The New Yorker articles from April 2003

The New Yorker archives from April 2003

Before Oil, Coal.(Book Review)
April 7, 2003... As the hunt for alternative fuels intensifies, the world finds itself looking to the past to secure the future. Barbara Freese's COAL: A HUMAN HISTORY (Perseus) offers an unflinching history of life in the mines: "Sometimes I sing when I've...

COLLATERAL DAMAGE.(Iraq)
April 7, 2003... One of the characteristic horrors of what Raymond Aron called the century of total war was the expansion of the battlefield to encompass whole societies. In many of the twentieth century's conflicts, from the Philippines to Algeria to Vietnam...

A BUTCHER FROM BAGHDAD.(Iraqis in the US)
April 7, 2003... On a normal night, the water-pipe smokers and Arab-coffee drinkers and cardplayers at the Ya Liel Ya Eien cafe, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, start to clear out at around seven or eight. But by 10 p.m. last Thursday, with the big-screen television in...

THE SURGE.(high security in New York City subways)
April 7, 2003... Last Wednesday, shortly before four in the afternoon, Lieutenant Bruce Simonetti left his office, at Transit Police District 2 headquarters, underneath Canal Street, boarded the A train heading downtown, and disembarked two stops later, at the...

HERE COMES THE SUN.(spring training baseball fans)(Column)
April 7, 2003... With Opening Day gone by, a visitor to the recent spring-training camps can expect to keep no more than a handful of memories of the short season, such as a low line-drive homer in Tampa by the Yankees' new import, Hideki Matsui, intensely...

A CLEAN SLATE FOR IRAQ.(forgive its foreign debt)(Column)
April 7, 2003... In February, 1895, Cuban nationalists seeking independence from Spain took to the hills and started a campaign of guerrilla warfare. When initial efforts to put down the rebellion failed, the Spanish military relocated hundreds of thousands of...

ILL WINDS.(Baghdad)
April 7, 2003... Jeffrey Goldberg reports from Kurdistan Isabel Hilton's report from Jordan Slide show: Scenes from Jordan Seymour M. Hersh on Rumsfeld's war plan During the first three days of the bombardment of Baghdad, the explosions came...

OFFENSE AND DEFENSE.(Iraq war)
April 7, 2003... Jon Lee Anderson reports from Baghdad Jeffrey Goldberg reports from Kurdistan Isabel Hilton's report from Jordan Slide show: Scenes from Jordan As the ground campaign against Saddam Hussein faltered last week, with attenuated...

THE ANGLOPHONE EMPIRE.(Iraq war)
April 7, 2003... During the past few months, much has been said and written on the subject of a "new American empire."This term, however, is a misnomer. If the Iraq war is to be seen as a kind of imperial venture, then the project is neither new nor purely...

WAITING AT THE FRONT.
April 7, 2003... Jon Lee Anderson reports from Baghdad Isabel Hilton's report from Jordan Slide show: Scenes from Jordan Seymour M. Hersh on Rumsfeld's war plan Last week, on a freezing night in a blacked-out bunker outside Halabja, a city in...

THE INVESTIGATION.(New York vs. investment advisors, investment banks)(Interview)(Industry Overview)
April 7, 2003... Toward the end of 2000, Eric Dinallo, the head of the investor-protection bureau in the New York State Attorney General's office, was talking with his father, Greg Dinallo, a novelist, about the stock market. Investors had already lost billions...

LITTLE IRAQ.
April 7, 2003... A Portfolio of photographs from an Iraqi-exile community in Amman, Jordan Jon Lee Anderson reports from Baghdad Jeffrey Goldberg reports from Kurdistan Seymour M. Hersh on Rumsfeld's war plan A little before noon on the...

THE THIN ENVELOPE.(college admission)(Industry Overview)
April 7, 2003... In the spring semester of my senior year of high school, my father got a call from the headmaster of the school I was about to graduate from. The headmaster said that he was expecting to speak soon with the admissions office at the single Ivy...

NEWS UNDER FIRE.(Iraq coverage)(Industry Overview)
April 7, 2003... Last week, as the war in Iraq became more complicated and confusing militarily--if not for the Americans who were running it, then certainly for the Americans who were trying to follow it on television--it also became harder for the news...

CREDIBLE HULKS.(Movie Review)
April 7, 2003... The movie I would most like to see this year is never going to happen. I have neither a title nor a plot; all I know is that it should star only those actors who have recently been in trouble with the law. What a lineup: Nick Nolte, Robert...

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN.(Obituary)
April 7, 2003... From 1999, Jeffrey Toobin profiles Daniel Patrick Moynihan From 1981, Moynihan reviews John Kenneth Galbraith's memoir From 1984, Moynihan on Richard Rovere "If my head were sticking on a pike at the South West Gate to the White...

With Some Frequency.(HELLO WORLD: A LIFE IN HAM RADIO)(Emergency Broadcasting)(Book Review)
April 14, 2003... "CQ, CQ, CQ, this is W2OJW, calling CQ. Whiskey Two Oscar Juliet Whiskey in Hackensack, New Jersey, standing by for a call."For seventy-four years, before his "key went silent,"in 2001, this was the nightly appeal of Jerry Powell, an...

