The New Yorker articles from December 2002

The New Yorker archives from December 2002

Dealing with the Disabled.('Raising Blaze' and 'The Normal One')(Book Review)(Brief Article)
December 2, 2002... A specific diagnosis of a disability may provide a welcome explanation for puzzling behavior, and even offer relief through medication or therapy. But as Debra Ginsberg explains in RAISING BLAZE (HarperCollins), her memoir of bringing up her...

TALES OUT OF PRESCHOOL.(need for universal preschool education)
December 2, 2002... The scandal at the 92nd Street Y Nursery School--an institution that anxious plutocratic parents in New York City believe will facilitate their progeny's acceptance to Harvard and teach toddler barons social-climbing skills when they have...

A PROSECUTOR SPEAKS UP.(about the 1989 Central Park jogger case)
December 2, 2002... The case of the Central Park jogger, a young investment banker who was raped and nearly beaten to death on April 19, 1989, stood for years as a symbol of urban predatory violence. In the days immediately after the crime, five teen-agers...

A HUNDRED MILLION.(bequest to Poetry magazine by Ruth Lilly)
December 2, 2002... Last week's news that Ruth Lilly, the eighty-seven-year-old heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, had bequeathed a hundred million dollars to the magazine Poetry, a modest Chicago monthly, was greeted by a range of reactions (glee,...

VACUUM CLEANERS, CHEAP.(Clean Air Program offered by New York, New York after World Trade Center collapse)
December 2, 2002... New York City may be facing steep tax increases and a generally diminished quality of life, but at least the federal government wants to buy everyone in town a new vacuum cleaner. Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Federal...

TALK TO THEM.(dream dates desired by non-native English speakers)
December 2, 2002... In the new Pedro Almodovar film, "Talk to Her," the thirty-five-year-old Spanish actor Javier Camara plays Benigno, a male nurse who takes care of a young dancer in a coma, talking to her constantly in Spanish. But in the intermediate-English...

THE RINGMASTER.(director Baz Luhrmann)
December 2, 2002... The Australian director Baz Luhrmann is an impresario of himself; inevitably, for a protean talent, he is known by many names. At the entrance to his temporary base of operations, in a wood-beamed loft on Wooster Street, in New York, he lists...

THE LONG WAR OF JOHN KERRY.(senator's outspokenness on political issues, including war)(Interview)
December 2, 2002... On a rainy October morning, the day after Senator John Forbes Kerry, of Massachusetts, announced that he would reluctantly vote to give President George W. Bush the authority to use lethal force against Iraq, the Senator sat in his Capitol Hill...

DEGAS'S MYSTERY PAINTING.(Edgar Degas, painting, Detroit Institute of Arts)
December 2, 2002... Although Edgar Degas, the son of a music-loving banker, is almost certain to have attended the Paris Opera from an early age, the fact that he didn't begin painting its dancers until he was thirty-three years old has long puzzled art...

GROUP THINK.(new books)(Book Review)
December 2, 2002... Lorne Michaels, the creator of "Saturday Night Live," was married to one of the show's writers, Rosie Shuster. One day when the show was still young, an assistant named Paula Davis went to Shuster's apartment in New York and found Dan Aykroyd...

PRESENT LAUGHTER.(Dagobert Peche, crafts and design, Neue Galerie, New York, New York)
December 2, 2002... The most exciting retrospective of the current New York art season presents more than four hundred objects of craft and design--furniture, fabric, wallpaper, women's fashion, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and jewelry, along with works on...

CONSOLATIONS.(composer Arvo Part)(Interview)
December 2, 2002... A discography of Part's recordings A few years ago, a man who faced a terminal diagnosis of cancer asked a friend to give him some compact disks so that he could have a little music to help him get through the night. Among the recordings...

LOVE AND WAR.('The Quiet American')(Movie Review)
December 2, 2002... Michael Korda on Graham Greene's fears and fantasies How do you transfigure Graham Greene for the screen? Many have grappled with the task, and, despite the occasional flesh wound, he has been treated fairly, if a little squarely--with far...

