The New Yorker articles from April 2002

The New Yorker archives from April 2002

Book currents: new day rising.(three books)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Dublin burned, British troops and Irish separatists exchanged gunfire and artillery shells, and about two hundred and thirty civilians were killed during Easter week in Ireland in 1916. As Tim Pat Coogan writes in 1916: THE EASTER RISING...

On and off the avenue: top hats.(women's hats and hat shops)
April 1, 2002... "That Easter-bonnet thing is strictly amateur day, like New Year's Eve for night-life people," said Linda Pagan, who describes her typical customer at THE HAT SHOP (120 Thompson St.; 219-1445) as "a style person, not a fashion person.'' On a...

Comment: sins.(The Talk of the Town)(priests, celibacy and sexual exploitation)
April 1, 2002... When a man (always a man) becomes a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, he takes vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. All three -- and their opposites, and their corruptions -- have been sometimes ironic themes of the internal crisis that...

Oscar night: a movie for everyone.(The Talk of the Town)(short film shown during Academy Awards ceremony)
April 1, 2002... Anifty feature of the Oscars ceremony this year was a short film showing about a hundred people, some famous and some not, talking about movies. The segment was directed by the filmmaker Errol Morris, whose grim comic take on the world, in...

Moscow postcard: a church for Lubyanka.(The Talk of the Town)( headquarters of the K.G.B.)
April 1, 2002... For decades, a statue of "Iron" Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of Lenin's secret police, glowered over the Moscow traffic swarming past Lubyanka, the squat, yellow headquarters of the K.G.B. Then, on an August night in 1991, steel cables...

The financial page: ageism in advertising.(The Talk of the Town)
April 1, 2002... When ABC pursued David Letterman recently as a potential replacement for Ted Koppel in the "Nightline" slot, the rationale was straightforward. Letterman's show, although less popular than Koppel's, has better -- that is, younger --...

The next world order: the Bush Administration may have a brand-new doctrine of power.
April 1, 2002... When there is a change of command -- and not just in government -- the new people often persuade themselves that the old people were much worse than anyone suspected. This feeling seems especially intense in the Bush Administration, perhaps...

The prize.(New York City landmark Tweed Courthouse)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... What to do with the Tweed Courthouse, which sits just to the north of City Hall, is shaping up to be one of the most contentious issues concerning a New York City landmark in some time. The courthouse is a sumptuous Anglo-Italianate palazzo...

O.K. Chorale: an English take on Rodgers and Hammerstein.(The Theatre)
April 1, 2002... In 1959, when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were beginning work on "The Sound of Music" -- the story goes -- their co-producer Richard Halliday, who was also the husband and manager of the show's star, Mary Martin, came to them with...

The Hitler Show; the Jewish Museum revisits the Nazis.
April 1, 2002... Ten years ago, Bruce Nauman was asked by officials in Hannover, Germany, to conceive a Holocaust memorial for their city. He came up with an idea that has become a cherished legend in the art world, although he eventually decided against...

The porcupine: a pilgrimage to Popper.('Wittgenstein's Poker')
April 1, 2002... Many years ago, when I was young and still in search of wisdom, I went on a pilgrimage to meet the man I thought was the wisest in the world. I came away wiser, though what I learned was what most pilgrims learn, which is that if you want to...

Briefly noted.(four books)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush, by Frank Bruni (HarperCollins; $23.95). Bruni, who covered the Bush campaign and the early Bush White House for the Times, announces at the start that Bush's ideology, his policies,...

Absent presences; in a new novel, an Englishman returns to a childhood summer.('Spies')
April 1, 2002... Bernard Shaw couldn't do it, Henry James couldn't do it, but the ingenious English author Michael Frayn does do it: write novels and plays with equal success. His most recent play, "Copenhagen," about a problematical meeting in 1941 between...

Coming apart: City Opera vs. Lincoln Center.
April 1, 2002... What is wrong with Lincoln Center? The problem goes deeper than the virtuoso bickering over redevelopment which, to judge from reports, fills the corridors of what is called "the world's largest cultural complex." The chief personalities of the...

Play it again.('The Piano Teacher')
April 1, 2002... Professor Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), who gives piano lessons to advanced students at the Vienna Conservatory, stands at the window of her studio and hurls thunderbolts at the teen-age musicians. When a talented boy hits a clinker, she...

