The New Yorker articles from November 2008

The New Yorker archives from November 2008

Matsugen.
November 3, 2008... The front of the house at Matsugen belongs to Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the Asian-inspired French chef whose restaurants include Spice Market, Perry Street, and the extraordinary Jean-Georges. Matsugen used to be 66, Vongerichten's tribute to...

Like, Socialism.(The Talk of the Town)
November 3, 2008... Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain,...

Couch Potato Politics.(The Talk of the Town)
November 3, 2008... Every four years, beginning in 1984, the artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese have collected political ads from the Presidential election, adding a dozen or so particularly striking new spots to their project, "Political Advertisement."...

Newcomer.(The Talk of the Town)(Alexei Ratmansky)
November 3, 2008... Earlier this month, Mikhail Baryshnikov gave a party at his West Side arts center for a Russian citizen who has decided, as he did, thirty-four years ago, to work outside Russia: the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. Ratmansky is the artistic...

Pocketbooks in the Park.(The Talk of the Town)
November 3, 2008... New Yorkers love a line. Certain attractions--Shake Shack, Film Forum, Apple stores--even seem to prosper because of the lines leading to them: where there's fire, there's smoke. The latest of these may well turn out to be the Chanel...

Odd Man Out.(Chuck Hagel )
November 3, 2008... In early June, Senators Chuck Hagel and John McCain met in Hagel's office on Capitol Hill. McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, considered Hagel--a fellowRepublican and the senior senator from Nebraska--among his closest...

Red Sex, Blue Sex.
November 3, 2008... In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They...

Girls! Girls! Girls!
November 3, 2008... Silvio Berlusconi, the seventy-two-year-old Italian Prime Minister, is no stranger to scandal. Having survived some seventeen criminal trials without ultimately being convicted, he has inured the Italian public to feelings of shock or...

The Grammar of Fun.
November 3, 2008... Epic Games is a privately owned company and does not disclose its earnings. But on a Monday morning in late April, while standing in Epic's parking lot, at Crossroads Corporate Park, in Cary, North Carolina, awaiting the arrival of Cliff...

Works on Paper.('Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell')
November 3, 2008... In 1947, Elizabeth Bishop published "At the Fishhouses," in this magazine. Among those who admired the poem was her new friend the poet Robert Lowell. "I liked your New Yorker fish poem," he wrote. "I am a fisherman myself, but all my fish...

Tamara Drewe.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 3, 2008... Simmonds follows her celebrated Flaubert homage "Gemma Bovary" with a similar contemporary remake--this time, of Thomas Hardy's "Far from the Madding Crowd." Affectionately satirizing contemporary literary life, she updates Hardy's vain,...

Bat-Manga!(Brief article)(Book review)
November 3, 2008... The campy, Pop-artinfused Batman television series that debuted in 1966 was not just a hit in the U.S.; it also set off an international wave of Batmania. A Tokyo publisher licensed the comic-book rights and new weekly Batman adventures...

The Nancy Book.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 3, 2008... The guileless heroine of Ernie Bushmiller's long-running comic strip "Nancy" is an unlikely icon in contemporary art, recurring in work by postmodern cartoonists like Bill Griffith and Scott McCloud, in an Andy Warhol painting, and in rock...

Dreamy Wilderness.
November 3, 2008... Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. Her newest novel, "A Mercy" (Knopf; $23.95), begins with some kind of...

Just for Fun.
November 3, 2008... Retrospectives of two veteran contemporary artists who make a lot of people happy, including me, have opened, as if on order for hard times. "Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work 1972-2008," at the Baltimore Museum of Art,...

Fever Pitch.(The Shawl)(Theater review)
November 3, 2008... Among the many terrible realities to which David Mamet exposes us in his exceptional, calculated work, one theme stands out: suckers will never get a break in this wretched world. In the sixty-year-old playwright's fictional universe, the...

