The New Yorker articles from February 2004

The New Yorker archives from February 2004

UNSTEADY STATE.(The Talk of the Town)(State of the Union address)
February 2, 2004... George W. Bush says he wants to go to Mars--a motion that many of his fellow-citizens would heartily second--but he probably doesn't mean it. The speech in which he announced his "New Vision for Space Exploration" was exceedingly vague about...

NET LOSS.(The Talk of the Town)(New York, New York)
February 2, 2004... First things first: the proposed site of the new Brooklyn Nets arena is not, as some have suggested, the same as the one selected almost fifty years ago by the reviled Walter O'Malley, to keep the Dodgers around. That site, which was to have...

DARK MATERIAL.(The Talk of the Town)(His Dark Materials)(Theater Review)
February 2, 2004... Unless you reserved a seat in December, even before the reviews came out, the only way you can see the adaptation of Philip Pullman's trilogy "His Dark Materials," at the National Theatre in London this winter, is to stand in line and hope to...

AGAINST TYPE.(The Talk of the Town)(Charlize Theron)(Biography)
February 2, 2004... The former dancer and model Charlize Theron, who stands five feet nine inches tall in her stocking feet, was in town recently to promote the new film "Monster," in which she plays the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was executed by lethal...

OUT OF IOWA.(The Talk of the Town)
February 2, 2004... On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Teresa Heinz Kerry told a rally of more than a thousand Democrats at the state fairgrounds in Des Moines that she "felt very at home" in Iowa. "It's almost like where I grew up," she said, which was startling,...

DEALERSHIP.(art dealer Marian Goodman)(Biography)
February 2, 2004... "Serious," the art dealer Marian Goodman said. I had asked her to guess how other people in the art world regarded her. Concentrating, she paused between phrases. "Responsible. A passionate advocate for my artists. Batting average pretty good....

THE SURVIVOR.(screenwriter Larry Cohen)
February 2, 2004... In 1998, a script entitled "Phone Booth" started making the rounds in Hollywood. It had a simple premise: a smarmy New York City publicist picks up a ringing pay phone and learns that a sniper will kill him if he hangs up. The story, which...

THE CANDIDATE.(Abdulaziz al-Hakim)
February 2, 2004... Tariq Aziz, who was once Saddam Hussein's most visible emissary, lived in a big brick villa in Baghdad, on an embankment above the Tigris River with a sweeping view of the water and date-palm orchards on the other side. Many of his neighbors...

MIRACLE IN A BOTTLE.(dietary supplements)
February 2, 2004... One day last September, as Britney Spears was about to board a flight to Los Angeles from London, a rectangular blue bottle fell out of her purse. She quickly stuffed it back in, but not before the paparazzi recorded the event. Neither Spears...

L.A. LOVE.(The L Word)(Television Program Review)
February 2, 2004... "The L Word," the perhaps overpublicized new Sunday-night Showtime series about a group of lesbians who live in Los Angeles, is groundbreaking not because it shows naked women. For that, you can go to an art museum or buy a magazine or turn on...

INNOCENCE ABROAD.(The Light in the Piazza)(Theater Review)
February 2, 2004... Once upon a time in the early sixties, the composer Mary Rodgers suggested to her gloomy father, the composer Richard Rodgers, that he adapt for Broadway Elizabeth Spencer's novella "The Light in the Piazza" (which occupied almost an entire...

MURDER WILL OUT.(Peter Grimes)(Opera Review)
February 2, 2004... Maybe there is a saving grace in the fact that New York gets to hear "Peter Grimes" so seldom--every five years, on average. Benjamin Britten's beautiful and terrifying masterpiece, the tale of an antisocial East Anglian fisherman whose...

THREE'S A CROWD.(On the Run)(An Amazing Couple)(After Life)(Movie Review)
February 2, 2004... The Belgian director Lucas Belvaux has made three new films, which will open, during the coming month, at a rate of one per week. The first is called "On the Run," the second, "An Amazing Couple," and the third, "After Life." Belvaux would...

BLAME GAME.(The Talk of the Town)(intelligence services and the Iraq War)
February 9, 2004... "We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here." Thus David A. Kay, the Central Intelligence Agency's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, publicly confirmed what had become increasingly obvious: the assertions that Saddam...

