The New Yorker articles from November 2006

The New Yorker archives from November 2006

TABLES FOR TWO.(L Atelier Joel Robuchon)(Restaurant review)
November 6, 2006... L'ATELIER DE JOEL ROBUCHON -- 57 E. 57th St. (212-350-6658)--Few cities pride themselves on sophisticated luxury as much as Paris and New York, and when famous French chefs cross the Atlantic the result is often an uneasy face-off. A...

CLASSICAL MUSIC.
November 6, 2006... OPERA METROPOLITAN OPERA -- The return of the Zeffirelli production of "Tosca" is notable for the powerhouse casting of the roles of Tosca and Cavaradossi--the estimable Andrea Gruber and Jose Cura. James Morris, who has whittled his...

HEARTS AND BRAINS.(The Talk of the Town)
November 6, 2006... The great bafflement of next week's midterm congressional elections is that there is even a sliver of a hint of a shadow of a doubt about the outcome. The polls are unequivocal. In a mid-October NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, the public's "job...

DIRTY WIKITRICKS.(The Talk of the Town)
November 6, 2006... If you look up "negative campaigning" on Wikipedia, the interactive Internet encyclopedia, you will learn that "mudslinging has been called 'as American as Mississippi mud.' " Click on "mudslinging" and there it is: "The exchange of petty,...

JESSIE AGAIN.(The Talk of the Town)
November 6, 2006... Jessie Mann has chiselled shoulders and dark eyes set deep in their sockets. She is twenty-five and looks pretty much the way she did when she was three and eight and twelve, and her mother, Sally Mann, was taking photographs of her that,...

FAMILY DRAMA.(The Talk of the Town)
November 6, 2006... Charlotte d'Amboise, the Broadway veteran of such shows as "Chicago" and "Sweet Charity," stands onstage without moving for the first hour of "A Chorus Line," the revival that recently opened at the Schoenfeld Theatre. "Then I have twelve...

THE DATING GAME.(The Talk of the Town)
November 6, 2006... Scandals move in unpredictable ways. When news broke, earlier this year, that some companies had backdated stock-option grants to employees in order to make them more valuable, it seemed like a problem that would come and go quickly: the number...

FRESH PRINCE.
November 6, 2006... The first law of power, as set forth (or down) by Robert Greene in his 1998 book, "The 48 Laws of Power," is "Never outshine the master." Thou shalt not upstage the boss, the benefactor, the mentor, or the talent, whose good graces bestow clout...

A LOST CHILD.
November 6, 2006... If you mention the name Minou Drouet to your French friends in Paris, not many of them under the age of fifty know whom you're talking about. But older people know very well, even if they don't all know the same thing. What do they think they...

NOAH'S MARK.
November 6, 2006... On June 4, 1800, Noah Webster, a sometime schoolteacher, failed lawyer, and staggeringly successful spelling-book author, placed an ad in the back pages of a Connecticut newspaper, just above notices of a sailor's death, a shoe sale, and a...

GAME MASTER.
November 6, 2006... In 1972, an engineer and former carnival barker named Nolan Bushnell started a video-game company, in Santa Clara, California. As an engineering student at the University of Utah in the nineteen-sixties, Bushnell had become obsessed with an...

IN YOUR FACE.
November 6, 2006... Who is Sacha Baron Cohen? We know that he is British, that he is Jewish, and that he studied history at Cambridge, where his cousin Simon is a professor of developmental psycho-pathology. Sacha has entered a no less delicate field. He is a...

SICK CITY.
November 6, 2006... John Updike on "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Elizabeth Kolbert on the Armenian genocide and the politics of silence. After Katrina, cholera. On August 31, 2005--two days after the hurricane made landfall--the Bush Administration's Health and...

DOWN THE RIVER.
November 6, 2006... Steven Shapin on Steven Johnson's "The Ghost Map." Elizabeth Kolbert on the Armenian genocide and the politics of silence. The best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," by Harriet Beecher Stowe, does...

DEAD RECKONING.
November 6, 2006... Steven Shapin on Steven Johnson's "The Ghost Map." John Updike on "Uncle Tom's Cabin." On September 14, 2000, Representatives George Radanovich, Republican of California, and David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan, introduced a House...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
November 6, 2006... Steven Shapin on Steven Johnson's "The Ghost Map." John Updike on "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Elizabeth Kolbert on the Armenian genocide and the politics of silence. The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25). This...

