The New Yorker articles from May 2008

The New Yorker archives from May 2008

South Gate.(Restaurant review)
May 5, 2008... There's something resolutely male about South Gate, the new restaurant at the Jumeirah Essex House, the historic Art Deco hotel across from Central Park. Designed by Tony Chi as part of a ninety-million-dollar renovation, it's a bachelor pad...

Going Positive.(The Talk of the Town)(US presidential election)
May 5, 2008... The terms of the 2008 Presidential campaign were set twenty years ago--or, more accurately, perhaps, sometime around the fifth century B.C. In 1988, as Lee Atwater, President George H. W. Bush's young campaign manager, was contemplating how to...

Terror Comix.(The Talk of the Town)(After 9/11: America's War on Terror (2001))
May 5, 2008... In the fall of 2004, when Ernie Colon was employed as a security guard on Long Island and feeling perturbed because, at seventy-two, he had too much idle time, he got an idea. That summer, the 9/11 Commission Report had been published and...

War Games.(The Talk of the Town)(Le Jeu de la Guerre)
May 5, 2008... The centerpiece of the recent "Form as Strategy" exhibit, at Columbia's Buell Center, was a copper- and silver-plated board game called Le Jeu de la Guerre--a kind of modernist take on chess conceived in 1977 by the Marxist philosopher and...

Blooming.(The Talk of the Town)(Michelle Paige Paterson)
May 5, 2008... If there was a feeling of apprehension hanging over last week's Daffodil Project Benefit Breakfast, where Michelle Paige Paterson, the new First Lady of New York, was a guest, it may have been because the only thing most New Yorkers know about...

Bill Vs. Barack.(The Talk of the Town)(Bill Clinton, Barack Obama)
May 5, 2008... On the Thursday before the Pennsylvania primary, Bill Clinton spoke to a crowd of college students at a gymnasium in Lock Haven. The event was typical of the stops--forty-seven of them--that the former President had made in the state during the...

Street Scene.(Skid Row)
May 5, 2008... Nathaniel Ayers, a mentally ill man who lived on the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles for several years, pushing a cart and playing a two-stringed violin in a tunnel that runs almost directly underneath Disney Hall, is considering an attempt...

After Hamlet.(Mark Rylance)(Brief biography)
May 5, 2008... One early-winter evening in London, I walked with Mark Rylance, the founding artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and an actor regarded as one of the finest contemporary interpreters of Shakespeare's plays, across the Millennium...

The Countertraffickers.(International Organization for Migration)
May 5, 2008... Stella Rotaru's cell-phone number is scribbled on the wall of a women's jail in Dubai. That's what a former inmate told her, and Rotaru does get a lot of calls from Dubai, including some from jail. But she gets calls from many odd places--as...

Blood and Sand.(1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War)(Brief biography)
May 5, 2008... For thirteen centuries, between 1200 B.C. and the second century A.D., the Jews lived in, and often ruled, the land of Israel. The population was clustered mainly in Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee. The Jews' dominion was long but not eternal. The...

Olive Kitteridge.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 5, 2008... The whitecaps in the harbor, some familiar piano chords, the doughnut a man brings to his wife after visiting his lover--Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force. These linked stories introduce the inhabitants of Crosby, Maine,...

Pravda.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 5, 2008... This telescopic tale, sweeping from London to St. Petersburg, has elements of the thriller--the discovery of a dead body in the first chapter; a threatening drug dealer; a disaffected long-lost son with a claim on the family fortune--but it's...

The Greatest Game.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 5, 2008... In 1978, the American League East division champion was determined by a one-game playoff, a taut battle between the Yankees and the Red Sox at Fenway Park. Bradley gives a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of the Boston loss (a three-run homer by Bucky...

Death by a Thousand Cuts.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 5, 2008... In 1904, a French photographer documented the Chinese practice of lingchi, a form of execution that involved slicing off limbs and pieces of flesh. Europeans recoiled from what appeared to be a gruesome, lingering death, citing it as evidence...

Relative Strangers.(The Confessions of Max Tivoli, The Story of a Marriage)(Book review)
May 5, 2008... Andrew Sean Greer's 2004 novel, "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," quite brilliantly fulfilled the difficult task it set itself--to show the life of a man born old, who over the decades grows backward into infancy and, finally, nonexistence. This...

