The New Yorker articles from August 2004

The New Yorker archives from August 2004

BIG DOINGS.(The Talk of the Town)(a lighthearted look at Americans and their summer activities)
August 2, 2004... So far, this has been a summer of outsized events--the summer in which Michael Moore proclaimed a buddy link (well, sort of) between the Bush and bin Laden families said to have been in place before 9/11, and in which the Boston police...

THE FLOOR MOVED.(The Talk of the Town)(moving the New York Liberty from Madison Square Garden to Radio City Music Hall)
August 2, 2004... Madison Square Garden has officially closed up shop, more than a month before the opening of the Republican National Convention. No more concerts or wrestling entertainment or women's hoops until school resumes. The other night, the New York...

U.S. V. STEWART, PART II.(The Talk of the Town)(the trial of Lynne Stewart takes place in same courtroom where Martha Stewart's trial took place)
August 2, 2004... By last week, all signs of Martha Stewart's legal ordeal--the TV cameras, the lines of spectators, and the bottles of Japanese herbal tea that Stewart and her legal team sipped at the defense table--had vanished from the federal courthouse...

CHEAP GAS.(The Talk of the Town)(Inder Parmar protests prices of Getty-Lukoil)
August 2, 2004... Late this spring, as gas prices reached record highs and the Bush and Kerry campaigns jostled over which candidate was more pump-friendly, a Queens man named Inder Parmar began selling gas at about thirty cents below the market rate. By his...

CANDIDATE.(The Talk of the Town)(filmmaking at the Democratic National Convention with Robert Altman)
August 2, 2004... Careful observers at the Democratic National Convention in Boston this week may notice an unusual encounter, one that the historian Daniel Boorstin might have called a pseudo pseudo-event. Alexandra Kerry, the candidate's daughter, is filming a...

WINNERS AND LOSERS.(the long-range effects of outsourcing on U.S. employment and wages, coupled with the decline in American science graduates, means the U.S. must invest in its human capital to ensure our future prosperity)
August 2, 2004... N. Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, is a tall, mild-mannered Harvard scholar, widely admired within his profession for his sharp mind and clear exposition. He joined the Bush Administration last...

DON'T CALL ME SIR.(a standup comedian)(Biography)
August 2, 2004... Earlier this year, on a winter evening in Atlantic City, Don Rickles left his suite in the Sands Hotel and, with his publicist, his road manager, and a hotel bodyguard, took the elevator down to the Copa Room. On a scouting mission earlier in...

THE TERROR WEB.(Islamic militants' use of the Internet )
August 2, 2004... For much of Spain's modern history, the organization that has defined its experience with terror is ETA, which stands for Euzkadi Ta Azkatasuna (Basque Homeland and Liberty). ETA, which was founded in 1959, has a clear political goal: it wants...

RUSSIAN RUSH.(Theater Review)
August 2, 2004... "Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient," a new play by Rezo Gabriadze, has a simple, even naive, story, set in the Stalinist Georgia of Gabriadze's childhood. A man named Chito (Mikhail Baryshnikov) is abandoned by his fiancee in...

THE GIFT.(profile of Zell Kravinsky)
August 2, 2004... Last summer, not long after Zell Kravinsky had given almost his entire forty-five-million-dollar real-estate fortune to charity, he called Barry Katz, an old friend in Connecticut, and asked for help with an alibi. Would Katz call Kravinsky's...

ON THE WATERFRONT.(new architecture on the Jersey City, NJ waterfront)
August 2, 2004... If you stand on Eleventh Avenue in the upper Thirties and look south, the new forty-story Goldman Sachs building in Jersey City, on the other side of the Hudson, appears to be at the end of the street. The intimate connection created by the...

THE POLITICIAN.(Book Review)
August 2, 2004... One can make a plausible, if narrow, case that Bill Clinton was one of the most accomplished American politicians of the twentieth century. Among the century's seventeen Presidents, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt, Clinton went the farthest...

LIFE STEPS.(the ballets of Frederick Ashton)
August 2, 2004... The two giants of twentieth-century ballet, Frederick Ashton and George Balanchine, were both born in 1904. And so, early this month, we were no sooner getting over New York City Ballet's Balanchine centennial than the Lincoln Center Festival...

BABY SHOWER.(Movie Review)
August 2, 2004... The new Spike Lee movie, "She Hate Me," turns out to be at least two new Spike Lee movies rolled into one. In fact, the melange of plots, subplots, reveries, gags, cartoons, dirty bits, and hissy fits points to a work that is structurally...

CONVENTIONAL WARFARE.(The Talk of the Town)
August 9, 2004... There's a case to be made that it hardly matters how eloquent or effective John Kerry was at the Democratic National Convention last week. What matters infinitely more is that George W. Bush is the worst President the country has endured since...

COMERS.(The Talk of the Town)
August 9, 2004... Along East Broadway, in Boston, the day before the start of the Democratic National Convention, residents and shopkeepers stood on the sidewalk and waved at a passing convoy of buses. For months, police- and fire-department unions had...

