The New Yorker articles from December 2003

The New Yorker archives from December 2003

INSTITUTIONAL HEALTH.(The Talk of the Town; ethics)
December 1, 2003... Several months ago, an anonymous track-and-field coach sent a vial of clear liquid to the drug-testing laboratory at U.C.L.A. Inside the vial, the coach said, was one of the sporting world's dirty little secrets--and, sure enough, after months...

THE LIGHT OF SUNDAY.(The Talk of the Town; social activist William Sloane Coffin on his beliefs and latest book)(Interview)
December 1, 2003... The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, now seventy-nine and suffering from terminal heart disease, no longer preaches on Sundays, but he can't stifle the urge to prepare new material for what might as well be called impromptu sermons--at banquets...

TIMES WARP.(The Talk of the Town; dedicated New York Times reader Irving Tobin's diligent effort to keep up in his reading of the paper of record)
December 1, 2003... Irving Tobin reads at red lights. He reads in the dentist's chair. At dinner parties when he finds the company boring, he tries to read at the table. Several years ago, Irving's wife, Phyllis, came into the bedroom as he was getting dressed....

CAIRO FRED.(The Talk of the Town; Omar Sharif)(Interview)
December 1, 2003... Omar Sharif--Cairo Fred to his friends--has played a bandit and a Catholic priest and Khalil Gibran and Tsar Nicholas II and the British agent Cedric, who gets trash-compacted in "Top Secret!" He is seventy-one. He has wide-set, glistening...

GET SHORTY.(Selling short.)
December 1, 2003... A few years ago, the Finance Ministry of Malaysia suggested that a certain group of troublemakers needed to be punished. Caning, the Ministry said, would be the right penalty. And who were the malefactors being threatened with the rap of...

THE NOISES.(residents of exclusive Manhattan co-op complain of neighbors' disruptive noises )
December 1, 2003... The Walters first began hearing the noises three years ago, at around eleven in the evening, as they were getting ready for bed. "Thuds, bangs," Richard Walter recalled recently. "Like someone whacking the floor with a two-by-four." This was...

IT CAME FROM HOLLYWOOD.
December 1, 2003... The DVD of "Jurassic Park III" comes with an F/X voice-over, in which the special-effects creators talk about their work. If you listen during the first gory sequence in the film, when the Spinosaurus jumps out of the jungle and, shockingly,...

HOME AND AWAY.(Houston Rockets' center Yao Ming profiled)(Biography)
December 1, 2003... Little Fatty kept leaving it short. Twice he dropped the basketball on the way up, and the third time, when Yao Ming finally lifted him above the rim, he held the ball too low. His name was Sun Haoxuan; he was four years old, weighed...

THE AUTISM FIGHT.(struggle of Maryland's Regina and Dan Wagner to get desired educational programmes for their autistic children; Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children)
December 1, 2003... Regina Wagner began to realize that there was something wrong with her son Daniel when he was eight months old. He wasn't sitting or crawling, as her first child, Katie, had done at that age. Over the next year, Regina had more reasons for...

SHOW AND TELL.(Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Anna in the Tropics)(Theater Review)
December 1, 2003... John Lahr discusses Shakespeare's genius Dakin Matthews's adaptation of "Henry IV" (at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre, under the direction of Jack O'Brien) stuffs Shakespeare's two-part chronicle of the wayward Prince Hal's...

PURSUITS OF HAPPINESS.(The Early Stories; John Updike )(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... I am not one who golfs. The only time I tried it I was confident that a dozen balls would be an adequate supply. This is the sport of retired people: how hard could it be? The confidence was misplaced, also, one by one, the balls, and I had to...

THIS OLD HOUSE.(Column)
December 1, 2003... At midday on March 6, 1970, Charles Lockwood, a senior at Princeton, and his friend Robert Mayer, a photographer, were taking pictures of a particularly fine Greek Revival doorway on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village for Lockwood's...

STRANGE LANDS.(In America; The Triplets of Belleville)(Movie Review)
December 1, 2003... We are not told when "In America" takes place, but, given that a family is seen going to the movies to watch "E.T.," we are presumably being lured back to the early nineteen-eighties. The sense of period is far from overwhelming, although I...

