The New Yorker articles from November 2007

The New Yorker archives from November 2007

El Quinto Pino.(Restaurant review)
November 5, 2007... The other night at this tiny tapas bar in Chelsea, diners crowded in at the elegantly curved marble bar, most of them tapping away at iPhones. El Quinto Pino, the sophomore effort of Heather Belz, Mani Dawes, and Alexandra Raij, the owners of...

God Save the Queen.(Aretha Franklin's album, Rare & Unreleased Recordings from the Golden Reign of the Queen Of Soul)(Sound recording review)
November 5, 2007... If a cache of never-before-heard songs from Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" sessions suddenly surfaced, there would be parades in the streets of Greenwich Village. If thirty unknown Radiohead songs turned up in a suitcase in London, the Internet...

So Long, Joe.(The Talk of the Town)(Joe Torre)
November 5, 2007... The Red Sox and the Colorado Rockies wrap up their World Series this week, at last delivering a winner at the end of a season of spectacular losses in baseball. The art of losing isn't hard to master, as Elizabeth Bishop told us, and for...

The Fires.(The Talk of the Town)
November 5, 2007... Southern Californians don't like to wake up to hot weather. It's a sign of the short and eerie autumn season that's marked by the influence of the Santa Anas--dry winds that come from the desert, dervish through the canyons, and head for the...

Condi's Party Starter.(The Talk of the Town)(Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East)
November 5, 2007... At the age of twenty-five, Henry Kissinger was a war-delayed sophomore at Harvard, Madeleine Albright had just begun her Ph.D., James Baker was in law school, and Condoleezza Rice was a graduate student at the University of Denver. One of...

A Bird's Life.(The Talk of the Town)
November 5, 2007... If you're a small bird, bound for, say, the Caribbean in the autumn, your stay in New York City will begin around dawn. You'll be worn out from flying through the night and desperate for a safe place to rest and to eat, well, like a bird, which...

Coogan's Bluff.(Steve Coogan)
November 5, 2007... On a sweltering morning in mid-March, three executive producers for HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm," David Mandel, Alec Berg, and Jeff Schaffer, lolled around in shorts at the patio table of a Malibu beachfront house waiting for the actors to...

Future Reading.(development of online libraries)
November 5, 2007... In 1938, Alfred Kazin began work on his first book, "On Native Grounds." The child of poor Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he had studied at City College. Somehow, with little money or backing, he managed to write an extraordinary book, setting...

Neptune's Navy.(ships of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society)
November 5, 2007... One afternoon last winter, two ships lined up side by side in a field of pack ice at the mouth of the Ross Sea, off the coast of Antarctica. They belonged to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a vigilante organization founded by Paul...

Drug Warriors.(American Gangster)(Movie review)
November 5, 2007... Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), the dazzling thug in "American Gangster," is a man particular in his ways, and, early in the movie, he sees something that bothers him. For years, Frank, a real-life figure, was a protege of the Harlem crime...

Running on Fumes.
November 5, 2007... On September 29, 1993, President Bill Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore, the chief executives of G.M., Chrysler, and Ford, and the head of the United Auto Workers gathered in the White House Rose Garden to talk about cars. Clinton opened his...

The Last Cavalier.(The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-hermine in the Age of Napoleon)(Brief article)(Book review)
November 5, 2007... This long-lost novel by the nineteenth-century master of the swashbuckler was discovered in decidedly twentieth-century fashion, on microfilm in the National Library in Paris. A breathless seven hundred and fifty pages, the unfinished...

Growth of the Soil.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 5, 2007... When Hamsun won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1920, it was mostly because of this 1917 novel, an epic vision of peasant life in Norway's backcountry. The saga of Isak and Inger (born with a harelip) and their hard times is by turns...

Porius.(Porius: A Novel)(Brief article)(Book review)
November 5, 2007... This immense, robustly imagined novel was whittled down by more than five hundred pages when it was first published, in 1951. Powys's original conception is here restored, a dense, complex merging of modern psychology and ancient mythology. In...

