The New Yorker articles from October 2006

The New Yorker archives from October 2006

TABLES FOR TWO.
October 2, 2006... FALL PREVIEW MOVIES PREVIEW THEATRE PREVIEW NIGHT LIFE PREVIEW CLASSICAL PREVIEW ART PREVIEW ABOVE AND BEYOND PREVIEW DANCE PREVIEW DITCH PLAINS -- 29 Bedford St., at Downing St. (212-633-0202)--Ditch...

TOP OF THE CLASS.(The Talk of the Town)
October 2, 2006... The competition to get into, or get one's kids into, the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities is unmatched for cutthroat ferocity. But it is echoed, however faintly, in the jousting among Ivy League administrators to be at the...

WONK WEEK.(The Talk of the Town)
October 2, 2006... So many dignitaries, so little time. At MOMA last Wednesday night, a money manager whose wife had just given birth to their first son held a glass of white wine, surveyed the throngs, and said, "I need to spend more time in Davos, so I can...

STILETTO HEIST.(The Talk of the Town)
October 2, 2006... Next time you're eating at 60 Thompson and you happen to spot someone wearing white Habitual jeans, humming along to the new Madonna song, paying for his meal with a two-hundred-dollar gift certificate, and hobbling around on four-inch...

HIP FOR HIM.(The Talk of the Town)
October 2, 2006... Pete's Candy Store, the popular Williamsburg bar, opened at 4 P.M., an hour early, for a church service one recent Sunday. Pete's is known for its retro-chic entertainment--bingo, spelling bees, neo-vaudeville--but this was its first sermon,...

SHORTCHANGED.(The Talk of the Town)
October 2, 2006... In August, two Princeton economists released a study titled "Stature and Status: Height, Ability, and Labor Market Outcomes." The aim of the paper, by Anne Case and Christina Paxson, was to attempt to explain why tall people generally earn more...

TV DINNERS.
October 2, 2006... The first sign that I'd been unknowingly affected by cooking shows occurred on a Sunday morning when I realized I was talking to myself. I'd been making toast. "First, we cut our bread," I whispered. "Do you know why?" I stopped what I was...

COMMAND PERFORMANCE.
October 2, 2006... If you go east on Sunset Boulevard and take a left onto one of those burned-out stretches of arterial road which cut across the main drag like stitches on a baseball, you pass laundromats, motels, gas stations, pawnshops, and burger stands,...

UNSTRUNG.
October 2, 2006... It is the best of times in physics. Physicists are on the verge of obtaining the long-sought Theory of Everything. In a few elegant equations, perhaps concise enough to be emblazoned on a T-shirt, this theory will reveal how the universe began...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
October 2, 2006... The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf; $24). In his new novel, McCarthy exchanges the bleak Western setting of previous works for an even bleaker post-apocalyptic one. As usual, lawless space engenders violence, but here a nuclear holocaust has...

DISPOSSESSION.
October 2, 2006... "Cold Mountain," Charles Frazier's first novel, came out in 1997 and was a huge best-seller. It won a National Book Award and was turned into a big-budget movie, written and directed by Anthony Minghella and starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law....

KINGDOM COME.
October 2, 2006... After spending time with Shakespeare's tragedies, some people may find themselves peering at their once familiar world through the Bard's lush, bleak lens, which makes every word or gesture heavy with meaning and premonition. When one is in...

THE CLOSER.
October 2, 2006... Chris (Ludacris) Bridges, the twenty-nine-year-old m.c. and actor, is perhaps best understood not in the context of other rappers but in that of a sports figure: the Yankees' closer Mariano Rivera. Nobody complains that Rivera doesn't pitch...

POWER PLAYERS.
October 2, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File In the new version of "All the King's Men," Sean Penn, as Willie Stark, the Southern country boy who wants to be governor, wears his hair cropped close at the sides and standing up straight on top. With...

TABLES FOR TWO.
October 9, 2006... FALL PREVIEW MOVIES PREVIEW THEATRE PREVIEW NIGHT LIFE PREVIEW CLASSICAL PREVIEW ART PREVIEW ABOVE AND BEYOND PREVIEW DANCE PREVIEW DIRTY BIRD -- 204 W. 14th St. (212-620-4836)--"Dirty Bird" traditionally...