Now Paging.(bookstores)
December 9, 2002... Steve Crowley is the first to admit that his bookstore's success has a lot to do with what he calls "Strand spillover." Having that behemoth right around the corner from his shop, ALABASTER BOOKS (122 Fourth Ave.; 982-3550), insures a steady...

They, Robots.('BUILDING BOTS')('FLESH AND MACHINES: HOW ROBOTS WILL CHANGE US')(Book Review)(Brief Article)
December 9, 2002... In 1739, the French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson unveiled his latest startling creation: an anatomically convincing, yet wholly mechanical, duck--one that quacked, ate grain, and, most impressively, excreted. Vaucanson's mechanical duck was a...

TOO MUCH INFORMATION.(the mission of the Information Awareness Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense)
December 9, 2002... When it comes to concocting fevered visions of the future as a way of illuminating the present, Jules Verne got some things right in his time, Aldous Huxley got others, and George Orwell got still others. In our time--in this terror-haunted...

UNMARITAL BLISS.(Dorian Solot, Marshall Miller)
December 9, 2002... Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller are the founders of the Alternatives to Marriage Project and the authors of the newly published book "Unmarried to Each Other: The Essential Guide to Living Together as an Unmarried Couple," which advocates for...

SALE BOAT.(shopping at Target's temporary store at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan)
December 9, 2002... There could hardly be any news more thrilling to discount-minded Manhattanites, whose bargain-hunting triumphs are usually on the order of buying a couple of bags of postholiday candy at Duane Reade at fifty per cent off (you've just missed the...

A MEMORABLE MEAL.(re-creation of Marsilio Ficino's November 7, 1468, Neoplatonist dinner celebrating Plato's birth and death)
December 9, 2002... The re-creation the other night of Marsilio Ficino's Neoplatonist dinner did not go exactly the way the original dinner did, on November 7, 1468, when Ficino, the philosopher, sat down with eight fellow-Neoplatonists, at the Medici Villa at...

THE TALKING CURE.(Wall Street's new candor regarding conflicts of interest in securities and accounting industries)
December 9, 2002... When you think of Wall Street, candor is probably not the first word that leaps to mind, but in the past few months the Street has been gripped by it. Merrill Lynch now warns, on the first page of each of its research reports, that it may be...

NO MAN'S LAND.(Jersulem )
December 9, 2002... For more than ten years, I have been taking walks along the Gabriel Sherover Promenade, an elegant stone path planted with rosemary and lavender, which was built in 1989 by the philanthropist Gita Sherover in memory of her son. The promenade...

POINTE COUNTERPOINTE.(ballet slippers)
December 9, 2002... Onstage, the ballerina is an ethereal creature, balancing on the inch-wide platform of her pointe shoe. Backstage, she's a stock clerk, seamstress, blacksmith, and wrecking crew. Maintaining the central illusion of ballet--that women don't...

WHIRLWIND.(Mira Nair and her Chelsea production company Mirabai Films)(Biography)
December 9, 2002... To get to the director Mira Nair's house in Kampala, Uganda, you follow a single-lane highway north from Entebbe, dogleg right at the roundabout as you enter town, pass a service station where a sign announces "TOILETS NOW HALF OPEN," and...

ON THE CONTRARY.('The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken')(Biography)
December 9, 2002... From 1948, H. L. Mencken on Theodore Dreiser Many preeminent writers of the early twentieth century held views that now seem to us deplorable. But what Edith Wharton thought about Jews, or Hemingway about women, was enfolded in acts of...

MAGIC KINGDOMS.('The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales')
December 9, 2002... At the sand-logged, mildewy tail end of a beach vacation, four exhausted parents take two seven-year-olds to a rainy-day play, "The Fairy Tale Detective": the tales of the Three Bears and Hansel and Gretel and Red Riding Hood, retold as though...

HOTHOUSE.('Adaptation')(Movie Review)
December 9, 2002... From 1995, "Orchid Fever," by Susan Orlean "Adaptation," the new experimental comedy by the team of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovich"), begins with the crisis of a screenwriter--the crisis of Charlie Kaufman himself...