CHEW ON.(The Talk of the Town)(chewing gum and education)
February 9, 2004... The truly great scientific discoveries--gravity, laughing gas, Velcro--always seem to happen by accident. Take the case of Dr. Kenneth Allen, whose latest findings indicate that we should perhaps overturn one of the most sacred laws of primary...

TONY STEW.(The Talk of the Town)(It's an Undoing World or Why Should It Be Easy When It Can Be Hard?)(Theater Review)
February 9, 2004... The Jewish Museum--what an excellent place to see a play! First of all, a basement cafe (with a Zagat recommendation, no less) serving kosher Turkey Peking wrap sandwiches and gravlax on pumpernickel. Next, plenty of bathrooms on multiple...

THE MOUSE THAT REMIXED.(The Talk of the Town)(Danger Mouse's Grey Album)
February 9, 2004... The d.j. and producer Danger Mouse was born Brian Burton, in White Plains, twenty-six years ago; attended college in the indie-rock hotbed of Athens, Georgia; and then moved to London, where he became part of the underground hip-hop scene. Last...

OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY.(The Talk of the Town)(Conrad Black)
February 9, 2004... Two summers ago, Conrad Black, who was the chairman and C.E.O. of the newspaper giant Hollinger International, sent an e-mail to two of his fellow-executives complaining about the company's critics. Hollinger's stock price had been falling for...

THE SHAKEOUT.(John Kerry)
February 9, 2004... From 2002, Joe Klein profiles John Kerry John Kerry's long, angular face has something of the abstraction of a tribal mask. The features are at once stark and exaggerated, and, with the exception of his mouth, none of the parts appear to...

INSIDE THE WIRE.(Guantanamo Bay)
February 9, 2004... Will Gunn was on a training mission to Buenos Aires when he learned that he might be chosen as the lead defense counsel in the trials by military tribunal of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The military has placed approximately six hundred and...

THE ISLANDER.(David Walcott)
February 9, 2004... We had just finished lunch. Derek Walcott got up from his canvas chair and stretched. He said to his longtime companion, "Sigrid, I am going for a swim." We were on a beach in Castries, the capital of the island of St. Lucia, in the Lesser...

UNDERGROUND MAN.(Robert Kiley )
February 9, 2004... A couple of years ago, not long after moving from New York to London, Robert Kiley found himself being toasted by a British diplomat, who said, "You are the most important American to come to Britain since Dwight Eisenhower." This salut may...

THEY LIKE TO WATCH.(The Dreamers)(Movie Review)
February 9, 2004... The most interesting character in the new Bernardo Bertolucci movie, "The Dreamers," is a Paris flat--a worn but beautiful bohemian version of an appartement grand bourgeois, with olive walls, high-ceilinged corridors, many pictures and books,...

BACK TO BASICS.(Joe Eszterhas, Hollywood Animal)
February 9, 2004... How does an artist reach the people? Here are two views of the same quandary, drawn from opposing ends of the twentieth century. You can solve the problem like this: Thus arose on behalf of my idea the lively interest of a possible...

EXPRESS YOURSELF.(Here Is Elsewhere, at the Museum of Modern Art, in Queens)
February 9, 2004... I've been thinking about "Here Is Elsewhere," a group show that just closed at the Museum of Modern Art, in Queens. It was selected from the museum's permanent collection by Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese-born (to Palestinian Christian refugees),...

SLINGS AND ARROWS.(Daniel Libeskind and designs for the World Trade Center site)
February 9, 2004... Every time a new design element for Ground Zero is announced, the presentation room overflows with public officials. Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg give speeches hailing the planning process as democracy in action and congratulate each...

WARRIORS.(The Talk of the Town)(George W. Bush and John Kerry)
February 16, 2004... In Seattle last Tuesday night, John Kerry gave a perfectly O.K. victory speech. He was a little wooden, though marginally less so than he'd been in Manchester the week before or in Des Moines the week before that. He still has a tendency to...

STAR WITNESS.(The Talk of the Town)(Douglas Faneuil at the Martha Stewart trial)
February 16, 2004... From 2003, Jeffrey Toobin on Martha Stewart and her legal woes As crime scenes go, the Merrill Lynch branch office in Rockefeller Center seems to lack a certain grit. This is where Martha Stewart's infamous sale of nearly four thousand...

CITY LIGHTS.(The Talk of the Town)(the changing designs of street lamps)
February 16, 2004... A proper familiarity with the street lamps of New York requires a sustained interest beginning at an early, pre-self-conscious age--long before the native disdain for tourists kicks in and, with it, the automatic, jaded lowering of the eyes,...

