The New Yorker articles from February 2002

The New Yorker archives from February 2002

Book currents; three rings.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... David Carlyon begins his biography DAN RICE: THE MOST FAMOUS MAN YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF (PublicAffairs) with excruciating recollections of how he himself endured repeated failures as an aspiring clown before gradually learning how to read an...

Comment; science fiction.(bioethics)(The Talk of the Town)
February 4, 2002... The future of the life sciences in America may depend, in some small part, on the opinions of a bioethicist named Dr. Leon R. Kass. Kass, who was trained as a physician, is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, on leave from the...

Victuals; the New York Bite.(boxer Mike Tyson)(The Talk of the Town)
February 4, 2002... It has been four and a half years since Mike Tyson took a bite out of Evander Holyfield. The incident occurred during a world-title fight in Las Vegas, and, even now, mystery hangs over Tyson's motives for what soon became known as the first...

The old country; your inner haggis.(Ancestralscotland.com)(The Talk of the Town)
February 4, 2002... The Bryant Park Hotel had a Braveheart moment last week: a bagpiper was stationed on the street outside, and, in the subterranean Cellar Bar, swatches of Black Watch tartan decked the chandeliers while girls in short black skirts with tartan...

Is it Safe? Dept.; back at the Hart.(Hart Senate Office Building)(The Talk of the Town)
February 4, 2002... On the day last week that the Hart Senate Office Building reopened after three months of quarantine, anyone with questions about anthrax and fumigation could turn to Dr. Gregory Martin, the chief of infectious diseases at Bethesda Naval...

Postscript; Peggy Lee.(The Talk of the Town)(Obituary)
February 4, 2002... All entertainers have, to use Noel Coward's phrase, a talent to amuse, but Peggy Lee, who died last week at the age of eighty-one, had something else as well: a talent to be amused. She swung with a sense of humor, and handled lyrics with an...

The financial page; shredders through the ages.(The Talk of the Town)
February 4, 2002... For a while, the Central Pacific Railroad looked like a sure thing. Started in 1861 by four Sacramento merchants known as the Big Four -- one of them was Leland Stanford, the founder of Stanford University -- the company owned the right to...

My holy war; what do a vicar's son and a suicide bomber have in common?(Personal History)
February 4, 2002... When I was growing up in England, churches were still by far the tallest buildings in the landscape. With their towers and battlements, these domestic fortresses of Christendom, built as much to intimidate as to inspire, were close cousins and...

Underfoot; when buildings go up, the city's distant past has a way of resurfacing.(New York Journal)
February 4, 2002... The oldest known artifact of European settlement in New York is a coin. It was issued in 1590 by Prince Maurice of Orange, to commemorate his election as a stadtholder of the City of Utrecht; it may have once belonged to a businessman named...

The McCain code; from airport security to Enron, the Arizona senator keeps picking fights.(Senator John McCain)(Letter from Washington)
February 4, 2002... Senator John McCain, at the age of sixty-five, still has moments when he looks like a mischievous little boy who's hoping not to get nabbed for some bit of deviltry, and that was how he looked one Thursday morning in November just after he had...

White man at the door; one man's mission to record the "dirty blues" - before everyone dies.(R.L. Burnside)
February 4, 2002... R. L. Burnside sits in a folding chair backstage at the Village Underground, in New York, mopping his brow with a towel and sipping from a half pint of Jack Daniel's. With his hair upswept in two graying wings from his massive forehead, he...

The spider's web; Louise Bourgeois and her art.
February 4, 2002... The sculptor Louise Bourgeois just turned ninety, but she still works six days a week. On Sunday she rests, because that's her assistant's day off. This leaves her at loose ends, however, so for the past thirty years she has held a Sunday salon...

No brakes; a new biography of Sinclair Lewis.('Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street')
February 4, 2002... What has Sinclair Lewis done lately to deserve a new, five-hundred-and-fifty-four-page (plus notes and index) biography, "Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street," by Richard Lingeman (Random House; $35)? Mark Schorer's even bigger biography of...

Rapture.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Rapture, by Susan Minot (Knopf; $18). This novella takes place during a single act of oral sex, wittily reminding us (as did its notorious counterpart, Harold Brodkey's "Innocence") that a lot more thinking goes on between the sheets than is...

Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Robert Wojtowicz (Princeton Architectural Press; $27.50). This rich exchange between two fiery American iconoclasts began in 1926, when...

A Life in Pieces.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... A Life in Pieces, by Blake Eskin (Norton; $25.95). This is ostensibly a retelling of the story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, the Swiss musician who deceived the world with a wholly invented "memoir" of a childhood destroyed by the Holocaust. But,...

Dream Street.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Dream Street, edited by Sam Stephenson (Lyndhurst/Norton; $39.95). In 1955, the historian Stefan Lorant hired W. Eugene Smith to make a hundred photographs of contemporary Pittsburgh for a book in celebration of the city's bicentennial; he...

Shock waves; "The Son's Room" and "Storytelling."(two motion pictures)
February 4, 2002... The director Nanni Moretti has been tagged as the Italian Woody Allen. I cannot conceive of more disparate souls. The Allen we see onscreen is controlled by an invisible puppeteer, who ordains every trudging Woody walk, every sickly grimace,...

