The New Yorker articles from September 2008

The New Yorker archives from September 2008

Autumn Sounds.(sound recording releases)
September 1, 2008... Tricky, "Knowle West Boy" (Domino): The king of moody British trip-hop returns with an album that veers between woozy autobiography and dark, stabbing rock (Sept. 9). George Clinton and the Gangstas of Love, "Radio Friendly" (Shanachie):...

Attack-dog Days.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama and The Obama Nation)
September 1, 2008... The week before the week before this week's scheduled gathering of the delegates and their media camp followers in Denver, the nominee-presumptive of the Democratic Party did something that is strongly recommended, and ought to be mandatory,...

Test Drive.(The Talk of the Town)
September 1, 2008... Congestion pricing or not, the Bloomberg administration is impressively committed to altering the flow of traffic through the center city. Such is its determination, in fact, that it has now reduced Broadway, the original Manhattan highway, to...

Lost and Found.(The Talk of the Town)(Kehinde Wiley )
September 1, 2008... The painter Kehinde Wiley first travelled to Nigeria in 1997. He was trying to find his father, whom he had never met, or, more crucially for a portraitist, seen. (His mother didn't have any photographs.) After several weeks in Lagos, he found...

Gooooo, Sports!(The Talk of the Town)(Sports Museum of America)
September 1, 2008... Between the Mitchell Report and the N.F.L.'s Spygate affair, the image of sports as an arena of fun and fair competition has taken a hit lately. Even the Olympics' opening ceremonies were marred by a controversy over lip-synching. So the recent...

That Uncertain Feeling.(The Talk of the Town)
September 1, 2008... American investors are frazzled. True, oil prices have fallen from their most vertiginous highs, the dollar is a bit stronger, and the stock market has actually risen over the past month. But none of those things have happened in a smooth and...

The Code Of The West.
September 1, 2008... One day in early August, Bill Ritter, Jr., the governor of Colorado, met with Steve Feld, a professional filmmaker, to work on the video that will welcome delegates to the Democratic National Convention--and present Colorado to the rest of the...

Fun and Games.(Beijing Olympics)
September 1, 2008... The morning of Friday, August 15th, was one of unaccustomed freshness in Beijing, and it brought forth two objects, both wreathed in legend but hitherto hard to spot. The first was a boiling ball of gases some ninety-three million miles away,...

Stop, Thief!(loss-prevention )
September 1, 2008... On a recent morning, a dapper man in his fifties with a narrow mustache, dressed in a black Armani suit, strolled past the cosmetics counters on the main floor of a midtown Manhattan department store. He was the store's vice-president of...

Sole Sisters.(women's shoes)(Buyers guide)
September 1, 2008... Boys have cars, girls have shoes--nineteen pairs, on average, according to a Consumer Reports poll. And so: I'll take a hedge fund's worth of Manolo Blahnik stilettos, and you can have one Rolls-Royce. Or a litter of Roger Vivier kitten heels...

Enchanted.(Marc Jacobs)
September 1, 2008... The two individuals perhaps most responsible for transforming the West Village from what it was ten years ago into what it is today are Carrie Bradshaw and Marc Jacobs. The former is a bubbly, self-involved, inordinately chic blond journalist...

Winged Victories.(Santiago Calatrava)
September 1, 2008... Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect, speaks six languages, and although his English is less than perfect, its wrinkles only heighten the allure of his pronouncements. "Though I love the arts with all my heart--paintings, sculpture,...

Makeup and Make-believe.(Book review)
September 1, 2008... The happy story of Max Factor, as enthusiastically told by Fred E. Basten in "Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World" (Arcade; $24.95), begins, like a movie, at a high-energy moment of extreme peril: On a winter night in...

The Gargoyle.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... This debut novel combines Christian mysticism, medieval imagery, and postmodern fonts to create a sometimes inane and sometimes diverting story. The narrator is a burn victim and former "coke-addled pornographer" now reduced to a mummified...

