The New Yorker articles from May 2009

The New Yorker archives from May 2009

The Nick of Time.(The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)(Video recording review)
May 4, 2009... David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (now available in a two-disk set from Criterion and in a single-disk release from Paramount) is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a gentle fantasy about a man who is born old...

Vinegar Hill House.(Restaurant review)(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... Vinegar Hill House would merit a place in the American Museum of Natural History if it had a Hall of Cool New Yorkers Under Forty: with a faded flag, needlepoint, and potted cacti, it's a mint example of the pre-industrial, handmade sensibility...

Blood and Thunder.('Clytemnestra')(Dance review)(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... "Clytemnestra" (1958), Martha Graham's Oresteia, is an evening-length dance into which she put just about everything she had. The piece shows her grandiosity, her love of Greek myth, her flashing treatment of time, her casual attitude to music,...

His Private "I".('The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes')(Movie review)(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... In his gracious and melancholy film "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (1970), screening April 30 at BAM, Billy Wilder spoofs the legend of the great detective without quite overthrowing it. This Holmes, as embodied by Robert Stephens, is...

So Long, Pardner.(The Talk of the Town)(rallies on tax hike)
May 4, 2009... QUESTION: What do you think about the idea of secession or sovereignty for your state?, GOVERNOR PERRY, OF TEXAS: Oh, I think there's a lot of different scenarios. On April 15th, a.k.a. tax day, protest rallies promoted by conservative...

Take Two.(The Talk of the Town)(JumpStart NYC for laid-off wall streeters)
May 4, 2009... On a recent weekday morning, a laid-off trading-floor worker and a laid-off control officer were sitting in the basement of the Levin Institute, a business school in a town house on East Fifty-fifth Street, drinking coffee and talking about...

Looking Swell.(The Talk of the Town)(Dolly Parton)(Biography)
May 4, 2009... Dolly Parton, whose father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal, came to New York City for the first time in 1964, on a trip with the senior class of Sevier County High School. She stayed in a hotel (a first) and rode the...

At Sea.(The Talk of the Town)(City Island, New York)
May 4, 2009... Shortly before nine o'clock on the evening of July 13, 2007, a fire broke out on the front porch of the City Island Nautical Museum. The fire was most likely set by local teen-agers, for whom the porch was a favorite hangout. "We think they...

Art On The Grass.(The Talk of the Town)(Peter Brant exhibit at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center)
May 4, 2009... On a brilliant spring day last week in backcountry Greenwich, the art collector Peter Brant strolled into his new museum--the Brant Foundation Art Study Center--with the slightly bowlegged gait of a man who has spent a lot of time on horseback....

Horse Sense.(Larry Jones)(Interview)
May 4, 2009... In the spring of 2006, Rick Porter, the owner of a small but promising stable of racehorses, set out to find a new trainer for his thoroughbreds. Porter, a prosperous Delaware car dealer with Kentucky Derby ambitions, interviewed candidates at...

Open Channels.(treating cystic fibrosis)
May 4, 2009... When Chrissy Falletti was born, in 1975, she seemed healthy, but soon her father, a physician in Youngstown, Ohio, and her mother, a nurse, observed that she was losing weight. At six weeks old, Falletti was admitted to Rainbow Babies &...

The Life After.(Rwanda after the genocide)
May 4, 2009... When I began visiting Rwanda, in 1995, a year after the genocide, the country was still pretty well annihilated: blood-sodden and pillaged, with bands of orphans roaming the hills and women who'd been raped squatting in the ruins, its humanity...

Money Talks.(planning the economic policy)
May 4, 2009... A few weeks ago, Peter Orszag, President Obama's trim, apple-cheeked budget director, stretched out in the green room of what has become, in recent years, the locus of reliably liberal sensibility in this country--the midtown studios where Jon...

Cockeyed Optimist.(Amy Poehler)
May 4, 2009... Is there a more appealing performer on television than Amy Poehler? Yes, "appealing" sounds bland and unappreciative, and it's unspecific, but the radiance and the warmth that come from Poehler are general and broad in the best way, and they...

Doctor and Patient.(Lobo Antunes)(Biography)
May 4, 2009... The Portuguese novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes discovered his literary vocation while delivering babies, performing amputations, and carving up corpses. Lobo Antunes trained as a doctor, and in the early nineteen-seventies, during military...