Book currentrs; porn yesterday.(three books)(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... In THE EROTOMANIAC (Da Capo), Ian Gibson investigates the life of Henry Spencer Ashbee, a respectable Victorian merchant who collected thousands of volumes of pornography spanning several centuries and languages. Gibson believes that Ashbee was...

Comment; extra!(new newspaper, the 'Sun,' to be launched in New York City)(The Talk of theTown)(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... If you are the sort of person who believes that a newspaper is ipso facto exciting in a way that a Web site or a mixed pair of lacquered television announcers behind a desk labelled "Eyewitness News" can never be, and if you think that a...

Shipping dept.; pronoun overboard.(reference to ships in the United Kingdom)(The Talk of the Town)
April 8, 2002... The gloved hand pauses before dispatching the champagne bottle toward the gleaming hull, and a royal voice pronounces the baptismal words: "May God bless her and all who sail in her." Ships have been female in English since at least 1375,...

Gizmo dept.; cutting off Oscar.(Academy Awards television broadcast)(The Talk of the Town)
April 8, 2002... The test of any technology is the extreme case. For a car, it is surviving the Paris-Dakar Rally. For a hair dryer, it is baking Don King's hair into a ziggurat. And for TiVo, the digital video-recording device, it is capturing the wily and...

In captivity; tigers in Times Square.(animal rights demonstration)(The Talk of the Town)
April 8, 2002... "Is that legal?" Dennis, from Brooklyn, asked. He was standing on a traffic triangle in the middle of Times Square, next to a policeman. It was just past noon. In front of them, two nearly naked women were kneeling in a pair of small metal...

The boards; a new Laurey.('Oklahoma')(The Talk of the Town)
April 8, 2002... Josefina Gabrielle, the English actress who has taken on the role of Laurey in the new Broadway production of "Oklahoma!," could well be Laurey No. 30,000. The show is probably the most frequently produced musical ever, and has been performed...

On the mat; homegrown smackdown.(wrestling)(The Talk of the Town)
April 8, 2002... On a Sunday afternoon not long ago, the Underground Wrestling Association, or UWA, staged a farewell extravaganza at the Doghouse, a wres- tling gym in the Cypress Hills section of Brooklyn. UWA (it's pronounced ooh-wah) was merging with a...

The moviegoer; Peter Bogdanovich returns to filmmaking.
April 8, 2002... On a Wednesday evening in late February, Room 1057 at the New York University film school was crammed with young directors who were awaiting the start of a workshop with the director Peter Bogdanovich. Bodies in black turtlenecks packed the...

Leasing the rain; the world is running out of fresh water, and the fight to control it has begun.(Letter from Bolivia)
April 8, 2002... In April of 2000, in the central plaza of the beautiful old Andean city of Cochabamba, Bolivia, the body of Victor Hugo Daza lay on a makeshift bier. Daza, a seventeen-year-old student, had been shot in the face by the Army during protests...

Showboat; Robert Straus and his flair for selling literature.(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
April 8, 2002... A few months ago, Roger Straus, the founder and newly appointed chairman of the literary house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, gave a dinner party for twenty-five or so people in a private hotel dining room in Frankfurt, at the time of the...

A knife in the back; is surgery the best approach to chronic back pain?(Annals of Medicine)
April 8, 2002... Surgeons have often touted procedures that ultimately proved to be disappointing. In the nineteen-fifties, many patients with angina and coronary-artery disease had an operation that involved tying off an artery that runs under the sternum. The...

After God; Nietzsche believed in limitless possibility. The world knew better.(book: 'Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography')
April 8, 2002... In the fall of 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche proudly informed an admirer that he had completed "a ruthless attack on the crucified Christ." Long experience as both a soldier and a psychologist had taught him, he said, to bring the heavy guns of...

Where You Find It.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... Where You Find It, by Janice Galloway (Simon & Schuster; $24). The twenty stories in this unsettling, beautifully written collection take place in and around Glasgow, and the protagonists are mainly imperfectly loved girls and women. Galloway...