DVD NOTES.
October 9, 2006... FALL PREVIEW MOVIES PREVIEW THEATRE PREVIEW NIGHT LIFE PREVIEW CLASSICAL PREVIEW ART PREVIEW ABOVE AND BEYOND PREVIEW DANCE PREVIEW GLASS HOUSES -- Jacques Tati's "Playtime," from 1967, newly released in a...

INTERNATIONAL INACTION.(The Talk of the Town)
October 9, 2006... Darfur--the world's gravest humanitarian disaster, lately deteriorating, and likely to get much worse in the coming weeks--perfectly reveals the international politics of the moment, showing all the principal actors as they are, rather than as...

ON THE TRIB.(The Talk of the Town)
October 9, 2006... When a hundred or so veterans of the New York Herald Tribune showed up the other night at their former headquarters to mark the fortieth anniversary of the newspaper's demise, the most conspicuously absent fixtures (other than, say, the...

SKULDUGGERY.(The Talk of the Town)
October 9, 2006... In 1999, as Del Close lay in a Chicago hospital with terminal emphysema, he was still troubleshooting his plan to outwit death. Close, the improv-comedy guru whose students included Bill Murray and Mike Myers, had made provisions in his will...

WOMEN ON FILM.(The Talk of the Town)
October 9, 2006... The photographer Lillian Bassman is an irreverent beauty of eighty-nine whose fashion pictures from the heyday of couture--the late nineteen-forties to the late nineteen-sixties--were influential in animating a stilted genre. In an era of...

ESCAPED.
October 9, 2006... With a few noteworthy exceptions, people who meet Richard McNair tend to find him likable. He typically has an engaging and relaxed manner, chatty and unhurried; a former employer characterized him as having "an outgoing, lovable personality."...

THE SCORE.
October 9, 2006... At 5 A.M. on a cool Boston morning not long ago, Elizabeth Rourke--thick black-brown hair, pale Irish skin, and forty-one weeks pregnant--reached over and woke her husband, Chris. "I'm having contractions," she said. "Are you sure?" he...

WESTWARD HO!
October 9, 2006... In 1856, when he was forty-six years old and long since a legend, Christopher Houston Carson, better known as Kit, told the story of his life. "I was born on the 24 December 1809 in Madison County, Kentucky," he began. Before he was two, his...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
October 9, 2006... I'll Steal You Away, by Niccolo Ammaniti, translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt (Canongate; $23). Ammaniti's previous book, "I'm Not Scared," which was made into a movie, used to memorable effect the point of view of a terrified young...

THE MYSTIC WORD.
October 9, 2006... In 1919, the novelist and critic Waldo Frank published "Our America," a manifesto for a new generation of American artists. Surveying the cultural situation of the United States, on the brink of what already looked to be the American century,...

THE LOST BOYS.
October 9, 2006... Resentment is scrawled like graffiti across the faces of the major characters in Eric Bogosian's 1994 play "subUrbia" (now in revival, in an updated version, at the Second Stage). Blowing around the stage like ragged refuse, the three boys who...

METAMORPHOSIS.
October 9, 2006... At the bottom of one of the Metropolitan Opera's winding staircases, you can find a medium-sized wall plaque in honor of the arts patron Otto H. Kahn, who, decades ago, tried to change this grandest of opera houses into a more modern place....

BATTLE ROYAL.
October 9, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File The new Stephen Frears film, "The Queen," is about a clash of wills between Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Right Honourable Tony Blair, M.P., Prime Minister in Her Majesty's Government. Or, if you...

POP NOTES.
October 16, 2006... FALL PREVIEW MOVIES PREVIEW THEATRE PREVIEW NIGHT LIFE PREVIEW CLASSICAL PREVIEW ART PREVIEW ABOVE AND BEYOND PREVIEW DANCE PREVIEW WEIRD SCIENCE -- When "Weird Al" Yankovic first appeared in the early...

TABLES FOR TWO.
October 16, 2006... FALL PREVIEW MOVIES PREVIEW THEATRE PREVIEW NIGHT LIFE PREVIEW CLASSICAL PREVIEW ART PREVIEW ABOVE AND BEYOND PREVIEW DANCE PREVIEW MOMOFUKU SSAM BAR -- 207 Second Ave., at 13th St. (212-254-3500)--David...

