The New Yorker articles from October 2007

The New Yorker archives from October 2007

Borough Food & Drink.(Restaurant review)
October 1, 2007... Borough Food & Drink is a quizzical twist on the "locavore" movement, whose adherents insist on eating food grown close to home. Borough's co-creator and contributing chef, Zak Pelaccio, has assembled a menu that relies primarily on products...

American Sounds.(Sound recording review)
October 1, 2007... "Magic" (Columbia), Bruce Springsteen's new studio album, kicks off with the brooding, propulsive "Radio Nowhere." "I just want to hear some rhythm," Springsteen sings, railing like a lay preacher against the blandness of contemporary music....

Ghostbusters.(The Talk of the Town)
October 1, 2007... A spectre is haunting the leading candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination. It was with her last week when she outlined her health-care proposal, and it was no wispy phantom. It was an apparition solid enough to attract the notice...

The D Dock Curse.(The Talk of the Town)
October 1, 2007... There's something about politicians and boats. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated, all records of his visits to the Presidential yacht Sequoia were burned in an oil drum. A photograph of Donna Rice sitting on Senator Gary Hart's knee aboard...

Aunt Janny.(The Talk of the Town)(Janet Reno)(Concert review)
October 1, 2007... So Janet Reno was hanging out by the jukebox at Manitoba's last Wednesday afternoon, down on Avenue B. She was sitting in a booth, sipping from a bottle of water, and staring straight ahead, in the direction of daylight, which there isn't much...

You Say Vidal.(The Talk of the Town)(Not Vital)(Interview)
October 1, 2007... The sculptor Not Vital is an instigator of ridiculousness. For a 2004 work, "Camel," he commissioned silversmiths in Agadez, Niger, to cast sixteen smallish orbs, filling each, in a ship-in-a-bottle-like trick, with the remains of an entire...

Books in Bulk.(The Talk of the Town)
October 1, 2007... Between digging for artifacts and dangling from cliffs, Indiana Jones must have very little time to read, never mind to buy books. Luckily, he has a team of people to do it for him. Dr. Jones--as represented by the set decorators for the...

The Mannahatta Project.
October 1, 2007... It is remarkable, in the accounts of the earliest European visitors to the North American continent, how little interest some of these explorers seemed to take in the land they had just found. They hardly went ashore. As seamen--and seekers of...

Age Makes a Difference.(Philip Roth)(Interview)
October 1, 2007... HERMIONE LEE: As the book's title, taken from a stage direction in "Macbeth," tells us, this is a book of haunting. The novelist Nathan Zuckerman haunts his old city like a revenant, and is haunted by ghosts of the past--the ghostly warning...

The Tsar's Opponent.(Biography)
October 1, 2007... On a recent summer evening, the greatest player in the history of chess, Garry Kasparov, wrapped up an exhausting series of meetings devoted to the defeat of the Kremlin regime. After days of debate, a motley pride of unlikely...

Drive, He Wrote.(Jack Kerouac's book "On the Road")
October 1, 2007... "The social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang," Allen Ginsberg once observed. It's a sentiment that Frank Sinatra would have appreciated. The time of "Howl" and "On the Road" was also the time of "Frank...

Desert Storm.
October 1, 2007... What is God like? Is he merciful, just, loving, vengeful, jealous? Is he a bodiless force, a cool watchmaker, or a hot interventionist, a doer with big opinions, a busy chap up in Heaven? Does he, for instance, approve of charity and disapprove...

A Boston Fable.
October 1, 2007... Ann Patchett has not rushed to follow up her breakthrough novel, "Bel Canto" (2001), which promoted her from private to major in the embattled ranks of literary novelists. Before "Bel Canto," she had been admired but obscure, a veteran of...

Hotel de Dream.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 1, 2007... The American novelist Stephen Crane, according to an unreliable contemporary, began a book about a male prostitute. As no such manuscript survives, White steps in with an artfully pulpy tale about Elliott, a teen-age newsboy in New York, who is...