The Amazon.(The Amazon: Land without History)(Brief article)(Book review)
November 5, 2007... Euclides, a civil engineer turned journalist, occupies a unique niche in Brazilian letters. These essays, written after a 1905 trip, though they deal with topics like the hydrology, climate, and haphazard settlement of the Amazon, and the...

All Souls.
November 5, 2007... There are so many ways to be interested in Frida Kahlo, who was born a hundred years ago and died forty-seven years later, in 1954, that simply to look at and judge her paintings, as paintings, may seem narrow-minded. No one need appreciate art...

The Newcomer.(Christopher Wheeldon's new ballet troupe, Morphoses)
November 5, 2007... Christopher Wheeldon's new ballet troupe, Morphoses, had a weeklong New York debut season at City Center last month, and before each performance Wheeldon came out in front of the curtain to thank the companies that had lent him his dancers:...

The Endless Scroll.
November 5, 2007... Philip Glass is without a doubt America's most famous living composer of classical music. In fact, he may be America's only famous living composer of classical music--the single one who would draw nods of recognition (or irritation) if you were...

Flashbacks.(Movie review)
November 5, 2007... During the seventies and early eighties, American movie audiences were treated to a proliferation of Italian-American stars. In Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" (1973), the first two parts of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" (1972, 1974),...

Kefi.(Product/service evaluation)
November 12, 2007... Kefi, Michael Psilakis's casual Greek outpost, looks imposing from the outside--it's set in the garden level of a stolid limestone town house on the Upper West Side--but once down the steps and through the heavy door you find yourself in an...

Going After Hillary.(The Talk of the Town)(Hillary Clinton)
November 12, 2007... It took until the final minutes of last week's debate among the Democratic Presidential contenders for the flying saucers to make their appearance. Though the special effects were subtle, there was a surprise cameo by an important movie star....

A Firefighter's Theorem.(The Talk of the Town)(Bobby Beddia)
November 12, 2007... One Saturday in August, Rhonda Roland Shearer, the widow of the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, was on her way back from the park with her daughter and two grandsons. They made a stop, as they often do, at the fire station on Sixth and...

The Dresser.(The Talk of the Town)(Arnold Scaasi)
November 12, 2007... Last summer, Arnold Scaasi, the septuagenarian fashion designer, received a phone call from the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, informing him of a forthcoming exhibition, titled "First Ladies and Fashion," that was to focus exclusively...

On The Avenue.(The Talk of the Town)(vanity address program)
November 12, 2007... When a large steel bucket fell from the roof of a fifty-four-story construction site in midtown the other day, a news account described the offending building's location as "1 Bryant Park"--a stately address, to be sure, but not a real one....

Performance-pay Perplexes.(The Talk of the Town)(hedge fund managers; chief executive officers)
November 12, 2007... The havoc on Wall Street following the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market boils down to a simple truth: for years, lots of very smart people took lots of very foolish risks, betting borrowed billions on dubious mortgage derivatives, and...

Dangerous Minds.(criminal profiler; serial killers)
November 12, 2007... On November 16, 1940, workers at the Consolidated Edison building on West Sixty-fourth Street in Manhattan found a homemade pipe bomb on a windowsill. Attached was a note: "Con Edison crooks, this is for you." In September of 1941, a second...

Unconventional Crude.(Alberta; land development; oil exploration)
November 12, 2007... The town of Fort McMurray occupies a set of irregularly spaced hillsides on either side of the Athabasca River, in northern Alberta. It has a dozen check-cashing joints, a roughly equal number of hotels, and a gaming center called the Boomtown...

A Fool for Art.(Jeffrey Deitch)
November 12, 2007... On the Saturday before the May sales at Sotheby's and Christie's, the New York showrooms of both auction houses attract a cosmopolitan and fairly select crowd. Although the art on view is often better than anything in the galleries, there are...

Unforgiven.('My Grandfather's Son')(Book review)
November 12, 2007... A touchstone of Clarence Thomas's career on the Supreme Court has been his hostility to what he calls elites. When the Court, in 2003, upheld the use of racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, Thomas...