The End of Sleep.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... In this madcap picaresque, we follow Fin, an Irish journalist, as he spends a day in the streets of Cairo pursuing a story of buried treasure that he believes will restore his floundering career at an English-language newspaper there. Fin seeks...

The Same Man.(The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War )(Brief article)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh met on only one occasion, in 1949; neither man kept a record of what happened, and perhaps the only certain outcome of the meeting is the existence of this idiosyncratic book. Offering an appreciation of two...

The Book of Dreams.(Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams )(Brief article)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... In the early nineteen-sixties, under the influence of a Jungian analyst, Fellini started keeping a dream diary. His films, always fantastical, soon took a distinctly oneiric turn, and he eventually filled some five hundred sheets with drawings...

Three's Company.
September 1, 2008... In 1969, Larry Neal, a black writer, published an essay titled "Any Day Now: Black Art and Black Liberation." In it, Neal tried to clarify the goals of the Black Arts Movement, an ideological aesthetic that was first laid out by the poet and...

Sex and Sermons.(David Banner)(Sound recording review)
September 1, 2008... Why would you take on a stage name if your given name was the excellent and euphonious Lavell Crump? If, perhaps, you needed to suggest that your persona was not fixed. Calling yourself David Banner--a mild-mannered alter ego of the Incredible...

Under Suspicion.(I Served the King of England)(Movie review)
September 1, 2008... Ji?i Menzel's "I Served the King of England" is a Czech national epic served up with champagne and truffles. This graceful and leisurely movie, adapted from a 1974 novel by the masterly Bohumil Hrabal, covers an enormous time span, starting in...

The New French.(Restaurant review)
September 8, 2008... The New French is really the new New French, since its owners have reimagined a defunct Minneapolis joint of the same name. The New French also replaces the old French of Le Gamin, the spot's previous tenant. In any case, the New French isn't...

Conventional Battle.(The Talk of the Town)(Democratic Party Convention )
September 8, 2008... In the summer of 1960, Norman Mailer took an assignment to cover the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. This was when conventions could still be the scenes of smoky, unpredictable battle, and on this occasion the improbably junior senator...

Palin on Obama.(The Talk of the Town)(Sarah Palin on Barack Obama)
September 8, 2008... Before she was running against him, Sarah Palin--the governor of Alaska and now the Republican candidate for Vice-President of the United States--thought it was pretty neat that Barack Obama was edging ahead of John McCain in her usually...

The Bill and Hill Era.(The Talk of the Town)(Bill and Hillary Clinton)
September 8, 2008... The Clinton Era at the Democratic National Convention (and two days out of a four-day event is an era, maybe an epoch, possibly an age) dawned at 8:38 P.M., Mountain Time, on Tuesday. The opening act--a lapsed Republican, a retired admiral, a...

Vets For Democrats.(The Talk of the Town)(Jon Kuniholm)
September 8, 2008... Last Wednesday, on the morning of Securing America's Future day at the Democratic National Convention, Jon Kuniholm stood in the lobby of the Pepsi Center--a big man with the face of a studious boy, filling up every inch of a conservative gray...

Convert.(The Talk of the Town)(Rosalind Wyman)
September 8, 2008... Rosalind Wyman--seventy-seven years old; doughty feminist; political fund-raiser and philanthropist; hostess to J.F.K., Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, and Hollywood types too numerous to count; youngest elected member of the Los Angeles City...

Party Spoilers.(The Talk of the Town)
September 8, 2008... Tucker Bounds and Michael Goldfarb, two of John McCain's top media operatives, were bent over laptops last Wednesday night in a glass-enclosed room a mile away from the site of the Democratic Convention. They sat, with five other campaign...

Party Faithful.(Republican Party)
September 8, 2008... In the autumn of 1998, when Karl Rove was contriving to make Governor George W. Bush President and to build a lasting Republican majority, he came upon "The Catholic Voter Project," a study of voting behavior in national elections since the...