Achilles.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... Achilles, by Elizabeth Cook (Picador; $16). This forceful re-creation of the life of Achilles sacrifices nothing to modernity: gods mate violently with mortals, ghosts feast on sheep's blood, and Achilles rages and slays, unburdened by...

Edinburgh.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee (Welcome Rain; $25). When the director of a boys' choir in Maine molests his young charges, the damage he inflicts spirals outward in ever larger circles. The novel's hero, Fee, a Korean-American teen-ager, is...

The Eye Affair.
April 8, 2002... The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde (Viking; $23.95). It's 1985 in England, at least on the calendar; the Crimean War is in its hundred-and-thirty-first year; time travel is nothing new; Japanese tourists slip in and out of Victorian novels; and...

Washington wizard.('Hell to Pay')
April 8, 2002... Someone, maybe me, should publish a Hollywood-homes-of-the-stars-type map of America's premier crime novelists, complete with oval-shaped portraits of the authors displayed above the areas they chronicle. James Ellroy and Walter Mosley would...

Home fires.('Panic Room')
April 8, 2002... The plot of "Panic Room" could not be more simple. It is as simple as waking up in the dark and wondering whether you really heard a noise or whether it fell through a crack in your dreams. Meg Altman (Jodie Foster), newly divorced, moves into...

Full tilt.(comedian Robin Williams)(Review)
April 8, 2002... America abounds with comedy clubs, comedy channels, and situation comedies, but the fact is that comedy, as it is practiced on these shores, is generally a tame thing. The unbridled, murky mischief of a genuine madcap doesn't fit within the...

Book currents: the view from abroad.(three books)(Brief Article)
April 15, 2002... Behind the national tragedy of last September's terrorist attacks lay a puzzle of global proportions; a new set of books from the foreign press is helping us piece it all together. The German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, whose editorial offices...

Comment: one way out.(The Talk of the Town)(US and resolution of Middle East conflict)
April 15, 2002... On the less desperate days of the first Palestinian uprising, fifteen years ago, the rules of theatrical engagement were well understood. Foreign journalists would be notified of, say, an afternoon rock-throwing in Ramallah. The Palestinian...

The boards: behives on Broadway.(The Talk of the Town)('Hairspray' party)
April 15, 2002... This August, a musical based on "Hairspray," the John Waters movie that celebrates rigid updos and disintegrating racial segregation in early-sixties Baltimore, is coming to Broadway, and the other week a dozen or so group-sales people --...

You never know dept.: a reluctant poster girl.(The Talk of the Town)(Dana Fisher)
April 15, 2002... Contrary to what riders waiting for the crosstown bus at Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street have been led to believe, Dana Fisher would not, if she had a million dollars, "buy a car and a cute driver to go with it." That is the quote...

Sheep's clothing dept.: babes in Burberry.(The Talk of the Town)(party to launch new products)
April 15, 2002... Burberry's West Fifty-seventh Street store gave a supremely planned party for a bunch of preschoolers and their mothers last week, to launch a new line of toiletries for children called Burberry Baby Touch. On the second floor, several long,...

Horizon dept.: lights out.(The Talk of the Town)(memorial of lights at Ground Zero)
April 15, 2002... When the idea of evoking the towers of the World Trade Center by projecting two powerful beams of light into the sky was first proposed, right after September 11th, John Bennett, one of the architects who came up with the notion, said, "It will...

Don't mention it: the hidden life and times of a Greenwich Village restaurant.(Shopsin's General Store)
April 15, 2002... I suppose Kenny Shopsin, who runs a small restaurant a couple of blocks from where I live in Greenwich Village, could qualify as eccentric in a number of ways, but one of his views seems particularly strange to journalists who have had...

Can art be taught? How a dismissal at Harvard threw an entire field into question.(Department of Visual and Environmental Studies chair Ellen Phelan)
April 15, 2002... In a time when art can be anything at all, how do you teach it? That nagging question causes endless problems at the colleges and universities where most art teaching goes on these days, and it was at the heart of the recent unpleasantness at...

Ashcroft's ascent; how far will the Attorney General go?(John Ashcroft)
April 15, 2002... There had never been a congressional hearing quite like the one that was held before the Senate Judiciary Committee last December 6th. In the weeks leading up to it, Attorney General John Ashcroft had overseen a series of increasingly...