The Abstinence Teacher.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 12, 2007... Perrotta has made himself a specialist in suburban angst, peopling his novels with lonely daydreamers who are sexually dissatisfied and certain that their best days are over. In his latest, a high-school sex-ed teacher runs afoul of the local...

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 12, 2007... Sam Pulsifer, the "bumbling" narrator of this shambling, self-consciously comic novel, served ten years in prison after two people died when he accidentally burned down Emily Dickinson's house. Out of jail, he marries, has kids, and gets a...

The Whisperers.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 12, 2007... In this extraordinary study of a generation, Figes details the consequences of Stalin's ideological campaign to reorganize the self as rigidly as he reorganized the streets of Moscow. Using intimate oral histories gathered from hundreds of...

A Nation of Counterfeiters.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 12, 2007... When Americans went shopping in the early eighteen-hundreds, they used paper money issued by any one of hundreds of banks--the country lacked a single paper currency--and both customer and banknote would be scrutinized before being accepted....

Reanimator.('Pushing Daisies')(Television program review)
November 12, 2007... "Pushing Daisies" is the third TV series created by Bryan Fuller, and, like the others, it has a title that's tailor-made for Variety headline writers in the event of the show's cancellation, the other two being "Dead Like Me," which ran for...

Seeing Things.(Martin Puryear; Georges Seurat)
November 12, 2007... Coming upon sculptures by Martin Puryear, the subject of a strong retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, is always an arresting pleasure, like entering a zone where time slows. I'm drawn into a relationship with something unique (the...

Fighting and Writing.('Cyrano de Bergerac')(Theater review)
November 12, 2007... The word "panache" was adopted into English only after the phenomenal success of the French playwright Edmond Rostand's 1897 "heroic comedy" "Cyrano de Bergerac," whose flamboyant, big-nosed hero took revenge on his ugliness by making a legend...

Hunting Grounds.('No Country for Old Men'; 'Lions for Lambs')(Movie review)
November 12, 2007... The new Coen brothers movie, "No Country for Old Men," is set in Texas, with a foray over the border into Mexico. The cinematography is by Roger Deakins, a trusted collaborator of the Coens', who holds the wide, camel-brown sweep of the Texas...

Taim.(Einat Admony)
November 19, 2007... When a restaurateur with crossover dreams tries to make gourmet food "street," the trick can seem cynical: at Spice Market, his take on the cuisine of Southeast-Asian peddlers, for instance, Jean-Georges Vongerichten reaches into his hat and...

Silents Are Golden.(silent movies)(Movie review)
November 19, 2007... The psychological subtlety of the silent cinema owes much to a complex visual grammar that D. W. Griffith employed to tell surprisingly old-fashioned stories. His "True Heart Susie" (Image Entertainment), from 1919, is the tale of a...

Miscalculations.(The Talk of the Town)(General Pervez Musharraf)
November 19, 2007... In his autobiography, "In the Line of Fire," published last year, the Pakistani military leader, General Pervez Musharraf, describes himself as a once talented college athlete. His achievements attracted a particular compliment that lingered...

Awesome Ron.(The Talk of the Town)
November 19, 2007... The president of the Columbia College Libertarians, Mathieu Gordon, Class of 2008, says that he has watched dozens of video clips featuring the antiwar Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul. Gordon has so deeply absorbed Paul's message of...

No Seconds.(The Talk of the Town)(My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals / Portraits, Interviews, and Recipes)(Book review)
November 19, 2007... Late-night conversation has a tendency to go existential: ghost stories, God talks, rounds of "Would You Rather?" involving death by drowning or, alternatively, by fire. Chefs, a new book asserts, have their own tradition of nocturnal...

Hoopers.(The Talk of the Town)(Christian Jankowski's Rooftop Routine)
November 19, 2007... Two months ago, the German artist Christian Jankowski was making coffee in his eighth-floor apartment, on Division Street, when something out the window caught his eye: a woman, dressed in a tank top and shorts, hula-hooping on a rooftop....

