The New Yorker articles from February 2003

The New Yorker archives from February 2003

The Keys to Success.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
February 3, 2003... In A PIANIST'S LANDSCAPE (Amadeus), Carol Montparker quotes Martha Argerich as saying, "I love to play the piano, but I hate being a pianist." Alone onstage and performing from memory, a piano soloist probably has the loneliest, most...

MAKING A CASE.
February 3, 2003... In recent days, as the White House speechwriters were weighing the language and the imagery of Tuesday's State of the Union address, President Bush was extemporizing his way toward war. He declared himself (vaguely) "sick and tired of games,"...

AN EX--CON LOGS ON.(convicted computer hacker Kevin Mitnick can use computers again)
February 3, 2003... The last time Kevin Mitnick surfed the Web . . . oops. Until last week, Mitnick, who is usually described as the world's most notorious hacker, and who was considered such a profound threat to American society when he was arrested, in 1995,...

GREETINGS FROM BAGHDAD.(Americans on peace-seeking visit to Baghdad)
February 3, 2003... Strictly speaking, it is illegal for citizens of the United States to travel to Iraq without permission from the State Department or the Treasury Department, and doing so is punishable by up to twelve years in prison or a million-dollar fine....

THE NORAH THING.(songwriter Jessie Harris's hit single from Norah Jones's album)
February 3, 2003... Jesse Harris is an unsigned thirty-three-year-old musician who was recently nominated for a Grammy award for writing "Don't Know Why," the hit single from Norah Jones's album "Come Away with Me." (The album, which Jesse wrote about a third of...

MY GUILTY PLEASURES.(new TV series)
February 3, 2003... Those of us in the "literary game" often have "guilty pleasures" that we indulge in when not translating Cicero from the Latin into the German and then back into the Latin, to see how funny it sounds. My favorite guilty pleasure is watching the...

LUNCH AT MARTHA'S.(Martha Stewart)(Biography)
February 3, 2003... Martha Stewart's house is not the biggest one on her street in Westport, Connecticut, but the shrubbery gives away its owner. The bushes aren't just wrapped in burlap, the ne plus ultra of winterization; the fabric has been tailored to fit the...

SOPHIE'S "GUERNICA".(Sophie Matisse's painting of Picasso's 'Guernica' as Henri Matisse might have painted it)(Biography)
February 3, 2003... The idea of making a copy of Picasso's "Guernica" as Matisse might have done it was suggested to Sophie Matisse by her dealer, Francis Naumann. Naumann is a bit of an art-world wise guy. He was the curator of "Making Mischief: Dada Invades New...

THE VACCINE.(search for AIDS vaccine in Africa)
February 3, 2003... At forty-one, Hala has five children and eight grandchildren. Her first husband left when their second child was born. Her second husband died of AIDS nearly twenty years ago, in the earliest days of the epidemic. Hala often tells people that...

PLAYING FOR IMMORTALITY.(theater producer Sam Mendes)
February 3, 2003... In 2001, the British director Sam Mendes announced the end of his run as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, the flashy and successful London theatre he had co-founded nine years earlier. Under Mendes's supervision, the Donmar had been...

BARK.('The Pawprints of History')(Book Review)
February 3, 2003... Stanley Coren, a psychologist and dog trainer, is haunted by a primal scene. He pictures a distant ancestor, clothed in skins, huddled by a tiny fire. Next to the ancestor sits a dog, its pointed ears pricked for sounds of danger--sounds too...

THE SEARCHER.(artists Marsden Hartley retrospective )
February 3, 2003... Marsden Hartley was a great artist whose greatness is of a piece with the provincial clumsiness of American high culture in the early twentieth century. A strong Hartley retrospective that has opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford,...

BLOOD WEDDING.(Opera Review)
February 3, 2003... A few minutes before the end of Leos Janacek's "Jenufa," now at the Metropolitan Opera, the orchestra unleashes a long-drawn-out, floor-trembling storm of sound, in the elemental key of C. A pause follows, during which the audience may be...

DON OF CREATION.('Lost in La Mancha')('The Guru')(Movie Review)
February 3, 2003... For anyone who suffers from the wish to make movies, or who fears that this terrible condition may strike at any time, here is the cure. "Lost in La Mancha," directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, is a documentary account of Terry Gilliam's...

This Land Is Your Land.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2003... In 1785, Thomas Hutchins, the first Geographer of the United States, began the improbable task of literally measuring the expanding new nation, yard by yard. Inching west from the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, and equipped with Gunter's chain--a...