The General's Dilemma.(Commanding General David Petraeus )
September 8, 2008... Early in 2007, when David Petraeus became Commanding General of United States and international forces in Iraq, he had in mind a strategy to manage the political pressures he would face because of the unpopularity of the war, then four years...

Why Me?(Alec Baldwin)(Interview)
September 8, 2008... Alec Baldwin, who stars in "30 Rock," the NBC sitcom that has revived his career and done nothing to lift his spirits, has the unbending, straight-armed gait of someone trying to prevent clothes from rubbing against sunburned skin. He is fifty...

Imperishable Maxwell.(William Maxwell )
September 8, 2008... To those who knew him, William Maxwell as a person--soft-spoken yet incisive, moist-eyed yet dry-voiced, witty yet infallibly tactful--threatened to overshadow Maxwell as a writer. We aspiring authors who enjoyed his unstinting editorial...

The 19th Wife.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 8, 2008... This ambitious third novel tells two parallel stories of polygamy. The first recounts Brigham Young's expulsion of one of his wives, Ann Eliza, from the Mormon Church; the second is a modern-day murder mystery set in a polygamous compound in...

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 8, 2008... Guo's debut novel, first published eleven years ago in China and now reworked in English, distills the rush to modernization through the experience of Fenfang, a young peasant who leaves her village for Beijing. Part of the post-Cultural...

The Girl from Foreign.(The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories, and a Sense of Home )(Brief article)(Book review)
September 8, 2008... In this elegantly crafted memoir, the author sets out to fulfill her grandmother's dying wish that she learn about her heritage. Her grandmother grew up among the Bene Israel, a small Jewish community in India; when she married a Muslim, she...

Anonymity.(Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature )(Brief article)(Book review)
September 8, 2008... In England, the use of the word "anonymous" to describe a literary work dates only from the sixteenth century, but by the end of the eighteenth seventy per cent of all novels were published "in secret." Mullan traces the flourishing of the...

The Homecoming.(Home)(Book review)
September 8, 2008... Growing up in a religious household, I got used to the sight of priests, but I always found them at once fascinating and slightly repellent. The funereal uniform is supposed to obliterate the self in a shroud of colorlessness, even as it draws...

Why So Serious?(After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance and The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms)(Book review)
September 8, 2008... The modern classical-music performance, as audiences have come to know it and sometimes to love it, adheres to a fairly rigid format. The music usually begins a few minutes after eight, listeners having taken their seats beforehand to peruse...

View to a Kill.(Bangkok Dangerous and Hallam Foe)(Movie review)
September 8, 2008... Movies are a brotherhood. Wherever you look, there are siblings fighting for space behind the camera. The heyday of the Taviani brothers may, I fear, be over, but we still have the Coens, who are on a roll. In the agonized corner, we have the...

Square Meal.(Restaurant review)
September 15, 2008... For ten years, Yura's, the airy Madison Avenue muffin/latte/turkey-roll shop, has served the lionesses of Carnegie Hill as a mid-morning caffeinating hole and late-afternoon reheatable-meal hunting ground. Square Meal is the restaurant next...

Let It Rain.(The Talk of the Town)(political campaigns)
September 15, 2008... A couple of weeks before August 28th--the night that Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for President, in a Denver football stadium--Stuart Shepard, the digital-media director of the lobbying arm of Focus on the Family, one of the...

Act Your Age.(The Talk of the Town)(Republican Party)
September 15, 2008... Last week, in St. Paul, a band of antiwar protesters outside the Xcel Center confronted a group of stiff-looking guys in business suits as they tried to make their way into the Convention. There were chants of "Shame! Shame!" and a little...

Dem Delegates.(The Talk of the Town)(Republican Party )
September 15, 2008... The Republican Party in New York City is not unlike a species of tropical bird, in that it has evolved in unusual ways, will most likely never be dominant, and has always held a tenuous status in the political ecology of the five boroughs....