Striking Out.(The Talk of the Town)
November 19, 2007... In the spring of 1988, television and movie writers went on strike. The strike, which lasted for twenty-two weeks, was rhetorically bitter and economically destructive: it cost an estimated half billion dollars in lost revenues and wages and...

Laugh Riots.(Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala)
November 19, 2007... One day last March, on the stage of a theatre in central Paris, a light-skinned black man named Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala sat with his hands clasped over his knees. Next to him, smiling into the lights, was Jany Le Pen, the wife of Jean-Marie Le...

Small and Thin.(David J. P. Barker)
November 19, 2007... In the early nineteen-eighties, a group of British epidemiologists at the University of Southampton compiled a grimly detailed atlas of the common causes of death in various parts of England and Wales. The atlas contained page after page of...

Inside the Surge.(Ghazaliya)
November 19, 2007... Joint Security Station Thrasher, in the western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, is housed in a Saddam-era mansion with twenty-foot columns and a fountain, now dry, that looks like a layer cake of concrete and limestone. The mansion and two...

The Player Kings.
November 19, 2007... After playing in Paris, Hamburg, and the British military post at the remains of the concentration camp at Belsen, the Old Vic Theatre Company arrived in New York in April, 1946, on a victory tour for a battered but triumphant Western culture....

Stiffs.(Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein)(Theater review)
November 19, 2007... "I went into show business to make a noise, to pronounce myself," Mel Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in 1977. "I want to go on making the loudest noise to the most people." In "Young Frankenstein" (at the Hilton)--the new Broadway musical version of...

Late and Soon.(Robert Hass and Mark Strand)
November 19, 2007... American poetry of the nineteen-sixties was a contest of brilliant, unforgettable boasts: "I myself am hell," Robert Lowell insists; "I eat men like air," Sylvia Plath crows; "Versing, I shroud among the dynasties," John Berryman struts. For a...

Sons and Other Flammable Objects.(Sons and Other Flammable Objects: A Novel)(Brief article)(Book review)
November 19, 2007... This debut novel centers on an energetically discordant Iranian family living in the United States. As father, mother, and son fight to fit in while holding on to their roots, Khakpour explores ethnicity, nationalism, and post-9/11...

Ghost.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 19, 2007... In straightforward prose, Lightman tells the story of a divorced and childless forty-two-year-old man whose primary ambition has been to "understand the world," rather than change it. Believing that logic holds life together, he struggles to be...

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 19, 2007... "My work is like a diary," Picasso often said, and Richardson demonstrates the truth of this in the third installment of his biography. He rejoins Picasso after his Cubist stage, when Picasso is designing costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes...

Bears.(Bears: A Brief History )(Brief article)(Book review)
November 19, 2007... This droll, heavily illustrated history of the relationship between humans and bears brims with curious facts and anecdotes. For instance, all bears are descended from a creature that was originally the size of a small terrier; bear shoulder...

Let It Rip.(No Age)(Sound recording review)
November 19, 2007... Popular music in Los Angeles has passed through several golden ages, each unlike the others. Perhaps the sounds most closely associated with the region are the sunny harmonies of the Mamas & the Papas and the Beach Boys, from the...

Bowery Dreams.(New Museum of Contemporary Art)
November 19, 2007... In the past few decades, American museums have discovered an easy way to get themselves noticed: put up a building by an international architect who hasn't built much in this country before. Too often, though, these exciting debuts go nowhere....

Obsessed.( Brian De Palma's Redacted)(Book review)
November 19, 2007... Everyone complains about media overload, but no one, including me, wants to give up access to magazines, newspapers, TV, blogs, or Web sites--the thousands of sources of urgent or frivolous assertion. We are caught, willy-nilly, between hunger...

BLT Market.(Restaurant review)
November 26, 2007... The term "branding" has become the haute restaurateur's euphemism for "franchising." The latter is Applebee's and Bennigan's; the former Nobu, Craft, and BLT. Both sets have multiple locations, in multiple cities, but those who brand also have...

Gifts for Him.(Buyers guide)
November 26, 2007... Perhaps the most mysterious of all mammals is the male Homo sapiens. Indeed, many anthropologists classify the group as a subspecies. Like the female, the male is built to walk upright, and yet he is more often to be found supine on a...