Orphans.(Theater review)
May 5, 2008... "There is no such thing as naturalism in the theatre, merely degrees of stylization," Edward Albee once observed. If nothing else, the musical version of John Waters's 1990 film "Cry-Baby" (directed by Mark Brokaw, at the Marquis) is a lesson...

End Notes.(Examining Late Style)(Concert review)
May 5, 2008... Whatever it is that allows artists to maintain their powers of invention as they grow older, composers possess it more richly than most. Musical figures from Monteverdi to Messiaen have had careers that can be plotted as steadily rising curves....

Unsafe.(Iron Man, Then She Found Me)(Movie review)
May 5, 2008... In the past twenty years or so, Robert Downey, Jr., has gone through the following stages: a good young actor with a melancholy smile; a good young actor who was also a drug addict, jailbird, and insurance risk; and now, no longer young, an...

Spicy & Tasty.(Restaurant review)
May 12, 2008... For several years, spice fanatics have been making pilgrimages to Flushing in order to visit this brass-and-faux-marble shrine to the Sichuan peppercorn, and with reason. It's the sort of place where, if you turn to ask the people at the next...

No Endgame.(The Talk of the Town)(Hillary Clinton)
May 12, 2008... Presidential-primary races tend to proceed along self-reflexive lines. The candidate who is ahead--or who is perceived to be--receives more press coverage. He collects more contributions and endorsements, and these generate still more media...

Fan Feud.(The Talk of the Town)(Vander Ark)
May 12, 2008... Once upon a time, a talented weaver named Arachne declared herself superior in skill to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, who also invented weaving. Whether Arachne was actually better we'll never know, for Athena, in a jealous rage, destroyed her...

Word Feast.(The Talk of the Town)(Union Square Cafe)
May 12, 2008... When Christopher Russell, a captain at Gramercy Tavern for many years, went to work at Union Square Cafe, where he is now the general manager, he decided to import a few traditions. (Both restaurants are owned by Danny Meyer.) He banished wordy...

Amanuensis.(The Talk of the Town)(Ted Sorensen's Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History)
May 12, 2008... There was a long pause before Ted Sorensen answered the door the other day at his apartment, on Central Park West. In chinos and a tennis shirt, he still had the trim physique that all the New Frontiersmen had during their days of playing touch...

The Open Secret of Success.(The Talk of the Town)(Toyota Production System)
May 12, 2008... In the current atmosphere of economic tumult, the announcement that Toyota sold a hundred and sixty thousand more cars than General Motors in the first three months of this year might seem like a minor news item. But it may very well signal the...

In the Air.(scientific discoveries, Intellectual Ventures)
May 12, 2008... Nathan Myhrvold met Jack Horner on the set of the "Jurassic Park" sequel in 1996. Horner is an eminent paleontologist, and was a consultant on the movie. Myhrvold was there because he really likes dinosaurs. Between takes, the two men got to...

Birdbrain.(animal cognition, Alex)(Brief biography)
May 12, 2008... As the crowd at the Midwest Bird Expo waited for the cognitive scientist Irene Pepperberg to take the podium, the hum of human chatter was punctuated by the sound of parrots whooping it up--twittering and letting loose with wolf whistles, along...

Song of the Earth.(John Luther Adams' The Place)(Brief biography)
May 12, 2008... On a recent trip to the Alaskan interior, I didn't get to see the aurora borealis, but I did, in a way, hear it. At the Museum of the North, on the grounds of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the composer John Luther Adams has created a...

A Man of Taste.(Grant Achatz, Alinea Restaurant)(Brief biography)
May 12, 2008... The entrance to Alinea, a restaurant in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, is unmarked. Visitors pass through gray metal doors, go down a narrowing corridor, and arrive at a set of doors that slide open automatically. The diner walks...

Pixel Perfect.(Pascal Dangin)(Brief biography)
May 12, 2008... For a charity auction a few years back, the photographer Patrick Demarchelier donated a private portrait session. The lot sold, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to the wife of a very rich man. It was her wish to pose on the couple's...