Naysayer.(The Talk of the Town)(critics of Governor Sarah Palin)
September 15, 2008... Two Fridays ago, Lyda Green, the president of the Alaska state senate, awoke at about 6 A.M. to a call from one of her aides. "She started yelling," Green said last week, over the telephone from Wasilla, Alaska. "I said, 'I can't hear you. What...

Equal Before Mammon.(The Talk of the Town)(Lilly Ledbetter bill )
September 15, 2008... She was an ordinary middle-class mom who, despite fierce criticism, succeeded in a male-dominated profession. She challenged the local establishment and became a national figure, earning herself a spot as a featured speaker at her party's...

The Home Team.(citizen volunteers in 2008 Olympics)
September 15, 2008... The night before the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, Wei Ziqi joined two of his neighbors on the local barricade. It consisted of a rope stretched taut across the road, and the attendants had been given wooden paddles that read "Stop!"...

A Cloud of Smoke.(aftermath of World Trade Center attacks)
September 15, 2008... In January, 2006, shortly after James Zadroga died at his parents' house, in Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey, Dr. Gerard Breton received a call from the Ocean County Medical Examiner's Office. A retired hospital pathologist, Breton now conducts...

The Lonesome Trail.(John McCain political campaigns)(Biography)
September 15, 2008... Earlier this year, at a town-hall meeting at the Fantasy of Flight aircraft museum, in Polk City, Florida, Cindy McCain introduced her husband, the Republican Presidential nominee, with a speech about the nature of "the man." There are, she...

The Long Dig.(Gotthard tunnel )
September 15, 2008... The people of Allmannsweier, Germany, have never really grown used to the giant mechanical worms outside their village. You might say that the worms crept up on them. When the worms first appeared, almost thirty years ago, they were just little...

The Florentine.(The Essential Writings of Machiavelli and The Prince)(Book review)
September 15, 2008... One method of torture used in Florentine jails during the glorious days of the Renaissance was the strappado: a prisoner was hoisted into the air by a rope attached to his wrists, which had been tied behind his back, and then suddenly dropped...

Man in the Dark.(August Brill)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 15, 2008... A car accident and the death of his wife have left the retired book critic August Brill a physical and spiritual invalid. Virtually confined to his house with his recently divorced daughter and a twenty-three-year-old grandchild stricken with...

American Wife.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 15, 2008... In her third novel, Sittenfeld offers a thinly veiled account (Wisconsin, not Texas) of the life of Laura Bush, in the story of Alice Lindgren, who marries Charlie Blackwell, the ne'er-do-well son of a political dynasty who becomes President....

The Angel of Grozny.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 15, 2008... Seierstad, the author of "The Bookseller of Kabul," first visited Chechnya in 1995, shortly after Russian tanks rolled in. Twelve years later, as another war gave way to a dubious, corrupt peace, she returned, at one point hiding her blond hair...

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 15, 2008... This engrossing portrait of Virginia Woolf and the women who looked after her explores how modern ideas of class and gender crucial to Woolf's writing ran up against her lingering ties to a waning Victorian domestic order. Woolf frequently...

Re-start.(laptops as deejay equipment)
September 15, 2008... Last December, a friend and I went to a release party for Mary J. Blige's "Growing Pains" album. Near huge screens showing Blige videos, a d.j. was playing records on two turntables. The d.j.'s eyes, however, were trained on an Apple MacBook on...

Storm Warnings.(Movie review)
September 15, 2008... The new Coen brothers picture, "Burn After Reading," is a very black comedy set in a blanched, austere-looking Washington, D.C.--an uninspiring and uncomfortable place in which everyone betrays everyone else, and the emotional tone veers from...

General Greene.(Restaurant review)
September 22, 2008... The General Greene is a restaurant of lowered expectations, in the best possible way. The walls are largely unadorned, most of the tables line up along a (not uncomfortable) wooden bench, the bar stools were once tractor seats. The owner--Nick...