On and off the Avenue; from Russia with love.(A la Vieille Russie store)
February 11, 2002... Lots of people walk past A LA VIEILLE RUSSIE, in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel (781 Fifth Ave.; 752-1727), gazing at the Faberge snuffboxes and Schlumberger clips in the window but never daring to cross the threshold. This is a shame, because...

Book currents; I, me mine.(three books)(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... With the recent publication of yet another autobiography by a notorious thirtysomething author, the literary form that James Merrill called the "me-moir" has officially become the me-me-me-moir. These days, the self-reflection industry is...

Comment; grinding axis.(2002 State of the Union address)(The Talk of the Town)
February 11, 2002... A political by-product of the modern cult of personal authenticity is a tendency to treat a President's off-the-cuff remarks as more revelatory than the prepared kind. And so they can be. But the prepared kind are a better guide to policy,...

One world dept.; dreams of Davos.(World Econiomic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, to New York City)(The Talk of the Town)
February 11, 2002... Last Wednesday evening, the night before the World Economic Forum's annual meeting got under way, Klaus Schwab, the forum's founder, and George Soros, the financier, held a party at the headquarters of the Open Society Institute, on West...

The hardwood; the Slam team.(The Talk of the Town)
February 11, 2002... The magazine Slam, which has been around since 1994 and has a circulation of nearly a quarter of a million and an editorial staff of five, is all about basketball. It is aimed at young, obsessive fans and is full of hip-hop idiom (sample...

Rob the rich dept.; the king of cabaret.(The Talk of the Town)
February 11, 2002... A few weeks ago, John Loan, a forty-five-year-old events planner, was arrested in Manhattan and charged with embezzling more than three million dollars from the firm he worked for, Alliance Capital Management. This was no ordinary swindle. Loan...

The financial page; guns vs. butter.(The Talk of the Town)
February 11, 2002... Ayear ago, a glum Silicon Valley executive, seeing recession on the horizon, told me, "Only a war can save us now." Well, we got one and, with it, the supposedly resuscitative burst of government spending he had in mind. President Bush, in...

Is it funny yet? Jon Stewart and the comedy of crisis.(Annals of Entertainment)('The Daily Show with Jon Stewart')
February 11, 2002... One evening last November, Jon Stewart leaned on his anchor's desk and chatted with the audience before taping an episode of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." The show, which airs on Comedy Central, is a news-parody program, and Stewart was...

Private lives; Germany's troubled war on terrorism.(Letter from Europe)
February 11, 2002... "Terror" isn't a simple word in Germany, and this winter, when I started trying to make sense of the arguments I'd heard in Berlin nearly every day since September 11th -- arguments about whether it was racist to let policemen question Arab...

The real heroes are dead; a love story.(A Reporter at Large)
February 11, 2002... As Susan Greer was walking her golden retriever one morning near her home, in Morristown, New Jersey, she heard footsteps behind her. It was just after six, on a warm Saturday in late July of 1998; she liked the quiet and the early-morning...

Tough guy; the mystery of Dashiell Hammett.(Life and Letters)
February 11, 2002... At a party in Hollywood in the spring of 1935, Dashiell Hammett was asked by Gertrude Stein to solve a literary mystery. Why is it, she began, that in the nineteenth century men succeeded in writing about so many different varieties of men, and...

More harm than good; surviving the N-word and its meanings.(book: 'Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word')
February 11, 2002... That Jim. Now, there's a nigger for you. Argued over ever since he first appeared, in Mark Twain's 1884 masterpiece, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Nigger Jim is as dark and emotionally murky as the river that he and Huck Finn are...

Be My Knife.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Be My Knife, by David Grossman, translated from the Hebrew by Vered Almog and Maya Gurantz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25). When a thirty-three-year-old man named Yair catches a glimpse of Miriam at a class reunion, he senses a bond with her...

Tishomingo Blues.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Tishomingo Blues, by Elmore Leonard (Morrow; $25.95). Dennis Lenahan, an itinerant high diver setting up for a Mississippi casino show, watches a Dixie drug-ring murder from his eighty-foot diving platform. Various factions -- a smooth-talking...

Stillwater.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Stillwater, by William F. Weld (Simon & Schuster; $23). The flooding of five towns in rural western Massachusetts for the creation of a reservoir is the turning point in this elegiac novel about devastation in the name of progress and the...

Fair Warning.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Fair Warning, by Robert Olen Butler (Atlantic Monthly; $24). Amy Dickerson, the sleek heroine of this novel by the author of "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain," is an auctioneer at a second-tier New York auction house. It's not Butler's...

Stamp your feet; a festival of flamenco.('Flamenco Festival')
February 11, 2002... Flamenco is one of a number of great lyric forms (jazz, tap, tango, and others) that grew up not in the official venues -- the church, the court -- but in the bars and the whorehouses. According to the historian Timothy Mitchell, flamenco owes...