Maynard and Jennica.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 1, 2007... "It is not romantic that no one meets anyone twice in New York," Maynard Gogarty quips, after failing to woo the beautiful stranger Jennica Green on the uptown No. 6 train one steamy day in August. Happily, this remarkable debut is inclined...

Ike.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 1, 2007... In June, 1944, Anne Frank heard General Eisenhower on the radio, announcing the invasion of Europe, and wrote in her diary, "I have the feeling that friends are approaching." Korda's engaging biography does justice to Eisenhower's leadership on...

The Art of Political Murder.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 1, 2007... On April 26, 1998, after the U.N. brokered an end to Guatemala's decades-long civil war, Bishop Juan Gerardi was beaten to death. Two days earlier, he had presided over the release of a report that, while documenting abuses by both the...

Family Drama.(Theater review)
October 1, 2007... In Lucy Thurber's "Scarcity" (an Atlantic Theatre Company production at the Linda Gross), the thirty-something Martha (Kristen Johnston) is a case study in co-dependence. She both fights for her life and hands it over to Herb (Michael T....

Outlaws.(Movie review)
October 1, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File No film whose closing credits list a "senior inferno artist" is likely to lull us with its tranquil charms, and "The Kingdom" is a thumper of a movie, full of furious souls. The kingdom in question is...

Gemma.(Restaurant review)
October 8, 2007... This new restaurant, set in a boutique hotel along an avenue once better known for flophouses than for fashionistas, has the feel of a soundstage. Among the melodramatic accoutrements--cascades of melted wax, dangling hams and gleaming copper...

Disparities.(The Talk of the Town)(African-Americans in Jena, Louisiana)
October 8, 2007... Just over a year ago, during a high-school assembly in Jena, Louisiana, a black student asked the school's white principal if it would be all right to sit under an oak tree outside, an oasis of shade known as the "white tree," because only...

Prezbo Vs. the Prof.(The Talk of the Town)(Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Lee Bollinger)
October 8, 2007... When Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, announced that the school would host a forum featuring President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, the brothers of Pi Kappa Alpha decided to make a sign. "So we pitched around some ideas,"...

Iftar.(The Talk of the Town)
October 8, 2007... President Ahmadinejad, when he comes to New York, usually holds meetings over breakfast. But his visit last week occurred in the middle of Ramadan, so he hosted a nightly iftar--the meal that breaks the fast each evening at sundown. ...

The Office.(The Talk of the Town)(Anucha Browne Sanders' sexual harassment and wrongful termination case)
October 8, 2007... Down at the Federal Courthouse, on Pearl Street, a squalid little civil action has garnered big attention in recent weeks. Anucha Browne Sanders, a former marketing executive with the New York Knicks, is suing the team's head coach, Isiah...

Greenback Blues.(The Talk of the Town)(U.S. dollar)
October 8, 2007... Few phrases seem more quaintly outmoded these days than "sound as a dollar." Once the embodiment of American financial strength, the dollar has spent the past five years getting sand kicked in its face by the world's currencies, and in recent...

Shifting Targets.(George W. Bush's military policy on Iran)
October 8, 2007... In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. "Shia extremists, backed by...

Experimental Journey.(Elizabeth LeCompte)(Interview)
October 8, 2007... It was the top of the eighth on a drizzly night at Yankee Stadium--June 6, 2006. The Red Sox were in town, and Elizabeth LeCompte, wrapped in a thin red parka and settled into a great seat, in the seventh row, just to the right of home plate,...

The Shadow Act.(My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love)
October 8, 2007... Octavia picked up her pen in the dimly lit Moroccan restaurant and leaned over her notebook. A bespectacled nine-year-old who aspires to a career in fashion, she thought for a moment and then set to work. It was June, 2007. Outside, Paris was...

Wild Thing.('Nureyev: The Life')(Book review)
October 8, 2007... If ever there was an artist who invited the retributive sort of biography that is in fashion these days, it is Rudolf Nureyev. Nureyev, as a friend of his put it, did things that are "absolutely out of our habits." He dropped ballerinas on the...