CAKEWALK.(Iraq War)
April 14, 2003... LETTER FROM BAGHDAD LETTER FROM NORTHERN IRAQ PORTFOLIO FOLDER More than a year ago, Kenneth Adelman, a prominent national-security official in the Reagan Administration who now serves part time, with Richard Perle, on the...

MICHAEL KELLY (1957-2003).(Obituary)
April 14, 2003... A decade ago, a freelance journalist named Michael Kelly decided, with all due respect, to defy the government of the United States. The Pentagon had established such strict regulations on press coverage of the Gulf War that the human truth of...

RUMMY MEETS HIS MATCH.(Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's college wrestling match)
April 14, 2003... Every March, on the occasion of the N.C.A.A. wrestling championships, serious matmen abandon their desks and their wives for a few days and gather to reminisce about rapid weight loss and sweaty entanglements on the plasticcovered horsehair. At...

A LITTLE OLD MAGAZINE.(The Paris Review celebrates 50th birthday)
April 14, 2003... The anticipation of a fiftieth birthday need not evoke a sense of dread--especially, as the ancient wisdom suggests, when one ponders the alternative. Playboy and The Paris Review, periodicals whose subscriber lists don't much overlap but which...

RETIRED GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON.
April 14, 2003... Few Americans realize that, in addition to being the first U.S. President, George Washington was also the nation's first retired general. In the years immediately following his Presidency, Washington pioneered the field of military punditry,...

WARTIME FRIENDSHIPS.(Iraq's opposition groups)
April 14, 2003... Jon Lee Anderson on the state of Baghdad just before the coalition troops entered the city Hendrik Hertzberg on the not so short war An archive of NewYorker.com's coverage of the war in Iraq Photographs of Baghdad the day the...

FOREVER AMBER.(reconstruction of Amber Room in Russia's Catherine Palace)
April 14, 2003... On September 17, 1941, the German Army took the town of Pushkin, in the Pulkovo hills south of Leningrad, and immediately proceeded to occupy the Catherine Palace. Originally a gift from Peter the Great to his wife, the palace had been expanded...

WAR WOUNDS.(Baghdad during Iraq War)
April 14, 2003... Jeffrey Goldberg on Iraq's rival opposition groups Hendrik Hertzberg on the not so short war An archive of NewYorker.com's coverage of the war in Iraq Photographs of Baghdad the day the American troops took control of the city ...

THE EXTREMIST.(People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals official Ingrid Newkirk)
April 14, 2003... Each year, Victoria's Secret puts on a show in which two dozen of the world's most alluring models stroll down the runway dressed in nothing but stilettos and lingerie. Last November, the spectacle was held at New York City's Lexington Avenue...

SEASONS IN HELL.(Gulag: A History)(Book Review)
April 14, 2003... On a winter afternoon just before the collapse of the Soviet regime, I paid a call on Dmitri Likhachev, an eminent scholar of medieval Russian literature and an embodiment of the tragic history of his city. (The city was called St. Petersburg...

GRAND FUNK.(Elizabeth Murray; PaceWildenstein, New York, NY)
April 14, 2003... Elizabeth Murray's enchanting, tough show of recent paintings and drawings at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea is her best in many years. This makes it an important event in the New York art world. Murray has been eminent and beloved hereabouts for a...

DOUBLE TAKES.(Paul Taylor's "Promethean Fire"; Mark Morris Dance Group)(Dance Review)
April 14, 2003... Paul Taylor had a little fun with the press recently. When his "Promethean Fire"was unveiled at the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, last June, some reviewers speculated that the piece--with its big cast (the whole company),...

MONSTRES SACRES.(Cet Amour-La)(Movie Review)
April 14, 2003... In "Cet Amour-La,"we first see him on the beach: a tall, slender, mild-looking young man in a white suit, with a pursy little mouth and the dead eyes of a depressive. He calls her up and goes to her apartment. She lets him in. Then she changes...

LOST IN LANGUAGE.(A Day in the Death of Joe Egg)(Talking Heads)(Theater Review)
April 14, 2003... The British playwright Peter Nichols likes, he says, to keep audiences in a state of "comic alarm."In the Roundabout's revival of his 1967 semi-autobiographical play, "A Day in the Death of Joe Egg"(at the American Airlines Theatre), Nichols's...

Away from It All.(Solomon Time; Among Stone Giants; Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded)(Book Review)
April 21, 2003... When Hurricane Zoe hit the Solomon Islands last December, it took several days before anyone could reach the most remote islands, Tikopia and Anuda, to assess the damage. But isolation this extreme was precisely what the former high-school...

WAR WITHOUT END?(Iraq War and Bush Admministration's plans for future wars)
April 21, 2003... Photographs of Baghdad the day the American troops took control of the city A portfolio of photographs of the fight for the Iraqi capital Photographs of Baghdad taken before the coalition troops entered the city An archive of...