DEMOCRACY HYPOCRISY.(The Talk of the Town)(George W. Bush Iraq policies)
December 8, 2003... The Presidential election of 2000 was the first in which neither major-party candidate had held a military position in the Second World War since--well, if you count Commander-in-Chief as a military position--before the Second World War. But if...

BARON/BIOGRAPHER.(The Talk of the Town)(Conrad Black)
December 8, 2003... Not many historical biographers attract hordes of reporters and photographers to their book signings, but, then, not many historical biographers are also press barons who have just admitted receiving seven million dollars from their company...

NO. 9.(The Talk of the Town; microphone used to record vocalist Al Green)(Interview)
December 8, 2003... Recently, Blue Note released "I Can't Stop," the Reverend Al Green's first secular album in almost a decade, and only his second recording with the producer Willie Mitchell since 1976. The songs that Green collaborated on with Mitchell in the...

THE OFF-SEASON.(The Talk of the Town; Cape Cod after the tourist season)
December 8, 2003... Ever wonder what goes on up on the Cape when all the summer people are long gone, settled for the winter back in their metropolis? Nothing world-shaking, but the world is shaking enough, wouldn't you say? I'll start with blackbirds: Just before...

MEMORIES.(The Talk of the Town; Lower Manhattan Development Corporation competition for World Trade Center site memorial)
December 8, 2003... The most famous image from the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was a photograph of a fireman holding a dead baby pulled from the wreckage. So when the architectural competition for a memorial to the victims was...

THE GREAT ELECTION GRAB.(U.S. Supreme Court to consider complex question of redistricting and its potential abuse)
December 8, 2003... With his West Texas twang, loping swagger, and ever-present cowboy boots, Charlie Stenholm doesn't much look like or sound like anybody's idea of a victim. Since 1979, he has been the congressman for a sprawling district west of Dallas, and his...

USED GOODIES.(New York City's various thrift and vintage shops explored for treasures)
December 8, 2003... In my fourteen-year-old son's favorite photograph of me, I am a young woman with a faraway look wearing a black-and-white Ramones T-shirt from the band's 1978 "Rocket to Russia" tour. Last Christmas, he bought an identical shirt from a street...

THE DAVID KELLY AFFAIR.
December 8, 2003... Shortly after 3 p.m. on Thursday, July 17, 2003, David Kelly, a fifty-nine-year-old scientist employed by the British government, walked out of his house in Southmoor, a small village ten miles southwest of Oxford. Kelly, a slight, wiry man,...

DANCE MAN.(George Balanchine's hundredth birthday celebrated)(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... January 22nd is George Balanchine's hundredth birthday, and for the rest of 2004 the Russo-American ballet master, who died in 1983, will be getting the centennial treatment. His company, New York City Ballet, is devoting its winter and spring...

UNDERWATER BLUES.(Caroline, or Change)(Theater Review)
December 8, 2003... Nancy Franklin on HBO's "Angels in America" From 1992, Arthur Lubow on Tony Kushner There are moments in the history of theatre when stagecraft takes a new turn. I like to think that this happened for the American musical last week,...

AMERICA, LOST AND FOUND.(Angels in America)(Television Program Review)
December 8, 2003... John Lahr reviews "Caroline, or Change" From 1992, Arthur Lubow on Tony Kushner There is wide agreement, and no compelling counterargument, that Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" is the most important play of the last decade. A...

A FIRE IN THE BRAIN.(Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake)(Book Review)
December 8, 2003... Judith Thurman on Antonio Vignali's "La Cazzaria" William Butler Yeats, when he was riding the bus, would occasionally go into a compositional trance. He would stare straight ahead and utter a low hum and beat time with his hands. People...

THE ANATOMY LESSON.(The Book of the Prick)(Book Review)
December 8, 2003... In 1525, Antonio Vignali, a young Sienese nobleman, founded a lofty-minded humanist society that he called, with boyish irreverence, the Academy of the Stunned (Accademia degli Intronati). The commandments of its motto--"Pray, Study, Rejoice,...

WARRIORS.(The Last Samurai)(Movie Review)
December 8, 2003... In "The Last Samurai," Tom Cruise, an American trying to master Japanese fighting techniques, repeatedly gets knocked on his ass--he's tripped up and flipped over by limbs moving faster than his own, and then thwacked across the back, chest, or...