Caspian Rain.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 8, 2007... In pre-revolutionary Tehran, a Jewish girl from the slums finds her marriage prospects dimmed by the disgraceful behavior of her siblings, among them a delusional opera singer manque, an aged (i.e., nearing thirty) spinster, and a convert to...

Songs without Words.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 8, 2007... Packer's second novel examines the bonds of female friendship and how the connections formed by a childhood tragedy develop with age. Liz, married to a Bay Area technology executive and the mother of two teen-agers, is preoccupied with yoga and...

Sacco and Vanzetti.('Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind')(Brief article)(Book review)
October 8, 2007... When the news came, on August 23, 1927, that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a shoemaker and a fish peddler, had been executed for shooting two men in a holdup, "life felt very grubby and mean," Katherine Anne Porter wrote, "as if we were...

The First Word.('The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language')(Brief article)(Book review)
October 8, 2007... Evolutionary linguistics has had a troubled history; in the nineteenth century, linguists declared that inquiries into the origin of language were futile, a view echoed more recently by Noam Chomsky. But in the past two decades the field has...

Lost Men.('Michael Clayton' and 'Into the Wild')(Movie review)
October 8, 2007... It's forever being drummed into us that movies are a visual medium. Screenwriters are chastised with this half-truth all the time; they may be told to keep dialogue terse or suggestive or to drop lines altogether. After the movie is shot,...

Zenkichi.(Product/service evaluation)
October 15, 2007... This multilevel den, hidden at the far end of an uber-hip Williamsburg stretch, is mostly recognizable by the small, come-hither red light shining above its doorway. Inside, diners are ensconced in dimly lit private cells, curtained off by...

Brouhahaha.(The Talk of the Town)(Hillary Clinton; laughter)
October 15, 2007... Q: What don't we know about your spouse? , A: She has the world's best laugh., --Interview with Bill Clinton, Time.com, September 13, 2007. In the great American tradition of Washington's teeth, Lincoln's Adam's apple, T.R.'s pince-nez,...

First Book.(The Talk of the Town)(Jenna Bush; 'Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope')
October 15, 2007... Correction appended. Jane Friedman, the president and C.E.O. of HarperCollins, got a call from her friend Robert Barnett, the lawyer in Washington, D.C., last January. He said, "Jenna Bush is doing a book," and offered to arrange a...

Monster Career.(The Talk of the Town)(Tom Meehan; 'Young Frankenstein')
October 15, 2007... 1959: Guy walks into a bar in Greenwich Village. Spies a friend, Tom Meehan, a twenty-seven-year-old staff writer for this magazine. Guy tells Meehan he's just come from a party where the actresses Uta Hagen and Ina Claire happened to be...

Idle Hands.(The Talk of the Town)(monitoring air quality; idling drivers)
October 15, 2007... If you go to school in Bushwick, Brooklyn, you may have noticed, alongside the cotton-candy sellers and the babysitters who gather on the curb around 3 P.M., several academic-looking women making notes on clipboards. The clipboards are covered...

Stressbuster.(The Talk of the Town)(Sanskrit Vedas; Swami Parthasarathy)
October 15, 2007... When an American businessman calls upon a guru of the Eastern persuasion, he is generally seeking to be abused for his attachment to success and worldly goods while also learning how to acquire more of both. Swami Parthasarathy, eighty years...

Silent Minds.(comatose patients)
October 15, 2007... Ten years ago, Adrian Owen, a young British neuroscientist, was working at a brain-imaging center at Addenbrooke's Hospital, at the University of Cambridge. He had recently returned from the Montreal Neurological Institute, where he used...

Teen Queen.(Lady Jane Grey)(Brief biography)
October 15, 2007... Bookish, bartered, and betrayed: few girls, even in the British Royal Family, were as hounded as Lady Jane Grey. Almost three hundred years after her execution, Charles Dickens, who made a specialty of exploited children, wrote that the English...

