The New Yorker articles from January 2005

The New Yorker archives from January 2005

GETTING WARMER.(The Talk of the Town)
January 3, 2005... Halfway through Michael Crichton's new thriller, "State of Fear," the hero, John Kenner, finds himself trapped with a comely blonde, dodging bolts of artificial lightning. Fortunately, Kenner, an agent for the government's National Security...

WALK ON.(The Talk of the Town)
January 3, 2005... Last summer, Caleb Smith, a thirty-four-year-old librarian at Columbia, came across an old Times story with the headline "navy officer near the end of 4-year project of walking in every street on manhattan." The article, from December, 1954,...

CHEERS.(The Talk of the Town)
January 3, 2005... It's lucky that dolls can sit still longer than human beings. If a doll bellies up to a bar and orders a beer, she'll have to wait while the bartender puts three drops of resin into a miniature stein, adds a dot of yellow dye and three drops of...

PLUCK YOU.(The Talk of the Town)
January 3, 2005... A couple of weeks ago--on a real Christmas-miracle kind of day, cold and heartless in every other respect--the city's two most famous homeless guys both caught a break. First, of course, there was Pale Male, the celebrity hawk and victim of the...

VESTIBULE.(The Talk of the Town)
January 3, 2005... When an honest man accidentally corners the market in a product that he always describes to his customers as fairly ineffective and basically illegal to use, he is entitled to moments of puzzled reflection--such as the one that Lawrence...

FINAL CUT.(Biography)
January 3, 2005... From 2002, Elizabeth Kolbert on the assassination of Pim Fortuyn "It's the South Bronx," my friend Max Pam said as he drove me to his old neighborhood, the Overtoomse Veld, in west Amsterdam. Whatever it was, it wasn't the South Bronx....

THE PRICE OF PARADISE.
January 3, 2005... When I was two years old, I travelled across the country by train from New York to Oakland with my mother and my seven-year-old sister. In the observation car on the first morning, we fell into company with an older gentleman who was journeying...

AFTER ANGELS.
January 3, 2005... On May 2, 2004, the humid Sunday that his musical "Caroline, or Change" was to transfer from the Public Theatre, downtown, to the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, on Broadway, Tony Kushner left his apartment on the Upper West Side and ambled east...

THE DICTIONARY OF DISORDER.
January 3, 2005... In the mid-nineteen-forties, Robert Spitzer, a mathematically minded boy of fifteen, began weekly sessions of Reichian psychotherapy. Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst and a student of Sigmund Freud who, among other things, had...

THE VANISHING.
January 3, 2005... A thousand years ago, a group of Vikings led by Erik the Red set sail from Norway for the vast Arctic landmass west of Scandinavia which came to be known as Greenland. It was largely uninhabitable--a forbidding expanse of snow and ice. But...

A LOVELY COUPLE.
January 3, 2005... The Lyric Opera of Chicago began life in the highest style, with Maria Callas making her American debut. Fifty years on, it is probably in better health than any other opera company in America. Almost every performance is sold out, and the...

MR. WRONG.
January 3, 2005... For a few minutes before Neil LaBute's "Fat Pig" begins (at the Lucille Lortel, directed by Jo Bonney), the supersized woman of the title stands before us, munching a slice of pizza and reading at a tall table in a busy restaurant. She is Helen...

UNMASKED.
January 3, 2005... What does it take to shake a movie fan? Whether we are critics or bug-eyed buffs, so many of our evenings are spent in the company of crimes and misdemeanors that we can hardly be blamed for developing the hide of a pachyderm. Just...

THE PEDIATRIC GAP.
January 10, 2005... Not long ago, a three-year-old boy fell off a jungle gym in Boston and lacerated his cheek. His parents rushed him to the emergency room of a nearby hospital. A nurse restrained the screaming boy while a surgeon cleaned his cheek and injected...

OUT OF OHIO.
January 10, 2005... Recently I saw in a newspaper from Hudson, Ohio, my home town, that they were about to tear down the town's water tower. In principle, I don't care anymore how things I used to love about Hudson change or disappear. Each time a big change...

ORPHEUS AT THE PLOUGH.
January 10, 2005... On a cool day in June of 1843, in Concord, Massachusetts, Bronson Alcott loaded a horse-drawn wagon and set off with his family and several like-minded believers to establish a community called Fruitlands. They were to live on the fruits of the...

JAZZBO.
January 10, 2005... The audience had grown restless, and some people were heading for the exits--the twenty-second piece on the program was about to start--when the clarinet let out an uncorked whoop that riveted everyone in place before its wildly rising cry...

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.
January 10, 2005... The Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, a travesty troupe, with men darting about on point as sylphs and odalisques, made its debut in 1974 in a loft on Fourteenth Street managed by the West Side Discussion Group, a homophile organization. The...