Oakdale days; why do so many terrible things keep happening to one town?(fictional town from 'As the World Turns')
April 15, 2002... Barbara Ryan has not been lucky in love. She was dumped by her stepbrother for a jewelry thief who reminded him of his ex-wife, and later she dumped him for a pretender to the Swedish throne who turned out to be an Egyptian-tomb robber. She was...

The way they were.(photographs of Aramco, Saudi-American consortium that developed oil fields in Saudi Arabi)(Illustration)(Brief Article)
April 15, 2002... In February, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, two months before his death, conducted the first-ever meeting between an American President and an Arab king, when Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, came aboard Roosevelt's ship in the Suez Canal....

Lord Barney: Barnett Newman's majestic abstractions.(The Critics)
April 15, 2002... Barnett Newman was forty years old when, in 1945, he made the first of his surviving paintings. (He destroyed his earlier canvases.) From then until he died, of a heart attack, in 1970, he produced a mere hundred and twenty or so paintings,...

Briefly noted.(four books)(Brief Article)
April 15, 2002... Tests of Time, by William H. Gass (Knopf; $25). In this collection of fourteen essays, Gass ranges widely across the cultural landscape, offering appreciations of Italo Calvino and Peter Handke, a keen interrogation of the idea of the...

Property values: bad behavior in Russia's ruling class.(three plays)
April 15, 2002... Turgenev's little-known 1848 play "Fortune's Fool," now at the Music Box in an adaptation by Mike Poulton, has also been little known under two other titles, "One of the Family" and "A Poor Gentleman." But the current title resonates the most,...

The working life: French families then and now.(two motion pictures)
April 15, 2002... The French stage actor Aurelien Recoing, who plays Vincent, the fortyish hero of Laurent Cantet's extraordinary "Time Out," is a blandly presentable fellow, not quite handsome but reassuringly large, with a quick smile and a friendly, attentive...

Tables for two.(Strip House, New York, New York)
April 22, 2002... 13 E. 12th St. (328-0000) -- Flesh, in variously enticing permutations, is the come-on at this coyly named take on the good old American steak house. For lovers of those larger-than-life pachyderms known as opera singers, the bordello-red walls...

Book currents: full of hot air.(three books)(Brief Article)
April 22, 2002... Next month marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster, in which the mammoth airship -- to some a hopeful symbol of world unity, to others a harbinger of Third Reich aspirations -- met its fiery demise over Lakehurst, New...

Comment: two states.(The Talk of the Town)(Israeli and Palestinian border conflict)
April 22, 2002... Like any great tragedy, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is full of smaller sadnesses. One of these is that, as the Israeli tanks have rolled through the West Bank, discussion of the conflict has begun to take the form of...

String section: Slava at seventy-five.(The Talk of the Town)(cellist Mstislav Rostropovich)
April 22, 2002... The voice of the man who answered a phone call from the lobby of a midtown hotel last week was unmistakably that of Mstislav Rostropovich. "Helllloooo!" it roared. "Yes, you are early, but come up, please, now. Floor feeefty-two!" The Maestro...

Ink: the 'Times,' V.O.(The Talk of the Town)('Le Monde' publishes 'New York Times' insert)
April 22, 2002... Those members of the New York newspaper-reading public who rise bleary-eyed at seven every morning to go and search for the previous day's edition of the great Paris daily Le Monde (a group that probably numbers in the low one figure) got a...

The boards: man in tights.(The Talk of the Town)(journalist and author Andrew Sullivan)
April 22, 2002... Back in December, Andrew Sullivan -- the author, Tory sympathizer, fixed point on the punditry circuit, and a-thousand-words-a-day contributor to his Internet me-zine AndrewSullivan.com -- got an invitation from Michael Comlish, a director with...

The financial page: Tax Cheat, Inc.(The Talk of the Town)(offshore corporate taxation)
April 22, 2002... Mark Vicini was a local boy made good. In the early nineteennineties, this Monmouth County, New Jersey, entrepreneur built a computer company, Micro Rental & Sales, into a thriving business. He became a millionaire. He put a disabled relative...

