The New Yorker articles from July 2002

The New Yorker archives from July 2002

HOMELAND TRUTHS.(homeland security office)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... A few mornings ago, Bill Clinton came downtown from One-Two-Five Street to Vanderbilt Avenue to give a speech. He was a few minutes early, which pleased and flattered his audience--four hundred nicely tailored suits, assembled at the Yale Club...

POWER OF THE PENNE.(how food made by one Italian restaurant affects New York Mets baseball players)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Gino's, in Yorkville, is one of those modest Italian restaurants, more pizzeria than trattoria, that are rarely frequented by people outside the neighborhood. A couple of weeks ago, its co-owner Phil Mangiafridda got a takeout order from one of...

THE VIEW FROM THE SEVEN.(temporary home of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... When you approached the old Museum of Modern Art, on West Fifty-third Street, it didn't much matter whether you arrived on foot, by bus, in a taxi, or in a limousine. After the museum's new temporary quarters, in the former Swingline staple...

FLawlEss.(model railroad fans)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... A foamer is an exceptionally avid hobbyist. Some of the model-railroad foamers who gather every fourth Tuesday or so in Phil Chiavetta's garage, in New Jersey, are the species of train buff likely to hoard branch-line schedules and jubilee...

THE LAST CONGLOMERATEUR.(former Tyco International CEO L. Dennis Koslowski; conglomerate corporations)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In William Gaddis's 1975 novel "J R," a sixth grader from Long Island named J R Vansant quickly parlays one share of stock in a cable company and a deal to sell Navy-surplus wooden picnic forks into a vast empire he calls "the J R Family of...

ORANGE ALERT.(rising popularity of National Front party in Europe)
July 1, 2002... In 1996, shortly after the National Front unexpectedly won control of the historic Provencal town of Orange, in the South of France, the newly elected mayor, Jacques Bompard, declared that the town would become a laboratory for far-right ideas....

THE MORalist.(boxer Lennox Lewis)
July 1, 2002... From distant shores, it is hard to figure out why so few Britons have proved supreme in the prize ring since the passing of the Regency era and the advent of the padded glove. An age of futility has followed William Hazlitt's patriotic...

A DIFFERENT WAR.(Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, and his management)
July 1, 2002... When General Eric K. Shinseki became the Army's thirty-fourth Chief of Staff, in June of 1999, he declared that he would transform the ponderous Cold War force that stared down the Soviets for half a century into something more useful in the...

COUNTDOWN TO A BABY.(personal experience with in vitro fertilization)
July 1, 2002... WEEK ONE I have been telling my friends that what I am injecting into my wife, Doreen, this week is crushed, powdered Chinese hamster ovaries. This is not quite the truth. I am injecting her with cells from Chinese hamster ovaries that...

WALKING ALONE.(musical legacy and biography of Richard Rodgers)
July 1, 2002... When the composer Richard Rodgers died, in 1979, after sixty-two years in show business, forty musicals, and more than nine hundred songs, Lionel Trilling--an eminence grise not given to hyperbole--announced, "Few men have given so much...

REMEMBER THE LUSITANIA.(two books about the sinking of the Lusitania)
July 1, 2002... The sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania, on May 7, 1915, will always play second fiddle, in the ensemble of maritime disasters, to that of White Star's Titanic, a little more than three years earlier. Of the two glamorous great ships, the...

GROWING UP.(development of ballet dancers in the American Ballet Theater and the New York City Ballet)
July 1, 2002... In ballet, one of the hardest things to predict is how a young dancer will develop. At New York City Ballet over the past two decades, talent after talent has turned up, pink and shiny, only to succumb to the mixture of anxiety and ennui that...

THE GLOBAL SALON.(installation art; various artists; Kassel, Germany)
July 1, 2002... Amid the hundreds of works in Documenta 11, an event that trumpets the artistic entropy and civic pep of today's international art institutions, I kept returning to a marvellous video installation--a digital short story, essentially--by the...

WHOWILLHAVEDUNIT.('Minority Report')
July 1, 2002... The worst thing about the new Steven Spielberg picture is the title, "Minority Report." The best thing about it is pretty much everything else. After his unhappy fathomings of the future with "A.I.," Spielberg has plunged back in and fished up...

Last Resorts.(three books)(Brief Article)
July 8, 2002... The world's first milk line, the Midland Railroad, ran from New York to the Catskill foothills in 1870. According to IN THE CATSKILLS (Columbia), a collection of writings about the region edited by Phil Brown, the train was largely responsible...