1 + 1 + 1 = 1.
January 10, 2005... In July of 2003, Jeremy Brown, a.k.a. DJ Reset, took apart a song. Using digital software, Brown isolated instrumental elements of "Debra," a song by Beck from his 1999 album "Midnite Vultures." Brown, who is thirty-three and has studied with...

MASTERS AND SERVANTS.
January 10, 2005... There are terrible seasonal movies thrown together in a state of laziness and disgust--for instance, that poisoned plum pudding "Ocean's Twelve," in which the director, Steven Soderbergh, and a dirty-dozen pack of stars amuse one another with...

TSUNAMI.(The Talk of the Town)(Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami)
January 10, 2005... James Surowiecki on insuring against disasters From 1951, Rachel L. Carson on the sea How to help No one who survived the tsunami that crashed into South India on December 26th describes it as a wave. The fishermen and villagers...

BUSTED.(The Talk of the Town)(Bernard B. Kerik, police commissioner)(Biography)
January 10, 2005... Bernard B. Kerik's concern for his immortal reputation as Police Commissioner was such that--in an especially delicious detail that surfaced in his monthlong transformation from Presidential appointee to middle-aged unemployed guy--one of the...

SUSAN SONTAG.(The Talk of the Town)(biography)(Biography)
January 10, 2005... From 2002, an essay by Susan Sontag on photography and war Susan Sontag, who wrote for this magazine on and off for more than thirty years, died last Tuesday, to everyone's surprise, for though she had been in treatment for cancer...

THE CATASTROPHE PROBLEM.(The Talk of the Town)
January 10, 2005... Akash Kapur reports from the coast of South India From 1951, Rachel L. Carson on the sea How to help Markets are heartless. And so, last week, as the world was dealing with the human consequences of the tsunami that devastated...

The year's best CDs, in alphabetical order.
January 17, 2005... John Adams, "On the Transmigration of Souls" (Nonesuch)--At its world premiere, this piece, an ambitious memorial to the victims of 9/11, seemed like a modest success, but on record it has an overwhelming power; Lorin Maazel's command of the...

FLOOD TIDE.(The Talk of the Town)
January 17, 2005... Nearly four million men, women, and children have died as a consequence of the Congo civil war. Seventy thousand have perished in the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. In the year just ended, scores of thousands died in wars and massacres...

VISITING PREACHER KILLEN.(The Talk of the Town)
January 17, 2005... A sign on the narrow road that leads to Edgar Ray Killen's house, in the low hills southeast of Philadelphia, Mississippi, reads "If You Don't Believe in God, the Hellfire Awaits You." On the morning that I visited him, a few years ago, Killen,...

THE THIRD "R".(The Talk of the Town)
January 17, 2005... The South Indian fishing village of Komitichavadi, about seventy-five miles south of Chennai, the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, is situated on a stretch of coast that was particularly hard hit by the tsunami. In the neighboring hamlets,...

NOT DIRTY.(The Talk of the Town)
January 17, 2005... Russell Jones is a forty-four-year-old art director who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In the early winter of 1996, he and his wife began to receive some unusual phone calls late at night. They would pick up the receiver and a voice would shout...

STUMPED NEW YORK.(The Talk of the Town)(New-York Historical Society's two hundredth anniversary)
January 17, 2005... The New-York Historical Society celebrates its two hundredth anniversary this year, having survived, in recent decades, the threat of bankruptcy and the selling off of part of its collections. In spite of these reversals, demand has not...

BATTLE LESSONS.
January 17, 2005... During the early weeks of the Iraq war, the television set in my office was tuned all day to CNN, with the sound muted. On the morning of April 3rd, as the Army and the Marines were closing in on Baghdad, I happened to look up at what appeared...

LUNCH AT THE BILTMORE.
January 17, 2005... In the autumn of 1959, my father and I were quite a pair: at forty-six, he was recovering from his first heart attack, and I, at the age of eight, after having contracted a near-fatal kidney disease during a journey I'd made to Cuba with my...

KILLER INSTINCTS.
January 17, 2005... Many American courthouses have a Kenneth Peasley. For years, he was the most feared prosecutor in Arizona's Pima County, which includes Tucson. He was widely known as the government lawyer who wouldn't plea-bargain, who left his adversaries...

RENAISSANCE MAN.(Leonardo da Vinci)
January 17, 2005... When I was a teen-ager, I wrote a science-fiction story about Leonardo da Vinci. In it, a young art historian becomes fascinated with Leonardo's otherworldly paintings, with their strange rocky backgrounds, unplaceable landscapes, and enigmatic...

I, ME, MINE.
January 17, 2005... Herr Issyvoo. The name sounds like a kiss followed by a sigh. At least, that's the way it's pronounced--with reverence, with love--in the gay quarters of Berlin, where the English writer Christopher Isherwood (1904-86), who lived there, off and...

WOMEN GONE WILD.(Television Program Review)
January 17, 2005... America is having a torrid love affair with "Desperate Housewives," and I feel so left out. The nation is simply "Mad About 'Housewives,' " according to a Newsweek cover story, but not since the days of the Macarena have I felt this bewildered...