BOSTON TERRIER.(The Talk of the Town)
August 9, 2004... As many of their friends and neighbors fled to the Cape last week, the editors and columnists of the Boston Herald stayed in their locked-down and semi-deserted city to man the peanut gallery. All week, the conservative tabloid heaped derision,...

CASH KILLS.(The Talk of the Town)
August 9, 2004... Americans, we're constantly being told, have forgotten how to save. We have two trillion dollars in consumer debt and a national savings rate of just two per cent, and the government, after a brief experiment with thrift in the Clinton years,...

STANDUP FOR THE LORD.
August 9, 2004... Adam Green discusses the trend of Christian entertainment From 1993, John Lahr on the subversive comedy of Bill Hicks Most accounts of religious awakening feature a dark night of the soul, a moment just before God reveals his grace,...

GETTING THERE.
August 9, 2004... Late one night in the summer of 1937 or 1938, a young man at a party--a cheerful fellow named Charlie, the older brother of a girl I'd once been seeing--came into the room where I was, looking for the girl he had brought and was now ready to...

THE BAD MOTHER.
August 9, 2004... In 1977, Roy Meadow, a British pediatrician, published an account of two children whose symptoms had, for a time, baffled him. Initially, there seemed to be no similarity between the cases. Kay, a six-year-old, had what appeared to be a...

TWO SOLDIERS.
August 9, 2004... As a unit of the elite 82nd Airborne Division, Bravo Company found itself in some of the fiercest fighting last year during the advance on Baghdad. Its hundred-and-thirty-odd paratroopers are among the Army's best-trained and best-equipped...

NANOOK AND ME.
August 9, 2004... Whatever you think of Michael Moore's immensely satisfying movie about the awful Bush Administration and its destructive policies--and reasonable people can disagree, of course--one thing that cannot be said about "Fahrenheit 9/11" is that it...

TALKERS AND TOGAS.(Theater Review)
August 9, 2004... "After the Fall" (a Roundabout production at the American Airlines Theatre) is Arthur Miller's Eugene O'Neill moment--not the O'Neill of the lesser plays, "Dynamo," "The Rope," and so on, but the turgid, self-consciously grand O'Neill of...

MOTHER TONGUE.
August 9, 2004... Despite having invented the English language and those clever TV shows, Britain hasn't withstood our cultural colonization any better than the rest of the world. In the eighties and nineties, British m.c.s generally sounded like variants of...

NAUSEA.
August 9, 2004... "A ray of light: the Grail is fully radiant. A dove floats down from the dome above." These are Richard Wagner's stage directions for the maximally transcendent final moments of "Parsifal," his last opera. Christoph Schlingensief's production...

THRILLED TO DEATH.(Critical Essay)
August 9, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File In the second half of the Graham Greene-Carol Reed classic "The Third Man" (1949), the blundering, well-meaning American Joseph Cotten finally confronts his dazzling friend Orson Welles, who has been...

DANGERS PRESENT.(The Talk of the Town)
August 23, 2004... With a trumpet blare of martial rhetoric, the Committee on the Present Danger has reconstituted itself again. The original Committee, founded in 1950, was made up of Cold Warriors who felt that the country was insufficiently alert to the...

DRY.(The Talk of the Town)
August 23, 2004... As the Democrats just demonstrated in Boston and the Republicans are likely to show later this month in New York, mainstream political conventions don't offer much in the way of unscripted drama. For heated debate, backroom rainmaking, and...

JITTERS.(The Talk of the Town)
August 23, 2004... The Republican National Convention was still several weeks away when the folks at the New York Civil Liberties Union decided to set up shop in a defunct shoe store in order to prepare for all the marches, rallies, and inevitable arrests. The...

NEW JERSEY HAIRCUT.(The Talk of the Town)
August 23, 2004... "You want a New Jersey haircut?" Vito Quattrocchi said the other day. "Move to Florida." He was referring not to the cut you might get in one of those sleek New York-style salons that are increasingly relocating to the suburbs but to the...

AUTOPILOT.(The Talk of the Town)
August 23, 2004... Capitalism is supposed to be revolutionary: demolish the old and usher in the new, without regard for tradition or custom. The free market, as Marx and Engels wrote, is a place of "everlasting uncertainty and agitation," where "all fixed, fast...

SWINGTIME.
August 23, 2004... From 1996, Andrew Ferguson on the effects of attack ads Errol Morris, whose inventive and stylized documentaries include "The Thin Blue Line," "Mr. Death," and an Oscar-winning portrait of Robert McNamara, "The Fog of War," is also a...

BIG CHEESE.
August 23, 2004... Before I met Rob Kaufelt, the owner of Murray's Cheese Shop, in Greenwich Village, what I knew about cheese could be wrapped in a chestnut leaf. When people came to dinner, I bought Brie to have with drinks. At Christmas, my aunt, an...

