The New Yorker articles from April 2005

The New Yorker archives from April 2005

MATTERS OF LIFE.(The Talk of the Town)(Terri Schiavo)
April 4, 2005... Last week, Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo, known to cable-news viewers and talk-radio listeners as Terri, was as ubiquitous as Elian Gonzalez and Laci Peterson once were. Yet she was also hidden, obscured behind layers of political and...

ROUND-TRIP.(The Talk of the Town)(traffic congestion)
April 4, 2005... It's one thing to get stuck in traffic, and another to seek it out. The mind, accustomed to devoting all its powers to avoiding traffic jams, bucks at the prospect of being stuck in one on purpose. So a slight adjustment was called for last...

NIGHT VISITORS.(The Talk of the Town)(bedbugs)
April 4, 2005... Life is, like, so unfair sometimes. Case in point: Alexis Swerdloff and her friends Laura Perciasepe, Avni Bhatia, and Anna Arkin-Gallagher, a quartet of eye-on-the-main-chance nouvelles Yale graduates who late last summer set up housekeeping...

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA.(The Talk of the Town - Rosenthal's Children provokes controversy)
April 4, 2005... Last week, the political talk in Moscow was mainly about yet another popular revolution, in yet another corner of the old Soviet imperium. First Georgia, then Ukraine, and now the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, where the fallen autocrat...

PIECEWORK.(hospital doctors)(Column)
April 4, 2005... To become a doctor, you spend so much time in the tunnels of preparation--head down, trying not to screw up, trying to make it from one day to the next--that it is a shock to find yourself at the other end, with someone shaking your hand and...

BLOOMBERG'S GAME.(mayoral election)
April 4, 2005... Going back to James (Gentleman Jimmy) Walker, the Jazz Age dandy who spent his evenings at the Central Park Casino and rarely got to work before noon, New Yorkers have tended to elect civic leaders who embody the historic moment. During the...

PASSION PLAYS.(Edward Albee)(Biography)
April 4, 2005... Never trust a man who loves animals. First, ask him why he loves them. If he says that he loves them because they are artless and innocent, or incapable of duplicity, or because of the wholehearted unselfishness of their affection, or because...

DINING OUT.(The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine)(Book Review)
April 4, 2005... There are two schools of good writing about food: the mock epic and the mystical microcosmic. The mock epic (A. J. Liebling, Calvin Trillin, the French writer Robert Courtine, and any good restaurant critic) is essentially comic and treats the...

UNFORGETTABLE.(Oblivion)(Book Review)
April 4, 2005... In the long, groping, and haphazard drama of evolution, human consciousness is a recent and precarious acquisition. Our anxiety at its precariousness has much to do with our increasing life expectancy: living longer physically, what can we...

CLASS ACT.(Play Without Words)(Dance Review)
April 4, 2005... Matthew Bourne, who is probably the most acclaimed choreographer in England today, founded his first troupe, campily called Adventures in Motion Pictures, in 1987--a ragtag seven-member group that tooled around England in a minivan putting on...

YOUNG FUN.(Jean-Michel Basquiat)
April 4, 2005... Jean-Michel Basquiat, the subject of an important, intensely enjoyable retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, made nearly all of his best paintings, which are very good indeed, at the age of twenty-one, in 1982. He was not mature beyond his...

GLASS HOUSES.(Glass Menagerie)(Theater Review)
April 4, 2005... "It seems like yesterday"--a lovely phrase that may occur to you more than once if you're fortunate enough to catch David Leveaux's brilliant staging of Tennessee Williams's "Glass Menagerie" (at the Barrymore). It is hardly surprising that...

TWO WOMEN.(Look at Me)(The Upside of Anger)(Movie Review)
April 4, 2005... At its core, "Look at Me" ("Comme une Image"), the wonderful new film by the team of Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, is a modern-day fairy tale: cruel father, unloved daughter, young stepmother. But the movie is about so many other things as...

TAB WAR.(The Talk of the Town)(newspapers)
April 11, 2005... No longer can it be said that the News, traditionally the more restrained of the city's rival tabloids, lacks a fighting spirit. The paper, reeling (or so said the Post, many times) from a lotto-game debacle that awarded cash prizes to...

CAPTURING THE UNICORN.(tapestries)
April 11, 2005... In 1998, the Cloisters--the museum of medieval art in upper Manhattan--began a renovation of the room where the seven tapestries known as "The Hunt of the Unicorn" hang. The Unicorn tapestries are considered by many to be the most beautiful...

THE TANGLE.(progressive supranuclear palsy)
April 11, 2005... Billy Borja grew up in Sinajana, a hilltop village near the center of the island of Guam. As a teen-ager in the nineteen-fifties, he liked to hunt, and a few times a month he would take his shotgun down into the "boonies," which was what locals...

