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became a pol
Ryan Lizza
on the candidate’s first campaigns
––
and how Chicago’s byzantine politics shaped him
Hendrik Hertzberg
on the flip
-
flop flap
Kill your lawn!
Elizabeth Kolbert
on the revenge of the weeds
Genius on a surfboard?
Benjamin Wallace
-
Wells
on a physics conundrum
Heath Ledger’s swan song
David Denby
on ‘The Dark Knight’
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Plus:
Jill Lepore
on the battle
of Stuart Little
Patricia Marx
on Shanghai shopping
How Obama
THE NEW YORKER
JULY 21, 2008
6
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
27
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Hendrik Hertzberg on flip-flops;
Harold Bloom’s advice for A-Rod.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells
32
ANNALS OF SCIENCE
An outsider’s shot at physics glory.
Yoni Brenner
39
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Fourteen Passive-Aggressive Appetizers
Patricia Marx
40
ON AND OFF THE AVENUE
Buy Shanghai!
A city for serious shoppers.
Ryan Lizza
48
THE POLITICAL SCENE
Making It
Where Barack Obama learned to be a pol.
Jill Lepore
66
LIVES AND LETTERS
The Lion and the Mouse
The battle of “Stuart Little.”
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
74
FICTION
“ Yu r t ”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Elizabeth Kolbert
82
Saying goodbye to grass.
Alex Ross
88
MUSICAL EVENTS
“Die Soldaten” at the Armory.
Nancy Franklin
90
ON TELEVISION
“Generation Kill.”
David Denby
92
THE CURRENT CINEMA
“The Dark Knight,” “
WALL-E
.”
POEMS
Robert Bly
51
“Courting Forgetfulness”
Marcus Jackson
70
“Mary at the Tattoo Shop”
COVER
“The Politics of Fear,” by Barry Blitt
DRAWINGS
Robert Mankof, Tom
Cheney, Eric Lewis, Pete Holmes, William Haefeli, Barbara Smaller, Matthew Difee,
Bruce Eric Kaplan, David Sipress, Leo Cullum, P. C. Vey, Danny Shanahan, Zachary
Kanin, Ariel Molvig, Ward Sutton
SPOTS
Ever Meulen
www.newyorker.com
2
THE NEW YORKER, JULY 21, 2008
Surfing the Universe
87
Briefly Noted
CONTRIBUTORS
Ryan Lizza
(“Making It,” p. 48) is a staff
writer and the Washington correspon-
dent for the magazine.
Jill Lepore
(“The Lion and the Mouse,”
p. 66) is a professor of history at Har-
vard and chair of the History and Liter-
ature Program. “Blindspot,” her first
novel, written with Jane Kamensky, is
due out in December.
Hendrik Hertzberg
(Comment, p. 27),
the author of “Politics: Observations &
Arguments,” writes frequently about
politics and policy. He also writes a blog
on newyorker.com.
Marcus Jackson
(Poem, p. 70) is work-
ing on his first collection of poems,
“Neighborhood Register.” His poetry
has appeared in such publications as
The
Evansville Review
and
Heliotrope
.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells
(“Surfing the
Universe,” p. 32) writes for the
Times
Magazine
and is a national-affairs cor-
respondent for
Rolling Stone
.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
(Fiction,
p. 74) has a new novel, “Ms. Hempel
Chronicles,” coming out in September.
She directs the M.F.A. Program in
Writing at the University of California
San Diego.
Rebecca Mead
(The Talk of the Town,
p. 29) has been a staff writer since
1997. She is the author of “One Per-
fect Day: The Selling of the American
Wedding.”
Elizabeth Kolbert
(Books, p. 82) is
the author of “Field Notes from a
Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Cli-
mate Change,” which is available in
paperback.
Yoni Brenner
(Shouts & Murmurs,
p. 39) is a screenwriter who lives in
New York.
Patricia Marx
(“Buy Shanghai!,” p. 40)
has a children’s book, “Dot in Larry-
land,” with illustrations by Roz Chast,
coming out in December.
Barry Blitt
(Cover), an artist and illus-
trator, is working on illustrations for
a new children’s book, “What’s the
Weather Inside?”
Robert Bly
(Poem, p. 51) has published,
with the Islamic scholar Leonard
Lewisohn, “The Angels Knocking on
the Tavern Door,” a new translation of
the poems of the Persian poet Hafez.
Ever Meulen
(Spots) is an illustrator.