THE GRIEF GAME.
November 6, 2006... Rueful is perhaps the best way to describe the British writer Simon Gray's rankling wit, which he has purveyed, over the decades, first from the West End stage and, most recently, from a series of hilarious, superbly written diaries. Gray is a...

IN THE WIND.
November 6, 2006... Four years ago, "Movin' Out," a musical conceived, directed, and choreographed by Twyla Tharp, to songs by Billy Joel, opened on Broadway, and it was a big success, both artistically and commercially. "Movin' Out" was simple in its conception....

TRUE COLORS.
November 6, 2006... "It's hard to look at paintings," Brice Marden once said. "You have to be able to bring all sorts of things together in your mind, your imagination, in your whole body." Good paintings make the exercise worth the trouble. Great paintings make...

TABLES FOR TWO.
November 13, 2006... BELLAVITAE -- 24 Minetta Lane (212-473-5121)--Bellavitae, a resolutely authentic eno-gastronomia artigianale set deep in the dwindling heart of the Village's Italian quarter, is the sort of place that inspires fantasies. Surely those two...

HIGH COSTS.(The Talk of the Town)
November 13, 2006... Throughout the midterm campaign season, at least one major issue was conspicuously absent from debate. Except in California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reinvigorated his bid for reelection by vowing to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,...

THE FAT LOBBY.(The Talk of the Town)
November 13, 2006... The rule, when it comes to battling prohibitions, seems to be the badder the thing, the better the lobby. Of New York City's many bans--against ferrets, small planes, cell phones in schools, smoking in bars, beekeeping, lead paint--the one...

DR. GARBAGE.(The Talk of the Town)
November 13, 2006... There is a saying among the rank-and-file members of the Department of Sanitation, otherwise known as san men, or New York's Strongest: "You can go your whole life without ever having to call a fireman, and if you're lucky you'll never have to...

WANTED: S.W.F., LOVES KEEF.(The Talk of the Town)
November 13, 2006... The persistence of the Rolling Stones, like that of diphtheria or kudzu, is a riddle of nature. As a band, they are easy to mock: a collection of wealthy gents adding to their fortunes each year by replaying their tunes of sexual...

BELLA VS. BETTY.(The Talk of the Town)
November 13, 2006... In a year of all-too-public reconciliations (ranging from Tom and Brooke to Paris and Nicole), word of a rapprochement between the followers of the late Betty Friedan and those of the late Bella Abzug has been relatively slow to spread. It all...

HOLY ROLLERS.
November 13, 2006... In the fall of 1971, two years after the Stonewall Rebellion, sixteen months after Kent State, and a couple of weeks after the prison riots at Attica, a few hundred bicyclists rode down Fifth Avenue and on to City Hall, demonstrating for the...

STRANGERS IN PARADISE.
November 13, 2006... In "Wars I Have Seen" (1945), her memoir of the Second World War, Gertrude Stein writes of the remarkable kindness of a young Frenchman named Paul Genin, the owner of a silk factory in Lyons and a country neighbor, who came to her after America...

THE MEGACITY.
November 13, 2006... The Third Mainland Bridge is a looping ribbon of concrete that connects Lagos Island to the continent of Africa. It was built in the nineteen-seventies, part of a vast network of bridges, cloverleafs, and expressways intended to transform the...

SEEING THINGS.
November 13, 2006... One cool wet afternoon at the end of April, a dozen people stood in a round, foil-lined room in the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, in Chelsea, looking at a large piece of black plastic. Most of them were young, their clothes were splattered with white...

PROUD FLESH.
November 13, 2006... In 1597, Gaspare Tagliacozzi, a professor of surgery at the University of Bologna, published "De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem," an illustrated guide that documented for the first time a technique for performing a rhinoplasty, or nose job....

BRIEFLY NOTED.
November 13, 2006... Restless, by William Boyd (Bloomsbury; $24.95). Boyd's ninth novel, an absorbing historical thriller, is loosely based on the history of a covert branch of British intelligence created to coax America into the Second World War. The story...

VILLAGE SCRIBE.
November 13, 2006... "Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved...

FASCINATING RHYTHM.
November 13, 2006... The other day, I watched as Steve Reich walked away from Carnegie Hall, where celebrations of his seventieth birthday were under way, and out into his native city. Trim and brisk, he darted into West Fifty-seventh Street, fell back before...

HOUSE CALLS.
November 13, 2006... Of the many insights that the late Jane Bowles contributed to American letters, perhaps the most lasting are her observations of female domestic life as it is lived in far-off corners of the world. In short stories such as "A Guatemalan Idyll"...