A CENTCOM STAR.(Al Jazeera's coverage of Iraq War)
April 21, 2003... Photographs of Baghdad the day the American troops took control of the city A portfolio of photographs of the fight for the Iraqi capital Photographs of Baghdad taken before the coalition troops entered the city An archive of...

THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD.(Iraqi Jewish families in New York City)
April 21, 2003... Photographs of Baghdad the day the American troops took control of the city A portfolio of photographs of the fight for the Iraqi capital Photographs of Baghdad taken before the coalition troops entered the city An archive of...

A CUT TOO FAR.(tax cutting)
April 21, 2003... Photographs of Baghdad the day the American troops took control of the city A portfolio of photographs of the fight for the Iraqi capital Photographs of Baghdad taken before the coalition troops entered the city An archive of...

THE COLLAPSE.(Iraq War)
April 21, 2003... Jon Lee Anderson on the state of Baghdad just before the coalition troops entered the city An archive of NewYorker.com's coverage of the war in Iraq Photographs of Baghdad the day the American troops took control of the city A...

YOU'RE GETTING MARRIED.(wedding services industry)
April 21, 2003... Every year in the United States there are about 2.3 million marriages, and to the members of the North American Bridal Association, a trade organization for bridal retailers and wholesalers, each of those marriages represents evidence of the...

AD NAUSEAM.(job loss narrative)
April 21, 2003... Chased Away, by Akhil Sharma Union Blues by Julian Barnes All Washed Up, by Antonya Nelson Cloudburst, by Peter Trachtenberg Long ago, I got a job proofreading advertising copy for a swank little boutique ad firm situated in a...

PAYDAY.(Darryl Barnes case and tort awards against New York City)
April 21, 2003... Someone unfamiliar with the New York courts might conclude that Darryl Barnes had a pretty weak lawsuit against the city. In 1988, according to evidence presented at trial, he was a twenty-three-year-old member of a gang known as the Five...

NOBODIES.(slavery in agricultural industries of South Florida)
April 21, 2003... Some forty miles inland from the coastal resorts of Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island, the town of Immokalee sits at the bottom of a string of remote agricultural outposts extending through the South Florida interior. The swampy terrain seems...

CHASED AWAY.(job loss narrative)
April 21, 2003... Ad Nauseam, by Donald Antrim Union Blues by Julian Barnes All Washed Up, by Antonya Nelson Cloudburst, by Peter Trachtenberg I joined Chase before it merged with J. P. Morgan and when it was still a lousy investment bank. Some...

UNION BLUES.(job loss narrative)
April 21, 2003... Ad Nauseam, by Donald Antrim Chased Away, by Akhil Sharma All Washed Up, by Antonya Nelson Cloudburst, by Peter Trachtenberg In 1979, I went to work for the London Sunday Times. I had come from the New Statesman--small,...

MANHUNTER.(bail-bond agent Mackenzie Green)
April 21, 2003... Mackenzie Green opened the trunk of her sports car and tossed her gun inside. Green, a San Francisco bail-bond agent, was looking for one of her clients, and on this February evening the search had led her here, to a crummy neighborhood in East...

CLOUDBURST.(job loss narrative)
April 21, 2003... Ad Nauseam, by Donald Antrim Chased Away, by Akhil Sharma Union Blues by Julian Barnes All Washed Up, by Antonya Nelson I got my first job in 1968, at a bookstore on the Upper West Side. It was small, but known for its brawny...

THE COST OF DESIRE.(An American Tragedy)(Critical Essay)
April 21, 2003... With its usual impassivity, the Library of America has reissued a strange and awkward book, Theodore Dreiser's nine-hundred-and-thirty-page realist epic of 1925, "An American Tragedy."As with all the Library's volumes, no celebratory essay...

SUPPRESSED ATROCITIES.(Crabwalk)(Book Review)
April 21, 2003... Rumors from literary Germany this past year have had it that Gunter Grass, in his mid-seventies and heavy with honors, has produced his best and best-selling novel in at least a decade. The grand old man of German criticism, Marcel...

SUSPENDED ANIMATION.(Opera Review)(Concert Review)
April 21, 2003... Stravinsky once said, "Music is the best means we have of digesting time."Music has a way of putting to sleep those portions of the brain that count the minutes and worry about what's not being done. When you lose yourself in a live...

MR. EXCITEMENT.(Nine)(Jackie Wilson Story: My Heart Is Crying, Crying)(Theater Review)
April 21, 2003... If you look up the word "monster"in your etymological dictionary, you'll find that its Latin root has two opposite meanings: "miracle"and "warning."In "Nine"(revived by the Roundabout Theatre, at the Eugene O'Neill), an adaptation of Federico...

THE LOST GIRL.(Lilya 4-Ever)(Movie Review)
April 21, 2003... Do not be late for "Lilya 4-Ever,"or you will miss the most extraordinary noise. It is the first noise that we hear, and certainly the loudest, as the soundtrack reverberates to the churn of a heavy-metal band. Not just any old heavy metal but...