KEEP OUT.(The Talk of the Town)
October 16, 2006... There is an American tradition of responding to threats by confusing thoughts with acts and temporarily forgetting what Jefferson set down, in 1779, as one of the country's founding principles: "that truth is great and will prevail if left to...

SMART, USELESS.(The Talk of the Town)
October 16, 2006... Four years ago, three cheery gadget geeks--Dan Dubno, a.k.a. Digital Dan, the chief technologist at CBS News; his younger brother, Mike, then the chief technology officer at Goldman Sachs; and Greg Harper, an all-around tech wizard--met for a...

MASTER CLASS.(The Talk of the Town)
October 16, 2006... In her autobiography, the great Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya describes the morning in 1937 when the authorities came to arrest her father: "The whole house upside down. My mother, unkempt, pregnant with a big belly, weeping and clutching....

NIGELLA SHOPS.(The Talk of the Town)
October 16, 2006... Nigella Lawson, Britain's most telegenic cook, was in town last week to talk about her new Food Network show, "Nigella Feasts." The Food Network hopes to duplicate Lawson's success as Britain's "domestic goddess" with the American masses. But...

STANDARD-BEARERS.(The Talk of the Town)
October 16, 2006... In 1888, at Thomas Edison's laboratory, in West Orange, New Jersey, a macabre event took place. While reporters watched, dogs were placed on a metal plate that had been hooked up to a thousand-volt alternating-current generator and electrocuted...

MURDOCH'S GAME.
October 16, 2006... Like the legendary press barons to whom he is often compared--Hearst, Pulitzer, Northcliffe, Beaverbrook--Rupert Murdoch has relished playing kingmaker. In the fall of 1977, when he was forty-six and had recently arrived in New York from...

IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU.
October 16, 2006... Stevie Ryan received her first Oscar, after a fashion, this year, at the age of twenty-two, only eighteen months after moving to Los Angeles to become a movie star. She grew up in California's high desert, a couple of hours to the east, in a...

PARANOID STYLE.
October 16, 2006... "On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country," President Bush declared nine days after the 2001 attacks, during an address to a joint session of Congress which may turn out to be the high-water mark of...

THE CRUSADER.
October 16, 2006... Aboubakr Jamai publishes a newsweekly out of Casablanca. It's written in French and called Le Journal Hebdomadaire--the weekly paper--though people who read it just say Le Journal. You would be hard put to confuse Le Journal with any of the...

TABLOID DAYS.
October 16, 2006... The offices of the National Mirror were situated, in 1965, a few blocks down Fifth Avenue from the Flatiron Building. The Mirror was one of several imitation magazines and newspapers in a chain known as Countrywide Publications. They were...

THE FORMULA.
October 16, 2006... One sunny afternoon not long ago, Dick Copaken sat in a booth at Daniel, one of those hushed, exclusive restaurants on Manhattan's Upper East Side where the waiters glide spectrally from table to table. He was wearing a starched button-down...

HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT.
October 16, 2006... Until not long ago, Christopher Hitchens, the British-born journalist, was a valued asset of the American left: an intellectual willing to show his teeth in the cause of righteousness. Today, Hitchens supports the Iraq war and is contemptuous...

THE SHARPENED QUILL.
October 16, 2006... In the winter of 1776, John Adams read "Common Sense," an anonymous, fanatical, and brutally brilliant seventy-seven-page pamphlet that would convince the American people of what more than a decade of taxes and nearly a year of war had not:...

RED SHEEP.
October 16, 2006... The most important letter Jessica Mitford ever wrote was a forgery, addressed to herself ("Darling Decca") at the age of nineteen, on February 3, 1937. Pretending to be a girlfriend travelling on the Continent, the future muckraker issued an...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
October 16, 2006... Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf; $24.95). Based loosely on political events in nineteen-sixties Nigeria, this novel focusses on two wealthy Igbo sisters, Olanna and Kainene, who drift apart as the newly independent...

TOEING THE LINE.
October 16, 2006... In the 1933 film "42nd Street," the theatre director Warner Baxter sends the understudy Ruby Keeler out onstage with the famous line "You're going out a youngster, but you've got to come back a star." The musical "A Chorus Line," which opened...

GEHRY-RIGGED.
October 16, 2006... Frank Gehry may be the most famous architect at work today, but, like so many of his peers, he has found it nearly impossible to build in New York. Twenty years ago, he designed a tower for the site of Madison Square Garden which never got...