I Have To Ask.(Audition)(Critical essay)
May 12, 2008... Barack Obama walked onto the set of "The View" a few weeks ago and sat down. It took a moment for the fluttering to die down. When it did, Barbara Walters turned to him and said, "We were just saying before you came out--maybe we shouldn't say...

Our Own Devices.(The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America)(A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium)
May 12, 2008... James Prescott Joule, whose findings led to the first law of thermodynamics, spent his honeymoon jury-rigging a thermometer to take a reading at the top and bottom of a waterfall where a lesser man might merely have canoodled. Joseph Henry...

Daughters of the North.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 12, 2008... In Hall's unsettling third novel, a series of ecological and geopolitical disasters in Britain has caused all citizens to be herded into urban centers, where women are fitted with contraceptive coils. Hall's work covers familiar fictive ground...

Hardheaded Weather.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 12, 2008... This collection of both new and previously published poems showcases Eady's enormous range as a chronicler of contemporary American life--class, race, family, gender, jazz and blues, and the distinctions between urban and rural environments all...

The Hebrew Republic.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 12, 2008... The Bush Administration's fervent desire to broker a Middle East peace agreement before it leaves the stage, early next year, seems almost hopeless, given the fractures among the Palestinians, the heedless building of Israeli settlements, and...

Planet Shanghai.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 12, 2008... It's amazing how much you can accomplish in Shanghai while wearing pajamas. In recent years, Shanghai newspapers have worried that this sartorial habit will give the city a slovenly image, but it seems that many natives see little divide...

Many-colored Glass.(Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke)
May 12, 2008... By the lights of many in the international art world, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke are the leading painters of our day, though it's hard to find anyone who will declare them equally great. (I'm an exception.) Their careers are intertwined...

The Fight Back.(The Country Girl, Thurgood)(Theater review)
May 12, 2008... "Up, Odets!!" Clifford Odets cheered himself on in his diary in 1940, not long before he decamped from New York for Hollywood. "Or is it down, down, sunk into the self?" he added. At the time of that diary entry, Odets was in his prime: widely...

The Heatherwick Effect.(Thomas Heatherwick)
May 12, 2008... For the past few years, an office development tucked away overlooking an old canal behind Paddington Station, in London, has been attracting clusters of people who come to see a footbridge. Made of steel and wood, and crossing the water in...

Around the Bend.(Speed Racer, Turn the River)(Movie review)
May 12, 2008... Gluttons for "Duck Soup" will remember the scene in which Groucho is faced with an official document. "Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report," he says. "Run out and find me a four-year-old child." My sentiments exactly, as I...

Staying Power.(Blame It on Gravity, Same Old Man)(Sound recording review)
May 19, 2008... The Old 97's have been occupying a valuable sliver near the border of alternative country and power pop for the better part of a decade. With their last record, "Drag It Up," in 2004, it seemed as though they might move. Dark and sometimes...

Commerce.(Restaurant review)
May 19, 2008... Fancy food, unfancy setting: that's the guiding idea at Commerce, and the source of its schizophrenic charm. This ancient space, at the end of Commerce Street, was for many years Grange Hall, and before and after that the Blue Mill Tavern, and...

Over Not Out.(The Talk of the Town)(Democratic presidential nomination)
May 19, 2008... When the polls closed in Indiana and North Carolina last Tuesday evening, a lot of Barack Obama supporters braced themselves for bad news. Their candidate had just gone through a harrowing month, divided neatly in two by his thumping in the...

Cyclone.(The Talk of the Town)(cyclone Nargis)
May 19, 2008... The Burmese military government, which hides from its people in the splendid isolation of a jungle capital newly manufactured in the center of the country, told the public, on April 29th, to expect widespread rain and forty-five-mile-an-hour...

Fly on the Wall.(The Talk of the Town)
May 19, 2008... Yasmina Reza, the French playwright ("Art," among other works), was in town last week, talking about her newly translated book on Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, entitled "Dawn Dusk or Night." Sarkozy allowed Reza, a newcomer to...

Born Green.(The Talk of the Town)(Ted Turner)
May 19, 2008... "Our world is in peril. Gaia, the spirit of the earth, can no longer stand the destruction plaguing our planet. She sends five magic rings to five special young people. . . ." If you are familiar with this scenario, you probably grew up...

