The New Yorker articles from September 2006

The New Yorker archives from September 2006

TABLES FOR TWO.(Craftsteak)(Restaurant review)
September 4, 2006... CRAFTSTEAK -- 85 Tenth Ave., at 15th St. (212-400-6699)--During the prime dinner hour at this West Chelsea steak house, the large round booths fill up with groups of men, the collars of their dress shirts carefully loosened. The younger ones...

POP NOTES.
September 4, 2006... THEY LOVE THE EIGHTIES -- For almost a decade, musicians have been borrowing things from the nineteen-eighties: haircuts, synthesizers, shoes. But, until now, acts haven't borrowed that many songs. In 2004, a French band called Nouvelle...

NO MERCY.(The Talk of the Town)(School discipline)
September 4, 2006... In 1925, a young American physicist was doing graduate work at Cambridge University, in England. He was depressed. He was fighting with his mother and had just broken up with his girlfriend. His strength was in theoretical physics, but he was...

POACHED.(The Talk of the Town)(Paul Stuart)
September 4, 2006... A decent midtown lunch spot--not the expense-account sort but a good, clean sandwich shop, with a fresh salad bar, and maybe some seafood tom yum, if that's your thing--can be hard to come by. Once you find one, you tend to stick with it. You...

THIS OLD HOUSE.(The Talk of the Town)(Schenck house )
September 4, 2006... In 1676 or so, a Dutch settler named Jan Martense Schenck built a house on the south shore of Long Island, in an area that in those days consisted mainly of sweeping meadows, tidal wetlands, and sand dunes, and which today is part of the Mill...

CRASHING QUEENS.(The Talk of the Town)(Queens, New York)(County overview)
September 4, 2006... Most event planners, when they're throwing a party to publicize something, follow a few unspoken rules. These usually preclude the scheduling of such an event for a Saturday night, in summer, in Queens. But, supposing that there is some reason...

DEALER'S CHOICE.(The Talk of the Town)(companies preferring automobile dealers for sales)
September 4, 2006... When General Motors was the biggest and most profitable auto manufacturer in the world, its strategy was to provide "a car for every purse and purpose." G.M. offered a panoply of distinctive brands, each targeted at a particular category of...

BIG MEN ON CAMPUS.(Richard H. Brodhead)
September 4, 2006... In the summer of 2003, a search committee from Duke University set out to find a successor to its departing president, Nannerl Keohane, and decided upon the dean of Yale College, Richard H. Brodhead. Duke had long striven for a place among the...

THE SEARCHERS.(Lucien Lucius Nunn)(Biography)
September 4, 2006... L.L. Nunn, at just over five feet, was several inches shorter than his hero, Napoleon. He had a shrill voice, a stiff-collared Victorian habit of dress, and an energetic manner, in spite of a persistent case of tuberculosis that frequently...

THE LUNCHROOM REBELLION.(Berkeley public schools, California)
September 4, 2006... The lunch ladies of my elementary-school memories in Oklahoma are a stout, sweet-tempered breed. They wear cat's-eye glasses and have beauty-shop perms, with hairnets drawn taut across their foreheads. They have gray uniforms and dishwater...

LEARNING THE SCORE.
September 4, 2006... Not long ago, I went out to Malcolm X Shabazz High School, in Newark, New Jersey, to meet Hassan Ralph Williams, the director of the marching band. Upon arriving, I found the corridors empty; the guard at the door pointed me toward the band...

THE BABY LAB.(work of Elizabeth Spelke, a cognitive psychologist)
September 4, 2006... On weekday mornings at nine o'clock, at Harvard University's Laboratory for Developmental Studies, the babies start arriving in a long procession, looking like young pashas in their luxurious, oversized strollers. Researchers rush out to greet...

DEERFIELD IN THE DESERT.
September 4, 2006... At Deerfield Academy, an elite boarding school in the hills of western Massachusetts, sneaking out of a dormitory at night is considered a relatively mild form of malfeasance. It doesn't carry the dishonor or the opprobrium of cheating or...

BOB ON BOB.(Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews)
September 4, 2006... "Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews"--I'm not sure those are words that make the heart beat faster. "Dylan nil a me alienum puto," as Terence put it (or would have put it, if he had lived long enough): nothing having to do with Dylan can be...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Iliad)(The Devil's Feather)(Strangers in the House)(Sex Collectors)(Book review)
September 4, 2006... An Iliad, by Alessandro Baricco, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Knopf; $21). This retelling of the Homeric epic is defiantly modern: it excises the gods and supplants the omniscient narrator with alternating voices, as one...

