The New Yorker articles from July 2004

The New Yorker archives from July 2004

WARS AND IDEAS.(The Talk of the Town)(a sovereign Iraq will have to fight to survive)
July 5, 2004... Nir Rosen on the problem in Falluja The New Yorker's complete coverage of the conflict in Iraq Sheikh Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, who this week will take over Saddam Hussein's old job as the president of a sovereign Iraq, recently mentioned a...

WINNING THE WEST.(The Talk of the Town)(battle over whether or not to construct a football stadium on the West Side of Manhattan)
July 5, 2004... Both sides have started punching harder lately in the brawl over whether or not to build a seventy-five-thousand-seat football stadium over the Hudson rail yards on Manhattan's far West Side. The New York Jets, who would own the place, will be...

TAKEDOWN.(The Talk of the Town)(women's freestyle wrestling comes to New York City)
July 5, 2004... Last week, in case you missed it, was women's-wrestling week here in the city--or, as Mayor Bloomberg put it, in his official proclamation, "United States Olympic Team for Women's Freestyle Wrestling Week." Bloomberg delivered the good news in...

GANGSTA CONTENT.(The Talk of the Town)(quarterly magazine, 'Don Diva')
July 5, 2004... The summer issue of Don Diva, which bills itself as "The Original Street Bible," has just reached newsstands. Don Diva is a glossy quarterly, with a circulation of about a hundred thousand, in whose pages readers can follow the bloody rise and...

BY POPULAR DEMAND.(The Talk of the Town)(conversation with Paul Burrell, Princess Diana's former butler, during his book tour)
July 5, 2004... In the art of the high-profile literary striptease, it is always wise to keep something in reserve. Drawn-out exercises in revelation often prefigure anticlimax, and a second book--or, at least, a tantalizing round of public appearances. And so...

TO HELL WITH ALL THAT.(when mothers choose to work)
July 5, 2004... Throughout my childhood, the thirty-five-cent Cardinal edition of Dr. Spock sat on a kitchen counter beside another font of domestic good counsel, "The Settlement Cookbook." The books have fallen into my hands now, their spines mended with...

HOME RULE.(Falluja, Iraq)
July 5, 2004... George Packer on the beginning of Iraqi sovereignty The New Yorker's complete coverage of the conflict in Iraq On May 11th, the day after the United States marines withdrew from the streets of Falluja, about five hundred clerics, tribal...

THE BEST JOB IN TOWN.(the Americanization of Chennai, India due to outsourcing performed by firms like Office Tiger)
July 5, 2004... One Monday this spring, a forty-three-year-old salesclerk at the Home Depot in Plano, Texas, scribbled some updates onto an old resume and took it to his local copy shop. To his education and work history--a bachelor's degree in industrial...

A FEEL FOR THE WATER.(champion swimmer Natalie Coughlin heads for the Olympics)
July 5, 2004... Two years ago, as the summer competitive swim season was getting under way, a former national champion backstroker named Barbara Stark Jordan decided to stop by a meet in Los Angeles to watch Natalie Coughlin race. Coughlin was nineteen then....

RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT.(the life of poet Dylan Thomas)
July 5, 2004... From 1982, John Malcolm Brinnin on a memorial for Dylan Thomas To begin at the beginning: In October, 1914, when the Swansea schoolmaster David John Thomas decided to call his newborn son Dylan, the name was virtually unknown, even in...

TRIBUTE.(a look at New York City Ballet's two-season festival, 'Balanchine 100: The Centennial Celebration')
July 5, 2004... This year is the centenary of George Balanchine's birth, and, in recognition, his company, New York City Ballet, staged a two-season festival, "Balanchine 100: The Centennial Celebration," which ran from November through last week. In fact,...

WANDERERS.('Before Sunset' and 'The Terminal')(Movie Review)
July 5, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File In "Before Sunrise," the charmingly diminutive movie that Richard Linklater made in 1995, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), a footloose young American travelling through Europe, meets a student from Paris, Celine...