BLIXKRIEG.(Iraq policy )(Column)
February 10, 2003... The most tasteless passage in last week's State of the Union Message came about half an hour into the speech, as President Bush was enumerating his Administration's successes against Al Qaeda. Three thousand suspected terrorists have been...

DIAL AGAIN.(digits proliferate in phone calling - New York City)(Column)
February 10, 2003... Verizon has applied the branding iron, and starting this week everybody in Manhattan must punch in a 1 and then a 212 (or a 646 or 917) in front of the old local number before talking to his or her office or bookie or life companion or...

ROBOTO.(Toy Tokyo, 121 Second Avenue, New York City)(Industry Overview)
February 10, 2003... You're a collector looking at Hyper Hobby, the shiny Japanese magazine devoted to alluring vinyl toys and fantasy figures from Asia, tiny toys so desirable that you need tons of them. You probably can't read the Japanese text, but it's not...

STRAIGHT TO VIDEO.(DVD Premiere Awards)
February 10, 2003... It's awards season in Hollywood, and sneaking in between the People's Choice Awards and the Golden Globes a couple of weeks ago were the oddly glamorous DVD Premiere Awards, a non-televised event honoring the best movies and original...

THE OIL WEAPON.(Column)
February 10, 2003... On October 14, 1973, in one of the biggest tank battles in history, Israeli forces routed an invading Egyptian Army, destroying about two hundred and fifty tanks and losing just twenty-five. Two days later, the Israelis--who had been aided by...

THE UNKNOWN.(Middle East war and diplomacy - history)
February 10, 2003... Jeffrey Goldberg on the chemical attacks on the Kurds In April of 1998, President Clinton sent his United Nations Ambassador, Bill Richardson, to South Asia. Richardson's stops included New Delhi, Islamabad, and, most unusually, Kabul,...

THE EDMONTON PROTOCOL.(Type 1 diabetes )
February 10, 2003... One day in 1972, when Dana Shields was fourteen, she became so thirsty that she found herself gulping water from a faucet, unable to get enough. Soon afterward, she started to lose weight; within weeks, she had dropped about twenty pounds. At...

DREAMING OF BAGHDAD.(Iran)
February 10, 2003... Tehran is an enormous city, and the roads tangled through and around it are filled with cars barrelling along at high speeds, straddling dividing lines, and running red lights. The plethora of automobiles, which are fuelled by gas sold at...

THE LONG MARCH.(Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941-1973)(Book Review)
February 10, 2003... A guide to the civil-rights movement online From 1967, Calvin Trillin on race and a mayoral campaign in Cleveland The recent fall of a Senate majority leader for the crime of praising a centenarian colleague who had once been a leader...

CROSSING THE BORDER.(Kingpin, Dragnet)(Television Program Review)
February 10, 2003... The word for "soprano" is the same in Spanish as it is in Italian, but on TV "The Sopranos" translates as "Kingpin," which is the title of the new NBC miniseries about an affluent Mexican-American family whose illegal and murderous...

FACES IN THE CROWD.(August Sander, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA)
February 10, 2003... How do you book your place in an August Sander photograph? Well, it helps to be German, and to have lived in the first half of the twentieth century. You should be a farmer, perhaps, with a rutted face and a wrinkled coat, heading off to church...

A TALE FOR ALL SEASONS.(Theater Review)
February 10, 2003... On April 29, 1968, "Hair" ("The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical") opened on Broadway. In those faraway days, when a show tended to reflect something of the Zeitgeist and not, as more often happens now, our love of nostalgia, "Hair" was a...

FAST TIMES.(film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
February 10, 2003... Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died twenty years ago, was not an easy man to interview. Sometime in the late seventies, I sat with my back to a pink damask wall in one of the public rooms of the Algonquin Hotel while Fassbinder, dressed in his...

Flexible Benefits.(four books on yoga)(Brief Article)
February 17, 2003... Celebrity yoga has become its own industry, generating magazine covers, fashion lines, and now books. Christy Turlington, the limber supermodel and yoga-clothing designer, ambitiously combines memoir, historical survey, and instruction manual...

DOWN TO EARTH.(space shuttle Columbia accident)
February 17, 2003... There are federal programs that give succor to the old, the sick, and the hungry, that make food supplies and workplaces safer, and that train armies and buy ships and planes to protect friends and overawe enemies. There are programs that chase...

SIR GUY.(revelations of affair between Wallis Simpson and Guy Trundle)
February 17, 2003... In times of conflict, the quest for cheering news becomes more urgent by the day. What is required is a prime slice of international gossip, and none is more succulent and sustaining than that dished up, over the centuries, by the British Royal...

