The New Yorker articles from November 2005

The New Yorker archives from November 2005

TABLES FOR TWO.(Uovo restaurant)(Restaurant Review)
November 7, 2005... UOVO -- 175 Avenue B (212-475-8686)--Uovo is Italian for egg, and a large photo of one adorns a bare brick wall in Matthew Hamilton's spare, stiffly stylish restaurant. As it happens, Hamilton cooks eggs beautifully--delicately scrambled with...

HELL WEEK.(The Talk of the Town)
November 7, 2005... Last Monday, at the very start of George W. Bush's week of misery, Thomas M. DeFrank, the Washington bureau chief of the Daily News, published a story that portrayed the President as frustrated and enraged, a "peevish and melancholy" tenant of...

SCOOTER'S SEX SHOCKER.(Scooter Libby)
November 7, 2005... Of all the scribbled sentences that have converged to create the Valerie Plame affair, the most remarkable, in literary terms, may belong to Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's recently deposed chief of staff. "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens...

SELLING THE NEWS.(The Talk of the Town)
November 7, 2005... It is sometimes said that the best way to read the Times is to start by skimming the Post, as though it were a cheat sheet for deciphering the paper of record's impassive headlines and byzantine constructions. Then, there is the current...

THAT SMELL.(The Talk of the Town)(New York City smelled of maple syrup)
November 7, 2005... It's a well-known fact, among real-estate agents, that prospective buyers respond enthusiastically to the smells of cinnamon and baking dough. Brokers often instruct sellers to put an apple pie in the oven just before showing an apartment. This...

CLASS ACTION.(The Talk of the Town)(textbook publishing)
November 7, 2005... "I don't care who writes a nation's laws--or crafts its advanced treaties--if I can write its economic textbooks," Paul Samuelson, a Nobel-winning M.I.T. economist and the author of the most durable economics textbook ever written, once said....

TELLING SECRETS.(Valerie Plame Wilson, Robert Novak)
November 7, 2005... It's probably safe to assume that nobody who participated in the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a C.I.A. agent, in the summer of 2003, was mindful that the result of the process--the publication of Wilson's name in Robert Novak's syndicated...

ARTIST'S MODEL.(Emile Zola, Paul Cezanne, friends)(Biography)
November 7, 2005... When Emile Zola and Paul Cezanne stopped speaking to each other, they had been friends for thirty-four years. They met in 1852, at their school in Aix-en-Provence, when they were twelve and thirteen, and they both cherished memories of their...

PRESENT WAKING LIFE.(Fictional Work)
November 7, 2005... It's late already, five or five-thirty. John Ashbery is sitting at his typewriter but not typing. He picks up his cup of tea and takes two small sips because it's still quite hot. He puts it down. He's supposed to write some poetry today. He...

THE TRANSLATION WARS.(Constance Garnett, English translations, Russian literature )
November 7, 2005... In the early seventies, two young playwrights, Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato, collaborated on a satire about nineteenth-century Russian literature called "The Idiots Karamazov." In their liberal interpretation of Dostoyevsky, Father...

RAIL-SPLITTING.(Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln)(Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness)(Book Review)
November 7, 2005... At the age of seven, Abraham Lincoln poked his rifle through a crack in the family's log cabin and shot a turkey. It was the high point of his career as a hunter, and also the end of it. By his own account, he never afterward "pulled a trigger...

FIREBRAND.(Equal rights amendments)
November 7, 2005... From September 27, 1976, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "The Autumn of the Patriarch." On October 12, 1971, the United States House of Representatives approved the Equal Rights Amendment by a vote of 354 to 23. Five months later, the same...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(13 Steps Down)(Pigtopia)(Storm Chasers)(Defining the World)(Melville)(A Man with No Talents)(Book Review)
November 7, 2005... 13 Steps Down, by Ruth Rendell (Crown; $25). The British crime novelist Ruth Rendell is the author of fifty-odd books in which things go horribly, intricately wrong. (Her creepiest, most disturbing novels are written under the pseudonym Barbara...

DYING FOR LOVE.(Gabriel Garcia Marquez)(Critical Essay)
November 7, 2005... From September 27, 1976, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "The Autumn of the Patriarch." The works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez contain a great deal of love, depicted as a doom, a demonic possession, a disease that, once contracted, cannot be easily...

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE.(The Odd Couple)(Third)(Theater Review)
November 7, 2005... "The Odd Couple" (in revival at the Brooks Atkinson, under the direction of Joe Mantello) is Neil Simon's enduring masterpiece, a textbook on comic construction, as streamlined and solid as the Pyramids. The curtain rises on a poker table,...

