The New Yorker articles from February 2005

The New Yorker archives from February 2005

HOMELAND INSECURITY.(The Talk of the Town)
February 7, 2005... It's not easy to remember, but we didn't always think of ourselves as a target-rich country. A rich country, sure, but terms such as "target-rich" and all that they imply hadn't penetrated everyday American awareness. Today, nearly everyone who...

THREE TO FIVE.(The Talk of the Town)
February 7, 2005... In the wake of a natural disaster or a major accident, there is an inevitable rush to dredge up parallels. After the recent Chambers Street subway fire--which destroyed a Depression-era control room integral to the dispatching of the Eighth...

KOONS AT FIFTY.(The Talk of the Town)(Jeff Koons)
February 7, 2005... Jeff Koons, the boy king of the art world, turned fifty the other day, and was given a surprise birthday party whose internal complexities and contradictions easily eclipsed the hoopla over Donald Trump's latest wedding. A hundred and fifty...

FOLLOW THAT CAB.(The Talk of the Town)
February 7, 2005... In 1996, after two seasons, HBO's "Taxicab Confessions," the mother of all reality television, was run out of New York City by a pettifogging official from the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Since then, the show's special taxi, which has no...

JOHNNY CARSON.(The Talk of the Town)(Obituary)
February 7, 2005... How strange it was to learn, on a Sunday, that Johnny Carson had died. Strange that it was a Sunday--one of only two nights of the week that he had not owned. That day, we didn't even have Letterman or Leno to look forward to in the hope that...

MISSION TO SUMATRA.
February 7, 2005... The United States military has a long and bitter history of being constrained by the countries that host its overseas military bases. Thailand in 1975 objected to U.S. Marines using Thai bases to stage their response to the seizing of the...

THE CLEVELANDERS.(Cleveland Orchestra--Severance Hall)
February 7, 2005... The home of the Cleveland Orchestra--Severance Hall--may be the most beautiful symphony hall in America, thanks to a bridal gown. In 1928, a local oil magnate, John Long Severance, and his wife, Elisabeth, pledged a million dollars toward the...

SHAPE-SHIFTER.(Philip Johnson)(Obituary)
February 7, 2005... From 1977, Calvin Tomkins on Philip Johnson From 1997, Paul Goldberger on Philip Johnson In 1959, the Seagram Building was a shimmering new presence amid the stolid masonry of Park Avenue, but Philip Johnson, who designed the glass...

HOTEL CALIFORNIA.
February 7, 2005... The western entrance to the Ambassador Hotel, an H-shaped nineteen-twenties Spanish Revival that occupies a twenty-three-acre parcel on Wilshire Boulevard, is a monumental porte-cochere. Thick columns, banded with green, yellow, and shell-pink...

GROSS POINTS.
February 7, 2005... The people who make the popcorn basically know what they're doing. The people who make the movies basically don't, at least not until the product is out there, and then it's too late. Moviemaking is a business almost in spite of itself. No film...

RUBENESSENCE.
February 7, 2005... My favorite picture in "Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings," at the Metropolitan Museum, portrays an ox. In black and red chalks, with enhancing traces of other mediums, the work conveys ponderous mass, rippling musculature, bristling hair, and...

NEW MORNING.
February 7, 2005... There are three things that people often say about Conor Oberst, the singer, songwriter, and only permanent member of the band Bright Eyes. One is that he started his musical career when he was thirteen. Another is that he is the new Bob Dylan....

GUILT AND INNOCENTS.(Nobody Knows)(Turtles Can Fly)(Movie Review)
February 7, 2005... If the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda hadn't gone into the movie business, he would have made a great botanist. The evidence is plain to see in his latest film, "Nobody Knows." It is there in the photosynthetic feel for the fluctuations of...

LANDMARKS.(The Talk of the Town)
February 14, 2005... Last week, midway between Iraq's surprisingly successful Election Day and President Bush's State of the Union address--in which he asserted, not unreasonably, that the election proved that "the Iraqi people value their own liberty"--excerpts...