ALWAYS WITH US.(The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time)(Book Review)
April 11, 2005... On July 9, 1985, a thirty-year-old American economist named Jeffrey Sachs stepped off a plane in La Paz, Bolivia, high in the Andes, where the inflation rate was three thousand per cent. Prices were rising so fast that on the streets of the...

LIVING LARGE.(Fat Actress)(Television Program Review)
April 11, 2005... When Roseanne Barr took the stage at the dopey TV Land Awards last month to accept an award, she said, by way of explaining that she was grateful for the recognition, "Even though I'm slim, my ego is still morbidly obese." It was an...

SLOW FADE.(Slint)(Concert Review)
April 11, 2005... In the summer of 1989, a band called Slaughterhouse played at the Pyramid, a club in the East Village. The band was generically noisy, and hostile in a manner that was common at the time, especially among groups that performed in the...

SHADES OF BLACK.(This Is How It Goes)(Theater Review)
April 11, 2005... Jeffrey Wright is a brilliant American actor. At this point, it scarcely matters what he appears in: whatever play or film he lends his graceful frame and formidable imagination to yields levels of complexity, shades of light and dark, that...

FEELINGS.(Sin City)(Movie Review)
April 11, 2005... Here is something that we never thought to see. Something that exists beyond the bounds of logic: a scary Elijah Wood. Presumably, the actor looked around, seeking a film that would dispel the ripe aroma of Frodo Baggins, happened upon "Sin...

JOHN PAUL II.(The Talk of the Town)(Obituary)
April 11, 2005... Karol Wojtyla, a poet, actor, and playwright, who had been a bishop in Poland for twenty years, was elected Pope by the College of Cardinals on October 16, 1978. Shortly afterward, Yuri Andropov, the head of Soviet intelligence, called the...

DEEP.(The Talk of the Town)(bathyspheres)
April 11, 2005... In the 1953 science-fiction thriller "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms," a scientist is lowered into the ocean's depths in a stylized Hollywood interpretation of a bathysphere--a self-contained diving chamber--to look for a giant prehistoric...

ALL TOGETHER NOW.(The Talk of the Town)(Sony)
April 11, 2005... In 1979, Masaru Ibuka, the co-founder of Sony, asked the company's engineers to make him a portable stereo cassette player that he could take on a plane. Within a few days, the engineers had delivered a prototype. The headphones were gigantic,...

THE PARACHUTE ARTIST.(Tony Wheeler)
April 18, 2005... On the evening after the rainiest summer day in Melbourne's history, Tony Wheeler's dinner guests, who were British, wanted to discuss the weather. Wheeler gradually redirected the conversation to the Falkland Islands. He had recently written a...

KEEPING UP.(travel)(Column)
April 18, 2005... My street in Paris is named for a surgeon who taught at the nearby medical school and discovered an abnormal skin condition, a contracture that causes the fingers to bend inward, eventually turning the hand into a full-time fist. It's short,...

DANGEROUS GAME.(skiing)(Column)
April 18, 2005... In the ski-bum brain, the chance to ski with a magus like Andrew McLean is the equivalent of an invitation for a night on the town with Don Juan. The allure is great, but there's always a possibility that the excursion will not end well. McLean...

MY SUMMER IN POLAND.
April 18, 2005... As a child, I had an inexhaustible passion for junk food--at least in theory, since I was never allowed to have it. For this reason, the trip my mother and I took to Pathmark in late June of 1984, when I was nine, stands out like a meteor in an...

STRANGERS IN THE FOREST.(Papua)
April 18, 2005... The jungle canopy below us was suddenly ruptured by a rectangular clearing not much longer than a suburban lawn. This was the airstrip for Wanggemalo, a tiny village in the Indonesian province of Papua, which is the western half of New Guinea....

A COLD LIGHT.(photojournalism)(Sebastio Salgado)
April 18, 2005... The Amazonas photographic agency is in a neighborhood of rising elegance and property prices in northeastern Paris, in a former coal warehouse on the Saint-Martin canal. Just in front of the building, a steeply arched wrought-iron footbridge...

COUNTDOWN.(travel)
April 18, 2005... In 1969, the drive from Minneapolis to St. Louis took twelve hours and was mostly on two-lane roads. My parents woke me up for it at dawn. We had just spent an outstandingly fun week with my Minnesota cousins, but as soon as we pulled out of my...

OUT IN THE SORT.(couriers)(Column)
April 18, 2005... In an all but windowless building beside the open ocean in Arichat, Nova Scotia, a million lobsters are generally in residence, each in a private apartment where temperatures are maintained just above the freeze point. In a great high-ceilinged...

COLD FRONT.(travel)(Column)
April 18, 2005... When I was a young woman in Iowa, one quality I considered indispensable in a prospective mate was the willingness to drive to a coast. Over the years, there were trips to every conceivable coast, including Puget Sound, Niagara Falls, and Santa...

