The New Yorker articles from April 2004

The New Yorker archives from April 2004

CAMPAIGNS.(The Talk of the Town)(Iraq War, 2003)
April 5, 2004... As the war in Iraq enters its second year, Americans find themselves trapped in an epistemological black hole: the war's end recedes into an indefinite future while its beginning grows daily more contentious and obscure. Before the war, the...

OLD SPILL.(The Talk of the Town)(Newtown Creek, New York)
April 5, 2004... In the quaint game of rhapsodizing about the city's foul waterways, Newtown Creek is generally a bastard stepsister to the more celebrated Gowanus Canal. The Newtown offers only one point of public access, and it has just one residential...

NECK FACE.(The Talk of the Town)
April 5, 2004... For the past year and a half, a mischievous presence has been asserting itself on the city's street lamps, doorways, traffic-light-control boxes, and any other visible surface that it is in no one's interest to monitor or clean too diligently:...

DOUGH DREAMS.(The Talk of the Town)(George Giove)
April 5, 2004... George Giove, a twenty-nine-year-old journeyman pizzaiolo (Italian for "pizza guy"), competes for the United States Pizza Team. He made his name in the freestyle pizza toss, on the strength of his double-dough toss-and-spin moves (across the...

PUNCTUALITY PAYS.(The Talk of the Town)(Ecuador)
April 5, 2004... At high noon last October 1st, the citizens of Ecuador did something they'd never dreamed possible: they synchronized their watches. In doing so, they embarked on a Campana Contra la Impuntualidad, a national crusade against lateness. A group...

SELLING THE BEAT.(Club La Vela)(Nightclub Review)
April 5, 2004... Club La Vela, a sprawling hacienda on a swampy stretch of coast along the Florida Panhandle, claims to be the largest night club in the country, accommodating up to seventy-five hundred people in its many dance halls and bars. For several weeks...

THE HEIGHT GAP.(United States)
April 5, 2004... Burkhard Bilger talks about America's height, and its wealth When Vincent van Gogh was thirty-one years old, in the fall of 1883, he travelled to the bleak moors of northern Holland and stayed at a tavern in the village of Stuifzand. The...

ESCAPING THE MATRIX.("Riff Raff" by Laurence Fishburne)
April 5, 2004... In the history of drama, many plays have been published with an author's note, but Laurence Fishburne's "Riff Raff" is the only one, to my knowledge, that comes with a warning. "Practitioners of the craft, be forewarned," he writes in the 1997...

KINDERGARTEN.(China)(Column)
April 5, 2004... The night before his first day of kindergarten, Wei Jia refused to talk about it. He was five years old, and he had spent the summer playing in Sancha, wearing nothing but a dirty tank top and a pair of underpants. Sancha is a small village in...

SCREWBALLS & ODDBALLS.("Twentieth Century")(Movie Review)
April 5, 2004... Wolcott Gibbs on the 1951 production of "Twentieth Century" By 1934, when Howard Hawks's screwball comedy "Twentieth Century" was released, America had fallen victim to the twin catastrophes of the Depression and the Hays Office (the film...

MEAN TO GENE.(Eugene McCarthy)
April 5, 2004... From 1968, a day in the life of the candidate Eugene McCarthy Eugene McCarthy, the dragon-slayer of American politics, belonged to a famous cohort of Minnesota Democrats who came together in the years after the Second World War and produced...

MYSTERIES OF LOVE.("Salome" )(Opera Review)
April 5, 2004... The first time the Metropolitan Opera staged Richard Strauss's "Salome," ninety-seven years ago, J. P. Morgan's daughter blanched at the sight of a soprano making out with a severed head, and the production was shut down after one night. The...

IT TAKES TWO.("Significant Others")(Television Program Review)
April 5, 2004... The theme song for the Bravo miniseries "Significant Others," an improvisational comedy about the marriages and the marriage-therapy sessions of four couples, is a speed-rock version of the old Partridge Family hit with the refrain "I think I...

HEISTS.("The Ladykillers")(Movie Review)
April 5, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File Why remake "The Ladykillers"? The original, directed by the Scotsman Alexander Mackendrick in 1955, was not the cream of the Ealing comedies--that supremacy belongs to "Kind Hearts and Coronets"--but it...

RELUCTANT WITNESSES.(The Talk of the Town)
April 12, 2004... From 2002, Lawrence Wright profiles the F.B.I. agent John O'Neill, who died in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center From 2002, Nicholas Lemann profiles Condoleezza Rice After an unusually conspicuous episode of...

