The New Yorker articles from August 2003

The New Yorker archives from August 2003

Great Barriers.(Bayou Farewell; A Celebration of the World's Barrier Islands )(Book Review)
August 4, 2003... After the Great Mississippi Flood, in 1927, which cost more than a thousand lives and a billion dollars in damages, a massive network of levees was constructed to tame the river's turbulent flow. The river had been constantly shifting to find...

BUSINESS AS USUAL.(Bush Administration showing signs of reverting to practices of pandering to big busines)
August 4, 2003... A year ago this week, President Bush signed into law the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires corporate C.E.O.s to certify the accuracy of their companies' financial statements, prohibits retaliation against whistle-blowers, and raises the...

SHOTS IN THE BALCONY.(shooting of New York City Councilman James Davis)
August 4, 2003... Last Wednesday at about four o'clock, Ed Kosner, who will be departing as editor of the News in March, was sitting in his office, overlooking the paper's newsroom, and examining a photograph that would become the next day's front page: it...

WANTING YOU TO WANT ME.(Cheap Trick's promotional in-store appearance in Virgin Megastore in Times Square, New York City)
August 4, 2003... When a rock band has conquered the world, sold millions of records, been the top of the pops and the toast of the town, seen its fortunes fall both critically and commercially, as an autumn leaf falls from a tree, and then watched as, in strict...

DEATH BY CRAB.(death of President Warren Gamaliel Harding)
August 4, 2003... Kyle Jarrow is twenty-three years old and bears a passing resemblance to Dennis the Menace. He is the kind of person who enjoys provoking people, and who can enlist a piano and a trumpet to get his point across loudly, if he wishes. His usual...

OPEN WIDE.(summer movie marketing)
August 4, 2003... In August, 1975, the critic Stephen Farber, writing in the Times, attributed the success of "Jaws"--which in just two months had become one of the most popular films in history--to an "aggressive media blitz" that had "pummeled" moviegoers into...

THE SEARCH FOR OSAMA.(Osama bin Laden)
August 4, 2003... A Q. & A. with Jane Mayer One day this past March, in Langley, Virginia, there was jubilation on a little-known thoroughfare called Bin Laden Lane. Analysts at the C.I.A.'s Counter-Terrorism Center, a dingy warren of gray metal desks...

MISSING IN ACTION.(artist Lee Bontecou)(Interview)(Biography)
August 4, 2003... The disappearance of Lee Bontecou has been an art-world mystery for more than thirty years. Only a handful of male artists broke from the starting gate as strongly as she did in the nineteen-sixties, and no women came close. She showed at the...

WRECK OF THE PANDORA.(1791 wreck of ship transporting Bounty mutineers)
August 4, 2003... By air, the Great Barrier Reef can be seen for what it truly is. From the height of thirty-seven thousand feet, or from the fifteen hundred feet of a high-winged, low-flying charter--or from the one hundred feet of, say, the crow's nest of a...

CHERNOBYL.
August 4, 2003... On April 26, 1986, at 1:23 a.m., Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl trembled and exploded, causing a conflagration that spewed a radioactive cloud ten times as deadly as the radiation at Hiroshima. Many residents of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian towns...

INVISIBLE CITIES.("Kotko" and "Kitezh")(Opera Review)
August 4, 2003... Andrew Porter, who wrote warmly erudite music criticism for this magazine from 1972 to 1992, used to travel out of town for stagings of neglected Russian operas, commenting that even a threadbare production of something like "Ruslan and...

BIG DEAD WHITE MALE.(bicentennial books on Ralph Waldo Emerson)(Book Review)
August 4, 2003... A guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson online The observances this year of the two-hundredth anniversary of Ralph Waldo Emerson's birth, in 1803, have been measured but widespread: conferences were scheduled in the great man's adopted home town of...

TARGET AMERICA.("The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY)
August 4, 2003... "The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003," a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art of recent works by fifty mostly little-known artists, filmmakers, and collaborative groups from thirty or so countries,...

HORSE POWER.("Seabiscuit")(Movie Review)
August 4, 2003... From 1937, a Profile of the horse Man o' War "Seabiscuit" is a triumph-of-the-equine-spirit movie. The legendary horse of the nineteen-thirties--small, knobby-kneed, and often torpid, with an irregular gait and an uncertain temper--is all...