Mamet Talk.(The Talk of the Town)(David Mamet )(Interview)
May 19, 2008... The playwright and screenwriter David Mamet was in town recently to talk about his new film, "Redbelt." He sat patiently for an interview on a white wire chair in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, one of his favorite haunts. He...

Virtual Iraq.
May 19, 2008... In November, 2004, when he was nineteen years old, a marine I'll call Travis Boyd found himself about to rush the roof of the tallest building in the northern end of Falluja in the midst of a firefight. Boyd, whose first assignment in Iraq was...

Largo Nights.
May 19, 2008... A few days before the Super Bowl this past February, Benmont Tench, who has been playing keyboards with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for more than thirty years, took a break from rehearsing, in Tempe, Arizona, for the game's halftime...

The Bribe.
May 19, 2008... The most exuberant football rally at the University of Mississippi last year occurred four days after the season ended, when the school's chancellor, Robert Khayat, announced the hiring of a new head football coach. A cheering overflow crowd at...

Bird-watcher.(Phil Schaap, Bird Flight)(Brief biography)
May 19, 2008... Every weekday for the past twenty-seven years, a long-in-the-tooth history major named Phil Schaap has hosted a morning program on WKCR, Columbia University's radio station, called "Bird Flight," which places a degree of attention on the music...

Idolatry.(American Idol)
May 19, 2008... At a time when radio has lost relevance, and many fans have settled on niches that are reinforced on the Web every twenty minutes with updates and free music, "American Idol" offers a recurring event that almost everybody talks about at almost...

The Last Bite.(The End of Food)
May 19, 2008... In his "Essay on the Principle of Population," of 1798, the English parson Thomas Malthus insisted that human populations would always be "checked" (a polite word for mass starvation) by the failure of food supplies to keep pace with population...

The Invention of Everything Else.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 19, 2008... In this surreal historical novel, the aged and forgotten scientist Nikola Tesla is eking out his last days at the Hotel New Yorker in 1943, communing with pigeons and the ghost of Mark Twain. His ruminations on his career (he was exploited by...

Factory of Tears.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 19, 2008... "Everything is from shit. Absolutely everything," Mort writes in her debut American publication. "The thing is that there is good shit and bad shit." It's a difficult point to dispute in this argumentative collection. Mort, a young Belarusian...

Worshipping Walt.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 19, 2008... For some devoted readers in the late nineteenth century, Walt Whitman was a "man magnified to the dimensions of a god," and "Leaves of Grass" a divinely inspired gospel. In a series of entertaining and acutely observed biographies of the...

Rite of Spring.(Stravinsky Festival)(Concert review)
May 19, 2008... Miller Theatre's Stravinsky Festival, a five-concert tribute to the undefeated champion of musical modernism, began with a witty and touching conceit that captured the composer's impish spirit. At first glance, the opening concert, which took...

Diehards.(Top Girls)(Theater review)
May 19, 2008... Let's let Marlene, the diehard Thatcherite in Caryl Churchill's 1982 play "Top Girls" (revived at the Biltmore, under the direction of James Macdonald), make the introductions to the imaginary dinner party she throws to congratulate herself on...

The Unquiet Life.(Noise, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay)(Movie review)
May 19, 2008... David Owen (Tim Robbins), the outraged hero of "Noise," is a pain in the neck, and, depending on your point of view, either the craziest or the sanest man in New York. Making love one night to his wife, Helen (Bridget Moynahan), David is...

Elettaria.(Restaurant review)
May 26, 2008... Any restaurant formed by the remaining Presidential candidates (two parts Kenya and Kansas; one part Panama Canal Zone; a dash of Anywhere You Want) would surely resemble Elettaria, a kaleidoscope of cultures and histories. Elettaria's chef,...

In McCain's Court.(The Talk of the Town)(John McCain)
May 26, 2008... Successful politicians know how to attract attention, and how to avoid it, so it's worth noting that John McCain chose to give his speech about the future of the judiciary on May 6th, a day when the political world was preoccupied with the...