BJORK'S SAGA.
August 23, 2004... I first met Bjork in the lobby of the Hotel Borg, a funky Art Deco place in the center of the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. The Borg opened in 1930, the dream project of a famous wrestler who liked to host swank parties for American military...

SPEED.
August 23, 2004... As a boy, I was fascinated by speed, the wild range of speeds in the world around me. People moved at different speeds; animals much more so. The wings of insects moved too fast to see, though one could judge their frequency by the tone they...

THE BIG ONE.
August 23, 2004... The last century, through its great cataclysms, offers two clear, ringing, and, unfortunately, contradictory lessons. The First World War teaches that territorial compromise is better than full-scale war, that an "honor-bound" allegiance of the...

GREEK GIFTS.
August 23, 2004... Socrates liked it better than costly perfumes: a compound smell of olive oil, earth, and sweat. He would have grown up knowing it from the playing fields and the gymnasia (literally, "places for training in the nude") at festivals where, for a...

LIARS AND CHEATS.(Theater Review)
August 23, 2004... Had I been around at the time that J. Hartley Manners's notoriously treacly melodrama "Peg o' My Heart" began its historic run on Broadway, in the early years of the last century, I might well have been a fan. There are certain occasions in a...

VILLAGE PEOPLE.(Movie Review)
August 23, 2004... According to Thoreau, "Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl." One envies Thoreau many things, among them the confidence that he could stride through the woods of Maine and Massachusetts without being poked in the rear by the...

G.O.P. CITY.(The Talk of the Town)
August 30, 2004... The Republicans are coming, and it isn't easy to tell who's more jittery--the visitors or the natives. On billboards and television, Ed Koch admonishes everybody to "make nice." ("anarchy threat to city"was the two-inch front-page headline...

TRICKY DICK.(The Talk of the Town)
August 30, 2004... A political prank, according to a mock dictionary entry on Dick Tuck's business card, is "a political activity, characterized by humor, devised to unmask, ventilate, bring to light, debunk, hold up to view, etc., the comical, ludicrous, or...

AUGUST.(The Talk of the Town)
August 30, 2004... Until a few years ago, if you wanted to locate your therapist during the month of August, your best bet was to scour the summer resorts on the New England coast, such as Truro and Ogunquit, where vacationing shrinks have traditionally gone to...

FLIP-FLOP EMERGENCY.(The Talk of the Town)
August 30, 2004... It's hard to imagine that there is any major American clothing brand that does not have a store in the consumer vortex that is East Hampton; and it is equally hard to imagine that the most avid of shoppers, strolling past the Ralph Lauren...

CANNONBALL!(The Talk of the Town)
August 30, 2004... Neddy Merrill, the hero of John Cheever's story "The Swimmer," "had an inexplicable contempt for men who do not hurl themselves into pools." Neddy would have been troubled by aquatic developments over the past two decades. After a golden age in...

THE PLAYING FIELD.
August 30, 2004... From 1984, Eugene Kinkead on the first Olympic Games Short reviews of Olympic-themed books Omonia, in the heart of Athens, is a working-class district of six- and eight-story concrete high-rises built in the nineteen-sixties on the...

HOW HIGH CAN YOU GO.
August 30, 2004... The Midwest is often spoken of as if everybody there were sane, but the weather makes up for it. The weather often changes its mind, drastically, within minutes. On the road through Ohio, you pass towns like Berlin and Milan, that really should...

DYING IN DARFUR.
August 30, 2004... A portfolio of photographs from Sudan, by Bruno Stevens Amina Abaker Mohammed occupies a simple mud hut with a thatched roof outside a refugee camp in northern Chad. Until earlier this year, she lived in Darfur, the western region of Sudan,...

THE BOYS.
August 30, 2004... When talking about sports, you are supposed to have an opinion, which another person can then agree with or disagree with, so that a conversation may proceed and silence may be averted. The opinion need not be subtle or original, as long as it...

THE UNPOLITICAL ANIMAL.
August 30, 2004... In every Presidential-election year, there are news stories about undecided voters, people who say that they are perplexed about which candidate's positions make the most sense. They tell reporters things like "I'd like to know more about...

ANATOLIAN ARABESQUES.(Book Review)
August 30, 2004... Orhan Pamuk's new novel, "Snow" (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely; Knopf; $26), abounds with modernist tracer genes. Like Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past," it bares its inner gears of reconstituted memory and ends by promising...

SEE HOW THEY RUN.(Television Program Review)
August 30, 2004... As a break from this season's Presidential campaign, you might check out R. J. Cutler's unreality series "American Candidate," on Showtime on Sunday nights. It has the virtue of featuring none of the candidates who are actually running for...

HUSBANDS AND WIVES.(Movie Review)
August 30, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File The great actress Laura Dern looks like an Alice who has wandered a bit too far into Wonderland. Dern has a lengthy, skinny torso, a long neck, and a back like a drawn bow, and when she stretches that body...