THE STATE WE'RE IN.(New York City's budget deficit)
February 17, 2003... State of the city: wet, congested, hard up. You got your rain, your traffic, your budget problems, plus Latrell on the block and twenty-minute delays on the Ronkonkoma line of the L.I.R.R. The usual stuff. Gifford Miller, the City Council...

THE BRONX LUGE.(Gordy Sheer offers luge lessons in Van Cortlandt Park, New York City)
February 17, 2003... It's not often that weather conditions in New York City are conducive to Olympic events like the luge, but the recent cold spell coincided neatly with a visit from Gordy Sheer, a silver-medallist "slider" in Nagano, to Van Cortlandt Park, in...

THE WAY WE WATCH.(TV sweeps system)
February 17, 2003... In the next few weeks, Trista the bachelorette will finally choose her man, Joe Millionaire will come clean, Demi Moore will play an ex-babysitter on "Will & Grace," and "Dateline NBC" will devote a full, solemn hour to the medical marvel that...

AFTER IRAQ.(Bush administration plans for democracy in Middle East)
February 17, 2003... Has a war ever been as elaborately justified in advance as the coming war with Iraq? Because this war is not being undertaken in direct response to a single shattering event (it's been nearly a year and a half since the September 11th attacks),...

CLUB RULES.(controversy over Augusta National Golf Club's refusal to admit women members)
February 17, 2003... In early winter, the course at the Augusta National Golf Club bears a faint promise of the Oz-like spectacle of magnolias, azaleas, and piercing green rye that it will become in April, when the club conducts its annual Masters tournament. In...

EXIT HAVEL.(Czech Republic Pres. Vaclav Havel)(Interview)
February 17, 2003... On his last weekday in Prague Castle as the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel taped a brief farewell address to the nation and then took a telephone call from George Bush. Havel, who came to office thirteen years ago wearing...

A.K.A. SAM.(novelist describes relationships with an uncle)
February 17, 2003... In the back seat he kept a bicycle with the front wheel removed. I never saw him put the wheel on and ride. Next to the bicycle was a golf bag holding woods and irons, balls, tees, pencils for scoring, golf gloves, a visor. Adjacent to the...

BACK TO THE BASEMENT.(ping-pong)
February 17, 2003... I loved the house I grew up in, a big mock-Tudor, built in the twenties, with stained-glass windows and an old-time solidity, but I was afraid of the basement. It had two rooms where, for all eighteen years that my parents owned the house, I...

SPEND! SPEND! SPEND!(Tyco Internaitonal CEO L. Dennis Kozlowski)
February 17, 2003... On a Friday afternoon last May, Mark Belnick, the general counsel of Tyco International, the giant industrial conglomerate, hurried into the Boca Raton office of the company's chairman and chief executive officer, L. Dennis Kozlowski. Belnick...

A FLEET OF ONE.(narrative of trucking hazardous chemicals in 18-wheel tanker )
February 17, 2003... The little four-wheelers live on risk. They endanger themselves. They endangered us. If you're in a big truck, they're around you like gnats. They're at their worst in the on-ramps of limited-access highways, not to mention what they do on...

SPARKINGS.(artist Joseph Cornell)
February 17, 2003... The monosyllables of condescension form at the back of the throat and hover in the staging space just before the lips: "twee," "fey," "camp," even "cute." The art under inspection, after all, has that form technically called mushy stuff in...

RHYTHM AND BLUES.(Theater Review)
February 17, 2003... Toward the end of August Wilson's exquisite play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" (revived at the Royale, under the deft direction of Marion McClinton), the eponymous Delta blues singer, whose low throaty contralto broadcasts her impudence and her...

ANGELS AND INSTINCTS.(Julia Margaret Cameron, National Portrait Gallery, London, England)
February 17, 2003... There used to be an exit off the expressway to Boston's Logan Airport marked "Mystic River Bridge." I passed the sign a thousand times when I was a student, and always wondered what made the river mystic. I assumed that it had something to do...

EARLY SPRING.(Martha Graham Dance Company's 2003 New York season)
February 17, 2003... The Martha Graham Dance Company, which recently completed a two-week season at the Joyce Theatre, looks as though it's just been let out of jail. As has been widely reported, Graham, when she died in 1991, willed all her property--presumably...

MEN'S WORLDS.(Dark Blue, All the Real Girls)(Movie Review)
February 17, 2003... Unless I'm missing something, the latest Ron Shelton picture, "Dark Blue," appears to have absolutely nothing to do with sports. What's going on here? This is the gentleman who is best known for "Bull Durham," "White Men Can't Jump," "Cobb,"...