HAPPY DAYS.(The Talk of the Town)(George W. Bush on the economy)
December 15, 2003... Things are looking up--according to George W. Bush and the Times, anyway. Last Tuesday, the paper led its front page with this sunny triple-decker: "manufacturing at highest level in two decades; hiring outlook is upbeat; stocks at 18-month...

BRUSH WITH POWER.(The Talk of the Town)(painter Barbara Ernst Prey)
December 15, 2003... Longtime recipients of the annual Prey family Christmas card--fellow-parishioners of the First Presbyterian Church in Oyster Bay, Long Island; summer residents in Tenant's Harbor, Maine; the United States Ambassador to the Czech Republic--may...

WHEN EDIBLES ATTACK.(The Talk of the Town)(the Food Allergy Ball)
December 15, 2003... The guests at the Food Allergy Ball, a black-tie gala that took place at the Plaza Hotel last week, were drawn from that class of New York society which includes Fortune 500 C.E.O.s and senior partners at corporate law firms and exclusive...

MAKE IT FUNNY.(The Talk of the Town)(Steve Brykman, Joe Oesterle, Sean Crespo, and Mason Brown on Ebay)
December 15, 2003... For four years, the comedy team of Steve Brykman, Joe Oesterle, Sean Crespo, and Mason Brown--the Los Angeles-based staff of the National Lampoon Web site--were riding high. Their 2002 Hollywood Reporter spoof was one of the finest...

JET BLUES.(The Talk of the Town)(Phil Condit's resignation from Boeing )
December 15, 2003... When Phil Condit resigned as the chairman and C.E.O. of Boeing last week, the official version was that he was taking one for the team. Boeing has been embroiled in two defense-contracting scandals this year. First, news broke that in 1999 its...

MOVING TARGETS.(covert operations in Iraq)
December 15, 2003... The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month, American officials and former officials said that the main target was a hard-core group of Baathists who are...

CHILD'S PLAY.(creating new toys)
December 15, 2003... In 1913, an Illinois stonemason named Charles Pajeau created a toy after seeing his children playing with pencils and empty thread spools--he called it Tinkertoy. In 1916, John Lloyd Wright, the son of the architect, invented Lincoln Logs, a...

1839/2003.(travelling the route of John and Henry Thoreau)
December 15, 2003... On the thirty-first of August, 1839, John and Henry Thoreau--brothers, aged twenty-five and twenty-two--set out from their home in Concord, Massachusetts, in a small skiff on the Sudbury River. They were bound for Hooksett, New Hampshire, about...

BACK ROADS.(Israel and the roadmap to peace)
December 15, 2003... In the 2000 Presidential campaign, George W. Bush was sharply critical of Bill Clinton's efforts to pressure Israel for a peace settlement with the Palestinians. "In recent times, Washington has tried to make Israel conform to its own plans and...

IRRESISTIBLE.(John Currin)
December 15, 2003... The soaring fame of John Currin, the forty-one-year-old satiric and surrealistic painter, whose sparkling mid-career retrospective has come to the Whitney Museum by way of Chicago and London, surprises me, and I'm a longtime Currin enthusiast....

DANCE-OFF.(Never Gonna Dance)(Theater Review)
December 15, 2003... Deidre Goodwin is a lioness of sorts. She's the kind of performer who is as fiercely protective and nurturing of her talent as Elsa was of her cubs in the 1966 sudser "Born Free." With her long, muscular limbs and shrewd, darting eyes, she is...

HIGHER AND HIGHER.(Great Fortune)(Higher)(Book Review)
December 15, 2003... From 2002, Claudia Roth Pierpont on the construction of New York's Chrysler Building "Heroic materialism," Kenneth Clark called the best of what the commercial culture of the past two centuries had made, at the close of his 1969 series...

HIS STORY, HER STORY.(Big Fish)(Movie Review)
December 15, 2003... At the start of "Big Fish," our friendly narrator, Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor), delivers the first of many homilies in his spicy Southern twang. "There are some fish that cannot be caught," he informs us. True, and there are some accents that...