The Sweetest Thing.(Dylan's Candy Bar, Economy Candy and Chocolate Bar retail stores, New York, New York)(Brief Article)
July 8, 2002... As if a giant statue of a bunny in the center of the store weren't enough, DYLAN'S CANDY BAR (1011 Third Ave., 646-735-0078) has its own infomercial playing on a screen between the ice-cream counter and a cotton-candy machine. "Depressed? Need...

SHORT-SIGHTED.(boycott of Sidney Hook symposium)(Brief Article)
July 8, 2002... COMMENT DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS CHIANTI POSTCARD THE CREATIVE LIFE BIG NIGHT On May 23, 1985, Sidney Hook received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan, along with such distinguished Americans as Chuck...

HERE COMES THE NEIGHBORHOOD.(drop off point for released prisoners to move from Queens Plaza)(Brief Article)
July 8, 2002... COMMENT DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS CHIANTI POSTCARD THE CREATIVE LIFE BIG NIGHT For as long as anyone can remember (that is, about seventeen years), a busload of inmates newly released from Rikers Island has been dropped off...

A VERRAZZANO TRIBUTE.(Giovanni da Verrazzano)(Brief Article)
July 8, 2002... COMMENT DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS CHIANTI POSTCARD THE CREATIVE LIFE BIG NIGHT Not long ago, Cavalier Luigi Cappellini and his wife, Silvia, gave a dinner party, at the Castello di Verrazzano, in Chianti, to mark the...

A TROUPE TURNS FIFTY.(Merce Cunningham Dance Company)(Brief Article)
July 8, 2002... COMMENT DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS CHIANTI POSTCARD THE CREATIVE LIFE BIG NIGHT Sixty people rode the always unpredictable Westbeth elevators to Merce Cunningham's eleventh-floor dance studio on a warm day last month, for the...

THE HOT OR NOT GUYS.(Hot or Not website creators)(Brief Article)
July 8, 2002... COMMENT DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS CHIANTI POSTCARD THE CREATIVE LIFE BIG NIGHT James Hong and his roommate, Jim Young, who live in Mountain View, California, flew into town last week to attend a promotional party for...

UNDER WHERE?(Robin Williams comments on court ruling regarding Pledge of Allegiance)(Brief Article)
July 8, 2002... After a federal appeals court ruled last week that it is unconstitutional to make schoolchildren recite the phrase "one nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, we placed a call to Robin Williams, to hear his thoughts on the decision....

THE DEATH BEAT.(obituary writers meet)
July 8, 2002... LAS VEGAS, NEW MEXICO Carolyn Gilbert has no trouble remembering where she was when she came up with what, in all modesty, she still regards as an excellent idea--the First Great Obituary Writers' Conference. She was in North Dallas, in a...

YANKEE IMPERIALIST.(George M. Steinbrenner, III)
July 8, 2002... George M. Steinbrenner III, the principal owner of the New York Yankees, was born and brought up outside Cleveland, Ohio, where his family owned a shipping business, but for the past twenty-five years he has lived in Tampa, Florida, and that is...

THE RELUCTANT MEMORIALIST.(Maya Lin reconsiders the business of monuments following September 11th)
July 8, 2002... One afternoon this winter, Maya Lin walked with me from SoHo, where she has her studio, across Canal Street and down Church Street to the place where the World Trade Center once stood. Lin is a friendly, unpretentious woman. She is slight--she...

ENVELOPE ART.(Edward Gorey)
July 8, 2002... For years before his death, in April, 2000, Edward Gorey lived with a great deal of clutter, and as many as six cats, in a rambling house facing the village green in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts. That house has recently been opened as a museum,...

NAKED PUNCH.(Lucian Freud retrospective at Tate Britain, London, England)
July 8, 2002... Lucian Freud, the subject of a huge retrospective at Tate Britain, in London, is living proof that national character still counts in art, globalization or no globalization. The musky realist painter is extremely English. He hails from...

IRONISTS ABROAD.('Prague')
July 8, 2002... The names of Central European cities may not strike you as being all that amusing; still, the wittiest title in recent years could well be the one that Arthur Phillips has given to his debut novel, "Prague" (Random House; $24.95). It's not that...

MASTER OF CEREMONIES.(Max Ophuls films)
July 8, 2002... The centenary of the birth of Max Ophuls has not been marked with quite the cascade of affection that his fans were hoping for. No fireworks glimmering over the East River, no white-tie dances in aid of the Distressed Cameramen's Association,...

INVADERS.(two motion pictures)
July 8, 2002... "Men in Black II" has one moment of goofy, brilliant invention: There's a new alien threat in town, and Agent Jay (Will Smith), seeking help, has to retrieve his partner, Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones), who, at the end of the first movie, was...