Park Life.(Book Review)
August 11, 2003... In 1863, at the peak of the Civil War, a package turned up on President Lincoln's desk containing stereoscopic images of the municipal wonder taking shape up in New York: Central Park. These high-tech photographic scenes were intended to soothe...

RADIO DAZE.(AnShell Media plans to offer liberal alternative to conservative domination of political talk radio in New York City)
August 11, 2003... New York City is the home base of Fox News, National Review, and "The Rush Limbaugh Show." We're in our tenth straight year under Republican mayors. And we're the world headquarters of heartless, rapacious, crush-the-workers Finance Capitalism....

SALAAM NEW YORK.(college-age South Asian Muslims visit New York as part of American Studies program)
August 11, 2003... Not a lot usually gets accomplished when future Prime Ministers meet with former Presidents, but there they were, Omer Chaudhary and Akbar Ansari, up-and-comers from Pakistan and India (respectively), being ushered unexpectedly into the Harlem...

WAR GAME.(playing card decks of Iraq's most wanted and Bush administration)
August 11, 2003... With the recent deaths of the Baath Party's prodigal sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein, the number of active cards in the centcom-issued Iraqi "most wanted" decks has dwindled to sixteen; those with familiar names on them number just two--Saddam and...

THROW THE BOOKS AT HIM.(Sam Waksal's Amazon.com Wish List)
August 11, 2003... Schuylkill, the correctional facility in Pennsylvania, is the kind of place that, according to attorneys who try to get their white-collar clients sent there, bears a beguiling resemblance to a college campus: it has sports facilities and a...

WILDING.(pianist Earl Wild)
August 11, 2003... When the eighty-seven-year-old American pianist Earl Wild gave a recital the other day at the Mannes College of Music, on West Eighty-fifth Street, as part of a piano festival, he walked onto the stage with the aspect of a man who has earned...

SICK WITH WORRY.(hypochondria)
August 11, 2003... Amanda was sure that she had contracted leukemia, developed a brain tumor, and had a stroke--all around the same time. She made this self-diagnosis while experiencing intermittent discomfort in her abdomen and feeling a persistent wooziness in...

THE CAR OF TOMORROW.(hydrogen-powered cars)
August 11, 2003... Capitol Hill is a lousy place to sell a car but a good place to sell the idea of one, which is why on a muggy afternoon not long ago Rick Wagoner, the chairman and C.E.O. of General Motors, was standing on First Street next to a...

IRAQ'S BLOODY SUMMER.
August 11, 2003... One morning a few days before Qusay and Uday Hussein were killed in Mosul, I had an appointment with the Imam of the Abu Hanifa Mosque in Adhamiya, a traditionally pro-Baathist, predominantly Sunni Muslim neighborhood in the northwestern part...

THE HAVES AND THE HAVES.(opposition to luxury golf course in Norfolk, CT)
August 11, 2003... NORFOLK, CONNECTICUT -- I feel slightly guilty mentioning that, earlier this year, Connecticut Magazine's annual survey of towns with populations under five thousand rated Norfolk, a Berkshires village in northern Litchfield County, the...

MAYHEM AND MADNESS.(Avenue Q)(Theater Review)
August 11, 2003... The musical puppet-and-people show "Avenue Q" (at the Golden) has so much to recommend it--an exceptionally gifted cast, a strong book by Jeff Whitty, with equally strong music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, and the splendid...

LOVE'S LABORS.(Against Love: A Polemic)(Book Review)
August 11, 2003... In 1643, John Milton published his "Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce," an essay addressed to the members of the English Parliament, in which he deplored matrimonial laws that imprisoned the unhappily married in "a drooping and disconsolate...

BROTHERS AND SISTERS.(Buffalo Soldiers; The Magdalene Sisters)(Movie Review)
August 11, 2003... You could set up a neat double bill with "Buffalo Soldiers" and "The Magdalene Sisters." Each considers a closed and largely monosexual community--one run by soldiers, the other by nuns, most of whom make the soldiers look like a highly scented...