PRETTIER PICTURES.
November 13, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Nicole Kidman, who assumes the role of Diane Arbus in "Fur," is unique among modern movie stars in her willingness to take on tough parts and put herself in the hands of little-known or art-house...

TABLES FOR TWO.
November 20, 2006... ZUCCO: LE FRENCH DINER -- 188 Orchard St., near Houston St. (212-677-5200)--Don't despair if, in looking through the windows of this tiny restaurant on the Lower East Side, it appears completely full. Zucco, the wiry and goateed owner, might...

THUMP.(The Talk of the Town)
November 20, 2006... Interviewing President Bush aboard Air Force One a few days before his second inauguration, a Washington Post reporter noted that American forces in Iraq had neither been welcomed as liberators nor found any of the promised weapons of mass...

INNER OFFICE.(The Talk of the Town)
November 20, 2006... Two months ago, Kenneth Adelman, the former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, received a call from the Pentagon: Donald Rumsfeld would like to see him as soon as possible. Adelman said he knew then that this meeting...

PARTY ANIMALS.(The Talk of the Town)
November 20, 2006... Political contests are generally thought of as binary affairs: a candidate runs as a Democrat or as a Republican, gets more votes or doesn't, stays up to celebrate or concedes and goes to bed. Last week, in New York, the former scenarios...

ELECTIVE ECONOMIES.(The Talk of the Town)
November 20, 2006... In the days leading up to the midterm elections, Republicans spread a simple message. "If the Democrats take control," Dick Cheney warned, "the economy would sustain a major hit." Wall Street pundits forecast a future of tax hikes and new...

TALKING TURKEY.
November 20, 2006... Joe Hutto, who is sixty-one, has spent most of his waking life looking at wild turkeys. He may have looked at more of them than any other living American, with the "possible exception" of Lovett E. Williams, Jr., a wildlife biologist, and the...

HOMER IN INDIA.
November 20, 2006... Sixteen years ago, I moved to the Indian state of Rajasthan to begin work on a book. Bruce Chatwin was then my hero, and his widow, Elizabeth, had told me about a remote fortress in the desert where Bruce had written his great study of...

DOWNFALL.
November 20, 2006... The improbable restoration of Donald H. Rumsfeld to the seat of American military power was consummated on a cold Friday afternoon in January, 2001, when he was welcomed back to the Pentagon with a full-honors review. The ceremony, a ritual...

THE DARKENING SEA.
November 20, 2006... Pteropods are tiny marine organisms that belong to the very broad class known as zooplankton. Related to snails, they swim by means of a pair of winglike gelatinous flaps and feed by entrapping even tinier marine creatures in a bubble of mucus....

THINK AGAIN.
November 20, 2006... In "The Chain," a chirpy British film comedy from 1984 about moving house, the foreman of a team of movers is taking evening classes in philosophy, and is prone to metaphysical musings while lugging heavy pieces of furniture. On the way to his...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
November 20, 2006... Lisey's Story, by Stephen King (Scribner; $28). In his intricate new novel, King explores two hidden worlds--the private life of a recently deceased best-selling writer, as seen from the perspective of his widow, and the imaginative landscape...

HEAVY WEATHER.
November 20, 2006... In the late eighties, two teen-age skateboarders, Camilo (Chino) Moreno and Stephen Carpenter, met in Sacramento and began talking about music. Carpenter, who liked aggressive heavy metal, had been hit by a drunk driver while skateboarding and...

KILLER SERIAL.
November 20, 2006... Most vigilante dramas plant their outrages up front--the murder of the architect's wife in "Death Wish," for instance--to enlist our approval of the ensuing slaughter of punks and loiterers. Showtime's "Dexter" skips all that, daring us to turn...

CYCLES.
November 20, 2006... In early October, the London Symphony, under the direction of Bernard Haitink, played the nine symphonies of Beethoven at Lincoln Center. At the end of the month, the Orchestra of the Maryinsky Theatre, under Valery Gergiev, unleashed six...

OF HUMAN BONDAGE.
November 20, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Who said this: "It is interesting for me to see this new Bond. Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the center of them. When one gets there the...

TABLES FOR TWO.
November 27, 2006... BRIDGE CAFE -- 279 Water St., at Dover St. (212-227-3344)--This restaurant, housed in a red painted wooden building in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, has a lively history: the structure dates from as early as 1794, five prostitutes...