Women and children; Frederick Wiseman's 'Domestic Violence.'
February 11, 2002... In Frederick Wiseman's new documentary, "Domestic Violence," which is set largely at a shelter for battered women in Tampa, Florida, some of the women are sullen and abashed and so quiet that they seem to have relinquished the right to be...

Kidnapped.(kidnapping of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan)
February 18, 2002... So much anguish and sadness and fear have been visited upon so many people since September 11th -- the thousands murdered that morning and killed or maimed since, the hundreds of thousands grieved or uprooted, the millions upon millions filled...

Trumpery below canal.(Red Cross disbursement of funds to victims of terrorism)
February 18, 2002... In Tribeca, apparently, there are people who still go home for lunch. The other day, a man returned to his building, on Hudson Street, near Jay Street, to discover half a dozen strangers occupying his lobby. They had set up card tables, where...

The sound of America.(project of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors)
February 18, 2002... Norman Pattiz, the man in charge of delivering the American message over the radio waves to the Middle East,is not a policy wonk. To begin with, he lives in Beverly Hills, not Washington, and he likes to spend his time going to Laker games with...

Old master, new hands.(Rembrandt's 'Minerva in Her Study')
February 18, 2002... The most expensive Old Master painting currently known to be for sale anywhere in the world is a Rembrandt, painted in 1635, that has just been brought to the market by a gallery on the Upper East Side. It costs forty million dollars. The...

Is Moscow burning?(production of 'War and Peace' opera by Prokofiev)
February 18, 2002... In Tolstoy's "War and Peace," the burning of Moscow after Napoleon's forces invaded it, in 1812, is attributed to a panicky exodus of Muscovites. In Prokofiev's opera "War and Peace," which was composed after Germany invaded Russia, in 1941,...

Mr. Potato Head's birthday.(toy)
February 18, 2002... On the eve of the Toy Fair last week, Hasbro gave a party at the company's Chelsea showroom to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of its first toy, Mr. Potato Head. Guests included a couple of dozen four-to-seven-year-olds from the...

Shadow land: who's winning the fight for Iran's future?(Letter From Tehran)(politics in Iran)
February 18, 2002... On the evening of September 11, 2001, about two hundred young people gathered in Madar Square, on the north side of Tehran, in a spontaneous candlelight vigil to express sympathy and support for the United States. A second vigil, the next...

The lady and the tigers: is New Jersey any place to keep a pack of wild cats?
February 18, 2002... On January 27, 1999, a tiger went walking through the township of Jackson, New Jersey. According to the Tiger Information Center, a tiger's natural requirements are "some form of dense vegetative cover, sufficient large ungulate prey, and...

True north: is a state's name giving it a bad rap?(North Dakota)
February 18, 2002... North Dakotans who favor changing the state's name tend to be realists. They readily concede that many evocative and desirable alternatives (Florida, Tahiti, Martinique) are unavailable, while certain other options (Southern Manitoba, Lower...

A Purim story: the funny thing about being Jewish.
February 18, 2002... I suppose it is a sign of just how poor a Jew I am that when I got a letter from the Jewish Museum last February asking me to be the Purimspieler at its Purim Ball I thought there must be some kind of mistake. I don't mean that I thought there...

The people's preacher: Al Sharpton would rather walk naked than wear your wretched dress.
February 18, 2002... The Reverend Al Sharpton knows that you do not take him seriously. Racism is like that. A man can win eighty per cent of the black vote, and still white people will question whether he really represents anyone. This is an outrage, and also a...

Whistling in the dark: Schoenberg's unfinished revolution.(composer Arnold Schoenberg)
February 18, 2002... The Arnold Schoenberg Center, in Vienna, is a scholarly shrine to the man who invented what is still known, after almost a hundred years, as "modern music." How the center ended up in Vienna, Schoenberg's native city, is a curiously tangled...

Surrealism revisited: heavy breathing at the Met.(various artists, and works; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)
February 18, 2002... "Surrealism: Desire Unbound," which opened last week at the Metropolitan Museum, is an oddly evangelical exhibition. It seeks to renew the appeal of a movement that sprang from the spiritual wreck of Europe after the First World War and sank in...

If you ask me: etiquette through the ages.('Debrett's New Guide to Etiquette and Modern Manners;' 'The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette;' 'The Fabulous Girl's Guide to Decorum')
February 18, 2002... In 1844, one Peter Parley published an etiquette book with a title that cannot be improved upon: "What to Do, and How to Do It." The nineteenth century was the heyday of the genre, although it has been with us since ancient times. The Cumaean...

Homeland defense: an exile's return.('Sorrows and Rejoicings')
February 18, 2002... "You and me. That is how it starts. The two factors in an equation which resolves out into either heaven or hell, and most likely both," the South African playwright Athol Fugard writes in the introduction to "Blood Knot" (1961), which was the...

Making arrangements: a wedding in Dehli and a wake on the English coast.('Monsoon Wedding,' 'Last Orders')
February 18, 2002... While watching "Monsoon Wedding," you may find yourself feeling uncertain about who these people wandering around onscreen are. Have no fear; not only does the rest of the audience feel the same way but so do half of the people themselves. Take...