The New Yorker articles from January 2004

The New Yorker archives from January 2004

TRIALS.(The Talk of the Town)
January 5, 2004... "Revenge Is Sour" is the title that George Orwell gave to a short essay on war-crimes trials, written just after the Second World War. "The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream," he argued. "Properly speaking, there is...

CAUSE FOR ALARM.(The Talk of the Town)
January 5, 2004... One night a year ago, Aaron Friedman, a twenty-five-year-old classical-music composer and jazz saxophonist, was awakened, as he often had been, by the bleating ostinato of a car alarm. His apartment, in Washington Heights, looked onto a...

THE SUN ON MARS.(The Talk of the Town)
January 5, 2004... Five years ago, at a meeting of Cornell University scientists to discuss the design of Mars probes for nasa, there was spirited debate, naturally, on the question of photometric calibration. What sort of apparatus would enable an unmanned...

A NOT SO BRIEF RECESS.(The Talk of the Town)
January 5, 2004... Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., became known, in his thirty-four years on the Supreme Court, as perhaps the country's foremost advocate of free speech and public access to information. Before his retirement from the court, in 1990, he sought...

AUSTER AFTERNOONS.(The Talk of the Town)
January 5, 2004... "Isn't there supposed to be a reading here in about twenty minutes?" I asked. . . . "It was cancelled," the bartender said. "With all that slop out there today, there wouldn't have been much point to it. Poetry's a beautiful thing, but it's...

DOG TROUBLE.
January 5, 2004... Four years ago, I was in a relationship that everyone who cared about me considered abusive. I was covered with bruises and scars. When my older son came home from college, he was greeted with a scene of loud, belligerent menace. My younger...

THE SOUL SINGER.
January 5, 2004... We are living, operatically speaking, in what might be called the Age of the Seconda Donna. During most of the four hundred years since opera originated in the Italian courts at the turn of the sixteenth century, the commanding singers have...

THE KINGDOM OF SILENCE.
January 5, 2004... "This is a newspaper?" I asked the cabdriver in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as he pulled up in front of the lavish new headquarters of Okaz, the most popular paper in the kingdom. I had expected the usual dingy firetrap that characterizes newspaper...

MASTERS OF THE MATRIX.
January 5, 2004... Louis Menand discusses the larger issues of Presidential stagecraft "It was TV more than anything else that turned the tide," John F. Kennedy said on November 12, 1960, four days after his election to the presidency. He was referring to the...

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.(Theater Review)
January 5, 2004... Lemon (Lili Taylor) wears a "Les Miserables" T-shirt that's a little too big for her slight frame. She swims in her dark cotton trousers, too, which seem baggy from frequent washing. She keeps everything neat, though, even her sentences. From...

FULL CIRCLE.(The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)(Movie Review)
January 5, 2004... This is what happened when a fellow-critic and I emerged, on December 11th, from a screening of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." It had started well before noon, and the skies were practically dark by the time we staggered out....

BEST OF THE "BEST".(The Talk of the Town)
January 12, 2004... As Aristotle said (was it Aristotle? maybe it was Parmenides), Man is the list-making animal. He was dreaming, no doubt, of a list, someday, of the Top Ten Philosophers. Such a list might fall a little short of universal appeal. That cannot be...

HERE TODAY.(The Talk of the Town)(Micropaleontology Press at American Museum of Natural History)
January 12, 2004... Not many people know this, but there was a plan, in the nineteen-fifties, to sheathe the American Museum of Natural History in aluminum--a city block putting on the foil, in the name of progress. Visitors to the neighborhood will note that this...

SQUISHED.(The Talk of the Town)(Patrice Lumumba Moore)
January 12, 2004... In retrospect, it almost has the ring of a creative-problem-solving challenge: can you fit more than fifty industrial-size trash bags' worth of junk in a ten-by-ten room? As we now know, thanks to Patrice Lumumba Moore, the answer is yes--but...

STILL HAPPENING.(The Talk of the Town)(Gene Weber)
January 12, 2004... When the raffish Winchell-era press agent Eddie Jaffe died, in March, at the age of eighty-nine, the consensus was that there went the last of his kind. Then, in December, Leonard Traube, another New York publicity man of the old school, died,...

ARMY, INC.(The Talk of the Town)
January 12, 2004... If there were an annual prize for the world's most despised company, Halliburton would have been the runaway favorite in 2003. It was the designated villain for those who believe that the United States went to war for oil. Its connection to...

BIG AND BAD.(Ford Expedition)
January 12, 2004... In the summer of 1996, the Ford Motor Company began building the Expedition, its new, full-sized S.U.V., at the Michigan Truck Plant, in the Detroit suburb of Wayne. The Expedition was essentially the F-150 pickup truck with an extra set of...

