetts, some thirty miles north of Smith College, in the Berkshires: the small town's most famous inhabitant that historic afternoon was not, as one would expect, a New England...

Greed.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 7, 2007... When Jelinek won the Nobel Prize, in 2004, the honor provoked outrage from critics who claimed that her books contain more hateful fury than artistic virtuosity. Her latest novel might appear to bear out this view. Its tone is contemptuous, and...

Acceptance.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 7, 2007... This delightfully acerbic sendup of the college admissions process is set in a tony suburb of Washington, D.C. A group of overachieving students (a "cluster of brainpower . . . packed so tight, it was like the inner loop of the Beltway at rush...

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 7, 2007... Godwin, the author of a previous memoir about growing up during Zimbabwe's war of independence, has written a sequel of sorts, tracing the collapse of his country in the course of the past decade (the violently destructive Robert Mugabe is the...

Dry Manhattan.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 7, 2007... Nowhere was Prohibition more keenly felt or more hotly contested, Lerner argues, than in the diverse cosmopolis of New York City. The city's immigrant and working-class populations, disproportionately targeted by the dry lobby, resisted in...

Portrait of the Artist.(Persephone)(Theater review)
May 7, 2007... To show brilliance, you have to have shadow; but to show shadow you also have to have brilliance. With the new comedy "Persephone" (crisply directed by Nicholas Martin at the Calder-wood Pavilion, in Boston), the playwright Noah Haidle has...

Army of Two.(Tori Amos and Bjork)
May 7, 2007... By the time Tori Amos was thirty, she had been through several drafts of a career. A child piano prodigy, she was the youngest person ever to attend the Peabody Conservatory of Music, in Baltimore. (She was five when she auditioned.) In her...

Acting Out.(Spider-Man 3)(Critical essay)
May 7, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File There is one great scene in "Spider-Man 3," and you can pretty much leave the theatre once it's over, but for those three or four minutes you wouldn't want to be anywhere else. An escaped convict named...

Lunetta.(Restaurant review)
May 14, 2007... Smith Street has been celebrated as Brooklyn's restaurant row for almost a decade, but this mostly amounts to a profusion of bistros that aim no higher than acceptable steak frites during the week and eggs Benedict on the weekend. There are a...

Three on a Match.(string trio; sound recording)(Sound recording review)
May 14, 2007... The string trio--violin, viola, and cello--was the Marlon Brando of the Classical era: it coulda been a contender. But Joseph Haydn's invention of the string quartet proved to be an irresistible force; composers rapidly exploited the expanded...

No Blame, No Shame.(The Talk of the Town)("At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA")(taking responsibility)
May 14, 2007... Why has it become impossible to admit a mistake in Washington and accept the consequences? The last time a senior government official quit over his own job failure was more than twenty years ago, when Robert McFarlane, President Reagan's...

Paper Chase.(The Talk of the Town)(Dow Jones; Rupert Murdoch)
May 14, 2007... In the ninth-floor conference room at the Wall Street Journal, outside the office of the managing editor, Paul Steiger, there is a framed T-shirt that reads "WWBD"--or What Would Barney Do? It refers to Byron (Barney) Calame, now the outgoing...

Blowup.(The Talk of the Town)(larger-than-life size drawings of Matteo Pericoli)
May 14, 2007... Matteo Pericoli has never felt compelled to keep his drawings to standard sizes. In 1998, he began drawing the entire perimeter of Manhattan on two thirty-seven-foot rolls of white paper. (Pericoli, an architect who now works mainly as an...

Horse Talk.(The Talk of the Town)
May 14, 2007... Horses once abounded in New York, with a hundred and twenty thousand of them still in residence in 1908, when a reporter called them "an economic burden, an affront to cleanliness, and a terrible tax upon human life." Their numbers declined...

Exporting I.P.(The Talk of the Town)(Intellectual property protection in the global context)
May 14, 2007... Free trade is supposed to be a win-win situation. You sell me your televisions, I sell you my software, and we both prosper. In practice, free-trade agreements are messier than that. Since all industries crave foreign markets to expand into but...

Crash Course.(particle physics)
May 14, 2007... The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, has its offices on the outskirts of Geneva, in an area once devoted to dairy farms and now given over to sprawl. The offices occupy several dozen buildings, some of them in...

String Theory.(Ken Parker as a guitar maker)
May 14, 2007... Ken Parker's workshop lies an hour north of New York City, on a winding forest road that skirts the highlands of the Hudson River. It's a trapezoidal structure of concrete and glass, set into a steep slope like a piece of quartz, and serves...