Every Man Dies Alone.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 4, 2009... Fallada wrote this novel in twenty-four days in 1947, the last year of his life; he was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and had just been released from a Nazi insane asylum. The story is based on that of an actual working-class Berlin couple who...

Wandering Stars.(Plot summary)(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... Best known for his stories of Tevye the Milkman, a character later brought to Broadway in "Fiddler on the Roof," Sholem Aleichem was a Russian humorist sometimes referred to as "the Jewish Mark Twain." In this romantic epic, previously...

The Rider on the White Horse.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 4, 2009... The novella was a form beloved of nineteenth-century Germans, who favored the spooky variety. This, from 1888, is one of the greats. Hauke Haien, a young Frisian man, builds a new dike for his town, to shield it from the furies of the North...

Armenian Golgotha.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 4, 2009... On the night of April 24, 1915, Grigoris Balakian, an Armenian priest, and more than two hundred other Armenian politicians and intellectuals were arrested in Constantinople. Soon, Armenians across Turkey were massacred or forced to join a...

Alien Emotions.
May 4, 2009... "The Pictures Generation," at the Metropolitan Museum, revisits a hothouse orchid of an avant-garde that sprouted in art schools in the nineteen-seventies and, by 1984 (the cutoff date for works in the show), had withered in the chill winds of...

Twos and Threes.(Think Punk!)(Nearly Ninety)(Dance review)
May 4, 2009... At the beginning of Merce Cunningham's "Nearly Ninety," which had its premiere on April 16th--his ninetieth birthday--at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, thirteen dancers came out in unitards (by Romeo Gigli) that had black sections laid over...

Adieu.(Esa-Pekka Salonen life as a musician)
May 4, 2009... When Esa-Pekka Salonen began rehearsing for his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in 1984, he introduced himself to the orchestra with these somewhat unpromising words: "I suppose that you know the Lutos?awski notation." On the program...

Men of Mystery.(The Limits of Control)(Il Divo)(Movie review)
May 4, 2009... What kind of man reads a mystery story but rips out the page on which the villain is about to be unmasked? Who, in other words, prefers eternal suspense to the vulgar eclat of resolution? The answer, according to "Il Divo," is Giulio Andreotti:...

Shang.(Restaurant review)
May 11, 2009... Susur Lee has been called one of the best chefs in Canada--a bit of a backhanded compliment, and a characterization that accounts, perhaps, for his decision last year to shutter his eponymous restaurant in Toronto and head for New York. The...

Interrogating Torture.(The Talk of the Town)(coercive interrogation of prisoners)
May 11, 2009... On November 14, 2003, at Abu Ghraib prison, on the outskirts of Baghdad, six hooded Iraqi prisoners accused by their American jailers of trying to start a riot were brought to the Military Intelligence cellblock and handed over to Corporal...

Standstill.(The Talk of the Town)(swine influenza's influence in the daily life of Mexicans)
May 11, 2009... One of the larger consequences of the government's efforts to contain the spread of the swine-influenza virus here in Mexico City is tedium. Mexicans are generally festive people, and now that the city government has closed down restaurants,...

Samela's Shammash.(The Talk of the Town)(Sammy Davis, Jr.)
May 11, 2009... If there is a Heaven, and Sammy Davis, Jr., is looking down from it, he's probably distressed about the state of his earthly possessions. "He was meticulous," Burt Boyar, Davis's friend and a co-writer of Davis's autobiography, "Yes I Can,"...

By Any Other Name.(The Talk of the Town)(swine influenza)
May 11, 2009... Last week, there were a lot of questions about swine flu, not the least of which was what to call it. An Israeli health minister, loath to utter the words, attempted to rename the virus the "Mexican flu." The hog farmers and the pork processors...

Monsters, Inc.(The Talk of the Town)(financial services)
May 11, 2009... Amid the blizzard of economic data that the government puts out every week, last Tuesday's report analyzing G.D.P. industry by industry got little notice. But it contained one very interesting piece of data: in 2008, for the first time in...

How David Beats Goliath.
May 11, 2009... When Vivek Ranadive decided to coach his daughter Anjali's basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball--the Little League of basketball. The team was made...