Go West, and Write About It.( 'RODEO QUEENS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM')('WRITING LOS ANGELES')('PRINT THE LEGEND')(Book Review)(Brief Article)
December 16, 2002... Before the first postcards arrived back East showing sunlit cactuses and mesas, railroad-company photographers and government surveyors had already begun to document the American West for commercial gain. In PRINT THE LEGEND (Yale), Martha A....

UNNATURAL Law.(Homosexual Conduct Law)
December 16, 2002... Like whist, whilst, and self-abuse, the word sodomy has an old-fashioned ring to it. You don't even see it alluded to much anymore, except in punning tabloid headlines about the situation in Iraq. But it--or its kissin' cousin, the nearly as...

DISASTER!(NASA e-mails about global disasters)
December 16, 2002... In October, NASA started sending out daily e-mails about global disasters, serving, in effect, as an earth-sciences version of the Fox network. These "Natural Hazards Announce" bulletins contain links to satellite photos of the world's craziest...

PLay it again.(establishment of the Classical Recording Foundation)
December 16, 2002... Adam Abeshouse, a Grammy-winning classical-record producer and helpless hyper-enthusiast, has taken several concrete measures to address what he regards as an urgent imperative: to rescue Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, and that crowd from a...

ANNA HAMBURGER.(Obituary)
December 16, 2002... Anna Hamburger was the place your gaze stopped when you'd just come into a crowded East Side living room, dropped in at a friend's Village gallery opening, arrived at a neighbor's walkup for Christmas cheer, or looked past the surrounding...

CANDIDE.(Senator Joseph Lieberman's candidacy for president)
December 16, 2002... Jeffrey Toobin discusses Joseph Lieberman's chances in 2004 Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut and Al Gore's Vice-Presidential running mate, is seldom happier than when he is talking about his own Presidential ambitions, even...

PARTY LINE.(telephone party line services)
December 16, 2002... If you're one of those people who have three phone lines at home, plus a pager, plus a CDMA trimode cell phone with a Web browser and SMS, and you still want to upgrade your telecommunication system, you should meet Pat and Jim Bannick. Better...

THE RUSSIAN GOD.(vodka)
December 16, 2002... In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was "vodka." In the vast but secluded expanse of Russia, vodka gives and vodka takes away. At the start of the twentieth century, a third of the Russian Army was supported...

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.(Harvey Weinstein)
December 16, 2002... I Harvey Weinstein sometimes believes that Hollywood is out to get him. He believed this even before it was true. Weinstein, or Harvey--in the movie business, there is only one Harvey--believes that he is a target partly because Miramax,...

SHOCK TREATMENT.('The Sopranos')(Television Program Review)
December 16, 2002... At the beginning of the first episode of "The Sopranos," back in 1999, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) sat in a psychiatrist's waiting room, about to embark on what would be a transformative journey--not so much for Tony but for TV viewers. The...

THE LOST.(works of writer and artist Bruno Schulz)
December 16, 2002... In 1941, when the Germans seized the Polish town of Drohobycz, Felix Landau, the notorious Gestapo officer in charge of the Jewish labor force, took an interest in Bruno Schulz, a local writer and artist who had submitted samples of his work to...

OPERAPOLITIK.(future of opera houses in Berlin)
December 16, 2002... Only in Berlin would an argument over the future of three opera houses take on the dimensions of a constitutional crisis. Here is how things stand in the first days of December: the Social Democratic Party, which governs Germany with the...

SOUL FOOD.('Our Town')(Theater Review)
December 16, 2002... In 1938, when Thornton Wilder's second full-length play, "Our Town," had its world premiere, at Princeton's McCarter Theatre, Variety's verdict was brusque. "The season's most extravagant waste of talent," the broadsheet's critic called the...

LOOKING BACK.('About Schmidt')('Russian Ark')(Movie Review)
December 16, 2002... The new Alexander Payne movie, "About Schmidt," is, when you get down to it, about Schmidt. In fact, it is all about Schmidt (Jack Nicholson). There is barely a scene in which, glazed with inertia, he does not swinishly loll. Our initial sight...