Fighting Words.(The Talk of the Town)(political campaign)
November 26, 2007... Earlier this month at the National Press Club, in Washington, two expert September 11th political opportunists joined in an embrace, when Pat Robertson, the televangelist who attributed the terrorist attacks to American sinfulness, endorsed...

Under The Sea.(The Talk of the Town)(theater adaptation of The Little Mermaid)
November 26, 2007... The other evening, Francesca Zambello, the opera director, was waiting in a restaurant on Forty-sixth Street. Zambello, who is best known for psychologically probing interpretations of the operatic repertoire--her dark, interior "Don Giovanni"...

New Job.(The Talk of the Town)
November 26, 2007... The other day, Ralph Dayton was standing in the middle of his living room in East Hampton, in jeans and hiking boots, packing for Anbar Province, in Iraq. For the next month, he will be embedded with the Marines as a photographer for the East...

Naughty or Nice.(The Talk of the Town)(chocolate figurines by Peter Paul Chocolates LLC)
November 26, 2007... "Business art is the step that comes after Art," saith Warhol the Prophet, and, thirty years later, we know whereof he spake. The mergers of art and commerce accumulate on every side, as brand-name artists such as Damien Hirst, Richard Prince,...

Sovereign Wealth World.(The Talk of the Town)
November 26, 2007... Between corrupt mortgage brokers, feckless lenders, and risk-happy hedge funds, there's plenty to keep investors and policymakers up at night. But recently a new item has appeared on the list of things to worry about: so-called sovereign wealth...

The Relaunch.
November 26, 2007... From 1993 to 2004, Barack Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School. According to his students, he was a gifted teacher. "If you had just a surface opinion, he would ask why you held it. He always dug deeper," Barbara Blank, a...

Wheels of Fortune.
November 26, 2007... The first accident wasn't my fault. I had rented a Volkswagen Jetta and driven to my weekend home in Sancha, a village north of Beijing. I parked at the end of the road, where the pavement widens into an empty lot. It's impossible to drive...

Movable Types.
November 26, 2007... "Alive, and very much so," Tolstoy's diary entry for November 19, 1889, begins. That is how it feels to be caught up in the bright sweep of Tolstoy's "War and Peace": alive, and very much so. It is to succumb to the contagion of vitality. As...

The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.(Brief article)
November 26, 2007... The surreal inventiveness of Winsor McCay, a cartoonist best known for "Little Nemo in Slumberland" and the animated film "Gertie the Dinosaur," surfaced earlier in a weekly black-and-white strip that ran in U.S. newspapers between 1904 and...

The Complete Terry and the Pirates, Volume I: 1934-1936.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 26, 2007... In this ground-breaking adventure serial, a pair of eager Americans, a boy named Terry Lee and a young fortune hunter named Pat Ryan, land in China to search for an abandoned mine and quickly find themselves facing a succession of gangsters,...

Life, in Pictures.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 26, 2007... Eisner's career encompassed much of the history of comic art, from the birth of comic books, in the nineteen-thirties, through the contemporary efflorescence of the graphic novel (a term that Eisner popularized with the 1978 publication of "A...

Back to Bossa.(bossa nova music)
November 26, 2007... Rosa Passos is often described as the heir to, or female equivalent of, Joao Gilberto, which is a way of saying that she is a distinguished interpreter of bossa nova at a time when gifted young Brazilian singers, like Marisa Monte, have adopted...

High-school Confidential.(Gossip Girl)
November 26, 2007... There was every reason to think that "Gossip Girl," one of the new fall shows on the CW, would be a hit. It comes from the kind of stock that makes it a perfect fit for a network geared toward young viewers: it's based on a best-selling series...

Tangled Up.
November 26, 2007... The new Todd Haynes film, "I'm Not There," is not a documentary about Bob Dylan. His name is in the opening credits of the movie ("inspired by the music & many lives of Bob Dylan"), and his face looms in closeup at the end, cheeks sucking and...