THE MOP-UP.(polio in India)
January 12, 2004... The index case was an eleven-month-old boy with thick black hair his mother liked to comb forward so that the bangs rimmed his round face. His family lives in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, in a village called Upparahalla, along the...

RUNNING ON INSTINCT.(Howard Dean)
January 12, 2004... From 2002, Joe Klein on John Kerry On a sultry Tuesday night last August, Howard Dean stood on a stage in Bryant Park, in midtown Manhattan, and faced a crowd of ten thousand. He was nearing the end of his twenty-minute stump speech, an...

BAGS IN TREES: A RETROSPECTIVE.
January 12, 2004... For more than ten years now, I've been tangled up with the problem of plastic bags stuck in trees. If I've learned anything from the experience, it's "Be careful what you notice." I was living in Brooklyn; I noticed the many plastic bags...

TAKING STEPS.(Glover, Savion)
January 12, 2004... The tap virtuoso Savion Glover began his career as a child star, and, because he was so young, reviewers often felt free to give him advice. He should show a little warmth, they said, not perform like a machine (the child-prodigy syndrome). He...

THEATRES OF WAR.(Critical Essay)
January 12, 2004... The early spring of 431 B.C. witnessed, at Athens, the outbreak of a great war, the commencement of a great book, and the premiere of a great play. The war was the culmination of fifty years of simmering tensions between two superpowers:...

LIVING IN AMERICA.(House of Sand and Fog)(The Cooler)(Movie Review)
January 12, 2004... There's been some joking over the years about Ben Kingsley's availability as an all-purpose ethnic, ready to play any character requiring a little salt in his accent or a skin tone darker than lily white. But what's not always said is that...

LATE REVIEW.(The Talk of the Town)('The Fog of War')(Movie Review)
January 19, 2004... American families plunked down half a billion dollars for movie tickets in the holiday season just past, a nice upturn in an otherwise disappointing year, with Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" beating out "Cold...

HOMECOMING.(The Talk of the Town)(basketball player Stephon Marbury plays in front of hometown crowd after being traded to the New York Knicks)
January 19, 2004... A buzz enveloped Madison Square Garden last Thursday the likes of which had not been felt there in years. (The Knicks and the Rangers, let's face it, have been awful.) The formidable Houston Rockets, coached by the Knicks' former coach Jeff Van...

ONE GLOVE.(The Talk of the Town)(lost gloves)
January 19, 2004... The ratio of right-handed people to left-handed people is said to be about nine to one (and this dominance goes back more than a million years, apparently), so the lost-glove theory espoused by Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist who...

BUILD YOUR OWN.(The Talk of the Town)(house in New York, New York)
January 19, 2004... Here's a way around the city's increasingly impossible real-estate market: build your own house. Granted, it's the road less travelled--if indeed it's travelled at all. (In the last thirteen years, according to Buildings Department records,...

CLEAN GENE.(The Talk of the Town)(Eugene J. McCarthy)
January 19, 2004... Former Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, the paladin of the antiwar movement in the nineteen-sixties, is not encouraged by the current crop of Democratic candidates for President. Asked about them recently, in an informal conversation at his...

WEBSTALKER.
January 19, 2004... After my lover left me, I went a little crazy for a while. By day, I could pass for normal, as that concept is broadly understood on the Upper West Side, where I live--I sat at my desk, I took long furious walks in Riverside Park rehearsing all...

THE CRYONIC CASTLE.(architect's efforts to find land on which to build facility for Life Extension Foundation)
January 19, 2004... When Stephen Valentine talks to real-estate agents, he uses a made-up name. He doesn't want them to say that no land is available because they have looked him up and don't like the sound of his project. He tells them that he represents a...

FORTRESS BUSH.(relations between the media and President Bush)
January 19, 2004... Last August, in Crawford, Texas, George W. Bush gave a barbecue for the press corps. Bush has let it be known that he's not much of a television-news watcher or a newspaper reader, apart from the sports section; and during a conversation with...

ANGRY MIDDLE-AGED MAN.(comedian Larry David)(Interview)
January 19, 2004... From 2000, David Owen on George Meyer, the writer behind "The Simpsons" At the end of the nineteen-eighties, Larry David was a standup comic in trouble. He was middle-aged, single, living in a building with subsidized housing for artists...

EUROPEAN DREAMS.(works by Joseph Roth)
January 19, 2004... In "The Radetzky March," Joseph Roth's 1932 novel about the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there is an Army surgeon, Max Demant, whose wife loathes him. She is very beautiful. We first encounter her as Demant walks into their bedroom....

