The New Yorker articles from September 2007

The New Yorker archives from September 2007

Ramen Setagaya.(Japanese restaurant)(Restaurant review)(Brief article)
September 3, 2007... Long known in the U.S. merely as a staple of dorm-room hot plates, ramen has now risen high enough in culinary estimation to have its own battles of braggadocio. When Ramen Setagaya, the first American outpost of a Japanese chain, opened in...

Floor Show.(Watch My Feet)(Sound recording review)(Brief article)
September 3, 2007... Hip-hop fans have endured several years of griping about their genre: a lack of star-quality m.c.s, the rise in simplistic lyrics, and various Chicken Little prophecies of imminent extinction. Dude 'N Nem, a duo from Chicago, have released a...

THE LOBBY.(The Talk of the Town)(The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy)
September 3, 2007... Last year, two distinguished political scientists, John J. Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard, published a thirty-four-thousand-word article online entitled...

Escapism Express.(The Talk of the Town)(John McCain's promotion of his new book)
September 3, 2007... "Politics is all sports metaphors," John McCain said the other day. "It's unfortunately overwhelmed with cliches from sports. It's sickening, almost." Nonetheless, he was in the mood to talk athletics, and he speculated that his campaign for...

Girl-counter.(The Talk of the Town)(Danny Gordon, park visitors)
September 3, 2007... For the past month, the keepers of Bryant Park have employed a system of electronic sensors to count the number of people using the park's public rest rooms. In September, they're going to test the system at a couple of the park's entrances,...

High-water Marks.(The Talk of the Town)(boat racing for companies)
September 3, 2007... Prior to the launch of the annual Hedge Fund Regatta, which took place in New York Harbor one recent mild evening, Michael Fortenbaugh, the commodore of the Manhattan Sailing Club, called the competing skippers together at the marina in Battery...

The Unfriendly Skies.(The Talk of the Town)(airline management)
September 3, 2007... In the summer of 1999, after a series of highly publicized customer-service debacles, the nation's major airlines collectively promised Congress that they would revamp their operations, offering a "service commitment" that they dubbed...

Three Chopsticks.(Short story)
September 3, 2007... When I think back on the conversations that took place after I told people that I was going to Singapore to eat, I'm reminded of the scene in "Little Red Riding Hood" when the title character first encounters the big bad wolf. I play the wolf:...

Rationed.(family relations and dining)
September 3, 2007... In the days of my adolescence, my parents returned from work around 3:45 P.M., and the family dinner was held at four o'clock. The radio was always on for the four-o'clock news, featuring international disasters and domestic socialist...

New York Local.(localism and food)
September 3, 2007... Twelve-thirty on a beautiful summer day, and the chicken committee of the City Chicken Project is meeting at the Garden of Happiness, in the Crotona neighborhood of the Bronx. The chicken committee is devoted to the proliferation of egg-laying...

The Fast Lane.(We Care Spa in Desert Hot Springs, California)
September 3, 2007... Caesar's doctor, it is said, once gave him some good diet advice: "Rise from the table half full." What would the world be like if, knowing what was good for us, we did it, and, knowing what was bad for us, we resisted? Eve might have asked the...

My Life List.(exotic foods)(Essay)
September 3, 2007... My life list is in no way comparable to Sandy Frazier's, and I hope that anyone reading this will not even faintly imagine that I am presuming otherwise as I go on to mention my own modest history with eccentric food. In this field, Sandy is an...

Real Food.(food and family)
September 3, 2007... I was nine years old, sitting stiffly at the dining table in my blue-and-white school uniform, and across from me sat my mother, who had come home from work at the university registry, elegant in her swishy skirt, smelling of Poison perfume and...

Spice Routes.(Claudia Rohen)
September 3, 2007... Some years ago, Claudia Roden was walking down a hall in an apartment house in North London, on her way to a friend's, when she smelled a soup that reminded her of home. Roden was born in Cairo. She has lived in London for more than fifty...

Tasteless.(taste disorder)
September 3, 2007... One of the things they promise when you quit smoking is that food will regain its flavor. Taste buds paved beneath decades of tar will spring back to life, and an entire sense will be restored. I thought it would be like putting on a pair of...

Choke.(artichokes)(Essay)
September 3, 2007... The place was France, the time was the mid-nineteen-seventies, the evening was warm, and the thing on my plate was trying to kill me. That, at least, was the only sane conclusion at which I could possibly arrive. The thing resembled a...