The Fifth Blade.(razors)
May 11, 2009... In the boom years, it seemed, everyone collected something. Cohiba cigars or Koons's inflatable flowers, vintage claret or worthless stock. In an economy of excess, money was free to flow into artifacts, cultural bullion. Bill Gates collected...

The Art Doctor.(Christian Scheidemann)
May 11, 2009... In late 2007, Ann Goldstein, the senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, asked Rosa de la Cruz, a collector of contemporary art who lives in Key Biscayne, Florida, if she would lend the museum a painting by Martin...

Brain Games.(apotemnophilia )
May 11, 2009... One morning in January, a tall, gray-haired man whom I will call Arthur Jamieson arrived at the Mandler Hall psychology building, at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla. Jamieson is seventy years old and lives in the Midwest....

The Long Shot.(Jia Zhangke and her work in fashion photography)
May 11, 2009... Just after dawn on a frigid plateau in northern China, the director Jia Zhangke was having trouble with a scene involving a fire-breather. The fireballs were coming out of the man's mouth a foot too low, and were obscuring other faces in the...

Helenism.(Bad Girls Go Everywhere)(Book review)
May 11, 2009... "Sexual intercourse," according to the British poet Philip Larkin, "began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me)-- / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP." This, it turns out, is complete...

How to Win a Cosmic War.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 11, 2009... Aslan's thoughtful analysis of America's war on terror argues that the nation's jihadist enemies believe the conflict is taking place on a spiritual, "cosmic" plane and thus cannot be lost. Only by denying the terrorists their good-versus-evil...

The Parents We Mean to Be.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 11, 2009... In this ardent and persuasive inquiry, Weissbourd, a Harvard psychologist, warns that "happiness-besotted" parents do children a disservice by emphasizing personal fulfillment over empathy. (A high-school English teacher laments the difficulty...

Natural Elements.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 11, 2009... Mason's first novel was published while he was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at Oxford; this third effort is an immensely readable magnum opus that encompasses the Boer War, the French Resistance, the conflict in Iraq, geriatric psychiatry,...

Out of My Skin.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 11, 2009... A journalist leaves New York in the wake of a failed love affair and heads to Los Angeles, hoping to write about movies. He winds up interviewing a Steve Martin impersonator and is inspired to try "being Steve" himself--not as a paid gig but as...

Back to Basics.(poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' works and his biography, 'Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life' by Paul Mariani)(Critical essay)
May 11, 2009... English poetry began with a vision of God. Caedmon, the first English poet whose name we know--he lived in the seventh century, in the town of Whitby--was not a poet by training. He knew so little about the art, in fact, that at parties, when...

Boys' Choir.(Gizzly Bear's albums Veckatimest and Yellow House)(Sound recording review)
May 11, 2009... Grizzly Bear, a four-piece band from Brooklyn, arranges its songs so carefully that they accrue intricate, hairline detail with no loss of momentum, but the group's most obvious gift is the vocals--all four members sing, and well. The band's...

Hard Knocks.(X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Fighting, and Tyson)(Movie review)
May 11, 2009... V iolence (not sex) is the bedrock of international mass culture--violent aggression as joyfully dispensed by the male body, whether sheathed (Spider-Man), tuxedoed (Bond), cool in black (Bourne), shirtless (Sylvester Stallone), hairless (Vin...

Delicatessen.(Restaurant review)
May 18, 2009... As soon as the government has finished with the banks, a stress test for restaurants might be in order, and the ones in east SoHo and on the Lower East Side, which have burgeoned roughly in step with bank branches, should be first in line. Some...

Living Dolls.(One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This)(Sound recording review)
May 18, 2009... The achievements of the original New York Dolls are difficult to describe and impossible to equal. The two records that the band made in the early seventies threw together fifties rock and roll, girl-group pop, kitsch, and glam in a recipe that...

College Try.(the planned commencement speech of Barack Obama at Arizona State University)
May 18, 2009... With summer almost here, and the green shoots on the ground (if not on the Dow) grown to leafy fullness, the White House has completed an annual springtime chore: choosing among the many invitations from colleges and universities for the boss...

Engine Trouble.(environmental activist George Pakenham on his drive against engine idling)
May 18, 2009... George Pakenham works for an international mortgage desk on Wall Street, but his business cards are printed with Section 4-08, Subsection P, of the New York City traffic code, as it pertains to engine idling. (Roughly speaking, it is prohibited...