The Blow-Up Artist.(Victor Niederhoffer)(Brief biography)
October 15, 2007... On a wall opposite Victor Niederhoffer's desk is a large painting of the Essex, a Nantucket whaling ship that sank in the South Pacific in 1820, after being attacked by a giant sperm whale, and that later served as the inspiration for...

The Countdown.(Kosovo; Prime Minister Agim Ceku)
October 15, 2007... Early in the morning on May 14, 1999, a large force of Serbian paramilitaries, soldiers, and special police appeared in Qyshk, a farming village in western Kosovo. The Serbs had come to Qyshk before, searching for weapons and valuables, but...

The Joker.(Richard Prince)(Brief biography)
October 15, 2007... The immense art-world success of Richard Prince, the subject of a large and seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim, depresses me, not that I can gainsay it. If "quintessential artist in a generation" were a job opening, Prince, fifty-eight...

Parade's End.('Exit Ghost'; Philip Roth)(Book review)
October 15, 2007... Before his death, Jonathan Swift pointed to a blighted tree and said to a friend, "I shall be like that tree; I shall die first at the top." Philip Roth's dying animals, at loose in the twilit carnival of his late work, reverse Swift's...

The Almost Moon.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 15, 2007... Sebold's first book was a memoir of rape, her second, "The Lovely Bones," a prodigiously successful novel about a murdered child, and her new novel kicks off in a similar vein: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." Helen...

Samedi the Deafness.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 15, 2007... Ball, a poet, was once a croupier, and elements of both professions are evident in his debut novel, which combines the measured culling of language with the headlong propulsion of chance. Nominally a thriller, the book begins with the discovery...

The Terror Dream.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 15, 2007... Faludi's third book provides an unexpected but incisive assessment of the post-September 11th era, through the lens of gender relations. Sifting rhetoric and symbolism in the media, Faludi concludes that "women's independence had become...

Diamonds, Gold, and War.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 15, 2007... In 1879, Viscount Wolseley, a British general sent to what later became South Africa, wrote, "These Transvaal Boers are the only white race I know of that has been steadily going back towards barbarism." But, in the decades after the discovery...

Upstate.('Bridge of Sighs')(Book review)
October 15, 2007... "My natural inclination," says the narrator on the first page of Richard Russo's "Bridge of Sighs" (Knopf; $26.95), is "inertia rationalized." His name is Lou Lynch, and he is working on a memoir, which constitutes much of the novel we will be...

Pay and Play.('Mauritius')(Theater review)
October 15, 2007... Theresa Rebeck is a slick playwright; in fact, she's so slick that Gucci wears her shoes. Her scenes have a crisp shape, her dialogue pops, her characters swagger through an array of showy emotion, and she knows how to give a plot a cunning...

Leaving It All Behind.('The Darjeeling Limited'; 'Control')(Movie review)
October 15, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File Can you have a thriving movie culture in a country without enough trains? The decline of the American railroad neatly parallels that of the Hollywood studio system, and something about the train traveller...

Soto.(Restaurant review)
October 22, 2007... Soto, Sotohiro Kosugi's first restaurant in New York City, is a showplace for small, beautiful things. Even the glassware sets an elegant tone: a green teardrop is cut into the side of a decanter and filled with ice, creating the illusion that...

Chrome Never Sleeps.('Chrome Dreams II')(Sound recording review)
October 22, 2007... Neil Young's umpteenth studio album, "Chrome Dreams II" (Reprise), is a puzzle, from its title on down. The original "Chrome Dreams," as Young diehards know, is an unreleased album from 1977 whose songs included "Pocahontas," "Will to Love,"...

Ask the Iraqis.(The Talk of the Town)(Americans in Iraq)
October 22, 2007... In the upcoming Presidential primaries, Americans will have the chance to choose among candidates who propose immediate withdrawal from Iraq (Richardson), rapid drawdowns (Edwards and Obama), open-ended commitment to the war (Giuliani, Romney,...