WHEN I'M SIXTY-FOUR.(musical groups' trends)
January 17, 2005... Rock bands, like people, are living longer. U2 entered its twenty-sixth year by releasing a new album, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," in November. Adding to the band's aura of durability, a special black-and-red U2 edition of the iPod, the...

GO FISH.(Movie Review)
January 17, 2005... The new Wes Anderson picture, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," features Bill Murray as Steve Zissou, plus a shoal of other stars. It is impossible to imagine an Anderson project with a single, refulgent name gleaming above the title. His...

UNSOCIAL INSECURITY.(The Talk of the Town)
January 24, 2005... The Administration's campaign to do something about, or to, Social Security will get its prime-time launch next month in the State of the Union extravaganza, but President Bush is already busy softening up the battlefield. Last week, he granted...

DO-GOODER.(The Talk of the Town)(Dan Tynon's disaster services)
January 24, 2005... Dozing astride seats 62 F, G, and H on Thai Airways flight 775 to Bangkok the other day was a big, bearded man in a blue work shirt with "Red Cross Disaster Services" on the shoulder. His name was Dan Tynon, and this was his third ocean...

SAFE JOURNEY.(The Talk of the Town)(New York City private schools teaches community service and sensitivity training to students)
January 24, 2005... The world of New York City private schools is often portrayed as a cutthroat, almost Hobbesian place, but there is a tenderhearted side to it as well. These days, community service and sensitivity training are as central to most private-school...

SEA GYPSIES.(The Talk of the Town)(nomads)
January 24, 2005... In the province of Phangnga, some five hundred miles south of Bangkok, a temple known as Wat Samakhitham served as a command center in the tsunami relief effort and as a shelter for more than eight hundred people. By the middle of January,...

DON'T DO THE MATH.(The Talk of the Town)(Merck and Company Inc.'s Vioxx)
January 24, 2005... In the business world, bad news is usually good news--for somebody else. Ever since Merck announced, this past fall, that the pain reliever Vioxx could be linked to an increased risk of strokes or heart attacks, ads from lawyers trolling for...

THE COMING WARS.(against terrorism)
January 24, 2005... George W. Bush's reelection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities' strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree...

FUNNY BOYS.(CollegeHumor.com)
January 24, 2005... When Josh Abramson, Ricky Van Veen, Jakob Lodwick, and Zach Klein decided in the spring of last year that they wanted to live in New York City, their preparation consisted largely of what they called "Sex and the City" nights. They would rent...

A MAN OF THE SHADOWS.(Iyad Allawi, interim Prime Minister of Iraq)(Biography)
January 24, 2005... A few days before the New Year, on a crisp, sunny day in the Jordanian capital of Amman, I had tea with Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister of Iraq, on the terrace of an unremarkable limestone villa that serves as the local headquarters for...

BLOOD SPORT.(fox hunting)
January 24, 2005... Eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning in a field in Gloucestershire. The field is muddy. The hounds and the hunters are getting muddy. The sun hides, pale behind a drizzling November rain. The drink in everybody's flask is sloe gin. The food of...

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.(Book Review)
January 24, 2005... In the eighteen-eighties, residents of cities across Britain might have noticed an aged, bald, bewhiskered gentleman sedulously eying every girl he passed on the street while manipulating something in his pocket. What they were seeing was not...

SUBCONSCIOUS TUNNELS.(Kafka on the Shore, book review)(Book Review)
January 24, 2005... Haruki Murakami's new novel, "Kafka on the Shore" (translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel; Knopf; $25.95), is a real page-turner, as well as an insistently metaphysical mind-bender. Spun out to four hundred and thirty-six pages, it...

THAT EIGHTIES SHOW.(East Village USA, theater review)(Theater Review)
January 24, 2005... "East Village USA," at the New Museum, explores a do-it-yourself art scene that took form suddenly in 1981 and flourished until its equally abrupt end, in 1987. Bold youths stormed an impoverished neighborhood that had been devastated, in the...

MAD WOMEN.("K.I. from 'Crime' " portraying pain of a women)
January 24, 2005... All is lost, all is lost. Poor Katerina Ivanovna has gone quite mad, singing and nattering on about her past. Maybe it's her grief. Her husband has just been killed--trampled by a horse-drawn carriage. Maybe it's her tuberculosis. It ravages...

THE CONTENDER.(Ben Stiller)(Biography)
January 24, 2005... The tireless Ben Stiller is like a kid acting in a show at summer camp, cutting up for his relatives and friends. This boy-man wants the camera. Once he gets its attention, he hesitates and stumbles, playing out for us the eternal war between...

AND THE WINNER IS . . .
January 24, 2005... For this year's Cartoon Caption Contest, Alex Gregory drew a man and a chef in a sushi restaurant--a fairly ordinary setup, except for the giant squid standing next to the chef. Evidently, people like to make squid jokes, because we received...