The Get.(The Talk of the Town)
September 22, 2008... David Westin has served as the president of ABC News for about eleven years. He oversees the journalism of "Nightline," "World News with Charles Gibson," and "20/20." The Walt Disney Company owns ABC, however, and, at times, Westin has seemed...

One By One.(The Talk of the Town)(ants in city parks )
September 22, 2008... If people, viewed from a great height, look like ants, do ants, viewed at close range, look like people? Of course not. Ants have six legs, compound eyes, no lungs, and impossibly narrow waists, and they tend to hang around with aphids and...

Vacancy.(The Talk of the Town)(rehab centers)
September 22, 2008... One recent morning, Joseph McKinsey sat on the porch of the Ram's Head Inn, on Shelter Island, and laid out his vision for transforming the grounds into a high-end rehab center. McKinsey, sixty-three, an Amagansett-based businessman who made a...

Ptooey!(The Talk of the Town)(23andMe)(Company overview)
September 22, 2008... Certain innovations--cell phones, the umbrella--started out as symbols of wealth before trickling down to the masses. Getting to know your genotype may be next on the list. In 2006, Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki founded a company called 23andMe...

Echo in the Dark.(Echo of Moscow )(Company overview)
September 22, 2008... In the land of the Soviets, the voice of the Kremlin was everywhere, an omnipresent reality-via-radio that long preceded Orwell's dystopia. Lenin and Trotsky fomented revolution primarily in print--in the commanding editorials of Iskra and...

Freeing the Elephants.(the Babar books )
September 22, 2008... A chain of elephants, trunks and tails linked, wanders, with a mixture of upbeat energy and complacent pride, along the endpapers of a children's book. So begins one of the stories that most please the imagination of the modern child and his...

Outside Man.(Spike Lee)
September 22, 2008... One morning last June, Spike Lee arrived early at the Sony Pictures Studios, in Culver City, California, to record the score for his new feature, "Miracle at St. Anna," a Second World War film about the U.S. Army's 92nd Division, an all-black...

The State of Sarah Palin.(Alaska)
September 22, 2008... It rained a lot in Alaska this summer--even more than usual--and it was a cold summer, too. The sun doesn't set on much of the state between mid-June and mid-July, but the weather was such that if you came from Outside, which is how Alaskans...

President Tom's Cabin.(Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings )
September 22, 2008... In 1852, when Harriet Beecher Stowe finished "Uncle Tom's Cabin," she wrote to a congressman, Horace Mann, who happened to be Nathaniel Hawthorne's brother-in-law, to beg a favor. Might he know how to get a copy of her book to Charles Dickens?...

Exit Music.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... The seventeenth and final novel in Rankin's Inspector Rebus series is set during the Edinburgh detective's final week at work. (He is nearing the mandatory retirement age of sixty.) The novel begins with a dissident Russian poet beaten to...

Something to Tell You.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Kureishi's latest novel returns to the subject of immigrant life in London--a theme that brought him early success, with the screenplay for "My Beautiful Laundrette" and the novel "The Buddha of Suburbia"--but adds to it the jaundiced outlook...

The Other Half.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Jacob Riis, an ambitious carpenter from a rural town in Denmark who became famous for his photojournalistic expose of the squalor of Manhattan's tenements, abandoned his homeland after being spurned by a local beauty, and spent several years as...

Vanity Fair: The Portraits.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Because Vanity Fair ran from 1913 to 1936, ceased publication, and then resumed in 1983, this dazzling panoply of twentieth-century fame has some striking absences: no Elvis, no Marilyn, no Beatles. The two resulting eras are presented not...

Tables for One.(paintings by Giorgio Morandi)
September 22, 2008... In my ideal world, the home of everyone who loves art would come equipped with a painting by Giorgio Morandi, as a gymnasium for daily exercise of the eye, mind, and soul. I want the ad account: "Stay fit the Morandi way!" Take your dream pick...