BOYS IN THE HOOD.(My Name Is Earl)(Everybody Hates Chris)(Television Program Review)
November 7, 2005... The sitcom is always being prematurely buried. In the last couple of years, as "Friends" and "Everybody Loves Raymond" departed from the TV landscape, the words heard at the genre's funeral were alternately "alas" and "good riddance." (Viewers...

LOST BOYS.(Jarhead)(The Weather Man)(Movie Review)
November 7, 2005... "Jarhead," which is based on Anthony Swofford's 2003 memoir of the Gulf War, gets under way with a standard scene of boot-camp training. Tony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), a young Marine recruit, screams "Sir! Yes, sir!" as a drill instructor...

POP NOTES.(Green Day, Miranda Lambert)
November 14, 2005... SINGLES GOING STEADY -- The Bay Area punk band Green Day continues to soldier on, with surprising results. Green Day became a favorite with teen-agers in 1994 with "Dookie," an album of tuneful, mildly aggressive commercial punk accompanied by...

UPS AND DOWNS.(The Talk of the Town)(up-or-down vote, Congress)
November 14, 2005... During the six months or so prior to and encompassing the nomination and confirmation of John Roberts as Chief Justice of the United States, one phrase was on every Republican senatorial lip. "All of the President's nominees, both now and in...

WAR POET.(Brian Turner, "Here, Bullet" poetry collection)
November 14, 2005... William Butler Yeats had strong opinions about the poets of the First World War: Rupert Brooke, he said, was "the handsomest young man in England"; Wilfred Owen's stuff was "all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick." It is interesting to imagine...

TALKING THE TAWK.(The Talk of the Town)(American dialects)
November 14, 2005... Professor William Labov is to American dialect what Lewis and Clark are to American geography. He's the pathfinder. Labov's new work, which is called "The Atlas of North American English," constitutes the first coast-to-coast charting of all...

NEW NOTES FROM HARRIET TO GEORGE.(Harriet Miers, George W. Bush)
November 14, 2005... October 27, 2005 -- Hi! Just a quick note to say that you looked heavyish last time I saw you, which, come to think of it, was this morning, in the Oval Office, when you accepted my withdrawal (which you had secretly demanded) and ruined my...

TRUE BELIEVER.(The Talk of the Town)(Patrick J. Fitzgerald)
November 14, 2005... Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the gangbusting son-of-a-doorman U.S. Attorney assigned to investigate the Valerie Plame leak case, has lately seemed to elicit more appellations than just about anybody. He's "Eliot Ness with a Harvard degree" (his...

A DEADLY INTERROGATION.(Central Intelligence Agency detainees)
November 14, 2005... At the end of a secluded cul-de-sac, in a fast-growing Virginia suburb favored by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a handsome replica of an old-fashioned farmhouse, with a white-railed front porch. The large back yard has a...

THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE.(Robert Casey, Jr., Pennsylvania politics)
November 14, 2005... As Democrats regrouped after last year's elections, Senator Charles Schumer, of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, took up the task of preventing further Republican gains in 2006. The Democrats' cause had...

THE MALPRACTICE MESS.(medical malpractice lawsuits)
November 14, 2005... It was an ordinary Monday at the Middlesex County Superior Court in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fifty-two criminal cases and a hundred and forty-seven civil cases were in session. In Courtroom 6A, Daniel Kachoul was on trial for three counts of...

THE THIN MAN.(Steve Buscemi)(Interview)
November 14, 2005... Steve Buscemi doesn't loom into view. He's not a looming kind of guy. On an overcast day in June, as I waited on the designated corner of Union Square to meet him for the first time, I called his assistant. "He's late," I said. "Where is he?"...

A MAN WHO WASN'T THERE.(Javier Marias, Spanish writer)(Biography)
November 14, 2005... Vladimir Nabokov, upbraiding a poet friend for writing a newspaper column, declared, "I am writing my novel. I do not read the papers." Though it wouldn't have been out of character for Nabokov to tax the truth for the sake of a memorable line,...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Sea)(Beasts of No Nation)(The Third Reich in Power)(Dream Boogie)(Book Review)
November 14, 2005... The Sea, by John Banville (Knopf; $23). Banville's novel, which won this year's Man Booker Prize, is narrated by an art historian, whose grief at the death of his wife has stalled his work on a "Big Book on Bonnard." In retreat at an Irish...

MUSIC MEN.(Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)(Jersey Boys)(Theater Review)
November 14, 2005... After the sensational first production of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," in 1979, Stephen Sondheim underwent media canonization as the patron saint of the American musical. "Is Stephen Sondheim God?" one magazine headline...

A PLACE IN THE SUN.(hip-hop music from Houston)
November 14, 2005... In the fall of 1991, an unusual song found its way onto the radio. It was called "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," and was performed by a Houston hip-hop trio called Geto Boys. A slow, mournful plaint, "Mind" relied on long, harmonically complex...