NAME THIS JOINT.(The Talk of the Town)
February 16, 2004... Not long ago, Erez Itzhaki, a thirty-four-year-old Israeli real-estate broker and developer, and his business partner, Eric Salomon, decided to sponsor a contest to name their latest venture, a shawarma-and-falafel restaurant on Third Avenue at...

THE PIPELINE PROBLEM.(The Talk of the Town)(pharmaceutical industry)
February 16, 2004... Merck is one of history's most innovative corporations. It devotes three billion dollars a year and ten thousand people to the research and development of new drugs. So here's a question: How many drugs for diabetes do you think all these men...

The Living Dead.(Short Story)
February 16, 2004... I was on the front porch, drowning a mouse in a bucket, when this van pulled up, which was strange. On an average day, a total of fifteen cars might pass the house, but no one ever stops. And this was late, three o'clock in the morning. The...

CONTRACT SPORT.(Dick Cheney and Halliburton)
February 16, 2004... Vice-President Dick Cheney is well known for his discretion, but his official White House biography, as posted on his Web site, may exceed even his own stringent standards. It traces the sixty-three years from his birth, in Lincoln, Nebraska,...

LA VIE EN ROSE.(travelling in the 40's)
February 16, 2004... A Saturday evening in May, 1949, and I am taking a moonlight leak in the garden at Ditchley. Hedges and statuary cast elegant shadows nearby, but I've had a bit of wine and it probably doesn't occur to me that this is one of the better alfresco...

A DEMOCRATIC WORLD.(United States foreign policy)
February 16, 2004... In December, 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, President Bush asked Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who was then the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to draft a legislative proposal for winning the minds of young people...

ROUTE 3.(travelling New Jersey)
February 16, 2004... Between me in a New Jersey suburb and New York City, fifteen-some miles to the east, runs a highway called Route 3. For many bus and car commuters, it is essentially the only direct road from here (and other suburbs) to there. To say that...

ORACLE BONES.(Chen Mengjia)
February 16, 2004... THE BOOK In the library of the Anyang Archeological Work Station, the title of a book caught my eye: "Our Country's Shang and Zhou Bronzes Looted by American Imperialists." I had travelled to Anyang, a small city in the northern Chinese...

THE POPULIST.(Michael Moore)
February 16, 2004... Michael Moore is a comedian and a populist, and he is well suited to both missions. What sort of comedian would he be, after all, without the Big Mac belly, without the famous duck waddle? A clever one, perhaps, a witty one who keeps his cool,...

LISTEN TO THIS.(classical music)
February 16, 2004... I hate "classical music": not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It banishes into limbo the...

THE BRAND.(cracking the prison gangs)
February 16, 2004... On a cold, damp December morning in 2002, after weeks of secret planning, the United States Marshals launched one of the most unusual dragnets in the organization's two-hundred-and-fifteen-year history. As the fog lifted on a small stretch of...

ALL ABOUT ABISH.(Walter Abish)(Critical Essay)
February 16, 2004... Walter Abish, though he has published relatively late and little, projects a distinct presence in contemporary letters, in part because of the black triangular eye patch that distinguishes his photograph on book jackets. His three novels, three...

SENTIMENTAL RE-EDUCATION.(books on sex)(Bibliography)
February 16, 2004... When I typed the phrase "self-help/relationships" into the Amazon search engine recently, eighty-four thousand six hundred and forty-three titles surfaced, treating every imaginable facet of the subject (and then some), from reincarnation to...

AMERICAN IDOL.
February 16, 2004... From 1997, Mark Singer profiles Donald Trump "The Apprentice," the NBC reality show starring Donald Trump as God, is the greatest show in the country, and maybe in the entire world, and, as I sit watching it in my spectacular apartment,...

UNTOUCHABLE.(the Barnes Foundation)
February 16, 2004... Last month, I visited the Barnes Foundation for the first time. This is an embarrassing admission for a veteran art critic, but it relieves my sour conscience at having sometimes let people assume that, of course, I knew the Barnes--I just had...

THE CREEPIEST.(Ripley's Game)(Movie Review)
February 16, 2004... Is there any place, in the world of Patricia Highsmith, for the non-weird? Not only do crooked souls seem more at ease there than the straight; after a while, the air grows so corrupting that the straight start behaving like the crooked....