Power Hour.(The Talk of the Town)
May 26, 2008... Anecdotally, powerful people seem inclined to do certain things (FedEx their luggage, order off the menu, keep immaculate desks) and not to do others (place their own calls, carry cash, learn how to e-mail, admit to sleeping). To academics, one...

Ich Bin Ein M4.(The Talk of the Town)(Mercedes-Benz Citaro)(Product/service evaluation)
May 26, 2008... Thar she blew, the lone Citaro, the elusive, ultralong, totally Teutonic Mercedes-Benz bendy bus that for the past month or so has been confounding riders on one of three routes all over town. Sleek and gray, glinting in the sun, it turned east...

House Hunt.(The Talk of the Town)
May 26, 2008... Richard Neutra, the architect, is not the sort of figure you think of as having much to do with artists like Damien Hirst and Jean-Michel Basquiat. But there he was last Tuesday night, at Christie's, as Lot 42, right before Hirst's "I'm in Love...

The Free-Trade Paradox.(The Talk of the Town)(trade policy)
May 26, 2008... All the acrimony in the primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has disguised the fact that on most issues they're not too far apart. That's especially the case when it comes to free trade, which both Obama and Clinton have...

Shadow Player.(Paul Chan)
May 26, 2008... Two weeks before the opening of Paul Chan's current exhibition at the New Museum of contemporary art, a mysterious poster began appearing on walls and billboards in downtown Manhattan. In black type on a white background, it read: You ,...

The Fall of Conservatism.
May 26, 2008... The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just...

Hungry Minds.(Church of the Holy Apostles, writers' workshop)
May 26, 2008... The Church of the Holy Apostles, at the corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, is a church only two-sevenths of the time. The other five-sevenths--every weekday including holidays, no exception made for weather, fire, or...

After Empire.
May 26, 2008... In a myth told by the Igbo people of Nigeria, men once decided to send a messenger to ask Chuku, the supreme god, if the dead could be permitted to come back to life. As their messenger, they chose a dog. But the dog delayed, and a toad, which...

Bright Shiny Morning.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 26, 2008... Two years after Frey's memoir "A Million Little Pieces" was outed as part fiction, the publicly chastised writer resurfaces with a novel much of which purports to be fact. Set in a Los Angeles populated by miniature-golf moguls, ex-beauty...

The Gift of Rain.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 26, 2008... Set in Penang in the years just before and during the Second World War, this debut novel explores the consequences of love and duty. Philip Hutton, born to a British father and a Chinese mother, finds himself drawn to a mysterious Japanese...

The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 26, 2008... The growing clamor for a return to Sharia law in the Muslim world has often been met with alarm by the West. But Feldman remains coolheaded, placing the movement in a historical context and suggesting that its ideal of "a just legal system, one...

Governess.(Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres)(Brief article)(Book review)
May 26, 2008... In nineteenth-century England, girls were most commonly educated by governesses; the system was also a way of absorbing the country's "huge pool of spinsters." (The 1851 census found that thirty per cent of women above the age of twenty were...

Out of the Blocks.(Beijing National Stadium, Water Cube, PTW Architects)
May 26, 2008... To understand just how important the Beijing Olympics are to China, you have only to look at where the Olympic Green has been built. During Beijing's first building boom--six hundred years before the current one--the city was laid out...

Action Figures.(Action/Abstraction at Jewish Museum)
May 26, 2008... "Action/Abstraction," at the Jewish Museum, is more a perambulatory essay than an art exhibition, though it incorporates superb exhibits: classic paintings by the rival godheads of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning,...

Intruder in the Wings.(Theater review)
May 26, 2008... The evening I saw "The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928)," the theatre company Elevator Repair Service's rendition of the first section of William Faulkner's 1929 masterpiece (at the New York Theatre Workshop), about a third of the...

Anchor Away.(Katie Couric, CBS Evening News)
May 26, 2008... And so here we are in the latest chapter of the Katie Couric story, though perhaps it can be considered merely a continuation of the chapter that began in September of 2006, when she took over the job of anchor of the "CBS Evening News." After...

Beautiful Friendships.(Movie review)
May 26, 2008... What is it with coincidence? Without it, movies could barely function: of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Bogart's place has to be the one into which Ingrid Bergman walks. His liquorish rant against the odds of her doing...