The New Yorker articles from June 2002

The New Yorker archives from June 2002

Fresh from the Oven.(American Pie; From Hardick to Home Fries)(Brief Article)
June 3, 2002... "You mean you just go up to complete strangers and talk to them about pie?" a friend's father asks Pascale Le Draoulec, the restaurant critic for the New York Daily News. Strangers not only talked to Le Draoulec, but they gave her enough...

UP IN THE AIR.(pole sitting as metaphor)(Brief Article)
June 3, 2002... Last week, a man stood on a pole in a park. Then he jumped off. It happened not far from the offices of this magazine, and a few people who work here walked over to watch him. David Blaine, the magician who did the standing and the jumping, is...

FORMER MOUSEBURGERS OF THE WORLD UNITE.(Cosmopolitan magazine)(Brief Article)
June 3, 2002... Thirty-five editors of the international editions of Cosmopolitan were in New York last week for a conference, and if you had stopped by the Tribeca Grand Hotel, where they were staying, you would have been able to identify members of their...

THE BRIDGE--AND--TUNNEL PROBLEM.(security and terrorism)(Brief Article)
June 3, 2002... The police began searching trucks and vans at the city's river crossings again last week, following reports that the captured Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah had claimed that his organization was targeting New York City landmarks. Traffic...

TV CRIMEDUSTERS.(producers of 'C.S.I: Crime Scene Investigation')(Brief Article)(Interview)
June 3, 2002... Carol Mendelsohn was changing her shoes in the limo. "I don't know how many shoes I've ruined at crime scenes," she said, as she stowed her Robert Clergerie flats and put on a pair of nineteen-dollar Lady Foot Locker sneakers. "I've run through...

BOLLYWOOD NIGHT.(tour by Indian film stars)
June 3, 2002... The other day, Bharat Jotwani, dressed in black leather and carrying two cell phones, was standing on the fifteen-yard line in the Continental Airlines Arena, in the Meadowlands. He was trying to imagine what the arena, which had been set up...

MISSED MESSAGES.(terrorism warning signals not heeded)
June 3, 2002... On September 23rd, twelve days after the terror attacks on America, Secretary of State Colin Powell told a Sunday-morning television-news show that the Bush Administration planned to publish a white paper that would prove to the world that...

FROM RACE TO CHASE.(Yale Law School Professor Stephen Carter)
June 3, 2002... When Stephen Carter, who is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor at Yale Law School, was in eighth grade, in 1967, his history teacher, Mrs. Ahlquist, made a comment that helped to change his life. "She said, 'You're pretty smart,' " Carter...

WASteland.(Zimbabwe)
June 3, 2002... Fifteen years ago, Richard Pascall, a professional hunter and safari guide, bought a fifty-two-thousand-acre farm near the village of Turk Mine, in Matabeleland, the western region of Zimbabwe, and began raising a herd of African black...

ISN'T IT WONDERFUL?(Tony Curtis to star in stage version of Some Like It Hot)
June 3, 2002... From downtown Las Vegas, it takes about twenty minutes, driving on flat, freshly paved, blistering-hot freeways, to reach Tony Curtis's house. To get there, one drives south on Las Vegas Boulevard, escaping the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the...

BEACHED.(The Hamptons)
June 3, 2002... Although the Hamptons are not a universal object of fantasy on the scale of Hollywood or Manhattan--there are no movies or musicals about young people in Kansas dreaming of making it in East Hampton someday--they have an allure that is at least...

THE FALL.(When I Was a Young Man)
June 3, 2002... On October 17, 1944, John Kerrey, an American soldier serving in the Philippines, died for no particularly good reason. That morning, Kerrey, who had survived the fall of Bataan and two and a half years of guerrilla fighting on Luzon, had set...

INTO THE RAINBOW.
June 3, 2002... Abstract painting used to be the prow of art history. Now it is a field of special, refined, even snooty taste, like serious jazz. The big values that it once represented, such as the symbolizing of up-to-date consciousness, aren't exactly...

INDOORS, OUTDOORS.(plays House, Garden)
June 3, 2002... I spent a lot of time during Alan Ayckbourn's manic but sodden comedy "Garden," now playing at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage II, trying to think of clever ways to combine the words "farce" and "snooze," but it was no use--the only...