WINNING AND LOSING.(The Talk of the Town)
December 22, 2003... One day late last summer, as the tally of bombings, shootings, and acts of sabotage against the American occupation in Iraq took on the unmistakable profile of a war of guerrilla insurgency, the office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity...

SURVIVOR: HOLIDAY EDITION.(The Talk of the Town)
December 22, 2003... The holiday season can be dangerous. People speak of it in terms of endurance and survival--oh, the gridlock, the fruitcake, the crazy great-aunt!--but there are real perils, too. The burning Christmas turkey, for example. A turkey that is left...

SILLY OLD BEAR V. MOUSE.(The Talk of the Town)
December 22, 2003... It's not entirely clear how the Winnie the Pooh lawsuit became a modern epic. The facts of the case seem straightforward. In 1930, a literary agent named Stephen Slesinger acquired the merchandising rights to the Pooh story from A. A. Milne,...

DEAN WAY UPTOWN.(The Talk of the Town)
December 22, 2003... In the minutes before Howard Dean was to be formally endorsed by Al Gore, last week, at the National Black Theatre, on 125th Street, a representative of the Dean campaign asked members of the media to please keep to the sides in order to make...

GOING DUTCH.(The Talk of the Town)
December 22, 2003... On January 17, 1956, the Ford Motor Company did what Henry Ford never wanted it to do: it went public. In the most highly anticipated initial public offering in history, investors shelled out more than six hundred million dollars for 10.2...

LOOKING FOR LORCA.
December 22, 2003... On August 18, 1936--or perhaps it was August 19th, no one is quite sure--Federico Garcia Lorca was taken from the cell where he was being held, in Granada, and driven into the hills north-east of the city. He may have spent the night, or just a...

CHICAGO CHRISTMAS, 1984.
December 22, 2003... At twenty-six, at the embarrassing end of a series of attempts at channelling Kerouac, I was beyond broke, back in my home town, living in my aunt and uncle's basement. Having courted and won a girl I had courted but never come close to winning...

BY THE ROAD.
December 22, 2003... It was the winter that Bernhard Goetz shot the four guys on the subway. The "subway vigilante," as news stories called him, had just surrendered to police, and everybody had an opinion about what he did and whether he was wrong or right. I was...

THE WEATHER IN THE STREETS.
December 22, 2003... For a time I lived in Hull, on Nantasket Beach, on Massachusetts' south shore, where the winter storms sent the ocean booming up the streets and threw its lobsters onto the driveways and into the hedges; where the storms would melt your leather...

Turn Signals.
December 22, 2003... Three of my four daughters were born in the dead of winter. One made it to early spring only because she was overdue. So for me the shortest days of the year and the deepest cold are a backdrop to the perilous stories of birth and the radiant...

KNIGHT'S GAMBIT.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... The windmills that Don Quixote mistakes for giants have something in common with the madeleine that makes Marcel's memory buds salivate: both occur conveniently early in very long books that are, in English at least, more praised than read. And...

BLACKOUT.(Theater Review)
December 22, 2003... At times, whether one "likes" a play matters less than the way in which it resonates in the imagination long after the drama has unfolded, the sets have been struck, and life has returned to what it is, or might be. After seeing Tracey Scott...

THE RING AND THE RINGS.
December 22, 2003... Early in "The Fellowship of the Ring," the first film in Peter Jackson's monumental "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, the wizard Gandalf finds himself alone in a room with the trinket that could end the world. It lies gleaming on the floor, and...

STAR SEASON.(Movie Review)
December 22, 2003... In many ways, 2003, with its extensive dead zones, was a terrible year for big Hollywood movies. But it will also be remembered as a year in which a group of remarkable large-scale productions hit the theatres in its last couple of months like...

TWICE CHRISTMAS.
December 22, 2003... The black dog of Christmas jumps in the window, right on schedule, around eleven in the morning, or maybe sneaks in the front door you've just opened to admit the granddaughter who's here on time, after all--her cheek cold from outdoors--before...

LET IT SNOW.(childhood memories of winter in North Carolina)
December 22, 2003... Winters were frustratingly mild in North Carolina, but the year I was in the fifth grade we got lucky. Snow fell, and, for the first time in years, it accumulated. School was cancelled, and two days later we got lucky again. There were eight...