TOO MUCH INFORMATION.(The Talk of the Town)
February 14, 2005... New Yorkers returning home after the Republican Convention last summer were startled and alarmed by an inexplicable new sight: oversized street signs hanging above busy intersections all over town. It has been five months now, and regrettably,...

LET THEM EAT CAKES.(The Talk of the Town)
February 14, 2005... Ten years ago, Mrs. Corrine Barsky split her time between an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a house in Lawrence, Long Island, and a home in Boca Raton, but today she has just one residence, a duplex apartment on an upper floor of the Carlyle Hotel....

PIGS MUST PLAY.(The Talk of the Town)
February 14, 2005... Most Americans know nothing of the location, composition, or purpose of the European Union. There is no shame in such ignorance, for most Europeans are in the same position--rather worse, indeed, given that they are the ones who are meant to be...

THE CUSTOMER IS KING.(The Talk of the Town)
February 14, 2005... Over the years, Wal-Mart has been given credit or blame for many things: the productivity boom of the late nineties, the destruction of American downtowns, the migration of jobs to China, the popularity of Toby Keith. Now, according to the...

OUTSOURCING TORTURE.
February 14, 2005... On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture." Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised...

ANDY.(Andy White)
February 14, 2005... From the 2003 New Yorker Festival, a conversation between Roger Angell and David Remnick Lately I have been missing my stepfather, Andy White, who keeps excusing himself while he steps out of the room to get something from his study or...

SOLE SURVIVOR.(Petr Hlavacek)
February 14, 2005... Petr Hlavacek's obsession with odd footwear stops just short of his own feet. During the week we spent together, he always wore the same shoes: crepe-soled loafers, wide at the front for uninhibited toe movement and low at the heel to encourage...

FEAR AND FAVOR.
February 14, 2005... Just before last fall's Presidential election, Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, and Philip Taubman, the paper's Washington bureau chief, went on the road to inspect the candidates' campaigns. In Florida, on October 22nd, they...

LOST DOG.
February 14, 2005... On August 6, 2003, Stephen Morris parked his car at the Atlanta History Center, expecting to spend half an hour or so edifying himself and his nephew on the particulars of the Civil War. It was the beginning of what would turn out to be a very...

THE MISFIT.
February 14, 2005... The moving images on the camera monitor offered, I thought, a plausible depiction of one of the drawbacks of life in the Old West--an invasive urological procedure conducted without benefit of anesthesia. "A situation involving significant...

MYSTERY MAN.
February 14, 2005... A slide show of images of Eustace Tilley It's hard to know what people who picked up the first issue of The New Yorker, eighty years ago this month, made of the drawing on the cover. The picture is a joke, of course: which is more...

CLIMBING THE REDWOODS.
February 14, 2005... The coast redwood tree is an evergreen conifer, a member of the cypress family, which grows in valleys and on slopes of mountains along the coast of Central and Northern California, mostly within ten miles of the sea. The scientific name of the...

BECOMING THE EMPEROR.
February 14, 2005... In 1981, six years before her death, Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman ever inducted into the Academie Francaise, and that weighty honor has been hanging around the neck of her reputation ever since. Every book jacket, every review,...

OSMOSIS.
February 14, 2005... On a recent night in Minneapolis, as the temperature plunged toward sixteen below zero, an unlikely midwinter carnival took place in Orchestra Hall. The Finnish conductor Osmo Vanska, who became the music director of the Minnesota Orchestra in...

PRISONERS OF ENVY.(Brooklyn Boy)(Theater Review)
February 14, 2005... On the surface, Donald Margulies's new play, "Brooklyn Boy" (at the Biltmore, under the direction of Daniel Sullivan), is a rueful account of what passes on these shores for literary success; beneath that familiar terrain, however, it is an...

BACK IN THE BUNKER.
February 14, 2005... Movie Listings The Film File In the past, in such films as Wim Wenders' "The American Friend" and "Wings of Desire," the Swiss-German actor Bruno Ganz seemed a rather gentle and melancholy fellow. Soft as swans' feathers, Ganz...