Cutting Off the Tongue.(books about languages and deciphering)(Brief Article)
July 15, 2002... "Not quite the Greek you taught me," wrote Michael Ventris to his old classics teacher after decoding an ancient Aegean script that had baffled experts for years. In THE MAN WHO DECIPHERED LINEAR B (Thames & Hudson), Andrew Robinson narrates...

TWO LITTLE WORDS.(the Pledge of Allegiance loses "under God")
July 15, 2002... COMMENT ODD BALL VISITING DIGNITARIES ABOUT TIME DEPT. THE FINANCIAL PAGE The Pledge of Allegiance--much in the news just now, on account of a soon-to-be-overturned court decision declaring its "under God" clause...

LEAGUES OF NATIONS.(Americans and soccer)(Brief Article)
July 15, 2002... COMMENT ODD BALL VISITING DIGNITARIES ABOUT TIME DEPT. THE FINANCIAL PAGE Nick Hornby on the 2002 World Cup From 1970, Alastair Reid covers the World Cup Every World Cup brings new pleasures, at least for those...

ON THE PISH.(Irvine Welsh in New York)(Brief Article)
July 15, 2002... COMMENT ODD BALL VISITING DIGNITARIES ABOUT TIME DEPT. THE FINANCIAL PAGE Irvine Welsh, the Scottish novelist, was in town recently to read from his new book, "Porno," which is due out in the fall. "Porno" is the sequel...

BLIND TOM'S TOMBSTONE.(memorial for Thomas Greene Wiggins)(Brief Article)
July 15, 2002... COMMENT ODD BALL VISITING DIGNITARIES ABOUT TIME DEPT. THE FINANCIAL PAGE One of the more unusual deliveries made last week to the Evergreens Cemetery, in East New York, came in a truck from Steinway & Sons. The...

L'AFFAIRE MESSIER.(Vivendi Universal's Jean-Marie Messier)(Brief Article)
July 15, 2002... COMMENT ODD BALL VISITING DIGNITARIES ABOUT TIME DEPT. THE FINANCIAL PAGE Two years ago, Jean-Marie Messier was the new face of European business. As the C.E.O. of Vivendi Universal, he had transformed a French water...

WE ARE THE WORLD.(2002 World Cup of Soccer)
July 15, 2002... From 1970, Alastair Reid covers the World Cup Adam Gopnik on Eurosport versus our sport The last goal in the 1998 World Cup was scored by Emmanuel Petit, a blond, muscular, ponytailed, and irritatingly good-looking midfielder for the...

WILD SANG.(poaching in national parks)(Brief Article)
July 15, 2002... When it's high summer in eastern Tennessee and the mountain laurel is in full leaf; when three times as many tourists travel here as to Yellowstone, and their boom boxes and bickering echo from hollow to hollow; when the Florida lawyers have...

THE LONG RIDE.(cyclist Lance Armstrong)
July 15, 2002... Michael Specter talks about Lance Armstrong and the sport of cycling A couple of weeks ago, on a sweltering Saturday afternoon, I found myself in the passenger seat of a small Volkswagen, careering so rapidly around the hairpin turns of...

AFTER THE TOWERS.(re-developing site of World Trade Center bombings)(Brief Article)
July 15, 2002... The agonizing work of cleanup and recovery at Ground Zero, which ended officially a month ago, was carried out by men and women whose shared purpose made them a united force. Now comes the far more controversial job of rebuilding. The Lower...

THE STORY OF HIMSELF.("Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II")
July 15, 2002... The autobiographical impulse seizes some novelists, such as Henry James, at the end of their creative labors; they relax at last from the trouble of disguise and manipulation and tell it like it was, as it is remembered, much as the host of a...

MASTER OF DISASter.("Globalization and Its Discontents")
July 15, 2002... In 1998, Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia professor who shared last year's Nobel Prize in Economics, visited a village in rural Morocco where aid workers had been encouraging local women to raise chickens. At the time, Stiglitz was the chief...

TOUGH LOVE.(artist Joan Mitchell)
July 15, 2002... At a boozy dinner party that I attended in a New York walkup nearly thirty years ago, a woman announced that she was getting married. Joan Mitchell, who was there, exploded. How could anyone even think of doing something so bourgeois? The...

CRIME--family man.("Road to Perdition")
July 15, 2002... "Road to Perdition," starring Tom Hanks as a Depression-era hit man, is a solemnly beautiful art concept--perhaps the most thoroughly stylized gangster picture since the Coen brothers' "Miller's Crossing," from 1990. In that tale of baroque...