WHAT LIES BENEATH.('The Man in My Basement')(Book Review)
January 19, 2004... A guide to Walter Mosley's novels In 1992, when reporters asked Bill Clinton about his favorite writers, he named Walter Mosley, a forty-year-old African-American mystery writer who had published a pair of novels featuring a hardboiled...

THE MAGIC OF MISS M.('Kiss My Brass,' Nassau Colesium, Uniondale, Long Island, New York)(Theater Review)
January 19, 2004... If you're fortunate enough to catch Bette Midler's extraordinary revue "Kiss My Brass" (on tour through March 2nd), you'll be reminded not only what a star is but what makes Midler such a great one. Even before she got to work on January 3rd at...

HANGING ON.('Touching the Void' and 'Crimson Gold')(Movie Review)
January 19, 2004... Do not go and see "Touching the Void" if you suffer from a fear of heights. Or a fear of death, which amounts to the same thing. Or a fear of Peru. That was the destination of two young British climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, in 1985....

TAXING.(The Talk of the Town)(book by Ron Suskind about former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill)
January 26, 2004... In 1981, David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director, invited the financial journalist William Greider to the White House and told him that the President's controversial and far-reaching tax-cut package was a "Trojan horse" designed to...

ECTOPLASM!(The Talk of the Town)(allegations that a New York hotel is haunted)
January 26, 2004... There is something about an evening snowstorm and an empty hotel ballroom--the cold, stale silence punctuated by creaks and groans--that can make even a hardened skeptic turn superstitious. The mind races with images of a wild-eyed Jack...

OLD HACK.(The Talk of the Town)(how a former taxi driver obtained a book contract)
January 26, 2004... Robert Miller, who is the president of Hyperion Books, had to get to a meeting, so he waved at a cab on Columbus Avenue. "The cab stopped," Miller said later. "It really just stopped for a red light, but I thought maybe it had stopped for me. I...

BARELY SHAVERS.(The Talk of the Town)(Moustaches for Kids contest)
January 26, 2004... It is probably a good sign for the mustache in America that the biennial World Beard and Moustache Championships, after being held in the Northern European towns of Hofen/Enz, Pforzheim, Trondheim, and Schomberg, came this past November to...

BIG SPACE.(The Talk of the Town)(space policy)
January 26, 2004... Last week, when President Bush unveiled his plan to establish a moon base and send a manned expedition to Mars, his stated reasons were, for the most part, high-flown. The plan, he argued, would revolutionize our understanding of the universe,...

THE GRIEF INDUSTRY.(dispute over the benefits of critical-incident stress debriefing)
January 26, 2004... Soon after the collapse of the World Trade Center, experts predicted that one out of five New Yorkers--some one and a half million people--would be traumatized by the tragedy and require psychological care. Within weeks, several thousand grief...

RIVER OF ANGELS.(history and protection of the Los Angeles River)
January 26, 2004... It was a hazy May afternoon, and the poet Lewis MacAdams was trespassing as usual, in this case on the roof of the parking garage at the Los Angeles County Jail. The roof commands a view of the city's downtown, and MacAdams grinned and flung...

VICTIMS AND VOLUNTEERS.(allegations that Amnesty International volunteer Barbara Bocek was threatened)
January 26, 2004... At around eleven o'clock on the night of March 10, 2002, Deputy Sheriff Brian King was driving on Highway 101 near Forks, a remote, rainy town in the northwest corner of Washington, when he noticed a car stopped fifty feet down the Wilson Road...

TWIN PEAKS.(champion skier Hermann Maier)
January 26, 2004... Wherever Hermann Maier goes, a small oompah band seems to follow. Most of the time, it is a ragged little outfit: a bass drum and a tuba, perhaps, with a clarinet tweedling beside them. But sometimes, on the occasion of great victories--Maier...

KILLER.('Monster')(Movie Review)
January 26, 2004... The prostitute and murderer Aileen Wuornos, who was executed in Florida in October, 2002, is difficult to look at without flinching. She appears in Nick Broomfield's documentary "Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer," which was filmed just...

THE BIG ROUNDUP.(works of playwright/director Richard Foreman)
January 26, 2004... Before the vital and brilliant American playwright and director Richard Foreman found a permanent home for his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, at St. Mark's Church, in 1992, you had to seek out his annual productions in small, experimental venues...

MIND/BODY PROBLEMS.('The Confessions of Max Tivoli,' 'The Body')
January 26, 2004... We look to fiction for images of reality--real life rendered as vicarious experience, with a circumstantial intimacy that more factual, explanatory accounts cannot quite supply. Yet the freedom to invent tempts the fiction writer to fantasy....