LOST GENERATION.
October 16, 2006... In television, victory doesn't have a thousand fathers so much as a thousand sons. Since "Lost" became a phenomenon on ABC two years ago, the networks have repeatedly sought to replicate its formula. But what is that formula, exactly? Should...

SMALL WORLDS.
October 16, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), the thirtyish heroine of Todd Field's extraordinary new movie, "Little Children," dropped out of graduate school to marry an older man--a business consultant--and moved into a...

TABLES FOR TWO.
October 23, 2006... THE TASTING ROOM -- 264 Elizabeth St., between Houston and Prince Sts. (212-358-7831)--Until it relocated, this summer, the Tasting Room packed its small but fanatical following into an even smaller space, on First Street (eleven tables, no...

NUKE REBUKE.(The Talk of the Town)
October 23, 2006... When Kim Jong Il, who seems to have modelled his villainy on old Jonny Quest cartoons, announced that his government had conducted a successful nuclear-weapons test, it was like watching the unhinged teen-ager in your neighborhood finally set a...

THE $40-MILLION ELBOW.(The Talk of the Town)
October 23, 2006... You might have seen "Le Reve," Picasso's 1932 portrait of his mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, in your college art-history textbook. The painting is owned by Steve Wynn, the casino magnate and collector of masterpieces. He acquired it in a...

BOBBY FOREVER.(The Talk of the Town)
October 23, 2006... Well before the day of Bobby Zarem's surprise party, people were spilling the beans. It was the end of an average week for Zarem, the inveterate P.R. man: the premiere of "The Departed" was on Tuesday, followed by an event at Guastavino's with...

ALEKSEY THE GREAT.(The Talk of the Town)
October 23, 2006... Four and a half years ago, Jordan Bass, a freshman at Yale, met a tall blond Uzbek immigrant named Aleksey Garber--a prospective student who, in this era of increased specialization, stood out for his almost cartoonish well-roundedness: a...

THE QUEEN, CONTINUED.(The Talk of the Town)
October 23, 2006... On the floor of George Condo's studio on East Seventy-eighth Street, portraits of Queen Elizabeth II were laid out in rows of three: nine portraits, oil on canvas, each one sixteen inches wide by twenty inches high. The Surrealist distortions...

ARRIBA!
October 23, 2006... Shortly before five o'clock one morning not long ago, a dozen people waited outside the locked glass door of a nondescript office building on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. Sunrise was still an hour away. Teen-agers buried themselves...

MINK INC.
October 23, 2006... A few years ago, Ervin Rosenfeld was asked to make a mink jacket for the Bronx rapper Fat Joe. This would not be just any mink jacket; it had to be the pale blue of a Tiffany box, light as champagne fizz, and flattering to a man who was said to...

REWRITING NATURE.
October 23, 2006... Darwin's Delay is by now nearly as famous as Hamlet's, and involves a similar cast of characters: a family ghost, an unhappy lover, and a lot of men digging up old bones. Although it ends with vindication and fame, rather than with slaughter...

THE LAST DROP.
October 23, 2006... Most mornings, the line begins to form at dawn: scores of silent women with babies strapped to their backs, buckets balanced on their heads, and in each hand a bright-blue plastic jug. On good days, they will wait less than an hour before a...

THE NUTTY PROFESSORS.
October 23, 2006... Anyone who has ever taught at a college or university must have had this experience. You're in the middle of something that you do every day: standing at a lectern in a dusty room, for example, lecturing to a roomful of teen-agers above whom...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
October 23, 2006... Breakable You, by Brian Morton (Harcourt; $25). This packed novel about the vagaries of love and grief takes place in a New York straight out of Woody Allen: enormous apartments abound, and girls in bars say things like "Paul Auster makes me...

BLOWING SMOKE.
October 23, 2006... Like all poisoned chalices, Neil LaBute's "Wrecks" (directed by the playwright, at the Public) isn't what it seems. Before the lights go up on this superb and subversive monologue, the butterscotch sound of Nat King Cole's romantic...

HARD AND FAST.
October 23, 2006... Globalization may have its downside, but it could do something for modern dance that a lot of people would appreciate; namely, restore musicality. Early this month, Pandit Birju Maharaj, the reigning guru of kathak--a dance form that grew up in...