Into the Woods.(Maverick Concerts, Woodstock, New York)(Brief Article)
July 22, 2002... It would be hard to find a classical-music series as down to earth as Maverick Concerts, which has hosted chamber programs for the past eighty-five years in a woodland hall outside Woodstock, New York. Hervey White, the Whitmanesque leader of a...

Verse from the West Coast.(Brief Article)
July 22, 2002... The wedding of the poet and novelist Carol Muske to the actor David Dukes (who played, among other stage and film roles, a murderer in "The First Deadly Sin"), made Liz Smith's column and gave Muske-Dukes a title for her collection of...

STREET SMARTS.(George W. Bush and corporate disclosure)(Brief Article)
July 22, 2002... COMMENT BROOKLYN BOYCOTT! BUSINESS AS USUAL DEPT. THE PICTURES DIMINISHING RETURNS DEPT. ON THE AIR The old Merchants' Exchange, where George W. Bush delivered his big speech on corporate malfeasance last Tuesday...

BROOKLYN BOYCOTT!(arab american newspaper vendors boycott New York Post)(Brief Article)
July 22, 2002... COMMENT BROOKLYN BOYCOTT! BUSINESS AS USUAL DEPT. THE PICTURES DIMINISHING RETURNS DEPT. ON THE AIR Tabloid readers in Brooklyn have had a harder time getting their fix in recent months, thanks to a campaign among...

STALEMATE AT THE S.E.C.(Harvey Goldschmid awaits appointment to the Securities and Exchange Commission)(Brief Article)
July 22, 2002... COMMENT BROOKLYN BOYCOTT! BUSINESS AS USUAL DEPT. THE PICTURES DIMINISHING RETURNS DEPT. ON THE AIR Last week, while President Bush was promising the American people that his Administration "will do everything in its...

SAD--EYED SIBLINGS.(Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal)(Brief Article)(Interview)
July 22, 2002... COMMENT BROOKLYN BOYCOTT! BUSINESS AS USUAL DEPT. THE PICTURES DIMINISHING RETURNS DEPT. ON THE AIR Jake Gyllenhaal is a twenty-one-year-old actor who plays depressed mis fits in three movies this year. In "Lovely...

A BANK GOES HOME.(Bank of New York's 101 Barclay office reopens)(Brief Article)
July 22, 2002... COMMENT BROOKLYN BOYCOTT! BUSINESS AS USUAL DEPT. THE PICTURES DIMINISHING RETURNS DEPT. ON THE AIR Over the years, the Bank of New York, the nation's oldest bank, has been forced to abandon its downtown offices...

EAST END OLDIE.(WLNG radio station)(Brief Article)
July 22, 2002... COMMENT BROOKLYN BOYCOTT! BUSINESS AS USUAL DEPT. THE PICTURES DIMINISHING RETURNS DEPT. ON THE AIR If you're out on the East End of Long Island, and your radio is tuned to 92.1 FM, you might at some point hear a...

THE TALENT MYTH.(McKinsey and Company Inc.'s book "War for Talent")
July 22, 2002... A Q. & A. with Malcolm Gladwell Five years ago, several executives at McKinsey & Company, America's largest and most prestigious management-consulting firm, launched what they called the War for Talent. Thousands of questionnaires were...

LEARNING TO DRIVE.(Short Story)
July 22, 2002... "Over there, the red Jeep. Park!" Ben, my gentle Filipino driving instructor, has suddenly become severe, abrupt, commanding. A slight man, he now looms in his seat; his usually soft voice has acquired a threatening edge. In a scenario that we...

HIS KIND OF TOWN.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
July 22, 2002... Some folks have all the luck. If you're a writer, though, or a movie director, or the sharpest kind of photographer, you can make the luck happen, and transform your art into news. As "Minority Report" came out, issues of incrimination--how and...

BALLBUSTER.(comic illustrator Bernard Krigstein)
July 22, 2002... The current "Spider-Man" movie will sell more Spider-Man toothbrushes, action figures, and frosted Spidey-berry-filled Pop-Tarts in its wake than actual Spider-man comic books: comics are simply not the popular form of popular culture that they...

THE LOYAL OPPOSITION.(Garry Wills and the Catholic Church)(Review)
July 22, 2002... It is hard to imagine a more timely book than Garry Wills's "Why I Am a Catholic" (Houghton Mifflin; $26). In the aftermath of recent events, many American Catholics may well be wondering why they are Catholic. That Wills has so promptly...

PLAY AT THE PLATE.("Take Me Out")
July 22, 2002... If there's anything that confounds the British more than American optimism, it's baseball, which brings together on one bright pastoral greensward those twin nineteenth-century American deliriums: industrialization and individualism. Baseball...

