The New Yorker articles from January 2002

The New Yorker archives from January 2002

Book currents; the fringing of America.(three books)(Brief Article)
January 14, 2002... "You never want to make a house look like an obvious fortress." This helpful observation comes from the "survivalist architect" Joel Skosen, who makes an amusing cameo appearance in Richard G. Mitchell, Jr.,'s DANCING AT ARMAGEDDON (Chicago)....

Comment: how all the news fit.(The Talk of the Town)
January 14, 2002... The world turned upside down after September 11th, and, as a small but noticeable side effect, so did the sports section of the Times. As of January 1st, the world (though seemingly in better shape than it had been a couple of months earlier,...

High life; diamonds for dinner.(watchmaker/jeweler Yves Piaget)(The Talk of the Town)
January 14, 2002... Attempts to pump up sales in high-end (a.k.a. expensive) merchandise took a bit of a surreal turn the other night when Yves Piaget, the jeweller-watchmaker, flew in from Tokyo to host a dinner party for thirty friends and clients in a private...

The financial page; the Argentine machine.(The Talk of the Town)
January 14, 2002... In the spring of 1940, a middle-aged Argentine Army officer named Juan Domingo Peron took a Cook's tour of Europe. Although the Second World War had just broken out, Argentina was officially neutral, so Peron travelled freely across the...

Golden touch; in Harlem, Thelma Golden has big plans for contemporary art.(Onward and Upward with the Arts)
January 14, 2002... Thelma Golden likes art, and knows about art, but the thing she wants to do, on as large a scale as possible, is curate -- which is to say influence, edit, or, to use her mother's phrase, "get in other people's business." Golden is the person...

The counter-terrorist; John O'Neil was an F.B.I. agent with an obsession: the growing threat of Al Qaeda.
January 14, 2002... The legend of John P. O'Neill, who lost his life at the World Trade Center on September 11th, begins with a story by Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for counter-terrorism in the White House from the first Bush Administration until...

Striking it rich; the rise and fall of popular capitalism.(The World of Business)
January 14, 2002... Thursday, August 12, 1982, didn't seem like a momentous day in American history. Events in the Middle East dominated the news. In Los Angeles, Henry Fonda died at seventy-seven after a long illness. In sports, the White Sox handed the Yankees...

Play it again; Pina Bausch and William Forsythe return to BAM.(Brooklyn Academy of Music; two dance programs)
January 14, 2002... Pina Bausch and William Forsythe, who turned up with their German-based companies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music recently, are the two most influential choreographers in Europe today. Actually, Bausch has left a deep print in America, too. In...

Enigma.('Anthony Blunt: His Lives')
January 14, 2002... On a Saturday morning half a century ago, the overnight ferry from Southampton docked at Saint-Malo. While most passengers headed for the boat train to Paris, two members of the British ruling class took a leisurely breakfast with beer. When...

Folks; a new home for unsung artists.(American Folk Art Museum, New York, New York)
January 14, 2002... The new American Folk Art Museum, on West Fifty-third Street, is a pleasure machine, and its two inaugural exhibitions are strong delights. One, entitled "American Radiance," is a collection of more than four hundred objects given to the museum...

Requiem; memorializing terrorism's victims in Oklahoma.
January 14, 2002... The debate about how to memorialize the victims of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City -- the only event in recent American history that comes remotely close to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in...

Classville.('Gosford Park')
January 14, 2002... At the beginning of Robert Altman's brilliant comedy "Gosford Park," two Rolls-Royces, both heading for a weekend shooting party in the country, stop on a narrow road. The weather is vile in the usual English way -- cold, gray, and wet -- and...

Book currents: various people, interrupted.(two books)(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... If the well-brought-up mental patients at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Massachusetts, did not arrive suffering from folie de grandeur -- one woman wandered the Olmsted-designed grounds dressed as a lady in a Thomas Gainsborough portrait --...

Comment: Dakota demon.(Republicans obediently attack Senator Tom Daschle)(The Talk of the Town)
January 21, 2002... It would be nice if President Bush had meant what he said the other day when he told a cheering audience in California, "Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes!" That is, it would be nice if he had meant that he does not regard the...