WAGON TRAIN.(Meryl Streep's portrayal of a Holocaust survivor )
September 4, 2006... In 1982, when the city was plastered with posters advertising Meryl Streep's Oscar-winning portrayal of a Holocaust survivor in Alan J. Pakula's "Sophie's Choice," the images made one think less of poor doomed Sophie than of another performer...

HOT PROPERTIES.
September 4, 2006... Something about upscale houses in Los Angeles, all those black leather sofas and mirrors, always makes the visitor suspect that a porn video is being shot upstairs. "Million Dollar Listing," Bravo's six-episode reality show about real-estate...

SEX SYMBOLS.(Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake )
September 4, 2006... Two ideas drive much of Christina Aguilera's new double album, "Back to Basics": one is that, as she states in the first song, she wants to "understand what made the soul singers and the blues figures that inspired a higher generation, the jazz...

DISASTERS.(When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee's documentary about Hurricane Katrina)
September 4, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File In the course of Spike Lee's enormous documentary about Hurricane Katrina and the city of New Orleans, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," the director shows us a curious funeral on the city's...

TABLES FOR TWO.
September 11, 2006... THE LITTLE OWL -- 90 Bedford St., at Grove St. (212-741-4695)--" 'Scuse me, is this the Red Owl?" a woman said to a couple sitting on a bench in front of a snug Village restaurant. It was the Little Owl, the inaugural venture from Joey...

DVD NOTES.
September 11, 2006... HILL ON THE PLAINS -- In the making-of documentary attached to the Western epic "Broken Trail" (Sony), Walter Hill, the co-producer and director of this three-hour 2006 AMC miniseries, defines the genre in terms of men working things out for...

LOST LOVE.(The Talk of the Town)
September 11, 2006... After the calamity that glided down upon us out of a clear blue sky on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001--five short years ago, five long years ago--a single source of solace emerged amid the dread and grief: a great upwelling of...

222.(The Talk of the Town)
September 11, 2006... It took hundred-and-twenty-five-mile-an-hour winds and a thirty-four-foot storm surge eight hours, last year, to destroy Dot Phillips's house. But putting it back together again is taking computer models, thousand-mile plane trips, and a team...

PIPE CLEANER.(The Talk of the Town)
September 11, 2006... On a recent Friday afternoon, Anthony Meloni was in his sun-filled workshop in Port Chester, New York, forty-five minutes north of Manhattan, cleaning a pipe organ. More precisely, he was supervising the cleaning. He had recently broken his...

OLD COUNTRY.(The Talk of the Town)
September 11, 2006... There's no knowing what place September 11th will occupy in our minds in another five or ten years, but the surprise just now is that so many of its persistent, recircling images are about age. How could it be, one still asks, that no Pentagon...

OSAMA'S BANK ACCOUNT.(The Talk of the Town)
September 11, 2006... In the federal courthouse in Manhattan, on Foley Square, a pyre of legal briefs is accumulating in the chambers of Judge Richard Casey, who has been assigned to make sense of a large number of lawsuits consolidated as "In re Terrorist Attacks...

JUNIOR.
September 11, 2006... For nearly a decade, a former Al Qaeda operative named Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl has been living in the United States government's witness-protection program, under an assumed identity. A Sudanese citizen and a onetime confidant of Osama bin Laden's,...

THE FORGOTTEN WAR.
September 11, 2006... Four skittish and dishevelled members of a Hamas rocket team threaded their way down a pitted alley in Beit Hanoun, a destitute town in northernmost Gaza. They stayed close to the walls, searching the sky for the pilotless, missile-firing...

THE MASTER PLAN.
September 11, 2006... Even as members of Al Qaeda watched in exultation while the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon burned on September 11, 2001, they realized that the pendulum of catastrophe was swinging in their direction. Osama bin Laden later boasted that he...

THE MODERATE MARTYR.
September 11, 2006... In 1967, a law student at the University of Khartoum named Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim was looking for a way to spend a summer evening in his home town, a railway junction on the banks of the Nile in northern Sudan. No good movies were showing at...

SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY.
September 11, 2006... On January 30, 1937, a letter to the New Statesman and Nation announced that Darwin, Marx, and Freud had a successor--or, more accurately, successors. "Mass-Observation develops out of anthropology, psychology, and the sciences which study...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
September 11, 2006... The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud (Knopf; $25). In this witty examination of New York's chattering classes, which opens in the spring of 2001, the despot of the title is Murray Thwaite, a famous journalist who made his name in the...