All Greek.(A Genealogical Chart of Greek Mythology)(The Genealogy of Greek Mythology)(Book Review)
August 18, 2003... You wait thousands of years for a family tree of all the Greek gods, and then two come along at once. The first, A Genealogical Chart of Greek Mythology (North Carolina), began in 1964 as the hobby of the late Harold Newman and was recently...

THE FAMILY ISSUE.
August 18, 2003... From 2000, Roger Angell remembers his father "We are fam-ilee," the great old Sister Sledge single went, and then the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates swiped it and made it their own, riding that beat all the way into the World Series and winning...

IMPRESSIONS OF GORE.(Al Gore's speech at New York University)
August 18, 2003... The will-he-or-won't-he follies reached fever pitch last week, and amid the chaos and comedy of this season's incipient and aborted political candidacies--Gary Coleman, in; Jerry Springer, out; Larry Flynt, likely; Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hasta...

A COMER.(teenage chef Jason Lepes)
August 18, 2003... If you spent an evening at the restaurant Aureole a year or two ago, you might have found, slipped in with the dainty bag of cookies you were given as you left, a little card printed with a phone number and the name "Jason Lepes." You might...

MAKING WAVES.(Rockaway Wave columnist Dorothy Dunne)
August 18, 2003... In line for the ferry from Manhattan to Rockaway was a blond woman wearing dark glasses, white shorts, a white shirt, white mules, and a white visor. It was an easy guess that she was bound for Breezy Point, or Breezy, as the natives call...

LEAVE NO PARENT BEHIND.("The Two-Income Trap")(Book Review)
August 18, 2003... To hear American politicians tell it, nothing matters more to good public policy than the family. Bill Clinton campaigned under the slogan "Putting Families First." George W. Bush promised to "Leave No Child Behind." John Kerry, Joe Lieberman,...

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR.(Short Story)
August 18, 2003... "Well that little experiment is over," my mother said. "You tried it, it didn't work out, so what do you say we just move on." She was dressed in her roll-up-the-shirtsleeves outfit: the faded turquoise skirt, a cotton head scarf, and one of...

NASCAR'S NEW TRACK.
August 18, 2003... A Q. & A. with Kevin Conley William Clifton France, the seventy-year-old patriarch of the family that owns nascar, the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing, is not the richest man in sports: Paul Allen, Mark Cuban, and Wayne...

AN ENLARGED HEART.(Short Story)
August 18, 2003... It began with a cough. Her brother had a cough. And, after all, what was a cough? They had all had them. In winter, they passed them around like sweets. Enough coughing meant no school. Although sometimes we sent them off anyway--risking a call...

THE JAZZ SINGER.
August 18, 2003... I have a handwritten family tree of uncertain provenance, according to which my father's mother's family, the Whitburns, splits into two branches around 1670. One branch, descended from the elder son, stayed in Cornwall: they were landowners...

THE MARRIAGE CURE.
August 18, 2003... One July morning last year in Oklahoma City, in a public-housing project named Sooner Haven, twenty-two-year-old Kim Henderson pulled a pair of low-rider jeans over a high-rising gold lame thong and declared herself ready for church. Her best...

LITTLE PEOPLE.(Book Review)
August 18, 2003... A good deal of our intellectual life in the past half century has been ruled by the following pattern: First, a French person, with great brilliance and little regard for standards of evidence, promulgates a theory overturning dearly held...

SUNNY MONEY.("The O.C.")(Television Program Review)
August 18, 2003... In the pilot episode of Fox's heavily promoted new drama "The O.C.," which debuted last week, getting a jump on the rest of the network's baseball-delayed fall season, a teen-age girl who's standing at the bottom of her driveway in a gated...

WAYWARD GIRL.(Concert Review)
August 18, 2003... Near dusk one evening a few weeks ago, the thirty-one-year-old singer and songwriter Chan Marshall, who performs and records under the name Cat Power, made an appearance with her backup band at Castle Clinton, in Battery Park. Built in 1811,...

LIFE IN PICTURES.("American Splendor")(Movie Review)
August 18, 2003... This is a wild guess, but I suspect that the title of "American Splendor" is touched with irony. There are many qualities that one associates with Harvey Pekar, the hero of the movie, but "splendor" is not the first that leaps to mind. He is a...