Fragmentary Knowledge.
May 14, 2007... In October, 2005, a truck pulled up outside the National Archeological Museum in Athens, and workers began unloading an eight-ton X-ray machine that its designer, X-Tek Systems of Great Britain, had dubbed the Bladerunner. Standing just inside...

Critical Mass.(Walter S. Mossberg's successful career in gadget evaluation)
May 14, 2007... On a blustery, overcast day early this year, P.R. representatives from Sprint and Samsung stopped by the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal to meet with the columnist Walter S. Mossberg. The agenda was clear: Sprint had a new music...

Branson's Luck.(Richard Branson's life)(Biography)
May 14, 2007... Richard Branson likes to pretend that business is his hobby; he sees himself as a modern version of a nineteenth-century British adventurer--Phileas T. Fogg, unbound. Rather than travelling around the world in eighty days, however, he appears...

The Illusionists.(Ricardo Scofidio)(Brief biography)
May 14, 2007... If you're going seventy-five miles per hour on the New York State Thruway, and a 1963 vanilla Porsche swings out beside you, cuts across three lanes, and darts into the distance, there is a good chance that the driver is Ricardo Scofidio, the...

What Else Is New?(The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900)(Book review)
May 14, 2007... I'm writing in the kitchen, surrounded by technology. There is a cordless phone, a microwave oven, and a high-end refrigerator, and I'm working on a laptop. Nearby is a gas range, a French cast-iron enamelled casserole, and a ceramic teapot....

Love and War in California.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 14, 2007... Hall's new novel comprises three discrete sections. The first, "Gates of Bone," follows the narrator, Payton Daltrey, from his time as a college student and aspiring writer in San Diego, in the months after Pearl Harbor, to his enlistment in...

Delirium.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 14, 2007... Set in mid-nineteen-eighties Bogota, this novel begins when an unemployed professor, Aguilar, returns from a short trip to find his wife, Agustina, incoherent and deranged, with a strange man in a hotel room. Intertwined with his search for the...

The Making of Victorian Values.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 14, 2007... Wilson tracks the emergence of Victorian pudeur from the looser, libertine Britain that preceded the Napoleonic Wars. Years of war and economic decline produced a national mood of "fear and anxiety," mobilizing evangelical organizations,...

The Last Mughal.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 14, 2007... In 1857, after a number of high-caste Hindu sepoys rose up against their colonial masters, the British came close to being pushed out of India. This history, drawing on a substantial trove of documents in English, Persian, and Urdu, re-creates...

Lost in the Stars.(Lotte Lenya)(Biography)
May 14, 2007... Lotte Lenya: four blunt syllables that connote not only an era but a style. Born Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer in 1898, the working-class Viennese girl was reared as a Catholic but, in an effort to escape her alcoholic father's abusive...

Performance.
May 14, 2007... An efficient test of where you stand on contemporary art is whether you are persuaded, or persuadable, that Chris Burden is a good artist. I think he's pretty great. Burden is the guy who, on November 19, 1971, in Santa Ana, California,...

Games of Chance.(Lucky You)(Movie review)
May 14, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File ESPN, by broadcasting the World Series of Poker and other competitions over and over again (much to the dismay of parents with teen-age sons), has helped turn poker--in particular, Texas hold'em--into a...

Brown Cafe.(Restaurant review)
May 21, 2007... It's been said that people look like their dogs, but they can also take after their restaurants. For instance, at brunch on a recent Sunday afternoon at Brown Cafe there was not a blond in sight. Instead, the hip storefront (metal grate still...

Triple Play.(Army of Shadows, Sansho the Bailiff and The Third Man)(Movie review)
May 21, 2007... The Criterion Collection's release of the masterpieces "Army of Shadows," "Sansho the Bailiff," and "The Third Man," by France's Jean-Pierre Melville, Japan's Kenji Mizoguchi, and Britain's Carol Reed, respectively, renews both the...

The Graduates.(The Talk of the Town)
May 21, 2007... On your first sleepover, your best friend's mother asks if you would like a tuna-fish-salad sandwich. Your own mother gives you tuna-fish-salad sandwiches all the time, so you say, "Sure." When you bite into the sandwich, though, you realize,...

Sego-Sarko.(The Talk of the Town)
May 21, 2007... For a nation trembling in the balance, the France that awoke on May 6th was not looking too rough. Paris, in particular, lolled on a dazzling Sunday, as if the second round of the Presidential election, between the Socialist Segolene Royal and...

Collaborators.(The Talk of the Town)
May 21, 2007... Just before the opening, at the Biltmore, of "LoveMusik"--about the composer Kurt Weill and his on-again, off-again singer-actress wife, Lotte Lenya--the show's director, Harold Prince, was hustling around the stage making last-minute changes....