PARENT TRAPS.(Pride and Prejudice)(Bee Season)(Movie Review)
November 14, 2005... The new film of "Pride and Prejudice," directed by Joe Wright, plays fast and loose with the novel. This is a good thing, the fast being as welcome as the loose. You can hear the creaks and scrapes as the screenwriter, Deborah Moggach, moves...

TABLES FOR TWO.(Crispo)(Restaurant Review)
November 21, 2005... CRISPO -- 240 W. 14th St. (212-229-1818)--Faced with Crispo's long, Seussian menu (zany typeface, lots of ham), it seemed natural to ask for some guidance. "Would you like to order vegetarian?" a pleasant but firm waiter began. "Are you...

DIFFERENCE.(The Talk of the Town)(immigrants, France)
November 21, 2005... Eight days ago, when the violence that had erupted in three hundred of the immigrant housing projects that circle France's big cities spread, briefly, to Belgium and Germany, the sigh of relief among French politicians could be heard from Lille...

DARWIN IN MANHATTAN.(The Talk of the Town)(Charles Darwin, American Museum of Natural History)
November 21, 2005... On Election Day, as the Kansas school board was voting to allow the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, a couple of fifty-pound Galapagos tortoises were settling in to their temporary new Manhattan home, at the...

CROSS-POLLINATION.(The Talk of the Town)(Baryshnikov Arts Center)
November 21, 2005... The Baryshnikov Arts Center, where the great Russo-American dancer, who is now fifty-seven, hopes to make life better for performing artists, didn't open officially until this month. But the center, housed in a new building on West...

SCOTUS WATCH.(The Talk of the Town)(weblogs on justices)
November 21, 2005... In the months since Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement, Americans have become obsessed with judge-watching. The new pastime practically eclipsed the World Series, with fans paying more attention to Harriet Miers's eye makeup than to...

UP IN SMOKE.(The Talk of the Town)(tobacco industry)
November 21, 2005... In 1638, Ch'ung-chen, the last Ming emperor, declared war on tobacco: anyone caught importing or using it would have his head chopped off. Ch'ung-chen was not the only seventeenth-century monarch to take a hard line on the matter. Thirty-four...

FAULT LINES.(Pakistan earthquake)
November 21, 2005... The earthquake that struck northern Pakistan on the morning of October 8th left some eighty thousand people dead, perhaps a quarter of them children. It was a catastrophe without precedent in the country's history, and the government was slow...

THE LATE SHOW.(professional baseball)
November 21, 2005... Baseball is off on its annual winter cruise, basking in better weather and no pauses for commercials. "Small ball" has gone away, too, along with Craig Biggio's dirt-smudged helmet, Red Sox Nation, and the speculation about Roger Clemens's...

FUGITIVES.(Iran)
November 21, 2005... One afternoon in June, three days before Iran's Presidential elections, thousands of young reformists gathered in Tehran University's soccer stadium. Their candidate, Mustafa Moin, was sure to lose, but the crowd was jubilantly defiant. "Free...

GREEN DREAMS.(emerald earrings of Elizabeth Farnese)
November 21, 2005... Fred Leighton, the jeweller, is situated on the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street. The ornate awning, window frames, and door are polished brass--from the outside the shop looks like an outsized brooch set with precious...

PRISONER OF NARNIA.(Biography)
November 21, 2005... The British literary scholar, Christian apologist, and children's-book author C. S. Lewis is one of two figures--Churchill is the other--whose reputation in Britain is so different from their reputation in America that we might as well be...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Joseph Smith, Warped Passages, No Applause--Just Throw Money and The Ongoing Moment)(Book Review)
November 21, 2005... Joseph Smith, by Richard Lyman Bushman (Knopf; $35). Joseph Smith claimed that he was visited by an angel who gave him golden plates from which he transcribed the Book of Mormon, and he had organized a church before he was twenty-five. His...

THE MESSENGER.(chamber music, works on single note)
November 21, 2005... In the beginning was the Tone. Throughout musical history, composers have commenced major works with a primordial hum, as if to suggest that the universe was audible before it became visible. Monteverdi's "Orfeo," the first masterpiece of...

HEAVEN ON EARTH.(Fra Angelico)
November 21, 2005... The sweet gravitas of Fra Angelico's paintings may be the all-time best advertising for Christian piety. The early-Renaissance master (circa 1395-1455), seen in a rare retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum (the first in the United States and...

DIVA IN DISTRESS.(Souvenir)(Theater Review)
November 21, 2005... It is difficult to prove--or disprove--the brilliance of those stage performers whose rise to fame occurred during the now distant pre-DVD age. While historians, by scouring reviews and photographs, can approximate what made a given performance...