Pacific Heights.(San Francisco Ballet)
November 3, 2008... San Francisco Ballet, America's oldest professional ballet company, is celebrating its seventy-fifth birthday with a big tour, which earlier this month included a stop at City Center. For the past quarter century, S.F.B. has been directed by...

Let's Put on a Show!(Synecdoche, New York)(Movie review)
November 3, 2008... The hero of "Synecdoche, New York" is a theatre director named Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman). He runs a successful troupe in Schenectady--so successful that he receives an award from the MacArthur Foundation, giving him carte blanche to...

Yerba Buena.(Restaurant review)
November 10, 2008... The term yerba buena refers to a number of different types of mint--exactly which depends on where in the Americas you are--and seems an apt name for a pan-Latin restaurant. Yerba Buena, which opened about four months ago in a slightly cursed...

The Test.(The Talk of the Town)
November 10, 2008... In 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Frances Perkins, his Secretary of Labor, to draft a plan that might help Americans escape poverty in old age. "Keep it simple," he told her. "So simple that everybody will understand it." On August...

Baked.(The Talk of the Town)(Sarah Palin and Ted Stevens)
November 10, 2008... Last Tuesday morning--a week before Election Day--John McCain called on Senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican in Congress, to step down. The day before, a jury in Washington, D.C., had found Stevens guilty on seven...

Tombstones.(The Talk of the Town)
November 10, 2008... Of all the sad Wall Street scenes--Lehman employees shuffling out of their offices in shorts, "reduction in force" victims commiserating over drinks on Stone Street--one of the saddest might be the headquarters of Icon Recognition, a company...

Theatre Of War.(The Talk of the Town)
November 10, 2008... "Black Watch," a play about the famed Scottish regiment's deployment in Iraq, received rapturous reviews during its initial three-week run at St. Ann's Warehouse, in Brooklyn, last fall. ("In the final marching sequence, as the men moved...

Everyone's Watching.(The Talk of the Town)
November 10, 2008... When people talk about the ongoing tumult in the stock market, they typically blame investors' lack of information. There's the uncertainty about the future state of the economy. There's the confusion about what the government will do next with...

The Uses of Adversity.
November 10, 2008... Sidney Weinberg was born in 1891, one of eleven children of Pincus Weinberg, a struggling Polish-born liquor wholesaler and bootlegger in Brooklyn. Sidney was short, a "Kewpie doll," as the New Yorker writer E. J. Kahn, Jr., described him, "in...

Days of the Dead.
November 10, 2008... Last May, an exhibit sponsored by the government of the Mexican state of Sinaloa compelled civic leaders in Culiacan, the capital, to denounce the artist Rosa Maria Robles and demand that the show be closed down. Comments left in the visitors'...

The Bright Side.(Thomas Friedman)
November 10, 2008... Thomas Friedman, the foreignaffairs columnist of the Times, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and the best-selling author of reassuring books about unsettling things, finished his column for the August 3rd edition while sitting at a plywood...

Suffering Souls.
November 10, 2008... The Western New Mexico Correctional Facility sits in high-desert country about seventy miles west of Albuquerque. Grants, a former uranium boomtown that depends heavily on prison work, is a few miles down the road. There's a glassed-in room at...

Melting into Air.
November 10, 2008... For most adults, the sensation of being proved right is usually a complex and bittersweet one. You might have said that your brother-in-law would turn out to be a no-goodnik, or that the forty-third President would turn out to be the worst in...

The Only Son.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 10, 2008... The older brother of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is mentioned only briefly--and dismissively--in the French philosopher's "Confessions," here embarks on an autobiography of his own, tracing his progress from a watchmaker's workshop in Geneva to...

Two Marriages.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 10, 2008... All marriages are a gamble: how well do you need to understand your partner before you jump in the game? In this pair of novellas, Lopate examines the question first with humor, and then with melancholy. In the opening one, a middle-aged...

Nights in the Pink Motel.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 10, 2008... In this quirky, revealing memoir, Earle, a retired foreign-service officer and a fiction writer with a history of depression, is, with the approval of his wife but not of his psychiatrist, talked into going to Iraq by John Negroponte, the...