Tough Guy.(The Talk of the Town)(Norman Mailer)
May 21, 2007... Late on a recent Saturday afternoon, Norman Mailer, equipped with two canes, willed his eighty-four-year-old hips and knees up three flights of stairs in his Brooklyn Heights brownstone. He'd just flown down from Provincetown, and within the...

See No Evil.(The Talk of the Town)
May 21, 2007... Mike White, the screenwriter and actor ("Chuck & Buck," "School of Rock"), passed through the city the other day to promote his film "Year of the Dog," his directorial debut. It stars Molly Shannon as a secretary who goes to pieces after the...

Woodward vs. Tenet.
May 21, 2007... The former director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, who for the past two weeks has been the most comprehensively excoriated man in America, keeps an office at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. It is cramped and badly...

The Meaning of Life.
May 21, 2007... In 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected President, a lanky, long-nosed, twenty-three-year-old Yankee named Milton Bradley invented his first board game, on a red-and-ivory checkerboard of sixty-four squares. He called it the Checkered...

Fault Lines.(California's Latin influence)
May 21, 2007... "Hola! Hola!" Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called out as he approached a crowd of boys and girls in MacArthur Park, on the gritty edge of downtown Los Angeles. The children, wearing green, red, and blue soccer shirts, swarmed around him as he...

Walking the Wall.(Great Wall of China)
May 21, 2007... When the weather is good, or when I'm tired of having seven million neighbors, I drive north from downtown Beijing. It takes an hour and a half to reach Sancha, a quiet village where I rent a farmhouse. The road dead-ends at the village, but a...

Underworld.(Opera review)
May 21, 2007... On a recent Saturday morning, I drove out to Moosic, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Scranton, to see the Metropolitan Opera. The detour was necessitated by a venture that Peter Gelb has launched in his first season as the general manager of the Met:...

Atheists with Attitude.(The End of Faith, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, The God Delusion)(Book review)
May 21, 2007... Great portents and disasters turn some minds to God and others away from him. When an unusually bright and long-tailed comet was tracked through the sky in the last two months of 1680, posters and sermons called on Christians to repent. A hen...

Angelica.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 21, 2007... Phillips's third novel, set in Victorian London, starts as a ghost story. When Joseph instructs his wife, Constance, to have their four-year-old daughter, Angelica, moved from their bedroom into a room of her own, Constance becomes convinced...

The Welsh Girl.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 21, 2007... In rural Wales in 1944, the bright, restless daughter of a sheep farmer finds herself pregnant after a violent sexual encounter with an English soldier. Her sense of entrapment draws her in mute sympathy to the newly built internment camp in...

Inventing Human Rights.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 21, 2007... In 1748, Montesquieu, in an attack on the then common use of torture, wrote, "I was going to say that it might be suitable for despotic government…but I hear the voice of nature crying out against me." His wavering, Hunt writes,...

The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 21, 2007... Lerman, who died in 1994, was at the center of fashionable New York society for almost fifty years, thanks to his work at such magazines as Vogue and Mademoiselle. The son of a housepainter in East Harlem, Lerman was drawn to "the surface...

Disappearances.(The Ministry of Special Cases)(Book review)
May 21, 2007... Early in Nathan Englander's first novel, "The Ministry of Special Cases" (Knopf; $25), Kaddish Poznan returns home late one night to find an unsettling welcome at his apartment door: "He reached for the keyhole and--accompanied by the sound of...

Cut Loose.(exhibition of Paul Poiret's designs)
May 21, 2007... Two years ago, at an auction in Paris that set new records for couture, the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum acquired twenty-six ensembles by Paul Poiret that his granddaughter had put up for sale. They had belonged to the...

Heat Wave.(110 in the Shade)(Theater review)
May 21, 2007... The thirty-six-year-old Audra McDonald is a kind of musical Diana Sands, the revolutionary black actress of the fifties and sixties who broke through New York theatre's racial barriers: a performer so freakishly gifted that you wonder how she...

Ordinary People.(Edward Hopper's paintings captured the concept of ordinary city life)
May 21, 2007... Why buck crowds to attend the big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston? Don't we know this artist well enough by now? When I want to commune with "Nighthawks" (1942) again, I can do so quite satisfactorily at my...

Drifters.(Movie review)
May 21, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File Near the start of "Fay Grim," the heroine of the title (Parker Posey) is asked out to dinner by Angus (Chuck Montgomery), a publisher with a grave manner and a Biblical beard. Fay is taken aback. "You...

Anthos.(Restaurant review)
May 28, 2007... By various accounts, Manhattan is enjoying a Greek-food renaissance; in this view of things, Michael Psilakis is the Greek-American Mario Batali. Psilakis, whose restaurant career began thirteen years ago at a T.G.I. Friday's, opened his first...