The Jefferson Bottles.(lawsuits brought about by vintage wine bottles)
September 3, 2007... The most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction was offered at Christie's in London, on December 5, 1985. The bottle was handblown dark-green glass and capped with a nubby seal of thick black wax. It had no label, but etched into the...

A Man in the Kitchen.(father's cooking and his marriage)
September 3, 2007... When I was a boy, it was said in my family that my mother, an otherwise respectable cook, had prepared for my father, during the first days of their marriage, a very bad dish. The dish was a hot tuna-andmayonnaise casserole with potato chips as...

Cloud Nine.(Paradiso)(Book review)
September 3, 2007... If you haven't yet read the Divine Comedy--you know who you are--now is the time, because Robert and Jean Hollander have just completed a beautiful translation of the astonishing fourteenth-century poem. The Hollanders' Inferno was published in...

The Life Room.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 3, 2007... Realizing just how dis-satisfied she is with her outwardly flour-ishing life, Eleanor Cahn, a Columbia professor with a loving husband and two thoughtful, spirited sons, becomes entangled--sometimes in deed, sometimes just in thought--with the...

Consumption.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 3, 2007... In the early sixties, the "anachronistic malady" of tuberculosis haunts a small Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic. A child is taken from her family for treatment in Montreal and returns six years later, forever marked as unique by her...

Circling My Mother.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 3, 2007... In this unflinching memoir, Gordon, an acclaimed fiction writer, attempts to "walk around" her mother's life, "to view it from many points--only one of which was her career as my mother." She considers Anna Gordon as an employee (a lawyer's...

Um . . .(Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean )(Brief article)(Book review)
September 3, 2007... Fascinated by the media's "fetishized" portrayal of George W. Bush's malapropisms, Erard sets out to write "a work of applied blunderology" to explain how individuals acquire a particular verbal style, and why it matters when that style doesn't...

Screwed Up.(Californication, Tell Me You Love Me)(Television program review)
September 3, 2007... The portmanteau title of the new Showtime series "Californication," in case you hadn't noticed, contains a reference to a certain act, an act that is performed by two parties, but the act that the show itself calls to mind is the solitary and...

Travelling Man.(Manu Chao)
September 3, 2007... Toward the end of a live show, weary musicians often appeal to the audience with a stock phrase intended to invigorate the proceedings: "How is everyone feeling tonight?" "I can't hear you!" "Cleveland, make some noise!" Manu Chao, a wiry...

Greek to Me.(A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iphigenia 2.0)(Theater review)
September 3, 2007... "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (a Public Theatre production, at the Delacorte, under the direction of Daniel Sullivan) is a sort of burlesque without the nudity, a celebration of the vulgarity endemic to show business and of the performer's need...

Eastern, Western.(The Nanny Diaries, 3:10 to Yuma)(Movie review)
September 3, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File In the 2002 best-seller "The Nanny Diaries," the N.Y.U. graduates Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin, who had spent some time taking care of children on the Upper East Side, pooled their anecdotes, merged...

Marlow & Sons.(Restaurant review)
September 17, 2007... You can be annoyed by Marlow & Sons, if you're in a stickler's mood. The place--a commissary/newsstand/tavern/oyster bar, and, most recently, restaurant--is pure ironic-nostalgic pastiche. Sausages dangle from the ceiling as if to evoke...

The New Don.(Don Quixote)(Movie review)(Brief article)
September 17, 2007... Next week's hottest dance ticket is free, but get there early, because there are fewer than two hundred seats. On Sept. 18 at 6, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, in its Bruno Walter Auditorium (111 Amsterdam Ave.), will show...

Missive to Mitchell.(River: The Joni Letters)(Sound recording review)
September 17, 2007... Herbie Hancock's new album, "River: The Joni Letters" (Verve), pays tribute to a pair of musical geniuses: Joni Mitchell, whose songs make up the album's marrow, and Wayne Shorter, the extraordinary saxophonist and longtime Hancock collaborator...

Offenses.(The Talk of the Town)(Larry Craig's misdemeanor)
September 17, 2007... On the evening of January 21, 1953, Bayard Rustin, a forty-year-old organizer for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a leading organization of religious pacifists, gave a talk, in Pasadena, California, about anti-colonial struggles in West...

Tiny Wheels.(The Talk of the Town)(DaimlerChrysler Smart Fortwo)(Product/service evaluation)
September 17, 2007... A classic problem in Euclidean geometry--how to fit more cars into Manhattan--has been solved. The two-passenger Smart Fortwo, which is manufactured by DaimlerChrysler, is only a hundred and six inches long, or nearly three and a half feet...

