The New Yorker articles from October 2008

The New Yorker archives from October 2008

Money Talks.(The Talk of the Town)
October 6, 2008... In the latest episode of the financial drama "Credit Crunch," the President, the Presidential candidates, and congressional leaders from both parties gather in the White House to agree on a seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout for the very...

Goldman Trust.(The Talk of the Town)(Goldman Sachs)
October 6, 2008... Last Thursday evening, around the time the Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs chief executive Henry Paulson was down on one knee, begging the congressional leadership not to scuttle his seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout plan, Lloyd...

Alaskan Tropic.(The Talk of the Town)
October 6, 2008... Of the many things revealed about the Alaska governor Sarah Palin since she became John McCain's running mate last month, one of the most curious is the fact, reported two weeks ago, that she had a tanning bed installed in the state mansion in...

"IN" Crowd.(The Talk of the Town)(Clinton Global Initiative)
October 6, 2008... "I have a theory that life is junior high," Tom Brokaw said last week, roaming the stage of the Metropolitan Ballroom at the Sheraton. "Everybody's trying to get to the right tables, hang out with the right crowd, say the right things, and...

Ambassador Liz.(The Talk of the Town)(Liz Smith)(Interview)
October 6, 2008... Wall Street, the spiritual (if not, these days, the actual) home of finance, and the Upper East Side, where many financiers live, maintain a special relationship, perhaps akin to that of Britain and America, or--more recently--to that of...

The Appalachian Problem.(Virginia on Barack Obama)
October 6, 2008... Barack Obama's September 9th trip to Lebanon, Virginia, in the southwestern hill country, came at a moment of deep unease among Democrats. John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, eleven days earlier, had yielded rich...

The Artist of the Portrait.(Elizabeth Peyton)(Interview)
October 6, 2008... My hindsight is as good as yours, but I'm still trying to figure out how Elizabeth Peyton launched her career with an exhibition of idealized figurative portrait drawings of Napoleon Bonaparte; Ludwig II, King of Bavaria; the King of Thailand;...

The Stolen Forests.
October 6, 2008... The town of Suifenhe, a former Russian imperial outpost on the Trans-Siberian Railway, has belonged to China since the nineteen-forties, and occupies a broad valley in northern Manchuria. From a distance, its homes and factories appear to cling...

The Timbaland Era.(sound recording album 'Scream')(Sound recording review)
October 6, 2008... At first, in the late eighties, he was DJ Timmy Tim--a kid named Timothy Mosley, from Virginia Beach, who liked creating beats in his bedroom. Then, in the nineties, he renamed himself Timbaland and began the stretch of work that has made him,...

Right Again.
October 6, 2008... It is a hard thing, being right about everything all the time. Nobody likes a know-it-all, and we wait for the moment when the know-it-all is wrong to insist that he never really knew anything in the first place. The know-it-all, far from...

The Given Day.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 6, 2008... Lehane, whose previous novels include "Mystic River" and "Gone, Baby, Gone," sets his latest at the end of the First World War, as waves of immigration, uneasy race relations, and agitation over labor issues culminate in a police strike in...

The Good Thief.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 6, 2008... This striking debut novel is an homage to old-fashioned boy's-own adventure stories, and unfolds like a Robert Louis Stevenson tale retold amid the hardscrabble squalor of Colonial New England. The sheer strangeness of the story is beguiling: a...

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 6, 2008... Facundo Bacardi, who founded the eponymous rum company in 1862, came to Cuba from Spain as a teen-ager. By the turn of the century, as Gjelten lucidly recounts, the distilling operation that Facundo had begun in a shed was among the brands most...

Unpacking the Boxes.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 6, 2008... Most memoirs begin with a birth, but Hall's starts with another sort of becoming: "At fourteen I decided to spend my life writing poetry, which is what I have done." Soon Hall moves from suburban Connecticut, where "nothing happened," to...

God in the Fun Machine.("Passion Play" and "Equus")(Theater review)
October 6, 2008... In 1997, as the playwright Sarah Ruhl was on her way to see the first work of hers to be produced, she was knocked unconscious in a car accident. Nonetheless, she managed to get to the show--two short plays that now, with the addition of a...

Edge of Dark.(Blindness)(Movie review)
October 6, 2008... Things go awry in "Blindness" from the start. In a busy, unnamed city, a traffic light changes to green, but one car fails to move. "I'm blind," the driver, a Japanese guy, cries, pawing at his eyes. In the ensuing melee--and this sets the tone...

The Choice.(The Talk of the Town)
October 13, 2008... Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching--that's the quadrennial cliche, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had...