The Wall.(musicians gather to honor Manny's Music store which will be closing down)
May 18, 2009... Manny's Music, one of the largest of the West Forty-eighth Street musical-instrument stores, is closing soon, and among the matters yet to be resolved between Manny's owner, Sam Ash Music, and Manny's founding family, the descendants of Manny...

Green Collars.(The Talk of the Town)(screening of documentary movie on green construction 'The Greening of Southie')
May 18, 2009... Aspiring ironworkers in New York City must complete a three-year apprenticeship. They take classes two evenings a week and on occasional Saturdays, and they spend most of the third year practicing things like arc-welding single-V butt joints...

End-Times 101.(The Talk of the Town)(professor Michael Taussig's seminar on the apocalypse)
May 18, 2009... It was a sunny spring day when Michael Taussig, a professor of anthropology at Columbia, wrapped up his graduate seminar on the apocalypse (official title: "Preemptive Apocalyptic Thought: The Angel of History Reconsidered in Light of Climate...

Don't!(Walter Mischel's experiment on delayed gratification)
May 18, 2009... In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a "game room" at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk...

Eastern Promises.(Anwar Ibrahim, Islam, and Malaysian democracy)
May 18, 2009... Anwar Ibrahim's voice was barely audible above the background din of chattering guests and a cocktail-bar pianist at the Hilton Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. Anwar--who had rebounded from six years in prison on corruption and sodomy charges to become...

Drink Up.(Fred Franzia, owner of Bronco Wine Co.)
May 18, 2009... Not long ago, Fred Franzia celebrated the sale of the four-hundred-millionth bottle of Charles Shaw, a wine that costs $1.99 at Trader Joe's and is known by the chummy nickname Two Buck Chuck. "Take that and shove it, Napa," he said. "Four...

Slang-Whanger.(William Hazlitt)(Biography)
May 18, 2009... Prepare yourself: you cannot be both a Coleridgean and a Hazlittean. I'm sorry, but it needed to be said. This doesn't mean that you can't like both "Kubla Khan" and "The Indian Jugglers," but somewhere along the line you have to choose. It's...

The Song Is You.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 18, 2009... Phillips's best writing achieves an elaborate, gratifying precision, combining a naturally flamboyant style with neat, observational wit. This quality is sharpest in some of the character portraits and delectable set pieces that animate this...

Apologize, Apologize!(Brief article)(Book review)
May 18, 2009... In this rousingly pell-mell debut novel, the tender arc of a bildungsroman is nearly squelched by a backdrop of epic family farce. The "fantastic Flanagans" of Squibnocket Beach suffer from "compulsive vividness." They brawl and squall without...

The Complete Game.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 18, 2009... What's on the mind of a major-league pitcher, out there in mid-inning and mid-career trouble once again, with men on base, his concentration wavering, and some of his best stuff not on call today? According to this account by Ron Darling, the...

The Last Witch of Langenburg.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 18, 2009... In the German hamlet of Langenburg in 1672, panic ensued when a young woman named Anna Fessler ate a butter cake and died overnight. Had Anna Schmieg, her neighbor, poisoned the cake by means of witchcraft? Robisheaux explores the lore...

Highly Illogical.(Star Trek)(Movie review)
May 18, 2009... What happened to "Star Trek"? There it was, a nice little TV series, quick and wry, injecting the frontier spirit into the galactic void, and managing to touch on weighty themes without getting sucked into them and squashed. It ran for three...

Panic Attack.(Waiting for Godot)
May 18, 2009... Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," billed as "the laugh sensation of two continents," made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956. My father, Bert Lahr, was playing Estragon, one of the two...

Bar Breton.(Restaurant review)
May 25, 2009... Good food can be found in perplexing places, and this casual French bistro, opened not long ago by the chef Cyril Renaud, sits in what must be Manhattan's last characterless quarter--an area that some maps sheepishly call Midtown South Central,...

In Search Of Success.(The Talk of the Town)(United States's foreign relations)
May 25, 2009... In 2007, a Guantanamo military commission reviewed prisoner No. 008, also known as Abdullah Gulam Rasoul, a designated enemy combatant who had been held without legal rights for about six years. Rasoul told his captors that he had "never been...