BLOWING BUBBLES.(The Talk of the Town)(Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's cheap-money policy has escaped attention, but may lead to collapse in currency, stick market crash and severe recession)
July 12, 2004... Next March, Alan Greenspan will turn seventy-nine. Sound health persisting--he plays tennis and golf regularly--he will be well into his eighteenth year as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and, depending on what happens in November, will...

THE CHICAGO PRECEDENT.(The Talk of the Town)(protest planning for Republican National Convention in New York City)
July 12, 2004... A case can be made that no political assembly in history has inspired more elaborate and widespread opposition planning than the impending Republican National Convention. At the web site CounterConvention.org, more than a hundred and thirty...

THE VICE-PRESIDENT'S DOCTOR.(The Talk of the Town)(Vice President Dick Cheney's personal physician for nine years turns out to have history of prescription narcotic abuse dating back to 1997)
July 12, 2004... When George W. Bush chose Dick Cheney to be his running mate four years ago, Dr. Gary Malakoff, Cheney's personal physician, assured the nation, in a letter released that July by the Bush campaign, that Cheney, despite having suffered three...

MARLON BRANDO.(The Talk of the Town)
July 12, 2004... Marlon Brando, who died last week in Los Angeles, was the subject of a Profile, "The Duke in His Domain" (November 9, 1957), which is excerpted here: Though Brando is not a teetotaller, his appetite is more frugal when it comes to alcohol....

PAYING TO PLAY.(The Talk of the Town)('the new payola,' or 'spot buys,' of air time for new songs, on radio)
July 12, 2004... James Surowiecki talks about the economics of choice Pop music thrives on repetition. You know a song's a hit when you've heard it so often that you'll be happy never to hear it again. Even by Top 40 standards, though, the playlist adopted...

THE PRICE OF VALOR.(U.S. armed forces teach soldiers to kill, but deal inadequately with psychological trauma of soldiers and veterans who have killed in battle)
July 12, 2004... The New Yorker's complete coverage of the conflict in Iraq Carl Cranston joined the Army in 1997, when he was still a junior at Sebring McKinley High School, not far from Canton, Ohio. He and his girlfriend, Debbie Stiles, had just had a...

NAKED PROFITS.
July 12, 2004... San Francisco has led the sexual revolution since 1964, the year a teen-age dancer named Carol Doda caused a sensation by appearing onstage at the Condor night club in a Rudi Gernreich swimsuit that lacked a top. In subsequent months, the...

GOING NOWHERE.(the Muslim Brotherhood against the Mubarak regime in Egypt)
July 12, 2004... Last November, President Bush delivered a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, in Washington, spelling out the loftiest of his rationales for the war in Iraq--a determination to remake the political world from North Africa to the...

FATHERS AND SONS.(comparison of George W. Bush to George H.W. Bush)
July 12, 2004... Moments after enemy fire punctured the fuselage, smoke filled the cockpit of George Herbert Walker Bush's plane, the Barbara III. The twenty-year-old Navy pilot and his two-man crew had not yet carried out their mission, which was to bomb the...

KING COLE.(profile of Cole Porter)
July 12, 2004... From 1940, a Profile of Cole Porter On October 24, 1937, Cole Porter went out for a horseback ride at the Piping Rock Club, in Locust Valley, Long Island--one of those swank playgrounds whose names he liked to rhyme in song and which...

ALL-AMERICAN.(exhibit, 'Childe Hassam: American Impressionist,' Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York city)
July 12, 2004... "He lived with gusto, smoked a pipe, played golf, kept a good cellar, buffeted the East Hampton surf with a great, bronzed body, and worked joyously until his last illness," an obituary notice in the Times gushed of the painter Childe Hassam...

SWING EASY.('Spider-Man 2' and 'The Clearing')(Movie Review)
July 12, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File Our first duty, with regard to "Spider-Man 2," is to congratulate the filmmakers on their refusal to elasticate the title. I am fed up with having to wrap my tongue around "Pirates of the Caribbean: The...

