The New Yorker articles from July 2005

The New Yorker archives from July 2005

POLITICAL PORN.(The Talk of the Town)(The Truth About Hillary)(Book Review)
July 4, 2005... On the strength of name recognition and a solid freshman term in the Senate, Hillary Clinton appears to lead all other potential candidates for the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in 2008. But Senator Clinton cannot become...

THE ENRON EXAMPLE.(The Talk of the Town)(Enron Code of Ethics, a 62-page booklet)
July 4, 2005... When questions of ambiguous morality arise, and no life is immune to them, a person in turmoil might turn for guidance to the Enron Code of Ethics, published in July of 2000 and, regrettably, now out of print. The Enron Code of Ethics is...

DON'T LAUGH.(The Talk of the Town)(Peter YarrowEs anti-bullying program)
July 4, 2005... The problem of antisocial behavior among the young has become so prevalent in Britain that a Blair official recently proposed forcing miscreants to wear bright-orange jumpsuits. New York City, on the other hand, seems to prefer, in these...

OFF DUTY.(The Talk of the Town)(Book Review)
July 4, 2005... A book party with no cocktails: ouch. In fairness to the folks at the New Press, which helped organize such a dreaded event recently, at a restaurant on West Twenty-ninth Street, there were a few limiting circumstances. For one thing, almost...

DOWN BY THE RIVER.(The Talk of the Town; cleaning up Italy's Tiber River)
July 4, 2005... Kristin Jones has a watchword that has guided her long struggle to make public art in Rome: " 'No' is an inspiration." Until last week, Jones's Eternaltiber project had endured years of inspiration, dispensed by a wide range of Roman...

REAL INSIDERS.(United States foreign relations)
July 4, 2005... Several years ago, I had dinner at Galileo, a Washington restaurant, with Steven Rosen, who was then the director of foreign-policy issues at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The group, which is better known by its acronym, aipac,...

DEATH OF A FISH.(event in a family's life)
July 4, 2005... When our five-year-old daughter Olivia's goldfish, Bluie, died, the other week, we were confronted by a crisis larger, or, at least, more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet. Bluie's life and his passing came to involve so...

THE DISAPPEARING POET.
July 4, 2005... It is almost half a century since San Francisco police found a 1954 Plymouth Savoy on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. On Tuesday, July 19, 1955, a highway patrol reported that the car, belonging to a Weldon Kees, had been discovered...

WHEN IN ROME.(Empire)(Television Program Review)
July 4, 2005... Juno's bustin' out all over, what with two series set in Rome at the end of Caesar's reign coming to television within a few months of each other: HBO's "Rome" begins in September, and ABC's "Empire" starts this Tuesday and runs every week...

ON YOUR TOES.(Billy Elliot)(Theater Review)
July 4, 2005... Bannered across the poster for London's new hit musical "Billy Elliot" (at the Victoria Palace)--a collaboration between two of the country's mightiest showmen, the director Stephen Daldry and the composer Sir Elton John--is an unbuttoned...

DECISIONS, DECISIONS.(The Talk of the Town)
July 11, 2005... Theodore Roosevelt appointed Oliver Wendell Holmes to the United States Supreme Court, in 1902, because he believed that Holmes would be a reliable vote in cases arising out of Roosevelt's trust-busting crusade. He had grounds for his faith: he...

TEAM FOR SALE.(The Talk of the Town)
July 11, 2005... Except for a long hiatus from 1972 until this year, the nation's capital was always a baseball town. In the eighteen-eighties, fans packed a stadium called Swampoodle Grounds to cheer the Washington Statesmen--a nickname that in the Gilded Age...

THE PUBLIC WHAT?(The Talk of the Town)
July 11, 2005... It does not necessarily recommend the office of the public advocate that one of the candidates currently seeking the post counts as his chief reason for campaigning a wish to eliminate the position ("I promise to report to work just long...

WHATEVER.(The Talk of the Town)
July 11, 2005... Attempts to justify Russell Crowe's assault on the night desk clerk at the Mercer Hotel last month came up short around here. Everyone sided with the humble clerk, who had taken a flying telephone to the cheek, and who, as the Times made sure...

ALL THE OIL IN CHINA?(The Talk of the Town)
July 11, 2005... When the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or cnooc, made an $18.5-billion bid for the American oil company Unocal two weeks ago, topping a previous offer of $16.5 billion from Chevron, a political storm was inevitable. The Chinese...

THE MISSING MADONNA.
July 11, 2005... The Metropolitan Museum of Art's recent purchase of an early Renaissance "Madonna and Child" by Duccio di Buoninsegna, for a price said to have been between forty-five and fifty million dollars, has been greeted by most New Yorkers with...