NEWSHOUNDS.(The Talk of the Town)
February 28, 2005... "Mr. President," George W. Bush was asked at a press conference on January 26th, "do you think it's a proper use of government funds to pay commentators to promote your policies?" "No," the President replied. "I expect my cabinet...

GATED.(The Talk of the Town)
February 28, 2005... An art critic was testily perambulating "The Gates," in Central Park, with his wife and a friend from Texas on the first Sunday afternoon of its installation when he suddenly got a load of their thousands of fellow-walkers and registered the...

NIGHT AT THE OPERA.(The Talk of the Town)
February 28, 2005... Ernest Lee, a cadet at West Point who comes from Sacramento and hopes to serve in South Korea's demilitarized zone, has musical tastes that are appropriately youthful, if not particularly martial. "I am kind of into the indie scene right now,"...

ONE BILLION.(The Talk of the Town)
February 28, 2005... About the Oscars this Sunday, one thing may safely be predicted: someone will do something embarrassing onstage, and someone else will point out that it was done in front of a billion people. It is common knowledge that the Academy Awards are...

MISS GOULD.(The Talk of the Town)(Eleanor Gould)(Obituary)
February 28, 2005... Six decades ago, not long after being hired by Harold Ross as a copy editor at The New Yorker, a shy young woman, an Oberlin graduate, set to work on a manuscript by James Thurber and soon came across the word "raunchy." She had never heard of...

TESTING GROUND.
February 28, 2005... The New Yorker's complete coverage of the conflict in Iraq. In the southern Iraqi city of Basra, three days before the country's recent national elections, Youssef al-Emara, a man in his mid-fifties, visited the office of Majid al-Sary, a...

nature's bioterrorist.
February 28, 2005... Early last September, an eleven-year-old girl from Kamphaeng Phet, a remote village in Thailand, developed a high fever, a severe cough, and a sore throat. She lived with her aunt and uncle in a one-room wooden house--not much more than a hut...

MAP OF SAUL.(Saul Steinberg)(Brief Article)
February 28, 2005... Never sure of his beginnings, the late Saul Steinberg invented the Romanian city of Ramnicul Sarat as a place "for me to be born in," and put it downstream from Hatteras, and not far from Laramie, Waikiki, and Juneau, in this 1966 drawing of...

THE BEARDS.
February 28, 2005... The Heavenly Music Corporation -- (1980-82, Mom dead.) "No Pussyfooting" is an album by the guitar player Robert Fripp and the keyboard player Brian Eno. The album consists of two songs, or compositions; there are no voices on the...

TIME BANDITS.(Godel, Kurt Friedrich)
February 28, 2005... In 1933, with his great scientific discoveries behind him, Albert Einstein came to America. He spent the last twenty-two years of his life in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had been recruited as the star member of the Institute for Advanced...

DIRTY DANCING.(Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show)(Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America)(Book Review)
February 28, 2005... On a weekend afternoon in the bland, uptight nineteen-fifties, shortly after I'd finished college, my parents persuaded my boyfriend, who was always eager to please them, to take us to New Jersey to attend a burlesque and striptease show. This...

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY.
February 28, 2005... As most writers know, the best editors tend to curtail those characteristics of the artist which are the weakest and the most self-serving, in order to free him or her from the prison of egocentricity. Similarly, actors need firm-handed...

FOUR HANDS.(pianists Radu Lupu, Piotr Anderszewski, Daniel Beliavsky, Soheil Nasseri)
February 28, 2005... When Beethoven played the solo part in the premiere of his Third Piano Concerto, in 1803, he introduced a bewitching effect that lingered in the memory of his pupil Carl Czerny. The Largo movement begins with a luminous theme in the key of E....

ORAL VALUES.(Inside Deep Throat)(Movie Review)
February 28, 2005... Movie Listings The Film File "Deep Throat" was a sixty-one-minute film, released in 1972. It was directed by Gerard Damiano, whom even French critics would struggle to classify as an auteur. He had been a hairdresser, before making...