The Chicagoan.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 10, 2008... From 1926 to 1935, a group of Midwestern writers, editors, and artists published a magazine strikingly similar to this one. The Chicagoan ran profiles, reviews, and editorials, interspersed with cartoons, and presented breezy dispatches on...

Heretics.
November 10, 2008... As a child, the director Peter Brook, the son of Latvian Jews who emigrated to Britain in 1914, showed an interest in photography, along with other aspects of the mechanics of illusion. He staged his own version of "Hamlet" in the family living...

Dirty Secrets.(Movie review)
November 10, 2008... In America, no frolic of innocence can last longer than its first gathering of hollyhocks. Just two weeks ago, the exuberant "High School Musical 3," with its Albuquerque teens bursting into song and dance, opened in theatres as the latest...

Allegretti.(Restaurant review)
November 17, 2008... On a forgettable block in the Flatiron district, chef Alain Allegretti, a native of Provence who has worked at Alain Ducasse's three-Michelin-star restaurant Le Louis XV, in Monte Carlo, and more recently at Le Cirque and Atelier, has bravely...

The End of Allegory.(The Killing of a Chinese Bookie)(Video recording review)
November 17, 2008... In 1975, after the critical and financial success of "A Woman Under the Influence," the director and actor John Cassavetes turned his attention to a gangland drama that he had cooked up with Martin Scorsese. The resulting movie, "The Killing of...

Obama Wins.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama)
November 17, 2008... At the Times, it is house style to refer to a successful Presidential nominee by his full name in the lead of the main story the morning after the election. He may be Bill or Jimmy on his campaign posters, but in the newspaper of record on that...

Emanuel In Full.(The Talk of the Town)(Rahm Emanuel)
November 17, 2008... When Barack Obama appointed Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff last week, a bunch of old stories went back into circulation, clues, perhaps, to how he'll run the White House: Emanuel wrapping up a dead fish to send to a pollster who'd made him...

Victory Speech.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama)
November 17, 2008... A theatre critic once memorably complained of a bad play that it had not been a good night out for the English language. Among other triumphs, last Tuesday night was a very good night for the English language. A movement in American politics...

In For It.(The Talk of the Town)
November 17, 2008... Every four years, an expat hedge-fund manager, a devout and rigorous conservative and international man of mystery, comes to New York from Europe and invites a bunch of his friends and peers to celebrate Election Night with him in a suite on...

Class Report.(The Talk of the Town)
November 17, 2008... When the news came, not late on Tuesday night, we did some hugs and high fives at my place, drank a little champagne, and dampened up at the sight of Jesse Jackson in tears amid the crowd of a hundred and fifty thousand or so in Chicago. In bed...

Battle Plans.
November 17, 2008... Last June, Joel Benenson, who was Barack Obama's top pollster during his Presidential run, reported on the state of the campaign. His conclusions, summed up in a sixty-slide PowerPoint presentation, were revealed to a small group, including...

The Fall.
November 17, 2008... A defining moment of the "old" John McCain--as many Americans, even some of his friends, have begun to refer to him as he was before his run for the Presidency in 2008--took place in February, 2000, during his first bid for the White House,...

The Joshua Generation.
November 17, 2008... 1 Barack Obama could not run his campaign for the Presidency based on political accomplishment or on the heroic service of his youth. His record was too slight. His Democratic and Republican opponents were right: he ran largely on...

The New Liberalism.
November 17, 2008... In September, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee for President, was asked by a reporter for his view of the job that he was seeking. "The Presidency is not merely an administrative office," Roosevelt said. "That's the least...

The Child Trap.
November 17, 2008... We've all been there--that is, in the living room of friends who invited us to dinner without mentioning that this would include a full-evening performance by their four-year-old. He sings, he dances, he eats all the hors d'oeuvres. When you...