One Man's Wallpaper.(The Talk of the Town)(Jackson Pollock paintings)
October 22, 2007... The art world, we keep hearing, is in a fine mess, awash in money and bereft of direction, and a recent documentary, "Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?," seems to prove the point. In it, a retired truck driver in California named Teri Horton...

You Say Potato.(The Talk of the Town)(dialect coach)
October 22, 2007... "The science of speech. That's my profession. . . . I can place any man within six miles." That's Henry Higgins, in Act I of "Pygmalion," about to transform a lowly flower girl into a proper Edwardian lady. If you are a Manhattan-born starlet...

Having One for Che.(The Talk of the Town)(Che Guevara)
October 22, 2007... The fortieth anniversary of Che Guevara's death went by quietly last week, unless you count a party at the Brecht Forum, in the West Village, where a skirmish erupted between the organizers over mojito pricing. Colin Robinson, a Brecht Forum...

The Corrections.(editing)
October 22, 2007... Our theme today is addition and subtraction, abridgment and expansion, and their effects on works of art and entertainment. (Sorry, what was that? No, the seminar on history of the cinema is in the next classroom.) What can be taken away from a...

The Well-tempered Web.(classical music, internet)
October 22, 2007... In the spring of 2004, I made the questionable decision to start a blog. I reserved a dot-com address, signed up for an Internet-for-dummies service called Typepad, and, to the delight of more than a dozen compulsively Googling insomniacs...

Voice of the Veil.(Shirin Neshat)(Brief biography)
October 22, 2007... Shirin Neshat's "Rapture" (1999) is a twelve-minute video-and-sound installation, shot in black-and-white. On one screen, the viewer sees the silhouette of a seaside fortress; a second depicts a rock-littered wilderness. The sound of rushing...

Age of Reason.(Jacques Barzun)
October 22, 2007... For the past few years, Jacques Barzun has been dreaming more and more in French. Sometimes two people are speaking--one in English, the other in French--as though nothing could be more natural than the cadences of one language summoning the...

Fallen Idols.(movies; movie stars)
October 22, 2007... Clark Gable, the most famous male movie star of the nineteen-thirties, drank heavily, hit the road and slept with prostitutes when he felt like it, had false teeth and bad breath, fathered an illegitimate child with Loretta Young, carried on an...

Man Behind the Curtain.(Peter Gelb; 'Lucia di Lammermoor')
October 22, 2007... Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, slipped into his theatre's darkened auditorium just as Natalie Dessay, the French soprano, was losing her mind. It was a Friday afternoon in early September, with less than three weeks...

Stealing Life.(David Simon; Baltimore)
October 22, 2007... On a muggy August afternoon in Baltimore, trash scuttled down Guilford Avenue, the breeze smelling like rain and asphalt. It was the last week of shooting for the fifth and final season of the HBO drama "The Wire," and the crew was filming a...

Sparky from St. Paul.(Charles Schulz)(Book review)
October 22, 2007... There is much to enjoy and admire in "Schulz and Peanuts," a biography of Charles Schulz by David Michaelis (HarperCollins; $34.95). The basic story, of how a not conspicuously gifted but very determined barber's son from St. Paul, Minnesota,...

Rocket Man.(Wernher von Braun)(Brief biography)
October 22, 2007... America's long-ago trips to the moon are now remembered mostly amid the knickknackery of eBay, a nostalgia niche for space buffs who might otherwise engross themselves in the relics of radio serials and baseball dynasties. The handful of...

Mister Pip.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 22, 2007... In the midst of a savage civil war, an adolescent girl on the remote island of Bougainville, "where the most unspeakable things happened without once raising the ire of the outside world," is engrossed by the struggle between art, in the form...

The Air We Breathe.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 22, 2007... Barrett's novel is narrated in the first-person plural by the patients of a tuberculosis sanitorium in the Adirondacks in 1916, some of whom are drawn from a previous collection of short stories. The invalids, their lives thwarted by illness,...