Treasury dept: embracing the euro.(The Talk of the Town)
January 21, 2002... The Italians say "e-ur-o." The Germans say "oi-ro." The Spanish haven't decided what to say, except that the "o" is loud. The French say something unpronounceable that involves turning your mouth into a small hole, about the size of a euro...

Postcard from St. Louis; sweet little seventy-five.(singer Chuck Berry)(The Talk of the Town)
January 21, 2002... It was not precisely a secret that Chuck Berry spent much of last spring in a place called the Four Seasons studio, not far from the airport in St. Louis, his home town. But few people besides family members and friends were aware that he was...

The wrecking ball; the little pavilion that could.(The Talk of the Town)
January 21, 2002... Given how much architecture was destroyed in lower Manhattan on September 11th, you might think that the last thing anybody would want to do now is to get rid of more of it, especially if the building in question is one of Battery Park City's...

The financial page; righting copywrongs.(questionable renewing of the Mickey Mouse copyright)(The Talk of the Town)
January 21, 2002... Three years ago, the Walt Disney Company pulled off a nifty legal heist. Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse -- who made his screen debut in "Steamboat Willie," in 1928 -- was due to expire in 2003. The rights to Pluto, Goofy, and Donald Duck...

The lost city; a former jewel of Central Asia, now under the rule of the Northern Alliance.(Letter from Herat)
January 21, 2002... At noon on November 15th, I was in an old Toyota, on a road full of old Toyotas, having crossed the Iranian border, on the approach to Herat, in northwest Afghanistan. Two or three hours into the journey, the traffic of Toyotas, most of them...

Battle for the Barnes; can one of America's greatest private collectons survive?
January 21, 2002... Before he died, in 1951, a Philadelphia businessman named Albert Barnes built what may be the greatest private art collection in American history. Like Henry Clay Frick, who filled his mansion on Fifth Avenue with Old Masters, and Isabella...

Lives of the Saints; at a time when Mormonism is booming, the Church is struggling with a troubled legacy.(the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)
January 21, 2002... When the 2002 Olympic Winter Games open in Utah next month, the world will be greeted by a young, well-scrubbed, and ingratiating religion. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has its headquarters in Salt Lake City, and although its...

The player queen; why Judi Dench rules the stage and screen.
January 21, 2002... In the opening sequence of "Iris," an extraordinary film about the late novelist Iris Murdoch's descent into the limbo of Alzheimer's, Murdoch and her loyal man-child of a husband, the Oxford don John Bayley, are shown swimming like two plump...

Some bodies; Irving Penn's nudes.(On Photography)(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)
January 21, 2002... Readers of Vogue know what they want from a photograph. Leaf through the recent December issue, for instance, and you will come across Mario Testino in spanking form. Italian locations, winter-busting sunlight, and a trunkful of everyday...

Roscoe.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Roscoe, by William Kennedy (Viking; $24.95). Roscoe Owen Conway, fifty-five, fat, and in failing health, is the brains who protects and preserves Albany's Democratic Party, and, as Kennedy's seventh "Albany Cycle" novel opens, Roscoe has plenty...

At the Hands of Persons Unknown.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... At the Hands of Persons Unknown, by Philip Dray (Random House; $35). In this history of lynching in the post-Reconstruction South -- the most comprehensive of its kind -- the author has written what amounts to a Black Book of American race...

Gwen John: A Painter's Life.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Gwen John: A Painter's Life, by Sue Roe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30). The impression that a portrait by Gwen John makes -- that here is a picture of a model as the model herself would have painted it -- is supported by the facts of her life....

Sacagawea's Nickname.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Sacagawea's Nickname, by Larry McMurtry (New York Review Books; $19.95). In twelve essays, the novelist contrasts the West of the American imagination -- "an eternal pastoral, very beautiful but usually unpeopled, except for the Marlboro Man"...