The Hardest Vote.
October 13, 2008... Barbie Snodgrass had agreed to meet me at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, on a strip of fast-food restaurants and auto shops west of downtown Columbus, Ohio, but she didn't have much time to talk. Her shift as a receptionist at a medical...

Verbage.
October 13, 2008... In recent elections, the Republican hate word has been "liberal," or "Massachusetts," or "Gore." In this election, it has increasingly been "words." Barack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words...

Exile on Main Street.(Crawford, Texas)
October 13, 2008... Keith Lynch lives three miles down the road from President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, and, like many of his neighbors, he comes from a family that has worked cattle on this land for more than a century. His great-grandfather Will Simpson...

Rock, Paper, Scissors.
October 13, 2008... On the morning of November 2, 1859--Election Day--George Kyle, a merchant with the Baltimore firm of Dinsmore & Kyle, left his house with a bundle of ballots tucked under his arm. Kyle was a Democrat. As he neared the polls in the city's...

Worlds Apart.
October 13, 2008... When John Kerry came to the stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he saluted smartly and said he was reporting for duty. Kerry was a decorated Vietnam veteran and a senator with many years of foreignpolicy experience. The Bush...

The Oracle.(Biography)
October 13, 2008... Arianna Huffington's best-selling biographies of Maria Callas (1981) and Pablo Picasso (1988) both open with anecdotes intended to illuminate an essential truth about the subject's fate. Were she to write her own life, Huffington said not long...

Set in Stone.
October 13, 2008... At the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C., on May 30, 1922, remarks by Robert Moton, the principal of the Tuskegee Institute, received special attention from the "colored" section of the audience. The federal commission...

The Snowball.(The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life )(Brief article)(Book review)
October 13, 2008... This authorized biography of Warren Buffett, based on thousands of hours of interviews, appears just a week after Buffett took a decisive role in the current financial crisis, investing some five billion dollars in Goldman Sachs--a deal that...

Capitol Men.(Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First BlackCongressmen)(Brief article)(Book review)
October 13, 2008... During Reconstruction, sixteen black men served as congressmen. They have been scorned as bumbling, corrupt, or ineffectual--former field hands in shiny suits--and even the growing recognition, in recent years, of the shamefulness of the...

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State.(Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do )(Brief article)(Book review)
October 13, 2008... Attempting to explain "why Americans vote the way they do," Gelman and a group of fellow political scientists crunch numbers and draw graphs, arriving at a picture that refutes the influential one drawn by Thomas Frank, in "What's the Matter...

The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 13, 2008... The journal of the Quaker mystic and abolitionist John Woolman has never been out of print since 1774, when it was first published. Along with Woolman's pamphlets and speeches, the journal was instrumental in persuading the Society of Friends...

Supersonic.(Karlheinz Stockhausen)
October 13, 2008... For a few years in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German avant-garde composer, nearly achieved the status of a pop icon. Each new piece of his attracted crowds of critics, struggling to convey the...

Geography of Regret.(The Seagull)
October 13, 2008... When Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" first opened in St. Petersburg, in October, 1896, the hubbub of catcalls was so loud that the actors had trouble hearing themselves. Recounting the play's sensational failure--the humiliated author stopped...

Good Fights.(Body of Lies)(Movie review)
October 13, 2008... There's a startling moment in "Body of Lies," the potent new thriller directed by Ridley Scott--a moment that not only crystallizes what the movie is about but shrewdly demonstrates the ironies of asymmetrical warfare in the age of terror. The...

Odds and Ends.(Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased, 1989-2006)
October 20, 2008... Bob Dylan's new collection of outtakes and rarities, "Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased, 1989-2006" (Sony), is an object lesson in the oddness of modern record distribution. In addition to the basic two-disk version, which has twenty-seven...

Beyond The Palin.(The Talk of the Town)(Sarah Palin)
October 20, 2008... Format isn't everything. John McCain's campaign specialty has been the "town hall," where the candidate wanders the stage, microphone in hand, answering questions from ordinary citizens and bantering with them. So his staff was happy that his...

Freeze!(The Talk of the Town)(credit markets)
October 20, 2008... At ten o'clock Wednesday night, the banker lingered in his office. He was a top-ranking executive at a major global financial institution (he did not want to be identified, because, well, he did not want to be identified), and he had been at...

Campaign '08 Abroad.(The Talk of the Town)
October 20, 2008... Fukui is a prefecture divided. On the one hand, it is home to Obama, a rustic fishing village on the Sea of Japan. (Obama means "little beach.") On the other, its capital city--two hours from Obama on the commuter train--is a Republican...

New Kid.(The Talk of the Town)
October 20, 2008... Lincoln Center Theatre has never had a rapper on its boards, but this month, as part of a new program to encourage emerging playwrights, it is taking under its wing--and stashing twenty blocks south, at its new two-hundred-seat Duke--the...