Animal Form.(ANIMAL PORTRAITS; ANIMALS ON WHITE; JUNGLES)(Book Review)(Brief Article)
December 23, 2002... While most wildlife photography tends to explain things--showing how animals hunt, migrate, breed, and so on--some photographers prefer a more unconventional approach. In Walter Schels's ANIMAL PORTRAITS (Edition Stemmle), a cavalcade of goats,...

THE POLITICS OF POLITESSE.(escalation of Presidential niceness)
December 23, 2002... One of the most striking trends in American politics in recent years has been the steady escalation in niceness coming from the White House. The baseline was set by Johnson and Nixon, who were, dispositionally, at the historical norm. Then...

CROSS-CULTURAL RAP.(State Department promotes rap group Native Deen in 'Shared BValues' initiative)
December 23, 2002... The rap-music industry has never had a particularly good working relationship with the United States government, nor have rap videos done much to dispel the notion abroad of America as a debased land full of Bentleys, Benjamins, and lascivious...

THE HUNDRED CLUB.(oldest businesses in New York, NY)
December 23, 2002... Fanelli's Cafe, at the southwest corner of Prince and Mercer Streets, is probably the second- or third- or fourth- oldest drinking-and-eating establishment in New York. It opened for business in eighteen-something-or-other-- with a different...

CHINESE WEDDING.(Chinese-American wedding season in New York, NY)
December 23, 2002... Right now the most likely place in New York City to see a young Chinese woman in a wedding dress--her lips painted the shiny red of a toy fire engine, her shoulders bare and quivering in the cold--is Central Park. This is the Chinese-American...

THE VIEW FROM THE TOP.(chief financial officers are more optimistic about US economy than chief executive officers)
December 23, 2002... In the perfect world of economic theory, corporations are impersonal machines, adjusting supply quickly in response to demand. In the real world, though, corporations are fickle institutions, run by individuals who are prone to bouts of...

MANHUNT.(Dept. of Defense targets selected individuals for assassination in War on Terrorism)
December 23, 2002... Seymour M. Hersh discusses the ins and outs of investigative journalism. Sometime on Sunday, November 3rd, an unmanned American Predator reconnaissance aircraft, flying out of a base in Djibouti, fired a Hellfire missile at an automobile...

WAITING FOR GHOSTS.(Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal investigator Joe Nickell)
December 23, 2002... The village of Lily Dale, New York, has been home to strange doings for so long that it hardly calls attention to itself anymore. Its brightly painted Victorian homes, clustered by the cobalt waters of Cassadaga Lake, an hour southwest of...

CAT PEOPLE.(influence of "The Cat in the Hat" on US culture)
December 23, 2002... The Cat in the Hat was a Cold War invention. His value as an analyst of the psychology of his time, the late nineteen-fifties, is readily appreciated: transgression and hypocrisy are the principal themes of his little story. But he also stands...

THE WALKER.(African-American artist David Hammons)(Interview)
December 23, 2002... At a Starbucks in Cooper Square one recent evening, I waited in vain to meet David Hammons, the charismatic, elusive African-American artist whose much anticipated current solo show, at the Ace Gallery, is his first in New York in ten years. As...

A DELICATE BALANCE.(architect Tadao Ando's new building for Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX)
December 23, 2002... The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth is an architectural masterpiece. It was completed in 1972, just two years before its designer, Louis Kahn, died, and it has become probably the most revered museum design of the second half of the twentieth...

KILLING FOR COMPANY.("Medea")(Imaginary Friends)(Adult Entertainment)(Theater Review)
December 23, 2002... Reader, have you been betrayed in love? Injustice poisons the soul and, worse, the memory of love. The betrayer lives and owns a future; you, the forgotten, die the slow death of abandonment and humiliation, with just the inheritance of empty...

FOR THE LOVE OF FIGHTING.(Gangs of New York)(Catch Me If You Can)(The Hours)(Movie Review)
December 23, 2002... What's going on with the English? For years, all you had to do was turn on a light bulb and they would show up to act. But recently several talented young men have threatened to abandon their calling in pursuit of higher virtue. Just when Linus...