The accountants' war.(former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission Arthur Levitt, Jr., issued warnings about accounting profession)
April 22, 2002... Nothing, it has been said, is duller than accounting -- until someone is defrauded. And after every modern financial disaster -- the stock-market crash of 1929, the bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad in 1970, the savings-and-loan crisis of...

College try.(Lowest Ebb)(financially low times)
April 22, 2002... The rough patch I skidded into when my son was in first grade and I embarked on single-momhood would not earn me a slot on the poverty tables, yet at no other time in my life have financial anxieties transformed my head into such an anthill of...

Saving paradise: the preservationist, the pastor, and a night-club in Harlem.(Michael Henry Adams, Calvin O. Butts, II, and Small's Paradise)
April 22, 2002... Michael Henry Adams is a preservationist with an unusual attachment to the history and houses of Harlem, an African-American neighborhood of vast reach, complicated history, and uncertain hopes at the northern end of Manhattan. Adams is an...

Cone head.(Lowest Ebb)(Stephen King's arrest in 1970 for picking up traffic cones)
April 22, 2002... In the spring of 1970, when I was twenty-two, I was arrested by the Orono, Maine, police. After a traffic stop, I'd been discovered in possession of some three dozen rubber traffic cones. After a hard night of drinking Long Island Iced Tea at...

The better boss: how Marshall Goldsmith reforms executives.
April 22, 2002... Marshall Goldsmith is a happy man. He started out happy, he worked on his happiness, and now, at the age of fifty-three, he is very happy. He is, in fact, a happiness professional. His official job description is "executive coach": he...

The mogul mayor; Mike Bloomberg adds it all up.
April 22, 2002... Michael Bloomberg is impatient with words but likes numbers. His public appearances, while notable for their brevity, nearly always feature some figure or factlet that he finds salient -- the size of the city's police force, say (forty thousand...

Homeless and high.(Lowest Ebb)(Denis Johnson lived penniless in the 1970s)
April 22, 2002... I arrived penniless in Berkeley in February of 1973, at night, dropped off on Telegraph Avenue by a woman driving around in her commune's Volvo. By this time, the era of peace, love, and flowers had overripened into madness. Destitute...

Blowing up: how Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy.
April 22, 2002... One day in 1996, a Wall Street trader named Nassim Nicholas Taleb went to see Victor Niederhoffer. Victor Niederhoffer was one of the most successful money managers in the country. He lived in and worked out of a thirteen-acre compound in...

Spanish guy.(Lowest Ebb)(Dagoberto Gilb)
April 22, 2002... I've driven across three deserts from my home in El Paso, where there's no work, to Long Beach, where, I'm told, there's so much. So what if I see only two tower cranes in the skyline? At the union hall, the business agent could care less that...

Can this divorce be saved? Marital mavens and their irreconcilable differences.(Critical Essay)
April 22, 2002... It's late at night, and I'm reading E. Mavis Hetherington's "For Better or for Worse" (Norton; $26.95) -- billed as "The Most Comprehensive Study of Divorce in America" -- trying to figure out where and how I fit into the book's madly...

Briefly noted.(four books)(Brief Article)
April 22, 2002... Martha Inc., by Christopher M. Byron (Wiley; $27.95). Though gleefully heralded in the press as a hatchet job, this biography of Martha Stewart turns out to be surprisingly evenhanded. The author's mixture of distaste and respect for his...

Bound.(Lowest Ebb)(Joyce Carol Oates)
April 22, 2002... A "lowest ebb" implies something singular and finite, but for many of us, born in the Depression and raised by parents distrustful of fortune, an "ebb" might easily have lasted for years. When I was growing up, my parents, my younger brother,...

Rock solid: the White Stripes, the Strokes, and the Hives.(rock music)
April 22, 2002... Will pop -- Britney, J. Lo, 'N Sync, and the rest -- kill rock? Whenever rock music has been threatened in the past (by disco, by New Kids on the Block), it has rebounded (with punk, with grunge). Sometimes it has wobbled, sometimes it has...

Secret lives.(two motion pictures)
April 22, 2002... There is one compelling reason to catch "Enigma," the new Michael Apted film. The reason, it must be said, lasts less than a second; nevertheless, how else are you going to see Mick Jagger dressed as a pilot in the Royal Air Force? The scene is...