The Trust Crunch.(The Talk of the Town)
October 20, 2008... In December, 1912, J. P. Morgan testified before Congress in the so-called Money Trust hearings. Asked to explain how he decided whether to make a loan or investment, he replied, "The first thing is character." His questioner skeptically...

Late Bloomers.
October 20, 2008... Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was...

A Desert Encounter.(Short story)
October 20, 2008... In our fifth winter in the Southwest, my wife discovered that her gardening skills could be turned to xerophilous plants. All afternoon, she had served as my assistant and directress in pruning some ocotillo, and was enough exhilarated by the...

Biden'S Brief.(Biden, Joe)
October 20, 2008... On a recent afternoon, Senator Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate for Vice-President, could be found inside a tent, pitched beside a pond in Claude Moore Park, in northern Virginia. His Secret Service agents, who were dispersed among the...

The Omen.
October 20, 2008... On Monday, January 21, 2008, concerns about deteriorating economic conditions in the United States caused a precipitous fall in the Asian markets. Investors in Hong Kong and Tokyo besieged brokerage firms. Markets in the United States happened...

Zen Master.
October 20, 2008... Gary Snyder, the Zen poet, lives on a hundred backcountry acres in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, meditates mornings, and thanks his food before he eats it, clapping his hands together and saying "Itadakimasu," which is Japanese for "Thank...

Bound for Glory.(presidential biographies)(Essay)
October 20, 2008... Biographers of Andrew Jackson used to be cursed. On January 8, 1815, the General led American forces in a stunning defeat of an invading British Army, winning the Battle of New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812. With a political career in...

Thumbspeak.(text messaging )
October 20, 2008... Is texting bringing us closer to the end of life as we currently tolerate it? Enough people have suggested that it is to have inspired David Crystal to produce "Txtng: The Gr8 Db8" (Oxford; $19.95). "I don't think I have ever come across a...

Place Settings.(Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners)(Book review)
October 20, 2008... New York's moneyed class has always loved to read about itself. In the early years of the twentieth century, it particularly loved to do so in a magazine called Town Topics: The Journal of Society. Far and away the weekly's most popular...

The English Major.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 20, 2008... The protagonist of this wistfully comic novel is a sixty-year-old English teacher turned farmer, whose wife has left him for another man, and who takes to the road in the quixotic pursuit of renaming all the birds and all the states. Along the...

The House at Sugar Beach.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 20, 2008... Cooper is a descendant of the Congo People--the elite who once governed Liberia--and can trace her ancestry to the freed American slaves who colonized the country in the eighteen-hundreds. In 1980, she and her family fled Monrovia following a...

Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 20, 2008... In 1944, Cyril Connolly, having just passed his fortieth birthday and in a melancholy mood, published "The Unquiet Grave," a gloriously strange book of fragments, quotations, epigrams, impressions, and wartime journal entries--a kind of...

Fire and Ice.(Per Petterson's novels)
October 20, 2008... On April 7, 1990, the ferryboat Scandinavian Star sailed from Oslo toward Frederikshavn, in the northern part of Denmark, carrying nearly five hundred passengers. The ship caught fire, and more than a hundred and fifty people perished. Four of...

Second Look.(Christopher Wheeldon )
October 20, 2008... No ballet company in the United States is being watched more closely right now than Morphoses, the troupe that Christopher Wheeldon founded last year. Wheeldon was the first really interesting choreographer to turn up in American ballet after...

Saints and Sinners.(A Man for All Seasons)(Theater review)
October 20, 2008... In Robert Bolt's 1960 hit "A Man for All Seasons" (now in a Roundabout Theatre Company revival, at the American Airlines, under the direction of Doug Hughes), Cardinal Wolsey (Dakin Matthews) asks Sir Thomas More (Frank Langella) a question...

Inside Jobs.(Movie review)
October 20, 2008... There have been countless occasions on which a husband and wife have acted together onscreen. A pair of mating movie directors, however, is altogether a more exotic find, and, as for both having a film released in the same month, it's almost...

Apiary.(Restaurant review)
October 27, 2008... In the East Village, a neighborhood known for its all-you-can-eat sushi and alarming preponderance of Irish sports bars, post-collegiate insouciance permeates the dining scene. Even the area's more ambitious restaurants, which are invariably of...

Overtaxed.(The Talk of the Town)
October 27, 2008... The rise and fall of Joe the Plumber as a symbol of the American self-made man's resistance to progressive taxation began on October 12th, outside Toledo, Ohio. As Senator Barack Obama campaigned for the Presidency in a neighborhood of modest...