SOCIAL MOBILITY.(The Talk of the Town)(the New York City bicycle taxi is glorified rickshaw, an embodiment of the widening gap between the wealthy few and everybody else)
July 26, 2004... One of the stranger sights in the city this summer is the bicycle taxi. Strictly speaking, it should be called a tricycle taxi, since it consists of a strong-thighed young man--there seem to be few women in the guild--on a contraption with a...

THE PET GOAT APPROACH.(The Talk of the Town)('The Pet Goat,' read by class to George W. Bush after he learned of Sept. 11 attacks, is a workbook exercise used in the Direct Instruction method of teaching developed by Siegfried Engelmann in the 1960s)
July 26, 2004... Although you do not know his name, Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann is one of the most talked-about authors in the country right now. His most prominent work, which you have not read, is a story for second graders. It begins, "A girl got a pet goat."...

ALL THAT YOU CAN BE.(The Talk of the Town)(U.S. military personnel are eligible for free cosmetic surgery, courtesy of the taxpayers)
July 26, 2004... There has been a great deal of speculation recently that the government might reinstate the draft at some point, in order to replenish the nation's armed forces. Military and government officials have, for the most part, dismissed such talk. As...

NO. 1 AUTHORITY.(The Talk of the Town)(Professor Paul Light is the top expert on the American Vice-Presidency)
July 26, 2004... In the early nineteen-eighties, Paul Light, who was then an assistant professor of political science at the University of Virginia, was advised by his faculty mentor to examine the changing nature of the American Vice-Presidency. "You know, it...

CAMARADERIE.(The Talk of the Town)
July 26, 2004... Ralph Kiner, the Hall of Fame ballplayer who has been a Mets broadcaster for four decades, showed up at Shea Stadium early the other day for one of the interleague games against the Yankees. He stopped in at his usual center of operations--the...

IN THE HIDING ZONE.(Waziristan, Pakistan, a tribal region along the border with Afghanistan)
July 26, 2004... Khalid Wazir, who is thirty and wears his hair in a mini-pompadour, twirls the tips of his mustache when he's ner-vous. The habit was little in evidence when I first met him, two years ago, through his cousins, a family of generous Wazirs who...

THE OUTSIDERS.(the resurrection of South Boston, Massachusetts)
July 26, 2004... From 1966, Joan Colebrook on urban renewal in Boston's South End The Church of Saints Peter and Paul in South Boston has had its share of both bedevilment and blessings. A grand gray building, a pile of granite chunks pierced by Gothic...

DAMAGE CONTROL.(Sen. John Kerry's position on the Iraq war)
July 26, 2004... During the loneliest days of his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, last December, when he was trailing Al Sharpton in some polls and reporters covering the race were placing bets that he'd drop out before the first voters...

NERD CAMP.(Short Story)
July 26, 2004... Another Saturday afternoon, and time again for Mandatory Fun. The High Math boys were sprawled on a patch of grass in front of their dormitory, waiting glumly for the games to begin. It was summer in Baltimore, and the wettest spring in memory...

TWICE COLLECTED.(Book Review)
July 26, 2004... American poetry lovers have of late been treated to two sandbag-size volumes of collected poems: those of James Merrill, edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, and those of Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. The...

MUCH ADO IN MESSINA.(Theater Review)
July 26, 2004... The idiosyncratic, perpetually boyish, and unequivocally American actor Sam Waterston is giving the performance of his career as the alternately loving, baffled, and furious patriarch Leonato in Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" (at the...

EMOTIONAL RESCUE.(Television Program Review)
July 26, 2004... It seems incredible now that there was ever a time when you might have walked by a firehouse in New York City and not thought about the lives of the people who worked inside, even if your lack of attention was in some ways a form of respect, an...

SEEING AND READING.(Ed Ruscha)(Biography)
July 26, 2004... Ed Ruscha, whose work is currently on view at the Whitney in a retrospective of his drawings, "Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors," and in a show of his well-known photographic books and far less familiar photographs, "Ed Ruscha and...

TEEN JOBS.(Movie Review)
July 26, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno), the heroine of the superb independent film "Maria Full of Grace," arrives early in life at an awful moment of decision: she must either take a big risk with her future or...