THE PLAYERS.
July 11, 2005... Erick Lindgren doesn't lock the doors of his home, which is in a gated community in North Las Vegas. This way, his friends, who are mostly professional poker players, like him, can drop in anytime, to swim, shoot hoops, play snooker, or watch...

THE EXPERIMENT.(Guantanamo Bay, Cuba)
July 11, 2005... On a steamy morning last month, as Congress was debating the treatment of the approximately five hundred terrorist suspects being held inside the United States-run military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a small delegation of...

THE TURTLES.
July 11, 2005... Zhang Xin likes to talk about her fascination with left-wing British intellectuals during her years at Sussex and Cambridge. Pan Shiyi, her husband, is a believer in Taoism who describes himself as a "feudal" Gansu country boy. When you see...

THE CANDY MAN.(Roald Dahl)
July 11, 2005... Roald Dahl, the British author of children's books, wrote in a tiny cottage at the end of a trellised pathway canopied with twisting linden trees. He called it the "writing hut," and, since Dahl was nearly six feet six, he must have inhabited...

TWO VIEWS.
July 11, 2005... In terms of a viewer's chief experience, "Pioneering Modern Painting: Cezanne & Pissarro, 1865-1885," at the Museum of Modern Art, is a show about Paul Cezanne: what he did, how it works, and why it's classical. Camille Pissarro, a likable man...

STAYIN' ALIVE.(Movie Review)
July 11, 2005... There are no experts in Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds"--no brilliant scientists from Caltech or M.I.T. talking of roentgens or alien blood types. And no military-intelligence officers, either, or any of the other authorities wearing...

NOT SCARED.(London bombings)
July 25, 2005... In the hours after the Thursdaymorning bombings in London, it seemed as if everyone was on the streets, walking home. With the Tube shut down and buses barred from the central part of the city, hundreds of thousands of people went trudging in...

FACE-OFF.(The Talk of the Town)(Asian faces superimposed on white ones in Virginia Fields' mayoral campaign photo)
July 25, 2005... The recent flap over a doctored photograph released by the mayoral campaign of Virginia Fields, in which two Asian faces were superimposed on white ones, offers another little chunk of evidence for the case that, in politics, image is...

LOW NOTES.(The Talk of the Town)(Metropolitan Opera Orchestra auditions for bassist)
July 25, 2005... When, this spring, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra held auditions to fill an open seat in its bass section, Kurt Muroki, who lives on the Upper West Side, carried his bass ten blocks south to Lincoln Center. Of all the candidates--there were...

REPORTER GUY.(The Talk of the Town)(actor Stephen Colbert)(Interview)
July 25, 2005... As the evening news dies and newspapers struggle for their lives, who knew that so many would pay so dear a price for made-up news? One recent afternoon, even in the shady bits of sidewalk along West Fifty-fourth Street the temperatures and...

A FAREWELL TO ALMS?(Live 8, Bob Geldof )
July 25, 2005... In 1985, when Bob Geldof organized the rock spectacular Live Aid to fight poverty in Africa, he kept things simple. "Give us your fucking money" was his famous (if apocryphal) command to an affluent Western audience--words that embodied...

READING RATZINGER.(Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger)
July 25, 2005... In May, 1984, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger summoned the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff to Rome. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Boff had helped create the movement known as liberation theology, working with poor Catholics in Latin...

GET OUT THE VOTE.(Iraq elections)
July 25, 2005... The January 30th election in Iraq was publicly perceived as a political triumph for George W. Bush and a vindication of his decision to overturn the regime of Saddam Hussein. More than eight million Iraqis defied the threats of the insurgency...

THE TERRORISM BEAT.(New York Department of Police)
July 25, 2005... They meet every morning: Raymond W. Kelly, New York City's Police Commissioner; David Cohen, the Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence; and Michael Sheehan, the Deputy Commissioner for Counter Terrorism. At these sessions, held at One Police...

BLOODSUCKERS.(use of leeches in modern medicine)
July 25, 2005... On a recent morning in Hendy, a tiny, rain-drenched town in southern Wales, a young man named Ioan Cunningham appeared at Biopharm, a commercial leech farm housed in a long, low brick building that sits on thirty-five acres of marshland near...

RED PLANET.(writings of Cormac McCarthy)
July 25, 2005... To read Cormac McCarthy is to enter a climate of frustration: a good day is so mysteriously followed by a bad one. McCarthy is a colossally gifted writer, certainly one of the greatest observers of landscape. He is also one of the great hams of...

MAKING MISCHIEF.(Wedding Crashers)(Movie Review)
July 25, 2005... The new Tim Burton movie stars Johnny Depp as an ageless weirdo, whose magical skills are matched only by his hangups about where he came from and how he is supposed to make friends with regular people. The film is called "Edward Scissorhands."...