Some Kind Of Show.(The Talk of the Town)
October 27, 2008... Ralph Nader came to Cooper Union last week, railing against the corporate "fat cats" and their political allies for continuing to subvert democracy with self-serving back-room deals. "They're going to throw this city into a very serious...

Been There.(The Talk of the Town)
October 27, 2008... If there is a typical way to look after you lose two billion seven hundred million dollars in the stock market, that's pretty much the expression on Hank Greenberg's face these days. Greenberg served for thirty-seven years as the chief...

Shtarkers.(The Talk of the Town)(Defiance)(Movie review)
October 27, 2008... On a recent Sunday, members of an extended Jewish clan, most of them Brooklyn-born, gathered at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in lower Manhattan, to watch a movie about their family. The movie was not a compilation of old wedding films or...

Teen Spirit.(The Talk of the Town)(13)(Theater review)
October 27, 2008... The other Friday evening, a couple of Broadway stars were on the second floor of Sardi's ordering pre-curtain cocktails. "I'll have a virgin strawberry Daiquiri," the leading lady was saying. "A virgin pina colada?" the leading man said....

The Third Man.(Bob Barr)
October 27, 2008... One afternoon in late August, Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party's candidate for President, stood in a greenroom at Stephen Colbert's television studio staring at a closed-circuit monitor. Barr, who was about to appear on "The Colbert Report," was...

The Destroyer.(Robert Mugabe)
October 27, 2008... Nine hundred years ago, at a site on a high plateau north of the Limpopo River called Great Zimbabwe, Shona kings built stone palaces where they lived in splendid isolation from their subjects, with absolute authority over their means to...

Method Man.(Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando)(Book review)
October 27, 2008... In the midst of Broadway's "victory season," in March, 1946, an outraged ad denouncing the critics appeared in the Times. Signed by the production team of Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman, the ad failed to save their drama about returning vets,...

Dutch Master.(Han van Meegeren)
October 27, 2008... The case of Han van Meegeren, the boldest modern forger of Old Masters (as far as we know), is a grand yarn of twisty deceit, involving prestigious dupes and scads of money, with a sensational trial at the finish. It even has a serious side....

George, Being George (George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals--and a Few Unappreciative Observers).(Brief article)(Book review)
October 27, 2008... No wonder Philip Roth, in his novel "Exit Ghost," made an elegiac set-piece of the death, at seventy-six, in 2003, of George Plimpton--the aristocratic, Zelig-like, heron-resembling founder and editor of the Paris Review, fearless amateur jock,...

Factory Girls.(Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China )(Brief article)(Book review)
October 27, 2008... China is in the midst of history's largest human migration, a hundred and thirty million of its citizens having left their home villages in search of urban employment. Chang, an American of Chinese descent, explores the migrant experience and...

Sea of Poppies.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 27, 2008... Ghosh's best and most ambitious work yet is an adventure story set in nineteenth-century Calcutta against the backdrop of the Opium Wars. On the Ibis, a ship engaged in transporting opium across the Bay of Bengal, varied life stories converge....

Godchildren.(Brief article)(Book review)
October 27, 2008... This wickedly enjoyable novel about a venal British billionaire and his godchildren shows a moribund class society being rapidly dismantled by global wealth. The property and shipping tycoon Marcus Brand's six godchildren include a Scottish...

Death Takes a Holiday.(Death with Interruptions)(Book review)
October 27, 2008... The philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote a paper, "The Makropulos Case," in which he argued that eternal life would be so tedious that no one could bear it. According to Williams, the constancy that defines an eternal self would entail an...

False Dawn.(Doctor Atomic)(Theater review)
October 27, 2008... I first heard John Adams's "Doctor Atomic"--an opera set in the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear test, on July 16, 1945--while driving toward the patch of New Mexico desert where the detonation took place. In the course of...

Laughing Matters.(Saturday Night Live)(Television program review)
October 27, 2008... "Saturday Night Live" got a gift from Senator John McCain on August 29th, when he selected as his running mate Governor Sarah Palin: she looked like a Tina Fey character come to life. Sure enough, the show's thirty-fourth-season premiere, on...

Grand Illusions.(Arthur Miller )
October 27, 2008... Arthur Miller was a fundamentally cold and moralistic writer, full of self-reproach. During his long career, the Manhattan-born playwright used his characters--a ruined salesman, a closeted dockworker, a crooked defense manufacturer, and other...

Troubled Sons.(W and Changeling)(Movie review)
October 27, 2008... Oliver Stone's "W.," a dramatized portrait of a hollow shell named George Bush, is a discomforting experience for a lot of reasons, of which the most important, perhaps, is that Stone brings us in close to the President without giving us any...