PILGRIMAGE.(Quebec)(Column)
April 18, 2005... My parents got the idea for our only vacation from a priest. Their marriage was based on shared devout Catholicism; our days were shaped and colored by it. They were middle-aged when I was born, my mother forty-one, my father fifty-five. My...

PIECEWORK.(Quicksands)(Book Review)
April 18, 2005... The English novelist Sybille Bedford is more than a novelist. She worked as a court reporter, covering notorious trials--the case of Stephen Ward, the society doctor at the center of the Profumo scandal, in London in 1963; the trial of Jack...

CLEANUP HITTERS.(Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big)(Book Review)
April 18, 2005... One young man leads another to a toilet stall, cautiously looking around to make sure they're not being observed. Then he has him lower his trousers so that he can get at his buttocks. What follows is a matter of enormous public interest. Years...

THE MANY FACES OF JANE.(What of the Night)(Theater Review)
April 18, 2005... Of the many unforgettable roles that Jane Alexander has brought to life in her thirty-five years as a player on stage and screen, two stand out in particular. The first is her Oscar-nominated movie debut as Eleanor Backman in Martin Ritt's 1970...

OFF THE RAILS.(Harry Partch)(Biography)
April 18, 2005... Of all the triumphantly weird characters who have roamed the frontiers of American art, none ever went quite as far out as the composer Harry Partch. His exit from civilization has assumed the status of legend, and it's all true. The turning...

TRACK AND FIELD.(Kontroll)(Fever Pitch)(Video Recording Review)
April 18, 2005... Movie Listings DVD Notes The Film File "Kontroll," the raucous and tender first film by the young Hungarian-American director Nimrod Antal, is set entirely in the Budapest subway. You could say that the movie is colored by subway...

WITHOUT DELAY.(The Talk of the Town)(Tom DeLay)
April 25, 2005... A current Washington joke, in the mordant style that used to be a Moscow specialty, has it that Republicans and Democrats have finally found something they can agree on: Tom DeLay must stay as the Majority Leader of the House of...

ELLEN BARKIN AT HOME.(The Talk of the Town)(Interview)
April 25, 2005... Last week, Ellen Barkin was flitting around town promoting "Palindromes," a new movie directed by Todd Solondz, in which she plays the unctuous mother of a pregnant thirteen-year-old girl. Simultaneously, she was carrying on her real life, as a...

SECRET GARDEN.(The Talk of the Town)(The Garden)(Movie Review)
April 25, 2005... It seems difficult to imagine that the owners of Madison Square Garden, who refer to it, rather boisterously, as the World's Most Famous Arena, would object to the release of a documentary about the Garden that had been filmed, with their...

A KIM JONG IL PRODUCTION.(The Talk of the Town)(Shin Sang Ok)(Interview)
April 25, 2005... When the South Korean director Shin Sang Ok was told recently about the upcoming New York premiere of his 1985 film, "Pulgasari," he was as perplexed as he was pleased. He didn't seem to mind that no one had thought to invite him; rather, he...

MR. BROOKLYN.(city hall)
April 25, 2005... Brooklyn's Borough Hall, a Greek Revival building with an Ionic colonnade clad in fine Tuckahoe marble and a roof topped, incongruously, with a Victorian cupola, is a monument to diminished expectations. The first plans for a City...

INVADERS.(Mongols)
April 25, 2005... Recently, I've been buttonholing everybody I know and telling them about Hulagu. What happened was, a couple of years ago Osama bin Laden said (in one of his intermittent recorded messages to the world) that during the previous Gulf War Colin...

THE CLIMATE OF MAN--I.
April 25, 2005... The Alaskan village of Shishmaref sits on an island known as Sarichef, five miles off the coast of the Seward Peninsula. Sarichef is a small island--no more than a quarter of a mile across and two and a half miles long--and Shishmaref is...

"I GOT A SCHEME!".(Excerpt)
April 25, 2005... On a summer afternoon in 1998, while I was visiting Saul Bellow and his wife, Janis, in their rural Vermont home, I proposed to Saul that he and I do an extensive written interview about his life's work. We had been talking for hours on the...

TEARS BEFORE BEDTIME.(Irish drama)(Critical Essay)
April 25, 2005... At times, silences and pauses onstage are as lovely to hear as a beautifully constructed monologue or a sharp turn of phrase. When an actor pulls back to consider the actions of another actor, wordlessly and without engaging in any showoffy...

JOHN BROWN'S BODY.(Biography)
April 25, 2005... "Weird John Brown," Melville called him, in a weirdly contemporary locution, and for a long time he was shuffled to the edges of American weirdness, among the staring-mad homicidal nuts and assassins. In the past several years, though, history,...

IN TRANSLATION.(The Interpreter)(Movie Review)
April 25, 2005... The new Sydney Pollack film, "The Interpreter," stars Nicole Kidman as Silvia Broome, an employee of the United Nations. Lonely and multilingual, Silvia bears a heavy responsibility: she sits in a booth and translates simultaneously from one...