DUMBASSIFICATION.(The Talk of the Town)
April 12, 2004... An hour or so after Air America began broadcasting last week, Chuck D, the front man for the rap group Public Enemy, arrived at its studios, on Park Avenue South. He was wearing a black nylon tracksuit, a black T-shirt, a black headband, and...

976-GONE.(The Talk of the Town)
April 12, 2004... There are many ways of checking the weather. The original one--step outside, feel the air, note the wind--has fallen out of favor, though if you know what you're doing you can still make it work. People tend to prefer secondary sources these...

BRUSH-OFF.(The Talk of the Town)
April 12, 2004... A year ago, when the French President, Jacques Chirac, declared that France would veto a United Nations resolution in favor of war against Iraq, "whatever the circumstances," he probably did not consider the potential collateral damage it...

READY, ATTACK!(The Talk of the Town)
April 12, 2004... In this time of war, it should perhaps come as little surprise that our emerging volumes of present-day history--particularly those insider accounts of the Bush White House--have titles suggestive of supermarket thrillers. "Against All...

FIGHT ON THE RIGHT.
April 12, 2004... Most days begin for Arlen Specter, the senior senator from Pennsylvania, with a game of squash around dawn, and they taper off in the evening after a couple of Martinis. "Martinis I find to be very relaxing," Specter told me recently, on an...

THE OTHER WAR.
April 12, 2004... Seymour Hersh discusses warlords, drug runners, and the hunt for Al Qaeda In December, 2002, a year after the Taliban had been driven from power in Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld gave an upbeat assessment of the country's future to CNN's...

WRITTEN IN STONE.
April 12, 2004... Oded Golan, a dark-haired antiquities collector with gentle brown eyes, is a controversial figure in the world of Biblical archeology. To his promoters and admirers, including Hershel Shanks, the editor of the widely read Biblical...

THE STORYTELLER.
April 12, 2004... My copy was blue. The book was a small Scholastic paperback, and on the cover was a trio of pale-green concentric circles. They looked like radio waves, or the kind of design you could get by fiddling around with a Spirograph set. In one of the...

DOOM'S DAY.(Madvillainy)(Sound Recording Review)
April 12, 2004... In the early nineties, thanks to performers like Dr. Dre and his muse Snoop Doggy Dog, hip-hop became geometrically more popular than it had ever been. In the mid-nineties, multitasking figures like Puff Daddy helped make it a brand. As this...

SPHERES OF INFLUENCE.(The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications)(Book Review)
April 12, 2004... When did the press become the media? It seems to have happened sometime during the last generation--long enough ago, anyway, for us to have forgotten that "media" is plural. But people who use "the media" as a more encompassing term for "the...

HIDE AND SEEK.(Sly Fox)(Sarah, Sarah)(Theater Review)
April 12, 2004... Volpone, whom Ben Jonson claimed to have invented in five weeks in 1606, is the kind of con man who would steal your stove, then come back for the smoke. A harbinger of the rise of both capitalism and individualism, he has proved to be one of...

FEEL THE EARTH.(I'm Not Scared)(Twentynine Palms)(Movie Review)
April 12, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano), the brown-legged ten-year-old at the center of the stirring Italian movie "I'm Not Scared," is fifty inches tall, and every inch a boy. By that I mean he has a boy's...

ESCALATION.(The Talk of the Town)(Iraq War and George W. Bush's public image)
April 19, 2004... Last week, in a speech at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, Edward Kennedy said, "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam." The last Kennedy brother--now an aging lion, in his eighth decade of life and his fifth decade in the Senate, a thunderer...

WANTED.(The Talk of the Town)(New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city marshals)
April 19, 2004... Do not let it be said that Mayor Bloomberg is weak on job creation. Late last month, a newly appointed mayoral committee began accepting applications for the position of city marshal. The job, obscure and unsalaried, is one of the oldest in...

PARDON?(The Talk of the Town)(John Kerry and international relations)
April 19, 2004... Alain de Chalvron, the Washington bureau chief for France 2, the French equivalent of the BBC, hasn't had an easy time since he came to America, last fall. He has had to endure a predictable barrage of remarks regarding freedom fries, Old...