HEAVEN'S GATE.
September 11, 2006... Alice McDermott's excellent novels "Charming Billy" and "At Weddings and Wakes" had to do with Irish-Americans living modest lives in Queens and on Long Island--this is the world McDermott comes from--and her new novel, "After This" (Farrar,...

NEW AND OLD.
September 11, 2006... "Out of Time," the third annual reinstallation of the rehoused Museum of Modern Art's capacious contemporary galleries, is a mixed bag of works from the past four decades, with a trenchant and, considering MOMA's history, somewhat melancholy...

SUPERMEN.
September 11, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File What will be our lasting image of Superman, in a year that marked his return? Will it be Brandon Routh, jutting his jaw at a world that craves salvation? Or will it be Ben Affleck, falling like a sack of...

TABLES FOR TWO.
September 18, 2006... CHINATOWN BRASSERIE -- 380 Lafayette St., at Great Jones St. (212-533-7000)--The cavernous NoHo space formerly occupied by Time Cafe now drips with chinoiserie: fringed lanterns, brocade panelling, lacquered everything. Chinatown Brasserie, the...

PRISONERS.(The Talk of the Town)
September 18, 2006... If only political jujitsu were a useful weapon in the war on terror, the President's speech last Wednesday, in the East Room of the White House, would have struck a powerful blow on behalf of what he called "the cause of humanity, against those...

FOOD FIGHT.(The Talk of the Town)
September 18, 2006... Consider the doughnut: workingman's food, light to the touch but heavy in the gut, beloved by Homer Simpson, cops, and Canadians. No snack sneers so winningly at pretension. Mayor Bloomberg, at both of his City Hall inaugurals, demonstrated his...

STOKED.(The Talk of the Town)
September 18, 2006... Sachia, a reedy fifteen-year-old from the Lower East Side, is a man of many passions: Nike Air Jordans, limited-edition baseball hats, snowboarding. Until recently, learning to surf was decidedly not among them ("I like hot water, not cold," he...

MRS. B.H.L.(The Talk of the Town)
September 18, 2006... Arielle Dombasle, a movie actress who is half of France's most famous couple--her husband is Bernard-Henri Levy, the dashing philosopher-journalist and timber-fortune heir--has hitherto been best known in this country for her appearance, in...

FAMILY TREE.(The Talk of the Town)
September 18, 2006... The head of the only genuine royal monarchy in North or South America is the fifty-two-year-old Brazilian prince, Dom Joao Henrique Maria Gabriel Gonzaga de Orleans e Braganca. He makes his living by developing tourist resorts and also by...

MIND GAMES.
September 18, 2006... Like many people who have accumulated some savings, I invest in the stock market. Most of my retirement money is invested in mutual funds, but now and again I also buy individual stocks. My holdings include the oil company Royal Dutch Shell,...

IN THE WAITING ROOM.
September 18, 2006... Six months after moving to Paris, I gave up on French school and decided to take the easy way out. All I ever said was "Could you repeat that?" And for what? I rarely understood things the second time around, and when I did it was usually...

THE WANDERER.
September 18, 2006... On a clear spring afternoon in Berlin, Bill and Chelsea Clinton rode to the World Cup final in the front seats of a bus. The Olympic Stadium--a severe Greco-Roman construction with Fascist flourishes and corporate logos--was built for the 1936...

HER DEBUT.
September 18, 2006... It's hard to say which of Katie Couric's news broadcasts last week was the most surprising. Was it her first one, on Tuesday, which she delivered live from the Burning Man festival? Or Wednesday's installment, which began with her swooping into...

WAR AND REMEMBRANCE.
September 18, 2006... "History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet," the narrator in Gunter Grass's most recent novel, "Crabwalk," says. "We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising." Now the author, a...

HUGGER-MUGGER.
September 18, 2006... Hugger-mugger is part of life, especially under modern political conditions. For decades, it had its capital in the Kremlin and the inner councils of Beijing; now it gathers thickly but elusively in the alleys of Baghdad and the mountains of...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
September 18, 2006... Minor Classics Reading Writing, by Julien Gracq, translated from the French by Jeanine Herman (Turtle Point; $17.50). Greatly respected for his early novels and criticism, Gracq seems to have done his utmost to eschew conventional acclaim....

INESCAPABLE PASTS.
September 18, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File New York, rising high, eliminates its past with a wrecking ball; Los Angeles, spreading out, broods over its history until it rots. Events from decades ago--a famous murder, a Hollywood scandal, a corrupt...

POP NOTES.
September 25, 2006... FALL PREVIEW MOVIES PREVIEW THEATRE PREVIEW NIGHT LIFE PREVIEW CLASSICAL PREVIEW ART PREVIEW ABOVE AND BEYOND PREVIEW DANCE PREVIEW CRAZY FROM LOVE -- Reading art as autobiography is a dicey business, but...