The Argument.(how donors and Internet gunslingers influence the Democratic presidential campaign)(Brief article)
October 22, 2007... Offering a conspectus of "shareholder revolt" in the Democratic Party, Bai, a political reporter for the Times Magazine, describes how, after John Kerry's defeat, two sets of insurgents determined, separately, to uproot the Party's sclerotic...

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 22, 2007... Elizabeth Marsh, the daughter of a shipwright, was conceived in Jamaica, was born in England in 1735, and died in Calcutta in 1785. Marsh's extraordinarily peripatetic life illuminates not only the vast global changes of that period, both for...

A Paler Shade of White.(American pop music)
October 22, 2007... In May, I went with a friend to see the Canadian indie-rock band Arcade Fire perform at the United Palace, a gilded rococo church in Washington Heights that seats more than three thousand and doubles as a theatre. The band was playing to a...

Lay It As It Plays.(Theater review)
October 22, 2007... In 1967, the year his boyfriend beat him to death with a hammer, the British playwright Joe Orton wrote "What the Butler Saw," a brilliant deconstruction of farce, which broadened the expressive boundaries of the genre, pushing it toward the...

The Colorist.(Sharp Center for Design at Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto)
October 22, 2007... It must be tough to be a British architect these days if your name isn't Norman Foster or Richard Rogers. The most famous British architects since Christopher Wren are filling the world with so many sleek glass-and-steel buildings that it can...

Nocturnes.(Movie review)
October 22, 2007... As if to prove that some things never change, the best scene in "We Own the Night"--the best scene, indeed, to be found at the movies this year--is a car chase. It centers on a young night-club manager, Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix), who has...

Wakiya.(Yuji Wakiya)(Restaurant review)
October 29, 2007... The hotelier Ian Schrager, looking for a chef for the restaurant in his renovated Gramercy Park Hotel, settled upon Yuji Wakiya, a Japanese chef who trained in China and has successfully adapted Chinese cooking to Japanese tastes. Whether the...

Dynastic Voyage.(The Talk of the Town)(politicians and their families)
October 29, 2007... Shortly after Hillary Rodham Clinton declared her candidacy for President last winter, Roger Cohen, writing in the International Herald Tribune, declared that "a delicate problem confronts her that few people are talking about: almost two...

We Are All Larry David.(The Talk of the Town)
October 29, 2007... In 2004, David Roberts, a second-year clinical-psychology student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had a summer job teaching social skills to a group of schizophrenic patients at a state hospital. He had a particularly...

Underwear Diplomacy.(The Talk of the Town)(smuggled men's wear)
October 29, 2007... The civil-rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith is fond of citing the ironies of the justice system as administered by the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay: cellblocks, for Muslim prisoners, named Romeo and Whiskey; mandatory reporting of...

Stitches in Time.(The Talk of the Town)(tapestry and embroidery)
October 29, 2007... Five years ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition of tapestries from the Renaissance that turned into a spring blockbuster. Its sequel, "Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor," opened last week. Most New Yorkers have,...

Recreational Vehicle.(The Talk of the Town)
October 29, 2007... The sight of Herman Zapp driving his 1928 Graham-Paige automobile up to the New Jersey entrance to the Holland Tunnel one recent Monday afternoon was enough to bring the toll-booth attendant out of his automated fog. "You driving this?" he...

The Mission.
October 29, 2007... On a recent Thursday in Derry, New Hampshire, Mitt Romney, the Republican Presidential candidate, was engaged in a conversation about milkshakes. It was early afternoon at a nineteen-fifties-themed diner called MaryAnn's, and Romney, surrounded...

The Extortionist.(Scott Boras)
October 29, 2007... Scott Boras has season tickets to see the Dodgers, the Angels, the Padres, the Giants, and the A's--a full California sweep. In Los Angeles and Anaheim, he also maintains luxury boxes, but, for the most part, wherever he goes he sits, or...