The New Yorker

At ten-thirty, Armando Colón comes to my office. It lifts my mood to see him. Armando lives in one of the worst properties I own, an apartment complex so rife with mold and vermin that, when I sent a man to clean a vacant unit there, he . . .

The goal: to walk from the Empire State Building, on West Thirty-third Street, to Rockefeller Center, on West Forty-eighth, without ever setting foot on Fifth or Sixth Avenue—to knife through tall buildings in a single bound, or at least in stepwise forays. A writer for this . . .

This is the story of a hundred-and-seventeen-year-old piece of cheese. The cheese has lived in an apartment in Brooklyn for the past year. Prior to that, it travelled the world, or more of the world than the average piece of cheese has travelled. The cheese is . . .

One midwinter night in 2008, Senator John Ensign, of Nevada, the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, was roused from bed when six men entered his room and ordered him to get up. Ensign knew the men intimately; a few hours earlier, he had eaten dinner with them, as . . .

After the Belgian tennis player Kim Clijsters won the U.S. Open last year, her eighteen-month-old—a blond morsel named Jada—ran onto the court and grabbed hold of her mother’s silver trophy. The moment was especially triumphant because Clijsters had left tennis in 2007 . . .

On February 8, 2007, Oprah Winfrey greeted her television audience by brandishing a DVD and asking, “Have you heard about it?” The DVD was “The Secret,” a low-budget inspirational documentary that was already a cult favorite; with Winfrey’s endorsement, it went mainstream. &#8220 . . .

It would be naïve to pick up the memoir of a recently retired politician expecting total candor. This may not be a law of nature—a lasting contribution to the American literary canon is Ulysses S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs,” written when the author . . .

Speaking from the Oval Office last Tuesday evening to mark what he called, with more hope than precision, “the end of our combat mission in Iraq,” President Obama had occasion to mention the previous occupant. “This afternoon,” he said, I spoke to former President George W . . .

PageBreak --> OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information. ABSOLUTION Owen O’Neill wrote and performs in this piece, which explores the mind of a serial killer, produced by Guna Nua Theatre from Dublin. Part of the 1st Irish . . .

goatTitle-->HOUSING WORKS BOOKSTORE CAFÉ Matt Dellinger celebrates the publication of his new book, “Interstate 69: The Unfinished History of the Last Great American Highway,” with a reading and a party, featuring a performance by the artist and musician Andy Friedman, whose drawings appear in the book . . .

THE THEATRE MR. PRESIDENT Sept. 20 “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” the exuberantly cheeky musical satire of the life of the seventh President, makes the jump from the Public to Broadway’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. Michael Friedman, who wrote the music and lyrics, and Alex Timbers, who . . .

PageBreak --> ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. B. B. KING BLUES CLUB & GRILL 237 W. 42nd St. (212-997-4144)—Sept. 9: The bantam guitarist and singer Nils Lofgren was a member of . . .

PageBreak --> OPENINGS BRAN NUE DAE A comedy from Australia, about a young man who abandons a religious mission and takes to the road. Directed by Rachel Perkins. Opening Sept. 10. (In limited release.) GENIUS WITHIN: THE INNER LIFE OF GLENN GOULD Reviewed below in Now Playing. Opening Sept . . .

goatTitle-->NEW YORK CITY BALLET With its spiffy new brochures—filled with sexy photographs of the dancers—and its new fall season, N.Y.C.B. is clearly trying to shake things up. Four weeks of repertory programs include something new—“Plainspoken,” yet another ballet by Benjamin Millepied . . .

PageBreak --> CONCERTS IN TOWN THE MOVADO HOUR Two potent violinists—Geoff Nuttall, of the St. Lawrence Quartet, and his wife, Livia Sohn—headline the next one-hour concert in the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s stylish series. They are joined by the violist Hsin-Yun Huang, the . . .

PageBreak --> MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Doug + Mike Starn on the Roof: Big Bambú.” Through Oct. 31. | “Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinstein’s New York Photographs, 1950-1980.” The title of this knockout exhibition doesn . . .

goatTitle-->“HOWL!” The annual downtown arts festival is under way, and highlights this week include a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same name, in Tompkins Square Park on Sept. 10 at 5. The following two days, the Lower Eastside Girls Club’s East . . .

In “The American,” a professional assassin (George Clooney) known as Jack, and sometimes as Edward, and sometimes not as anyone, enters a medieval hilltop town in the Abruzzo region of Italy and tries to lie low. In his wariness and his silence, Jack resembles those mysterious gunmen who . . .

A collection of cartoons from the issue, plus this week's Cartoon Caption Contest.

In this week’s magazine, Amy Wilentz writes about the upcoming Presidential election in Haiti, where a million people are still homeless or semi-homeless after the January 12th earthquake. The disaster brought destruction but also inspiration: here are some works of art made by Haitian artists since the quake.