SISTERHOOD.("Little Women")
July 22, 2002... Mark Adamo's "Little Women," an adaptation of the eternally adaptable Louisa May Alcott classic, opened at Glimmerglass Opera, in Cooperstown, New York, over the July 4th weekend. In many respects, it fulfills a stereotype of American opera...

A TALE OF THREE CITIES.(George Balanchine's "Jewels" and the Kirov Ballet company)
July 22, 2002... From 1992, Elizabeth Kendall profiles the Kirov Ballet The Kirov Ballet, of St. Petersburg, is now at the Metropolitan Opera House, courtesy of the Lincoln Center Festival, and the company has brought us a nice bouquet of Russian...

The Warmth of the Sun.(Brief Article)
July 29, 2002... "It has those little Emilios on it--that means it's one of our original patterns from the archives," says the saleswoman at the EMILIO PUCCI boutique (24 E. 64th St.; 752-4777), vouching for the authenticity of a saffron-and-heliotrope beach...

Sights and Sounds.(Brief Article)
July 29, 2002... "The '45' is here to stay, and let there be no doubt about it!" These were the words of Frank Folsom, the president of RCA Victor, who unveiled the revolutionary seven-inch, forty-five-r.p.m. record in 1949. Folsom may have been guilty of...

UP FROM ZERO.(Brief Article)
July 29, 2002... When Larry Silverstein, the developer who leased the World Trade Center from the Port Authority, said that the best thing to do after September 11th would be to rebuild the twin hundred-and-ten-story towers in the form of four fifty-story...

FUNGUS RISING.(spongy black morel mushrooms arose from area devastated last summer by the Moose Fire in northwestern Montana)(Brief Article)
July 29, 2002... Though the seventy-one-thousand-acre Moose Fire that visited northwestern Montana last summer may have destroyed millions of board feet of timber, redirected hundreds of family vacations, and displaced a handful of households, it proved to be a...

A GOOD TABLE.(human communication could be improved by using table with chairs that move around its perimeter en masse)(Brief Article)
July 29, 2002... Speaking recently on the telephone from an office in the lakeside city of Lugano, in Switzerland, a civil engineer named Paolo Rais described an invention that he hoped would improve human communication, promote world peace, and reduce the fear...

BROOKLYN TOBACCO PARTY.(anti-smokers protest New York City's new tax on cigarettes)(Brief Article)
July 29, 2002... CLASH, which stands for Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment, is the only organization dedicated exclusively to protecting the rights of New York City smokers. It was founded two years ago by Audrey Silk, a thirty-eight-year-old police...

IN NO ONE WE TRUST.(Brief Article)
July 29, 2002... In December of 1995, a young Russian man named Mikhail Khodorkovsky rigged a state auction and bought a controlling stake in the Russian oil company Yukos. As David Hoffman recounts in "The Oligarchs," his superb new history of Russia's first...

HORMONES FOR MEN.(public awareness campaign launched to help in recognition of symptoms of male menopause or andropause)
July 29, 2002... It goes by many names. "Male menopause" is perhaps the most popular, but "andropause" is the term that many doctors favor, and PADAM ("partial androgen deficiency in aging men") has its partisans, too. The condition may afflict millions of...

THE VIKING INVASION.(Brief Article)
July 29, 2002... A hundred years ago, Greenwood, Mississippi, in the heart of the Delta, was the cotton capital of the world. Now many of the squat brick buildings downtown are vacant, and Greenwood seems stuck in an era when shoe repair, sewing notions, and...

MR. BROWN.(legendary musician James Brown)
July 29, 2002... Forty-seven years ago, at a radio station in Macon, Georgia, five young men stood around a microphone and sang a song. One played guitar, another played piano, but the station's recording equipment picked up the instruments so faintly that the...

FRENCH POSTCARDS.(Metropolitan exhibit 'The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections')
July 29, 2002... A year before Paul Gauguin died, in 1903, from complications of syphilis in the Marquesas Islands, he wrote that he had a "fondness for running away." As a nine-year-old in Orleans, he recalled, he decided one day to light out for the forest...

FRAMED UP.(Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science Robert A. Dahl's new book 'How Democratic Is the American Constitution?')
July 29, 2002... Robert A. Dahl, whose new book's title asks the question "How Democratic Is the American Constitution?" (Yale; $19.95), is not a crank. He is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale, and he is about as covered with honors...

UNDER PRESSURE.(Brief Article)
July 29, 2002... There is a breed of film in which terribly important things fail to happen, preferably by less than an inch. In "The Day of the Jackal," General de Gaulle doesn't get shot; in "Thirteen Days," the world doesn't end; and in "Pillow Talk," Doris...