UNREALISTIC.(The Talk of the Town)
November 27, 2006... We are all realists now. Iraq has turned conservatives and liberals alike into cold-eyed believers in a foreign policy that narrowly calculates national interest without much concern for what goes on inside other countries. The Republicans had...

THE OTHER KAZAKH VISITOR.(The Talk of the Town)
November 27, 2006... Wladimir Klitschko's recent New York adventure began in relative anonymity, which was odd, given that he is the heavyweight champion of the world. He first arrived in town in September, checked into the Embassy Suites in lower Manhattan, and...

SHY VIOLET.(The Talk of the Town)
November 27, 2006... At a dinner held for Raf Simons, the reclusive Belgian designer, in New York the other day, the guest of honor was seated across from a human butterfly. The butterfly--actually a mannequin wearing a messy white wig and Technicolor wings--was...

DO NOT TOUCH.(The Talk of the Town)
November 27, 2006... Before Nuria Chang went blind, at the age of eight, she had wanted to be an artist. When she was one, she could draw a human figure; at four, she was using perspective to sketch her bedroom. Still, by the time she lost her eyesight she had...

DEAL SWEETENERS.(The Talk of the Town)
November 27, 2006... America has one heck of a sweet tooth. We consume more sweeteners per capita than any other country, and close to ten million tons of sugar every year. But American sugar producers aren't satisfied with supplying the most sweet-hungry...

THE NEXT ACT.
November 27, 2006... A month before the November elections, Vice-President Dick Cheney was sitting in on a national-security discussion at the Executive Office Building. The talk took a political turn: what if the Democrats won both the Senate and the House? How...

ROAD TRIPS.
November 27, 2006... The house I grew up in is located in a subdivision, and when my family first arrived the front yards were, if not completely bare, then at least close to it. It was my father who rallied the neighbors and initiated a campaign to plant maples...

CARDINALS RULE.
November 27, 2006... Pity the Tigers. In an autumn when the Taurus died, when thirty-five thousand workers were laid off at G.M., and Ford losses for the third quarter came in at $5.8 billion, here was a famous old Detroit model almost mythically reborn in October...

THE WEEKLY WARRIOR.
November 27, 2006... I. F. Stone, who spent most of his childhood living upstairs from his immigrant parents' drygoods emporium in Haddonfield, New Jersey, devoted most of his middle age to operating a mom-and-pop store of his own: I. F. Stone's Weekly, the ardent...

KLIBAN'S WORLD.
November 27, 2006... You could say that, for B. Kliban, it all began on the back of a cocktail napkin, but that would be too simple. By the time, in the late fifties, that he rode a motorcycle to California and began sketching showgirls at a nudie bar called the...

I DON'T GET IT.
November 27, 2006... From time to time, we print a cartoon that readers deem obscure or confusing. It is not our objective to baffle; indeed, to do so would violate the cartoonist's vow to "edify, enlighten, and amuse." To make amends, we hereby endeavor to explain...

DO THE MATH.
November 27, 2006... Thomas Pynchon is the apostle of imperfection, so it is arguably some sort of commendation to say that his new novel, "Against the Day" (Penguin; $35), is a very imperfect book. Imperfect not in the sense of "Ambitious but flawed." Imperfect in...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
November 27, 2006... Chicken with Plums, by Marjane Satrapi, translated from the French by Anjali Singh (Pantheon; $16.95). The writer and illustrator who chronicled her childhood in the best-selling graphic memoir "Persepolis" now turns to the life of her...

STREET LIFE.
November 27, 2006... Photographs by Jerry Shore. We see New York, and sometimes, as Henry James asked us to, we "do it"--explore and conquer it--but what we see when we see it is so far unlike what we experience when we're doing it that the difference itself...

FLEURS DU MAL.
November 27, 2006... Among modern playwrights, Tennessee Williams is unique in his fascination with the botanical world. Serafina, the heroine of his 1951 play "The Rose Tattoo," thinks of her love as "a rose of the world." And in his 1961 play "The Night of the...

QUEEN OF ARTS.
November 27, 2006... Great artists work from and for history, where no one lives. Kiki Smith, the subject of a tangy retrospective at the Whitney, "Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005," works from and for the moment, shared by everybody. She is a major figure--long...

LIBERAL EDUCATION.
November 27, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File It's nice that liberals win elections now and then, but I'm not sure they should be allowed to make movies. Two new pictures, "Bobby" and "Fast Food Nation," inspired by the most humane sympathies, and...