2666.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 17, 2008... More vast and more lurid than his previous novels that have been translated into English, "2666" is not Roberto Bolano's masterpiece but almost a compendium, in individual scenes, of the qualities that made him a great writer. His themes are...

The Northern Clemency.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 17, 2008... The English middle class is scrutinized in this sprawling account of two families on an affluent Sheffield housing estate. The Sellerses, carried north by a job transfer with "the Electricity," arrive on Rayfield Avenue in 1974, just as...

Remix.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 17, 2008... As Lessig, a law professor at Stanford, sees it, if intellectual-property law is left as it is an entire generation will be criminalized. He argues that the ways in which young people break copyright laws help them to become the sort of people...

The City's End.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 17, 2008... This richly detailed book celebrates the enduring cultural significance of New York with an account of our unending desire to envision its demise. Since the nineteenth century, when the city established itself as a symbol not only of power and...

Kiss and Tell.("Mouth to Mouth" and "Romantic Poetry")(Theater review)
November 17, 2008... To the list of playwrights whose gravestones should read "Finally, a Plot" let us add the name of Britain's Kevin Elyot. Elyot's 2001 play "Mouth to Mouth" (directed by Mark Brokaw, at the Acorn) is a Proustian exercise in guilt recollected in...

Tudor Reign.(Antony Tudor)
November 17, 2008... American Ballet Theatre spent its two-week fall season at City Center celebrating the centenary of the Anglo-American choreographer Antony Tudor. Tudor was part of the extraordinary convocation of dance-makers--Martha Graham, George Balanchine,...

Local Color.(William Eggleston)(Biography)
November 17, 2008... You can always tell a William Eggleston photograph. It's the one in color that hits you in the face and leaves you confused and happy, and perhaps convinces you that you don't understand photography nearly as well as you thought you did. To...

Soul Survivor.(Quantum of Solace)(Movie review)
November 17, 2008... Who wants to be James Bond? Everyone of the male sex, pretty much, in the old days. Schoolboys dreamed of growing up to be 007, and middle-aged men lay awake, in the small hours, and wondered why they had grown into something else--how it was...

Convivio.(Restaurant review)
November 24, 2008... Tudor City is an odd part of town, a puzzle of dead ends. Convivio, at the heart of it, replicates its screwy feng shui. If you walk in and feel confused--by the cramped, half-hidden bar, by the fact that it's no longer L'Impero, by the narrow...

CD Boxed Sets.(Sound recording review)
November 24, 2008... "Atlantic Vocal Groups 1951-1963" (Atlantic)--American popular music in the fifties was a stew of jazz, jump blues, and close-harmony groups; by the middle of the decade, rock and roll had taken hold. This four-disk set lovingly illustrates the...

Midnight Hour.(The Talk of the Town)
November 24, 2008... When President Jimmy Carter lost his bid for reelection, in November, 1980, he had lots of unfinished business that he did not intend to leave that way. Carter's Administration spent the next several weeks generating regulations at an...

Relations.(The Talk of the Town)
November 24, 2008... After months of open-air rallies and stadium speeches, America's political families turned last week to domestic scenery: Sarah Palin in her Wasilla kitchen, mixing baby formula; Michelle Obama discussing with Laura Bush which bedrooms at the...

Soup With Prince.(The Talk of the Town)
November 24, 2008... The thirty-thousand-square-foot Italianate villa, built this century by Vanna White's ex-husband, looks like many of the other houses in Beverly Park, a gated community in L.A., except for the bright-purple carpet that spills down the front...

The Perils of Efficiency.(The Talk of the Town)
November 24, 2008... This spring, disaster loomed in the global food market. Precipitous increases in the prices of staples like rice (up more than a hundred and fifty per cent in a few months) and maize provoked food riots, toppled governments, and threatened the...

Eviction.
November 24, 2008... In the early afternoon on October 1st, Donald Fatheree, a sheriff 's deputy in Akron, Ohio, drove his black-and-gold cruiser into one of Akron's dying neighborhoods and came to a stop in front of a small white wood-frame house, with a neatly...