“Verve,” his eleventh book, is a compi-
lation of his work from 1988 to 2005.
He lives in Brussels.
THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM
Ask the Author:
Ryan Lizza
takes readers’
questions about Obama and the election,
and talks to
Hendrik Hertzberg
,
Jeffrey Toobin
,
and
Dorothy Wickenden
on the Campaign
Trail podcast. /
Jill Lepore
and
Roger Angell
discuss E. B. White and children’s literature. /
Aleksandar Hemon
reads a Bernard Malamud
story. / The Book Bench, the Cartoon
Lounge, Goings On, and blogs by
George
Packer
and
Sasha Frere-Jones
. / From the
archives:
Larissa MacFarquhar
on Obama,
David Denby
on “Batman Begins.” /
Animated cartoons, the caption contest,
and a list of
New Yorker
events.
4
THE NEW YORKER, JULY 21, 2008
THEMAIL
COURTINGCONTROVERSY
and find smut in the entrails of a com-
plex political culture that eludes his in-
telligence. His commentaries depict
only the low-grade rationality of a
warped mind driven by vindictive, de-
fensive, and falsely redemptive motives.
Olbermann’s endgame is himself; the
costs to MSNBC might well come in
the form of TV remotes everywhere,
clicking to other channels.
Robert Lockwood
Williamsburg, Va.
With his acerbic, painfully honest ap-
proach to news and, more tellingly,
politics, Keith Olbermann is quite de-
serving of some media attention of his
own (“One Angry Man,” by Peter J.
Boyer, June 23rd). It must take a tre-
mendous sense of civic duty to put to-
gether a live broadcast such as “Count-
down” five nights a week, particularly
one that includes the kinds of indict-
ments that Olbermann aims at a gov-
ernment that has traded on fear and
distrust for so many years now. His
Special Comment directed at Senator
Hillary Clinton should only be taken as
such; Olbermann has never claimed
impartiality with these well-written di-
atribes, nor does he pretend to speak
for anyone but himself, which is, I be-
lieve, part of what makes him so re-
markable. I have never found any crit-
icisms of Senator Clinton on “Count-
down” to be either misogynistic or
unfair. The Special Comments that
have been directed at various members
of the government over the past years
have been like missiles: aimed carefully,
well crafted, and usually, in my opin-
ion, on target. Rare is the opportunity,
in this politically correct environment,
to listen to an intelligent, solid, and di-
rect essay on the current state of affairs,
and Olbermann has turned his venue
into an art form.
Danielle Goldfogel Holland
Littleton, Colo.
THEORIGINSOFPAINTING
Judith Thurman, in her piece on the
French cave paintings at Chauvet, cites
Pablo Picasso’s visit to Lascaux, which
was discovered in 1940 (“First Impres-
sions,” June 23rd). Decades before Pica-
sso’s encounter with Stone Age art,
John Singer Sargent conveyed the same
insight about cave painters and their in-
vention of visual language through his
famous painting “El Jaleo.” Sargent first
went to Spain in 1879, the year that cave
paintings were discovered in Altamira.
The painting contains a subtle but poi-
gnant homage to his Stone Age prede-
cessors. He finished “El Jaleo” in his
Paris studio in 1882, while the debate
was still raging about the authenticity of
cave paintings and their place in art his-
tory. “El Jaleo” features a flamenco
dancer and the flickering shadow she
casts against the wall of a dimly lit tav-
ern. However, along the left part of the
wall is a sepia drawing of an aurochs
alongside a handprint. The inclusion of
these details suggests that Sargent had
perhaps intuited the prehistoric and rit-
ualistic roots of European painting,
music, and dance.
Peter Eudenbach
Assistant Professor of Art
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, Va.
Boyer has captured well Olbermann’s
in-your-face dogma. Olbermann’s bom-
bast masks his self-absorption, a behav-
ioral style that is often pompous, para-
bolic, and paranoid, all at once. He
purports to find truth in his shallow pre-
dispositions, reacting with impulsive
verbal swipes at imagined adversaries
and imposing senselessly juvenile labels
on events that he cannot understand, let
alone interpret. Pity MSNBC, which
has installed a practitioner of neo-reac-
tionary journalism. Seeing conspiracies
everywhere, Olbermann liberally tosses
shock grenades, hoping to disembowel
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail
to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be
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lished in any medium. All letters become the
property of The New Yorker and will not be
returned; we regret that owing to the volume of
correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THENEWYORKER,JULY21,2008
5
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