Dodge City.(The Talk of the Town)(Dodge Landesman)
May 25, 2009... Dodge Landesman, Democratic candidate for City Council in the Second District, got his start in public speaking on the VH1 reality show "Ice-T's Rap School," as an eighth grader at York Prep, on the Upper West Side. "We had to open for Public...

Fish Out of Water.(The Talk of the Town)(Todd and Sarah Palin)
May 25, 2009... A couple of Fridays ago, when the weather was warm and office workers all over the city were streaming up the avenues at lunchtime, a group of Alaskans gathered at Alaska House, on Mercer Street, for a buffet lunch celebrating a program called...

Face Value.(Baselworld 2009 and luxuries)(Conference notes)
May 25, 2009... Once upon a time, before there was time, the market for wristwatches was sluggish. Today, almost fourteen billion years later, in a universe dense with cell phones, iPods, microwave ovens, and other objects displaying the current hour, minute,...

No More Mr. Nice Guy.(Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr)
May 25, 2009... When John G. Roberts, Jr., emerges from behind the red curtains and takes his place in the middle of the Supreme Court bench, he usually wears a pair of reading glasses, which he peers over to see the lawyers arguing before him. It's an...

The Sixth Extinction?(mass extinction of amphibians)
May 25, 2009... The town of El Valle de Anton, in central Panama, sits in the middle of a volcanic crater formed about a million years ago. The crater is almost four miles across, but when the weather is clear you can see the jagged hills that surround the...

The Real Rhett Butler.(movie director Victor Fleming)(Biography)
May 25, 2009... Howard Hughes, whose acumen outside certain areas of expertise (aeronautics and the acquisition of beautiful actresses) was rarely sound, once said something intelligent about the relative merits of two movie directors. The remark was delivered...

The First Tycoon.(Cornelius Vanderbilt )(Brief article)(Book review)
May 25, 2009... In the panic of 1869, Cornelius Vanderbilt "appeared in the role of a hero," Stiles writes, praised for steadying the markets with his confidence and his cash. In reality, Vanderbilt's own machinations had helped push the markets to the brink....

The Age of the Unthinkable.(radical changes that are unfolding)(Brief article)(Book review)
May 25, 2009... In this "revolutionary era of surprise and innovation," Ramo argues that America needs a new "grand strategy" that resembles an immune system in its flexibility and resilience. To illustrate the methods he has in mind, Ramo entertainingly...

The Way Home.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 25, 2009... Notions of revenge, redemption, and justice fuel this thriller, set in Washington, D.C. After a stint in juvenile hall, Chris Flynn sets out to turn his life around, taking a job as a carpet installer for his father, a flooring supplier,...

All the Living.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 25, 2009... This lyrical tale of grief and gruelling love on a tobacco farm takes place in the mid-nineteen-eighties but, if not for glimpses of linoleum and double-wides, might recall an earlier time. Aloma is an orphan who teaches piano at a mountain...

Mental Notes.(Mental)(Television program review)
May 25, 2009... There has been so much good television in the past decade ("The Sopranos" and "The West Wing," for example, started in 1999) that we can almost forget sometimes that TV programs are a commodity. When we love a show, we think of the skill and...

Hard Sell.(Death of a Salesman)(Theater review)
May 25, 2009... "To mount an all-black production of a 'Death of a Salesman' or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the...

Unsung.
May 25, 2009... Opera was, in effect, born twice. Its first coming was during the last decade of the sixteenth century, when humanist musicians and poets at the court of the Medici, in Florence, began to present a new kind of sung drama. The inaugural operas...

Wild Life.(Alice Neel's works )
May 25, 2009... "All experience is great providing you live through it," Alice Neel said, adding an implied caution: "If it kills you, you've gone too far." She spoke from authority. The great American portrait painter (1900-84), who is the subject of two...

Spiralling Upward.(design of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum )
May 25, 2009... In 1959, when the Guggenheim Museum opened, traffic on Fifth Avenue moved in both directions. As you drove northward, the bulbous form emerged from behind flat-fronted apartment buildings like a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I...

Unholy Alliances.(Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code)
May 25, 2009... "The Da Vinci Code"--both the 2003 novel and the 2006 movie--mesmerized audiences with puzzles and bloody horrors, while purporting to edify them with talk of religion and art history. Yet one element in the movie broke through the...