American Gothic.(Southern Promises)(Theater review)
September 22, 2008... When Robert Wilson chose the brilliant black performer Sheryl Sutton for his 1970 show "Deafman Glance," he was doing more than following his penchant for strong casting: he was purposefully incorporating blackness into America's primarily...

No Man's Land.(The Women)(Movie review)
September 22, 2008... The funniest thing about "The Women" is that Mick Jagger is one of the producers. There was a knowing laugh in the theatre as his name sprang up in the opening credits--our last chance to laugh, as it turned out, for the next two hours. The...

That Seventies Sound.(Sound recording review)
September 29, 2008... Last month, Jackson Browne sued the Republican Party over the use of his hit "Running on Empty" in a campaign commercial. Pundits joked that Browne was a has-been, but here he is with "Time the Conqueror" (Inside), his first album in six years....

I Sodi.(Restaurant review)
September 29, 2008... September brings Fashion Week, in which a large white tent swallows Bryant Park, recalling the quarantine scene from "E.T.," and Chipotle-munching earthlings are expelled by alien forces from the planet Cipriani. If you could take the appealing...

Bailing Out.(The Talk of the Town)
September 29, 2008... If Barack Obama is victorious on November 4th, someone on his transition team should send inauguration tickets to Richard Fuld, the chairman and chief executive of Lehman Brothers. For months, Obama had struggled to promote the sense--which was...

David Foster Wallace.(The Talk of the Town)(In memoriam)
September 29, 2008... David Foster Wallace, who died on September 12th, at the age of forty-six, was in many ways a writer of his time. "Infinite Jest," a 1,079-page literary manifesto that was also a piercingly funny, inventive, and deeply moving novel about...

Dial-a-mag.(The Talk of the Town)(Patrick McMullan Company)
September 29, 2008... When it comes to reading material, the thinking these days seems to be that smaller is better: Rolling Stone, the Wall Street Journal, the Post, and the Times have all determined that the only way to survive is to shrink. Michael Merriam, an...

Wiz Bucks.(The Talk of the Town)(credit-default swaps)
September 29, 2008... Any attempt to find causation or fault for what happened last week is fraught. So many things have gone wrong; so many people are to blame; so many people are now screwed. Often, the media exaggerates the significance of the ups and downs of...

Public Humiliation.(The Talk of the Town)(Wall Street crisis)
September 29, 2008... Before the government stepped in last week, the bodies of financial institutions--Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and A.I.G., with Washington Mutual and even Morgan Stanley threatening to be next--were piling up so fast it seemed possible that...

Rich Bitch.(the life of Leona Helmsley and her pet Trouble)
September 29, 2008... The life of Leona Helmsley presents an object lesson in the truism that money does not buy happiness. Born in 1920, she overcame a hardscrabble youth in Brooklyn to become a successful condominium broker in Manhattan, eventually alighting, in...

The Last Tour.(on Travis Twiggs and Willard Twiggs)
September 29, 2008... When the Twiggs brothers got to the Grand Canyon, on May 12th, Willard called his girlfriend, a married woman in Louisiana, on Travis's cell phone. She had to see the canyon someday, he said. "It will make the hair on your arms stand up. It's...

Regrets Only.
September 29, 2008... Lionel Trilling was not completely happy about being Lionel Trilling. "I have one of the great reputations in the academic world," he wrote in his journal after being promoted to full professor in the Columbia English Department, in 1948. "This...

Indignation.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 29, 2008... In a departure from Roth's recent meditations on age, his new novel revisits the no less sexually frustrating experience of growing up. We are back in nineteen-fifties Newark, and nineteen-year-old Marcus Messner, the son of a kosher butcher,...

The Road Home.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 29, 2008... Tremain's protagonists are often faced with trials that have a fabled quality--a doomed romance in the seventeenth-century Danish court; a sex change in nineteen-fifties Suffolk--and her latest novel is no exception. Lev has left his mother and...