The New Yorker articles from December 2004

The New Yorker archives from December 2004

GOING DOWN.(The Talk of the Town)
December 6, 2004... Americans long ago became accustomed to the pleasing notion that there is nothing quite so sound as the dollar. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when Pound, Hemingway, and Stein were in Paris, they lived on modest remittances from...

WHY KNOW?(The Talk of the Town)
December 6, 2004... When Judith Reisman and Eunice Van Winkle Ray lectured together recently in Nashville, Mrs. Ray was introduced by her husband, Colonel Ronald Ray, who grabbed the audience's attention by announcing that the United States "lost the most...

FOR THE BIRDS.(The Talk of the Town)
December 6, 2004... For every pigeon-lover--Mike Tyson, Marlon Brando, the gentleman with the stale bread--there are a thousand citizens who can name the danger zones, those spots so populated with pigeons that human passage invites bombardment. In Jackson...

HOME ALONE.(The Talk of the Town)
December 6, 2004... When Janine Reimen's daughter left for college, in the fall of 2002, Reimen was surprised to find that the filial departure did not bring grief to her and her husband, as she had anticipated; instead, it brought a measure of guilty...

WHO'S COUNTING?(The Talk of the Town)
December 6, 2004... On the scale of public ignominy, the last person to squeeze into a crowded New York elevator rates somewhere between the guy who hits "reply all" to group e-mails and the one who blocks the box. So the other night, in the lobby of the Le Parker...

PERMANENT FATAL ERRORS.
December 6, 2004... "You can't imagine how much time it takes to lie on the floor in a fetal position," Mark Mellman explained to a gathering of political scientists and polling experts at Stanford a week after the Presidential election. Mellman is the C.E.O. of...

WHAT TEACHERS WANT.
December 6, 2004... If you had a box filled with fourteen lime-green plastic shrimp forks and then you lost one, there are several things you could do. You could invite twelve people to dinner and serve shrimp. You could put the forks in a drawer and hope that the...

GOD DOESN'T NEED OLE ANTHONY.
December 6, 2004... Ole Anthony is tall and gaunt, with a shock of white hair and searing blue eyes. He has a high, bony forehead and the pale, scraggy features of his Norwegian ancestors (his first name is pronounced "Oh-lee"). His many enemies, most of them...

THE BELL CURVE.
December 6, 2004... An interview with Atul Gawande Every illness is a story, and Annie Page's began with the kinds of small, unexceptional details that mean nothing until seen in hindsight. Like the fact that, when she was a baby, her father sometimes called...

GYPSY.
December 6, 2004... A happy place to spend a winter afternoon in Paris is a bar called the Chope des Puces, just outside the Clignancourt flea market. Every Sunday, for longer than anyone can remember, two battered, time-worn guitarists have met there to play, on...

MINOR MAGUS.
December 6, 2004... Few things troubled the sunny complacency of Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth Baron Dunsany, but the prospect of being considered a dilettante and a small talent stood foremost among them. He had reason to hope that it would be...

EASY TO LOOK AT.(Museum of Modern Art )
December 6, 2004... When the Museum of Modern Art opened in six rooms on Fifty-seventh Street, in 1929, it was a cause. Reopened now in a lustrous building by the architect Yoshio Taniguchi, MOMA is an effect: historical, conservative, magisterial. It works. The...

FIFTH GRADE.
December 6, 2004... For people under thirty, Eminem may be the most significant recording artist in the English-speaking world. His previous album, "The Eminem Show," sold eight million copies in a little under a year. (The Beastie Boys' "Licensed to Ill," an...

THE DESTINY OF ME.
December 6, 2004... Once upon a time in 1955, sitting at the back of a bus carrying an Australian repertory troupe around the province of Victoria, Barry Humphries, an aspiring twenty-one-year-old actor, began to improvise a character called Edna Everage, who was...

WAR-TORN.(movie review)(Movie Review)
December 6, 2004... For more than thirty years, the shy, self-effacing Oliver Stone has been nursing fantasies of a film about Alexander the Great, although what attracted him to such a megalomaniac I can't begin to imagine. In the meantime, Stone has been forced...

TOP BROKERS SPOT THE HOT NEW NEIGHBORHOODS.
December 6, 2004... Marcy Spence-Brearley, The Tweedy Group "There's vibrant new life among the ruins in WoFa, the trendy South Flushing area cobbled into being on the site of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair by refugees priced out of Dumbo. The formerly...

POWER PLAYS.(The Talk of the Town)
December 13, 2004... The air of corruption that clouds the United Nations these days cannot simply be fanned away by forcing the resignation of Kofi Annan as Secretary-General, as a growing number of prominent Republicans have been urging. Their pretext is the...

BIG WINNER.(The Talk of the Town)
December 13, 2004... Thanksgiving passes--we fatten up. Christmas-in-the-City officially begins. The holiday parties are under way, so there's your eggnog, your winter spirits. But what of the spiritual element? Radio City's got it. The Christmas Spectacular,...