CLASSICAL NOTES.
September 25, 2006... FALL PREVIEW MOVIES PREVIEW THEATRE PREVIEW NIGHT LIFE PREVIEW CLASSICAL PREVIEW ART PREVIEW ABOVE AND BEYOND PREVIEW DANCE PREVIEW AFTER THE DELUGE -- As the First World War raged around him, the Viennese...

UNTRANSFORMED.(The Talk of the Town)
September 25, 2006... A distribution transformer, much, say, like an elevator, is easy to ignore until it malfunctions. Its unromantic job, in most cases, is to take the high-voltage current transmitted over the grid and convert it--or step it down--to the...

SWAMI.(The Talk of the Town)
September 25, 2006... Ever since Kofi Annan took on the role of Secretary-General of the United Nations, ten years ago, the opening day of the General Assembly has been accompanied by an interfaith prayer service at St. Bartholomew's Church, on Park Avenue. And...

TRU, TWO.(The Talk of the Town)
September 25, 2006... In the summer of 2003, after two years of research and writing, Douglas McGrath finished "Infamous," his screenplay based on the life of Truman Capote. As he had promised to do, he called his friend Bingham Ray, who was the executive on his...

AIR KISS.(The Talk of the Town)
September 25, 2006... American Airlines Flight 45--departing Charles de Gaulle at 10:40 A.M., arriving J.F.K. at one each afternoon--is a tourist's delight: timed just right to avoid late checkout, leaving time for one last Kir Royale at Les Deux Magots. On August...

WAGERS OF SIN.(The Talk of the Town)
September 25, 2006... It's fall, and an American's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of betting on the N.F.L. It is, of course, illegal to bet on sports in the U.S., unless you're in Nevada, but in the past five years many Americans have started using the Internet to...

COOL ENOUGH FOR SCHOOL.
September 25, 2006... I think I speak for everyone, with the possible exception of the home- schooled, when I say that September, thanks to its leadoff position in the academic calendar, is one fraught month. This is true whether you are in first grade, twelfth...

BAG LADY.
September 25, 2006... I had a handbag epiphany recently at a literary luncheon in Milan. The occasion was a book launch for Isabel Allende, at a grand apartment behind La Scala, and the high-ceilinged rooms lined with paintings were crammed with writers, a few...

RAG TIME.
September 25, 2006... I'll admit that I lost interest in Frenchy's for a number of years, once we got the scarecrow outfitted. In 1972, our family had started spending summers in a fishing village on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, and the scarecrow, which our...

THE HUNTRESS.
September 25, 2006... There was a time in the nineteen-seventies when the American woman, many millions of her, wore, tucked into a private spot under the soft fabric of her collar, brushing against the rounded, protruding spinal bone at the nape of her neck, the...

DRESSED FOR EXCESS.
September 25, 2006... Marie Antoinette, the ex-Queen of France, was thirty-seven when she was taken from her cell in the Conciergerie, the fourteenth-century fortress on the Ile de la Cite, and paraded in an open oxcart to the scaffold in the Place de la Revolution,...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
September 25, 2006... Only Revolutions, by Mark Z. Danielewski (Pantheon; $26). In his new novel, the author of "House of Leaves" is up to his old tricks--multicolored and upside-down text--and some flabbergasting new ones, including a double-ended structure that...

THE WAR ROOM.
September 25, 2006... Just as Hollywood has its star paradigms--Scarlett Johansson, for instance, is a direct descendant of Veronica Lake--the contemporary American theatre offers audiences a comfortable degree of familiarity. Would Richard Greenberg's class- and...

FERVOR.
September 25, 2006... On the day before the Fourth of July, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died of complications from breast cancer, at the age of fifty-two. News of her passing aroused little interest outside the classical-music world, since she was...

BACKSTAGE ANGST.
September 25, 2006... Aaron Sorkin must love television--only someone who loves it could savage the medium so. The first episode of his unfailingly enjoyable NBC drama, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," about the backstage maneuverings at a late-night comedy show,...

DREAM ON.
September 25, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Of the many things not to expect from Michel Gondry--the man behind "Human Nature" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"--the most obvious is a clear linear narrative. Given that he is unable, or at...

I REMEMBER MOMA.
September 25, 2006... In the late nineteen-forties, when I was just out of college and living in Manhattan for the first time, one of the reasons for being here was the theatre. Many of my friends went to ten or more shows a season, and when we got together we...