Bring me sunshine.('The Play What I Wrote')
January 21, 2002... The big hit of this theatrical season in London is the quick-witted comedy team The Right Size -- the lanky Sean Foley and the stocky Hamish McColl, who scored Off Broadway a couple of years ago in a bit of slapstick merriment called "Do You...

aKa Cafe.
January 28, 2002... 49 Clinton St. (979-6096) -- This spinoff of the pioneering Lower East Side culinary oasis 71 Clinton Fresh Food seems to be having an identity crisis, albeit an appetizing one. In a former dress shop -- whose display windows now hold high-style...

Burried treasure.(John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom)
January 28, 2002... John Maynard Keynes died on Easter Sunday, April 21, 1946. He was only sixty-two. His mind had always been indomitable -- "He never dimmed his headlights," Kenneth Clark, the art historian, once complained -- but his body was easily subdued. He...

Men's pictures.(The Shipping News; The Majestic; I Am Sam)
January 28, 2002... In "The Shipping News," Kevin Spacey takes tentative little steps, feet turned in, as if he were shackled, or protecting his privates. Walking in this hapless way, he can't get into a boat without flopping over the gunwales. If there's nothing...

Afghan tales.(Homebody/Kabul)
January 28, 2002... That Tony Kushner's new play, "Homebody/Kabul," which is set in London and Kabul and takes place mostly in 1998, shortly before and shortly after the United States bombed terrorist camps in Afghanistan in response to the two embassy bombings in...

Night move: the indifferent grandeur of Bruce Nauman.
January 28, 2002... Bruce Nauman's "Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage)," a video installation that has opened at the Dia Center for the Arts, is five hours and forty-five minutes long. It consists of seven large DVD projections (each about twelve feet...

Soft money, hard lesson.(Bush administration and Enron Corp.)
January 28, 2002... The Bush Administration's reputation for never letting the outside world know what it's thinking is well deserved, but it's a safe bet that last week it was feeling wronged about Enron. The White House announced -- that's announced, not...

The lice lady.(Abigail F. Rosenfield)
January 28, 2002... Although she declines to use the title, Abigail F. Rosenfeld, a thirty-five-year-old Borough Park mother of ten, is a nitpicker of extreme, if secret, renown. Her business card puts it bluntly: Lice Consultant Heads Checked & Cleaned Total...

A Morgan Stanley sunrise, a Lehman Brothers moon.(electronic sign on New York City office tower)
January 28, 2002... When Morgan Stanley sold Lehman Brothers its new glass tower at 745 Seventh Avenue, just north of Times Square, last fall, there wasn't much for the new owner to do except switch the name above the door. What works for one mega financial firm...

Big money, weird science.(ImClone Systems Inc.)
January 28, 2002... The way things are going, the question most often asked of corporate C.E.O.s will no longer be "How are you going to boost your stock price?" Instead, it will be "What did you know and when did you know it?" Executives at Enron and at Arthur...

The getaway: questions surround a secret Pakistani airlift.
January 28, 2002... In Afghanistan last November, the Northern Alliance, supported by American Special Forces troops and emboldened by the highly accurate American bombing, forced thousands of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters to retreat inside the northern hill town...

Missing links: boudin, anyone? In praise of the Cajun foodstuff that doesn't get around.
January 28, 2002... Of all the things I've eaten in the Cajun parishes of Louisiana -- an array of foodstuffs which has been characterized as somewhere between extensive and deplorable -- I yearn most often for boudin. When people in Breaux Bridge or Opelousas or...

The learning curve: like everyone else, surgeons need practice. That's where you come in.
January 28, 2002... The patient needed a central line. "Here's your chance," S., the chief resident, said. I had never done one before. "Get set up and then page me when you're ready to start." It was my fourth week in surgical training. The pockets of my...

After the revolution: the city of Kandahar, post-Taliban, is full of reminders that the Taliban were not what they seemed to be.
January 28, 2002... In the winter of 1988-89, I spent a month in a mujahideen camp in the Argandhab Valley, a few miles north of Kandahar. The Soviets had begun to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, but MIG warplanes were still carrying out daily bombing and...