Garden of Contentment.(Dragon Well Manor)(Restaurant review)
November 24, 2008... One day in September, I joined the Chinese restaurateur Dai Jianjun for a foraging expedition on a remote mountainside in Zhejiang Province. Ahead of us, our guide, Bao Laichun, cleared a path, hacking at branches with a bamboo-handled machete....

By Meat Alone.
November 24, 2008... I approached Texas Monthly's cover story on "The Top 50 BBQ Joints in Texas" this summer the way a regular reader of People might approach that magazine's annual "Sexiest Man Alive" feature--with the expectation of seeing some familiar names....

Sharper.
November 24, 2008... Bob Kramer is one of a hundred and twenty-two people in the world, and the only former chef, to have been certified in the United States as a Master Bladesmith. To earn that title, which is conferred by the American Bladesmith Society, Kramer...

One Fish, Two Fish.
November 24, 2008... F or more than half a century, I've had an obsession with a fish soup. It has led me on searches up and down the Adriatic Coast of Italy, but it all started with a brief mention over a family meal in a Bronx apartment. The man I was dating...

A Better Brew.
November 24, 2008... Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken rampages. (The...

The Hungry Travellers.
November 24, 2008... In the fall of 1985, a few months after China opened the Tibetan border, Jeffrey Alford, from Laramie, met Naomi Duguid, from Toronto, on the roof of a hotel dormitory for foreigners in Lhasa. It was ten at night, and since there were no lights...

Land of Lost Souls.
November 24, 2008... On the wall of David Rabe's television room, at his home in Connecticut, is a photograph of him as a football player at Loras Academy, the Catholic high school in Dubuque, Iowa, where he was a hard-driving running back and linebacker; in the...

A Day at elBulli.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 24, 2008... In the world of culinary porn, this five-hundred-plus-page tome of photographs from the fabled avant-garde restaurant elBulli, in Spain, is curiously banal. Little of the chef Ferran Adria's radical genius can be detected in the brochurelike...

Swindled.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 24, 2008... With the revelations in recent months of tainted food--salmonellainfected jalapenos, melamine-laced milk--Wilson's latest treatise, on contaminated, adulterated, and fake foods in the modern era, feels almost prophetic. If there's a whiff of...

A Revolution in Taste.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 24, 2008... Pinkard reveals that before the storming of the Bastille a revolution took place at dinner tables all over France, when ornate, liberally spiced medieval styles of cooking were displaced by farm-fresh food prepared so that it "not only tasted,...

Amarcord.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 24, 2008... Born in Cesenatico, a fishing village near Rimini, in 1931, Hazan married the son of a New York furrier and began cooking for him. Soon, she was giving classes in her Manhattan kitchen, and when Craig Claiborne came to lunch and wrote her up in...

Science Projects.(Fringe)(Television program review)
November 24, 2008... During the last episode of the first season of "Lost," after the castaways had endured yet another near-death experience on their not quite deserted island, the loopy old survivalist known as Locke turned to the valiant doctor, Jack, and...

Sass and Cadence.(Funhouse)(Sound recording review)
November 24, 2008... "Funhouse," the new album by Alecia Moore, who calls herself Pink, has already spawned an enormous hit--her first solo No. 1 in the U.S.--called "So What," an explosion of brattiness and rock-star entitlement that is both maddening and hard to...

Come On Down.
November 24, 2008... New Orleans is smaller and poorer than it used to be, as I have confirmed on my first visit there since the floods attendant on Hurricane Katrina obliterated a large part of the city and left much of the rest a mud-gray mess, traces of which...

Hard Times.(Slumdog Millionaire)(Movie review)
November 24, 2008... The new Danny Boyle film is called "Slumdog Millionaire," and a fine title it is, too. As with other mutt-flavored titles, like "Reservoir Dogs," it sounds like a rabid, crank-it-up rock album that decided to become a movie at the last moment....