MEN IN TROUBLE.(Sum of all Fears)(About A Boy)
June 3, 2002... "The Sum of All Fears" has a female chorus. It's that important a movie. The women's voices soar eloquently over views of Red Square, and everything else in the picture says, "Big movie about a big crisis." This is the latest in the series of...

AN EYE FOR LEADING LADIES.(Aubrey Reuben is a freelance photographer who takes pictures of theater and film stars)
June 10, 2002... For close to three decades, Aubrey Reuben, a seventy-year-old high-school Spanish teacher turned freelance photographer, has brought his mercurial presence and automatic-focus camera to just about every opening-night party, testimonial dinner,...

TURF WAR.(Nike takes business away from Callaway Golf as well as others)
June 10, 2002... I n the nineteen-nineties, a tin-pot West Coast company turned itself, almost overnight, into an industry superpower, eclipsing incumbents and increasing its sales by two thousand per cent in four years. This company had nothing to do with...

All Washed Up.(books about castaways)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2002... In 1704 a Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk, was abandoned on a remote South Sea island. Rescued more than four years later, Selkirk became a celebrity, as well as the model for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Diana Souhami's SELKIRK'S ISLAND...

THEM, TOO.(foreign assistance policy of Paul O'Neill and Bono)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2002... Last Friday, a couple of Irishmen named Paul returned from what the younger of the two, but probably not the older, might term a long, strange trip. The older one, who is not really Irish (his ancestors were, but he is a native of St. Louis),...

THE STATE EDITS THE CLASSICS.(The New York State Board of Regents edits Anton Chekhov's work for a public school essay test)
June 10, 2002... In 1887, Anton Chekhov said in a letter to Maria Kiselyova that the writer "should . . . acknowledge that manure piles play a highly respectable role in the landscape and that evil passions are every bit as much a part of life as good ones."...

A PUNK REUNION.(the Dead Kennedys reunite for a performance in Brooklyn, New York)
June 10, 2002... It has been twenty-three years since the Dead Kennedys released their first single, "California Uber Alles" (which envisioned President Jerry Brown flanked by "the suede-denim secret police"), and since their singer, Jello Biafra, ran for mayor...

THE DRIVER.
June 10, 2002... In 1999, a police officer named Charles Schwarz was convicted of participating in one of the most notorious crimes in recent New York history. A jury in Brooklyn federal court found that Schwarz had assisted in the sexual assault of Abner...

ABSENT WITHOUT LEave.(Fiction)
June 10, 2002... In stocking waders and cleated boots, I am standing in a clump of bushes that spend most of the year far out of water. Not to mention the trees. The water comes up to my waist. If I were to step a wee bit farther out, cops would pick up the...

THE HOWELL DOCTRINE.("New York Times" executive editor Howell Raines)
June 10, 2002... A man who takes the subway wearing the white panama hat of a plantation owner is either blithely arrogant or irrepressibly self-confident, and in the nine months that Howell Raines has been the executive editor of the Times both qualities have...

THE ASSASSINS.(killers of Afghani guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud)
June 10, 2002... Ahmed Shah Massoud was a wiry, thin-boned man with a long, handsome face that was distinguished by an aquiline nose and by deep furrows in the cheeks and around the eyes. He usually wore a pakul, a kind of flat-topped, soft wool hat that he and...

DOING IT IN THE ROAD.(Short Story)
June 10, 2002... I spent part of every summer until I was ten with my grandmother, who lived in a working-class suburb of Boston. The neighbors were devoutly Catholic, and they occasionally took me to Mass at their parish church up the hill. On sultry August...

THINGS HOLD TOGETHER.(James Tweedy)
June 10, 2002... In the early nineteen-nineties, Jeff Tweedy's voice was a fixture on the soundtrack I carried around in my head. Uncle Tupelo, the band Tweedy had started with his friend Jay Farrar, was something genuinely new, blending the rhythms and...

Baby hunger.(two Broadway plays)
June 10, 2002... Plays can be time bombs that keep exploding in the brain long after the curtain falls. Take Tom Donaghy's sprightly "Boys and Girls" (at the Duke). The title of the play suggests a certain childishness in its characters, and its introductory...