Alpha Dogg.(Swamp Dogg )(Sound recording review)
May 28, 2007... In 1970, after more than a decade in the record business as a producer for Atlantic Records and then, briefly, as a recording artist, Jerry Williams took the stage name Swamp Dogg and released "Total Destruction to Your Mind," a crazed,...

Human Nature.(The Talk of the Town)(United States Department of Agriculture on pest control)
May 28, 2007... The red imported fire ant, or Solenopsis invicta, is about an eighth of an inch long, with a ruddy-brown body covered in tiny hairs. It feeds mainly on other insects, but will eat just about anything--including electrical equipment--and is...

Charles in Charge.(The Talk of the Town)(art dealer Charles Saatchi)(Interview)
May 28, 2007... The art dealer Charles Saatchi spends a lot of time sitting at his desk. You might, too, if your desk were more of a table, capacious enough to occupy almost an entire wall of a parlor-floor room in your Belgravia town house; if its placement...

Ladies!(The Talk of the Town)(Cindy Adams)(Interview)
May 28, 2007... "Hello! I'm your hostess!" Cindy Adams was saying as she stood in the entryway of her Park Avenue apartment, welcoming a small group of women to a ladies' tea for Marianne Williamson, the New Age author, and Ellen Burstyn, the actress and...

Weigh-in.(Eric Gioia's diet)
May 28, 2007... Traditionally, dieting for a cause can be as good for one's figure as it is for the soul. Al Sharpton, during his hunger strike over Vieques, in 2001, dropped thirty pounds and several inches from his waistline. Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn's...

Feature Presentation.(The Talk of the Town)(usability of electronic products)
May 28, 2007... Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious...

Angels and Ages.
May 28, 2007... This all began on a very long plane ride, East Coast to West, when I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," her book about Abraham Lincoln and his political competitors, and how, in the course of the Civil War, he turned them into...

Remember This?(Gordon Bell's works)
May 28, 2007... October arrived in 1998, and Gordon Bell went paperless, after hearing from a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was engaged in a project to scan a million books and post them online. The professor, a friend of Bell's named Raj Reddy, had called...

A Boy's World.(Georges Remi and his Tintin comic books)(Critical essay)
May 28, 2007... A hundred years ago, on May 22, 1907, a child named Georges Remi came into being. He was born in the Etterbeek district of Brussels, which is about as quiet a start in life as any person can have. Four years earlier and sixty miles away, in...

O Lucky Man!(Ronald Reagan)
May 28, 2007... While he was President, Ronald Reagan kept an almost daily diary. He was the only President during the last century to do so, and the result--in a form that is greatly reduced but still makes a very long book--"The Reagan Diaries"...

The Big Girls.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 28, 2007... Set in a women's prison on the Hudson River, Moore's sixth novel chronicles the aftermath of a highly publicized murder and its impact on four intertwined lives. The story is told in the alternating voices of Helen, who has long suffered...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 28, 2007... "I am a lover of America," the young Pakistani narrator of this lucid, unsettling novel begins. In the course of a single day and night, he divulges to a mysterious and possibly menacing American his love affair with this country: embraced...

Twice as Good.(Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power)(Brief article)(Book review)
May 28, 2007... President George W. Bush has said of Condoleezza Rice, "Whatever she says, it's like talking to me." Mabry writes that many of Rice's sponsors, from Brent Scowcroft to a Marxist professor, have felt the same affinity, each to be "left...

Are We Rome?(Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America)(Brief article)(Book review)
May 28, 2007... Murphy writes that "Americans have been casting eyes back to ancient Rome since before the Revolution," and goes on to interrogate the comparisons drawn both by "triumphalists," who see the world's only superpower in terms of the Roman Empire...

The Seventh Day.
May 28, 2007... In June, 2003, President Bush tried to discredit any critics who dared dispute his artfully twisted intelligence assessments of Iraq by slinging the worst name he could think of: "Revisionist historians is what I like to call them." This was...

Kiss of Life.(Tennessee Williams, "The Rose Tattoo")(Critical essay)
May 28, 2007... On December 30, 1947, the thirty-six-year-old Tennessee Williams boarded a ship bound for France, sailing away from America and from the tumultuous success on Broadway, only a few weeks earlier, of "A Streetcar Named Desire." Almost...

Not Kids' Stuff.(Shrek the Third)(Movie review)
May 28, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File At a recent preview screening of "Shrek the Third," I was settling into my seat, enjoying the good sight lines (nothing but pipsqueaks between me and the screen) and the excited anticipation of the...