A PILE OF PAPER.(The Talk of the Town)(parody)
April 19, 2004... One evening in February, two Stanford University seniors, Steve Yelderman and Ian Spiro, were presiding over the weekly staff meeting of The Stanford Chaparral, the college's humor magazine. Spiro, a thin and gangly computerscience major with a...

HAIL TO THE GEEK.(The Talk of the Town)(government information)
April 19, 2004... In the early nineteen-thirties, as the American economy fell to pieces, policymakers in Washington had a serious problem: they had no idea what was happening. They knew that things were bad, but they didn't know how bad, because they had almost...

STOOPING TO CONQUER.(political humor)
April 19, 2004... Three days after placing third in the Iowa caucuses and delivering the much replayed "scream," Howard Dean made a taped appearance on the "Late Show with David Letterman." His task was to deliver the Top Ten list of "ways I, Howard Dean, can...

NYUK, NYUK, NYUK.(The Three Stooges and the Farrelly brothers script)
April 19, 2004... In March, seventy years after the release of the first Three Stooges short, "Woman Haters"--the only one spoken in rhyming couplets--Peter and Bobby Farrelly met up in a hotel in the ski resort of Sun Valley, Idaho, to resume work on a script...

THE RADICAL.(comic strip creator Aaron McGruder)(Interview)
April 19, 2004... On the day of Saddam Hussein's capture, last December, the left-leaning political weekly The Nation celebrated its hundred-and-thirty-eighth birthday. It was a Sunday night, and the weather was dreadful--forbiddingly cold and wet, heavy snow...

COMEDY FIRST.(humor writing and acting)
April 19, 2004... The lives of many young comedy writers and directors are divided into two parts. There is childhood, ruled by bland Hollywood comedies such as "The Goodbye Girl" and "Oh God!" And then there is the glorious, unruly adolescence of the person...

PUNCH LINE.(history of the obscene joke)
April 19, 2004... A few years ago, browsing in a dusty used-book store in Maine, I came across a curious volume. It was a fat, tattered paperback bearing the title "Rationale of the Dirty Joke." Its author, I saw from the sixties-style futuristic cover, was G....

CHILDHOOD INC.(Showbiz Moms and Dads)(Television Program Review)
April 19, 2004... "I'm so like a Captain von Trapp," a father of seven says in "Showbiz Moms & Dads," the Bravo series about child performers and their parental handlers, whose six weekly episodes begin on April 13th. The father, a now and probably forever...

UNNATURAL HISTORY.(Intimate Apparel)(Theater Review)
April 19, 2004... At the final beat of Lynn Nottage's subtle and compelling "Intimate Apparel" (a Roundabout Theatre Company production at the Laura Pels), the stage picture freezes on the heroine, a thirty-five-year-old seamstress named Esther Mills (Viola...

THE SONATA SEMINAR.(pianist Leon Fleisher at Carnegie Hall)
April 19, 2004... "There are so few notes," the pianist Leon Fleisher said, "but so many implications." The setting was a recent master class at Carnegie Hall. Fleisher, the master in question, was leading four young musicians through the mystical landscapes of...

CHOPPING BLOCK.(Kill Bill Vol. 2)(Movie Review)
April 19, 2004... Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol. 2" is a shapeless mess, but at least it's not as monotonous as "Kill Bill Vol. 1." It has some landscape and some odd characters, whereas the earlier movie consisted mostly of sliced-cranium combat scenes...

ON THE BARK.(stand-up comedy)
April 19, 2004... Late one Saturday night in January, at Ha! Comedy Club, on West Forty-sixth Street, Peyton Clarkson learned what it was to bomb. Peyton, a blond, blue-eyed twenty-three-year-old from Alabama, had been performing at Ha! for only a month and a...

POSSESSION.(finding an apartment)
April 19, 2004... "Finding an apartment is a lot like falling in love," the real-estate agent told us. She was a stylish grandmother in severe designer sunglasses. Dyed blond hair, black stockings, a little scarf tied just so around the throat: for three months,...

CARD TRICKS.
April 19, 2004... Last year, Hallmark Cards began sending members of its writing staff to various cities to talk about what they do for a living. The program, called "Hallmark Writers on Tour," was created in response to inquiries from devoted greeting-card...

BEYOND A JOKE.(personal memoriam to deceased relative)
April 19, 2004... His name was Eric Vachell, except that it wasn't. He was known to me as Uncle Eric, but he was not my uncle. He was born an Anglican and died a Roman Catholic. He never married, because of something he had read in a book. He was a doctor who...