RINGS OF FIRE.(Walk the Line)(Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price)(Movie Review)
November 21, 2005... He was homely as a young man, gloomy-looking, even a little forlorn, with a thin mouth and ears that stuck out, and he didn't know quite what to do with himself. As all the world is aware, however, no one ever aged better than Johnny Cash: if...

TABLES FOR TWO.(Viny Vincenz's Pizzamobile)(Restaurant Review)
November 28, 2005... VINNY VINCENZ'S PIZZAMOBILE -- W. 40th St. at Broadway (212-674-0707)--Every weekday around noon, John (Kid) Lynch swings his red step van into his spot on West Fortieth Street, just east of Broadway. The ovens inside the van's...

MISSIONS.(The Talk of the Town)(Sudan)
November 28, 2005... For the past two and a half years, the Arab-dominated government of Sudan has teamed up with sword-wielding marauders on horses and camels, known as janjaweed, to butcher, rape, and expel non-Arabs living in the western region of Darfur. In May...

BAUDRILLARD ON TOUR.(The Talk of the Town)(Jean Baudrillard)
November 28, 2005... There may never again be a year in Jean Baudrillard's life quite like 1999. Baudrillard, the French philosopher, is best known for his theory that consumer society forms a kind of code that gives individuals the illusion of choice while in fact...

NORTH.(The Talk of the Town)(David Crier, car salesman from New Orleans )
November 28, 2005... David Crier was doubtless flouting the spirit, if not the letter, of United Airlines' carry-on-bag regulations when he boarded Flight 1403 out of New Orleans one day in mid-October. Crier is a stolid, businesslike gentleman of sixty-six, with...

BLOODY ENOUGH.(The Talk of the Town)(Gabriel Byrne)(Interview)
November 28, 2005... On the eve of previews of the Roundabout's production of Eugene O'Neill's "A Touch of the Poet," Gabriel Byrne, who plays the father in a volatile Irish-immigrant family, sat in front of a mirror in the theatre's basement. A makeup artist was...

NO WORK AND NO PLAY.(productivity)
November 28, 2005... In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it was a commonplace that Americans would soon devote their lives to leisure, not work. The number of hours the average American worked had fallen by almost twenty-five per cent between 1900 and 1950, and...

STILL STANDING.(Roe v. Wade, abortion rights case, Supreme Court justice appointments)
November 28, 2005... The Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973, the day that Lyndon B. Johnson died, and obituaries of the former President, who had left the White House only four years earlier, led the news the next morning. But in the subsequent...

SHELTER AND THE STORM.(Louisiana)
November 28, 2005... Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, is a hub of oil and fishing industries on the Gulf of Mexico. The hamlets along its waterways rise in elevation and affluence as they increase in distance from the coast. Trailers, aluminum foil in their windows to...

IMAGINING THE WORST.(invasion, aggression, destruction imagined by writers, The Battle of Dorking)
November 28, 2005... "It was on a Monday that the declaration of war was announced, and in a few hours we got our first inkling of the sort of preparation the enemy had made for the event. . . . People of this country could not bring themselves to believe that what...

LAND OF THE DIESEL BEAR.(traveling in the tanker )
November 28, 2005... If you have crossed the American continent in the world's most beautiful truck, you prefer not to leave it forever. You think of it from time to time--stainless, flashing like a signal mirror in the Carolinas, in California, in Wisconsin,...

FROM THE ASHES.(Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945)(Book Review)
November 28, 2005... "When you are as worried as Europe is about the bare essentials of existence, you are not much interested in ideas," Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, wrote in 1947 after a visit there. "You cannot eat either 'Das Kapital'...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Quitter, Masters of American Comics, Tunes for 'Toons, The World on Sunday)(Book Review)
November 28, 2005... The Quitter, by Harvey Pekar, illustrated by Dean Haspiel (Vertigo; $19.99). Pekar's downbeat chronicle of his life, "American Splendor," has achieved classic status, but this memoir of his early years is less consistently effective. Pekar is a...

DAMON'S DAY.(Damon Albarn, Gorillaz)(Concert Review)
November 28, 2005... If Americans are familiar with the thirty-seven-year-old British musician Damon Albarn, it is largely because of his rock band Blur's 1997 hit "Song 2," a rambunctious blast of doggerel that is still played in sports arenas and commonly...

WHITE ON WHITE.(The Woman in White)(Hamlet)(Theater Review)
November 28, 2005... Years ago, an outrageous young man-about-town used to attend all sorts of parties, both high and low. And some of the more popular gatherings were theme-based. Generally, these were hosted by young men who had an almost fanatical interest in...

BOY WONDERS.(The Libertine)(Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)(Movie Review)
November 28, 2005... Of the many virtues that unite Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Illinois, the most compelling is the fact that the library of each institution contains a manuscript version of the following poem. It is called "The Wish," and I quote it...