LOST IN THE REVOLUTION.
October 23, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File In May of this year, word came through of an unruly mob in France. "Did you hear what happened?" a friend asked me. "Marie Antoinette got heckled. Absolutely slaughtered." This was news? The last time I...

TABLES FOR TWO.
October 30, 2006... CAFE D'ALSACE -- 1695 Second Ave., at 88th St. (212-722-5133)--Simon Oren, the owner of Nice Matin and Marseille, is the Dave Thomas of the New York bistro revival: not the originator (Keith McNally would be our Ray Kroc) but a distinguished...

POP NOTES.
October 30, 2006... TOP DOWN -- After releasing "The Black Album," in 2003, Jay-Z claimed to be retiring from rapping, which seemed to mean that he would keep rapping all the time. On November 21, he will officially end this farcical retirement when he releases...

ALTERNATIVE REALITIES.(The Talk of the Town)
October 30, 2006... When the National Security Council met to discuss Iraq earlier this month, in Washington, the sense of urgency was palpable. The director of national intelligence described the deterioration of security in Baghdad and Basra; the Iraqi Army was...

THE C.I.A.'S TRAVEL AGENT.(The Talk of the Town)
October 30, 2006... On the official Web site of Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, there is a section devoted to a subsidiary called Jeppesen International Trip Planning, based in San Jose, California. The write-up mentions that the division "offers...

GIFT HORSE.(The Talk of the Town)
October 30, 2006... Georgina Bloomberg, the younger of the Mayor's two daughters, has shown little interest in emulating her father's political and professional career: since girlhood, she has been devoted to things equine, and on the weekends that her father...

WORST NIGHTMARES.(The Talk of the Town)
October 30, 2006... "No one's really afraid of Frankenstein," Timothy Haskell said the other day. Last Halloween, Haskell, a theatre director, staged a public haunted house on the Lower East Side, and so many people showed up that hundreds never made it inside....

SAFE AS HOUSES?(The Talk of the Town)
October 30, 2006... In the past few months, it's been almost all bad news for the housing market. Homebuilders have had to tell Wall Street that between twenty and thirty per cent of their contracts have been cancelled. Janet Yellen, the head of the Federal...

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT.
October 30, 2006... The autumn political contest in Virginia began this year as it always does, with a Labor Day parade and festival in the Shenandoah Valley town of Buena Vista. The event featured appearances by the Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, and his...

SNOOK.
October 30, 2006... When I was in high school in Hudson, Ohio, I had a neighbor named Pete Snook. The Snooks lived one street over from us, and our back yards met on a tangent, in a brushy, unlandscaped area of the kind you don't see much today. I made a path...

MILLIONS FOR MILLIONS.
October 30, 2006... Over the Labor Day weekend of 1995, a ponytailed, bearded young software engineer named Pierre Omidyar wrote a code that enabled people to buy and sell items on the Internet. In the first few weeks after the program was introduced, items...

THE SHOW-WOMAN.
October 30, 2006... Down in the gray-green gloom of the New York City subway system, anything can happen, and frequently does. A bit of hucksterism. Alms for the poor. Sometimes, even unsuspecting critics have to field questions from that rarest of birds, the...

BODY LANGUAGE.
October 30, 2006... The title of Janet Jackson's new album, "20 Y.O.," is both an invitation to take note of her perpetually youthful looks (aided by the ritual magazine photographs of her near-naked, now forty-year-old body) and a directive for how to think about...

THE REVOLUTIONIST.
October 30, 2006... The Russian radical writer and philosopher Alexander Herzen loved Rome for its warmth and spontaneity, but he was a little chagrined to find himself there when the revolution of 1848 erupted in Paris, seven hundred miles away. Luckily, the...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
October 30, 2006... One Good Turn, by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown; $24.99). The second installment of the author's Jackson Brodie detective series is a complex jigsaw: when the driver of a rented Peugeot collides with a bat-wielding thug in a Honda Civic during...

HUMAN SHIELD.
October 30, 2006... In a one-person show, the most important question is not where to start the story but why to tell it. The actor needs a compelling reason, beyond vanity, to step from the wings onto the stage. There has to be both need and news; there rarely...

GUILTY AS SIN.
October 30, 2006... Running through James Woods's persona--the grave robber's face; the jittery, egomaniacal wheedling; the pimp's heart--is a seam of pure delight. No matter who else is in the frame, he's the one you watch, and he's watching himself, too. His...