Last Call.(The Talk of the Town)(St. Vincent's midtown hospital)
September 17, 2007... A recent block party to commemorate the closing of St. Vincent's midtown hospital (until 2003, it was called St. Clare's), at Fifty-second Street and Ninth Avenue, could have passed for any Labor Day cookout: hamburgers on the grill, beer in...

First at Ninety.(The Talk of the Town)(Millard Kaufman)(Interview)
September 17, 2007... Millard Kaufman, a debut novelist whose book "Bowl of Cherries" comes out this month, has been described by his publisher, McSweeney's, as quite possibly "the best extant epic-comedic writer of his generation." This is high praise, and would...

Social Studies.(live interaction and the influence of 'Facebook' website)
September 17, 2007... Jean Baudrillard, as any philosophy student will tell you, theorized that, in the postmodern world, "the territory no longer precedes the map." In other words, if you are a member of N.Y.U.'s class of 2011, you probably arrived in New York City...

Clintonism Without Bill.(Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton)
September 17, 2007... Hillary Clinton, in her memoir, "Living History," recalled the first words she heard out of Bill Clinton's mouth. It was the fall of 1970 at Yale Law School, and Bill (she thought that he resembled a Viking) was excitedly telling classmates...

The Colic Conundrum.
September 17, 2007... Amanda Chase gave birth to healthy twin girls last September, but by the time the babies were three weeks old they were crying several hours a day. Amanda, a forty-year-old psychiatrist who works in Manhattan, suspected that the twins had...

Planning for Defeat.(Iraq War and the United State's political and military strategy for Iraq)
September 17, 2007... An Iraqi whom I will call Ahmed lives in Saidiya, an area in south Baghdad where, in the nineteen-eighties, the regime of Saddam Hussein built large houses for well-connected Army officers, most of them Sunnis. After the American invasion, in...

Fantasia for Piano.(Joyce Hatto)
September 17, 2007... In the summer of 1989, in Royston, England, a man named William Barrington-Coupe cheerfully received a visitor from Germany: Ernst Lumpe, ahigh-school teacher, fervent music lover, and record collector. For a couple of years, the two men had...

Turning Tricks.(The Backwash Squeeze & Other Improbable Feats: A Newcomer's Journey Into the World of Bridge)(Book review)
September 17, 2007... When I was in ninth grade, back in 1970, we finished our geometry textbook six weeks before the end of the school year and spent the final grading period studying our math teacher's principal extracurricular passion, which was bridge. He gave...

Party Time.(Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1800)
September 17, 2007... The year is 1800. Americans go to the polls to elect a President. Which Founder do you favor? The Federalist incumbent, sixty-four-year-old John Adams, or the Republican challenger, fifty-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who, awkwardly enough,...

School's Out.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 17, 2007... At a middle school in Clerval, the teacher of class 9F jumps to his death, in an apparent suicide. Pierre Hoffman, a thirty-two-year-old melancholic literature instructor, is told to take his place and immediately senses something "unsettling"...

In Her Absence.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 17, 2007... Mario believes that his wife, Blanca, has disappeared and been replaced by an impostor who is almost identical, only more sensual and tender. Thus begins the story of an unlikely marriage. Mario, guided by the lessons of his working-class...

The Complete Poetry.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 17, 2007... The work of the great Peruvian modernist Vallejo (1892-1938) divides neatly into published and unpublished works, a feature that matches the sad trajectory of his life: briefly imprisoned after allegations of political insurrection, he moved,...

In Europe.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 17, 2007... This immense history-cum-travelogue of twentieth-century Europe by a celebrated Dutch journalist proceeds from the belief that Europe is a continent in which "all the different stages of the twentieth century are being lived, or relived,...

Space Cases.(Eastern Promises and In the Shadow of the Moon)(Movie review)
September 17, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File Where does David Cronenberg, born in Canada, belong? From the start, his movies have offered a guided tour of the geography of the body, pointing out local highlights such as the uterus, the stomach, and...

P*ong.(Pichet Ong )(Restaurant review)
September 24, 2007... In haute-cuisine circles, it often seems that food is considered art first, sustenance second; aspiring chef-auteurs create increasingly high-tech dishes, stacking and sculpting ingredients--liquefied, freeze-dried, or otherwise rendered...

General Accounting.(The Talk of the Town)
September 24, 2007... Last December, the Army released a document entitled "Counterinsurgency," an updated field manual designed to guide United States forces to victory in guerrilla wars. "Legitimacy Is the Main Objective" is one heading above its thematic advice....