Suit Yourself.(boutique clothiers in New York City)(Brief Article)
June 17, 2002... If you want, you can just buy bottoms at MALIA MILLS (199 Mulberry St.; 625-2311), a cheerful shop in Little Italy that sells beachwear all year round and even has its own slogan: "Love thy differences." A series of photos taped to the windows...

Letter Men.(two books of letters by famous authors)(Brief Article)
June 17, 2002... "My dear friend: what I am trying to say is that you should forget everything you've read in my letters about the structure of the novel--just sit down and write." The final sentence of the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa's LETTERS TO A...

IDENTITY CRISIS.(symbolism of Gandhi in India-Pakistan conflict)
June 17, 2002... Last Monday, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister of India, and his host, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the President of Kazakhstan, took an hour out of their busy schedules to participate in a ceremony. Their schedules were busy because they,...

BEN'S COURT.(death of Central Park fixture Ben Wildofsky)
June 17, 2002... Devotees of the 1.6-mile running track around the Central Park Reservoir pretty much take for granted the sight of the regulars, who not only walk or run but also make the benches at the East Eighty-fifth Street pump house, by the track, a kind...

SAYS WHO?(anonymity of newspaper reportage)(Brief Article)
June 17, 2002... A very short quiz for the end of the school year. Don't panic! There is only one question, and all you will need is a No. 2 pencil. Please settle down now and read the instructions carefully. Here is the test: You read the newspaper this...

MUSIC OF THE SPINES.(collection of books intended never to be read)(Brief Article)
June 17, 2002... A departing dinner guest at the Gardner Botsfords' apartment on Gramercy Park can find himself at a sudden loss for words, right in the middle of the thanks and farewells. The process is always the same. Somewhere between the promise to meet...

COLD SANCtuary.(experiences in Roman Catholic seminary)
June 17, 2002... When I was a young candidate for the priesthood at St. Patrick's College in Sydney, Australia, our family doctor said to my mother, "Tom has idealized the Church. It's going to be a great shock to him when he finds out that priests are human."...

A FATHER AND A BICYCLE.(childhood reminiscences)(Brief Article)
June 17, 2002... My father was not a man blessed with unusual talents. If a model father can rebuild the lawnmower, rig up a punching bag properly, offer tips on your science project or advice on your lifesaving merit badge, help with math homework, put a new...

PINOCHLE.(life story of nonagenarian who immigrated from Poland)
June 17, 2002... My father and I have convened on the West Coast to videotape the oral history of my ninety-four-year-old grandmother, Rose Leyner, who was born in Stralisk, Poland (where as a girl she rode around in a horse-drawn hay wagon), emigrated to the...

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL.("The Eminem Show")
June 17, 2002... On May 23, 2000, Eminem released the last great album of the twentieth century. His previous two albums had proved him to be a clever and foulmouthed rapper, but "The Marshall Mathers LP" was his masterpiece, condensing a few years of American...

KEEPING SECRETS.(two motion pictures)
June 17, 2002... Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage), the Marine hero in John Woo's square but emotionally satisfying Second World War film, "Windtalkers," is not a temperate guy in the style of, say, Tom Hanks's Army officer in "Saving Private Ryan"--an ordinary man...

THE DEATH OF MY FATHER.
June 17, 2002... In his death, my father, Glenn Vernon Martin, did something he could not do in life. He brought our family together. After he died, at the age of eighty- three, many of his friends told me how much they loved him--how generous he was, how...

LYING UNDER THE APPLE TREE.(1944 Sunday afternoons)
June 17, 2002... Over on the other side of town lived a woman named Miriam McAlpin, who kept horses. They were not horses that belonged to her--she boarded them and exercised them for their owners, who were harness-racing people. She lived in the original...

I BOUGHT A BED.(grieving a mother's death)
June 17, 2002... My mother, Louanne Antrim, died on a fine Saturday morning in the month of August, in the year 2000. She was lying in new purple sheets on a hospital-style bed rolled up next to the green oxygen tanks set against a wall in what was more or less...

A HARD CASE.(Primo Levi)(Critical Essay)
June 17, 2002... Primo Levi was a man whom people wanted on their side. Not only was he a concentration-camp survivor; with his 1947 book "Survival in Auschwitz," he was also the camps' noblest memoirist. No breast-beating for Levi, no look-at-me, no violin...