GOOD FOR THE GOOSE.(The Talk of the Town)
December 13, 2004... Advocates of animal rights, addressing the practice of overfeeding ducks and geese to fatten up their livers for foie gras, have for many years had a kind of exclusive hold on the literature of shock. It is a measure of how much ground they've...

MEXICO.(The Talk of the Town)
December 13, 2004... "Mexico is different," the Drifters asserted, some years ago. There could be no arguing this, over the past five weeks, as a white flatbed truck turned up at various busy spots around town, presenting an alternate vision of winter to passersby....

IT PAYS TO STAY.(The Talk of the Town)
December 13, 2004... In the late nineties, the city of Toledo, Ohio, faced a crisis. DaimlerChrysler, which ran a Jeep factory there, announced plans to build a new plant, but offered no guarantee that it would be built in Toledo. So the city and the state came...

CURIOSITY SHOPPING.
December 13, 2004... I'm not sure why I so rarely venture beyond my home turf to shop for the holidays. Sloth and habit, like an invisible cattle fence, have confined me to an outgrazed pasture. After the elections, however, I felt a pressing need to expand my...

MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES.
December 13, 2004... Richard Lancelyn Green, the world's foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, believed that he had finally solved the case of the missing papers. Over the past two decades, he had been looking for a trove of letters, diary entries, and manuscripts...

THE PICTURE PROBLEM.
December 13, 2004... At the beginning of the first Gulf War, the United States Air Force dispatched two squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets to find and destroy the Scud missiles that Iraq was firing at Israel. The rockets were being launched, mostly at...

HOLY SMOKE.
December 13, 2004... In its original meaning, a crusade was a Christian holy war, and in that sense it was a contradiction in terms. Christ's whole teaching was to love thy neighbor, not kill him. But, like everyone else, the early Christians had enemies, whom they...

A CLEAR VIEW.
December 13, 2004... In November, EMI Music held a listening party in Paris to celebrate the French release of "Nolita," the new album by the Israeli-Dutch singer and songwriter Keren Ann, who is thirty. (The album will be released here in March.) Before leaving...

PLAYING YOUR HUNCHES.(Theater Review)
December 13, 2004... In the canon of Stephen Sondheim-Hal Prince musicals, "Pacific Overtures" (produced in 1976 and now revived by the Roundabout Theatre at Studio 54) falls between the conventional romantic elegance of "A Little Night Music" (1973) and the...

PARTNERS.(Movie Review)
December 13, 2004... The new Mike Nichols film, "Closer," starts with a man falling in love with Natalie Portman. From this we may assume that the movie is concerned with universal, a-priori truths, although there is a scene in a lap-dancing club when the...

INVASION VS. PERSUASION.(The Talk of the Town)
December 20, 2004... President Bush has put the idea of spreading democracy around the world at the rhetorical heart of American foreign policy. No one should doubt that he and his surviving senior advisers believe in what they call the "forward strategy of...

JUST WHISTLE.(The Talk of the Town)(Book Review)
December 20, 2004... The other day, Andrew Thomson, a doctor at the United Nations, received a memo thanking him for his service to the organization--service that extends back twelve years, and includes stints exhuming mass graves in Bosnia and Rwanda. The purpose...

MEET THE BEATLES, AGAIN.(The Talk of the Town)
December 20, 2004... Hypothesis: The recent release of the American versions of four early Beatles albums in CD form has caused excitement among fans of a certain age; therefore, listening to the CDs should give rise to measurable physiological responses indicating...

HIGH TEA.(The Talk of the Town)(Company Profile)
December 20, 2004... The fortune of the Bronfman family, the owner of Seagram's, originated with a Montreal bootlegging business during Prohibition. (The name "Bronfman" means "whiskey man" in Yiddish.) A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court took up a long-running...

PUSH AND PULL.(The Talk of the Town)
December 20, 2004... A couple of weeks ago, Gordon Brown, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, made a promise. The United Kingdom, he said, would buy up to three hundred million doses of a new malaria vaccine for the developing world. It was a welcome sign that...

SIXTEEN TONS OF FUN.
December 20, 2004... When "Monty Python's Flying Circus" first began taping in London, in the fall of 1969, studio audiences were totally unprepared for what they were about to see. People brought in off the street, expecting to watch one of the BBC's comedies or...

THE PAINTING LIFE.(Book Review)
December 20, 2004... Willem de Kooning, the subject of "De Kooning: An American Master," a wise and delectable biography (Knopf; $35) by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, was the best pure painter of the twentieth century; the twenty-first will decide how much that...

TROUBLED WATERS.
December 20, 2004... "What one begs the American people to do, for all of us, is simply to accept our history," James Baldwin wrote in "The American Dream and the American Negro." But that imaginative challenge, as August Wilson demonstrates in "Gem of the Ocean"...

HIGH ROLLERS.
December 20, 2004... Howard Hughes the billionaire madman, the taloned hermit of Las Vegas, eating nothing but steak and peas, and guarding his sealed penthouse in shoes made of Kleenex boxes--that was the pop-culture lunatic, the haggard face in the tabloids we...