Paris on Madison.(The Talk of the Town)
September 24, 2007... The Cafe Carlyle, a night club that has been around for more than fifty years and has always managed to actually look like a night club where people who went to night clubs would actually go, has been redone. About a year ago, James McBride,...

For the Love of Jury Duty.(The Talk of the Town)
September 24, 2007... The celebrities assembled last week by the Postal Service to launch a new stamp in honor of jury duty had one thing in common: none had ever served on a jury. "I've been down here, but I was never picked," Bernadette Peters said, as she waited...

Cool for School.(The Talk of the Town)(Blue Man Creativity Center)
September 24, 2007... In November of 1991, at the Astor Place Theatre, Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink put on bald caps and painted themselves blue. Since then, Blue Man Group, as they called themselves, has added dozens of new Men to its ranks and...

The Piracy Paradox.(The Talk of the Town)(imitation clothes)
September 24, 2007... In 1932, a group of American fashion manufacturers found themselves beset by a proliferation of cheap knockoffs. Designs, then as now, were not protected by patents or copyrights, so the manufacturers decided to take direct action to stop the...

Hot Flashes.(clothing)(Buyers guide)
September 24, 2007... One brisk day, my nine-year-old niece and I were standing at my living-room window, observing the outerwear of passersby below. I was trying to persuade her to put on a warmer coat, maybe even a hat, before we ventured onto the street. In the...

The Abyss.(Clive Wearing's amnesia)
September 24, 2007... In March of 1985, Clive Wearing, an eminent English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was struck by a brain infection--a herpes encephalitis--affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory. He was left with a...

The Enthusiast.(Kim Hastreiter)
September 24, 2007... Kim Hastreiter has never been married or had children of her own (she has a terrier, Romeo), but everyone who knows her agrees that Paper, the downtown-life-style magazine she founded with David Hershkovits, in 1984, is a family--a...

Solar Chic.(Solar-Powered Jacket)(Product/service evaluation)
September 24, 2007... History has not been kind to garments that serve a function other than that of keeping their wearers warm or unnaked or adorable. You don't see a lot of people running around in chain mail these days, and the vogue for beer helmets--those...

Viva Donatella!(Donatella Versace)(Interview)
September 24, 2007... "Mai piu! Mai piu!" Donatella Versace, staccato and picking up speed, was yelling into a cell phone that an assistant had just planted in her right palm. Despite the buffed nails, her hands were meaty and brown--when she holds a goblet, they...

Candid Camera.(photography and the Leica camera )
September 24, 2007... Fifty miles north of Frankfurt lies the small German town of Solms. Turn off the main thoroughfare and you find yourself driving down tranquil suburban streets, with detached houses set back from the road, and, on a warm morning in late August,...

The Patriot.(J.M.W. Turner)(Critical essay)
September 24, 2007... Poor old Turner: one minute the critics were singing his praises, the next they were berating him for being senile or infantile, or both. No great painter suffered as much from excesses of adulation and execration, sometimes for the same...

The Indian Clerk.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 24, 2007... This melancholy novel, set in Cambridge around the start of the First World War, focusses on the real-life partnership between the British mathematician G. H. Hardy and his Indian protege Ramanujan. Hardy, astonished by the genius of...

The Worst Intentions.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 24, 2007... "Today it's a trip to be Jewish. Lamented, looked after, exalted." So declares Daniel Sonnino, the disgruntled and dissembling narrator of this wickedly scathing debut novel, a coruscating mixture of satire, family epic, Proustian meditation,...

Dead Certain.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 24, 2007... One of the more disconcerting elements in this portrait of George W. Bush is the real enthusiasm with which the President has, apparently, taken to visiting wounded soldiers. Time and again, he departs from Walter Reed with the sense of another...

Esalen.(Esalen Institute)(Brief article)
September 24, 2007... This history of the Esalen Institute describes how the Big Sur hot springs became a crucible for a brand of secular metaphysics known as "the religion of no religion." Founded in the early nineteen-sixties, Esalen drew eccentrics and artists...

In the Trenches.('The War')(Movie review)
September 24, 2007... You have to work very hard, and take yourself very seriously as the keeper of the keys to America, to make a tedious documentary about the Second World War. But that is what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have done with their fifteen-hour series...

Soldiers.(In the Valley of Elah)(Movie review)
September 24, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File In his long movie career, Tommy Lee Jones has never wasted a word or an emotion. When he's silent, his glinting eyes and suppressed smile suggest a secret held in reserve. When he speaks, at Gatling-gun...