The New Yorker articles from June 2003

The New Yorker archives from June 2003

The Lore of Explorers.('I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company,' 'Seduced by the West,' and 'Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness')(Book Review)
June 2, 2003... "The looming mist, the shout in his breast, the wordless awe. But that is just it: wordless. A crash of white filling his ears and I! I! I! as he flew down the cliff."The grandeur of the Great Falls of the Missouri overwhelms Meriwether Lewis...

THE CONGO TEST.(effectiveness of the United Nations)
June 2, 2003... "There is but one solution--to restore the unity of the international community,"Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, announced last week on French radio just hours before the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution...

THE WEEK IN WALKS.(using a person's gait as identification)
June 2, 2003... The recent revelation that the Defense Department may soon be using radar surveillance to monitor the way we walk, in an attempt to identify terrorists through their "gait signatures,"was alarming not only to diehard civil libertarians but also...

VIEWS.(from high-rise buildings in New York, New York)
June 2, 2003... In recent months, Hudson River strollers and Henry Hudson Parkway drivers may have noticed a banner hanging between the seventh- and eighth-story windows of the Chatsworth, the old Beaux-Arts apartment building on Seventy-second Street at the...

THE AL HIRSCHFELD.(caricaturist remembered)
June 2, 2003... Al Hirschfeld, the great caricaturist, was to have reached the magic age of one hundred on June 21st. Myriad celebrations were planned, the culmination to be the renaming of the Martin Beck Theatre the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. Death stepped in on...

REMAKE MAN.(film producer Roy Lee)(Interview)
June 2, 2003... One afternoon last winter, the movie producer Roy Lee sat in a taupe wing chair in the bar of Raffles L'Ermitage, a hotel in Beverly Hills, posed as if for a formal portrait. A thirty-four-year-old Korean-American in a nearly all-white industry,...

FUN WITH PHYSICS.(physicist Janet Conrad)
June 2, 2003... Janet Conrad fell in love with the universe at 3 a.m. on a cold autumn night in Wooster, Ohio. A teen-ager, she had no desire to get out of bed and face the frigid air in order to help her father, a dairy scientist, spray warm water on the prize...

GERTRUDE STEIN'S WAR.
June 2, 2003... When I read "The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book"for the first time, Eisenhower was in the White House and Liz Taylor had taken Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds. The book, published in 1954, was given to me by a fellow-member of a group of...

OFF THE STREET.('Facing Mekka')(Dance Review)
June 2, 2003... A few years ago, the choreographer Rennie Harris told an interviewer that it would be hard to write a history of hip-hop, because most of its innovators "are either locked up or were murdered on the streets."Many people in the hip-hop community...

THE PROPHET.(Kazimir Malevich, painting, Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York)
June 2, 2003... In 1915, in Moscow, Kazimir Malevich painted a black square against a white ground on a canvas about two and a half feet square and called it a work of Suprematism. It was an extreme act of art and philosophy that has stayed extreme. "Black...

LOST AND FOUND.(books about explorers Dr. David Livingstone and Sir Henry Morton Stanley)(Bibliography)
June 2, 2003... Few historical figures see their stock rise and fall as dramatically as do explorers. Poor Columbus, formerly revered for discovering the New World, now has Native American protests on the holiday named after him. Robert Falcon Scott, once widely...

BOTSWANA BLUES.('Mortals')(Book Review)
June 2, 2003... Ray Finch, the hero of Norman Rush's lengthy new novel, "Mortals"(Knopf; $26.95), finds many things annoying. A teacher of English at an Anglican school in the southern African nation of Botswana, he harbors frustrated literary ambitions and...

ARTISTIC LICENSE.(architect Zaha Hadid's work on the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio)
June 2, 2003... Zaha Hadid is famous for producing extraordinary drawings of visionary projects, such as a night club in the hills of Hong Kong that looks like a series of broken shards. She is a cultish figure who has built very little of note, save for a...

IN THE BASEMENT.('Capturing the Friedmans')(Movie Review)
June 2, 2003... "Capturing the Friedmans,"an extraordinary new documentary directed by Andrew Jarecki, is both a meditation on perversion and truth and one of the most heartbreaking films ever made about an American family. Baldly stated, the facts at the center...

Growing Up Middle Eastern.(Brief Article)
June 9, 2003... The Turkish novelist and translator Guneli Gun grew up on an Aegean island once used to quarantine pilgrims returning from Mecca. In REMEMBERING CHILDHOOD IN THE MIDDLE EAST: MEMOIRS FROM A CENTURY OF CHANGE (Texas), an anthology edited by...

BUILDING NATIONS.(rebuilding Iraq)
June 9, 2003... The other day, the Times quoted one of that ever-helpful breed, a "senior administration official,"as expressing surprise at the horrendous condition of Iraq's "infrastructure,"even before the destruction brought about by the war and its...

FROM JERSEY.(Sports Hall of Fame of New Jersey)
June 9, 2003... The Sports Hall of Fame of New Jersey occupies a hallway near the box office at Continental Airlines Arena, in the Meadowlands. It's basically a bunch of bronze plaques affixed to the walls. From a distance--say, from the ticket line, which...

KRAZY.(Scratch DJ Academy )
June 9, 2003... "Grand Wizzard Theodore was a guy up in the Bronx who was in his bedroom in 1975, playing around on his turntable, when his mother came in. Instead of hitting the start/stop button, he stopped it with his hand. He didn't want to hear what she...

ALL THAT.(celebration of Betsy Blair's new book 'The Memory of All That')
June 9, 2003... The other night, several generations of show-biz people gathered to celebrate the actress Betsy Blair's new book, "The Memory of All That,"a glamorous, name-filled memoir about her career, in the mid-twentieth century, on Broadway and in...

TO THE BARRICADES.(shareholder activism)
June 9, 2003... In the 1956 comedy "The Solid Gold Cadillac,"Judy Holliday plays Laura Partridge, a small investor in the giant conglomerate International Projects who shows up at all of the shareholder meetings to badger executives about their bloated...

LIFELIKE.(2003 World Taxidermy Championships)
June 9, 2003... As soon as the 2003 World Taxidermy Championships opened, the heads came rolling in the door. There were foxes and moose and freeze-dried wild turkeys; mallards and buffalo and chipmunks and wolves; weasels and buffleheads and bobcats and...

FATHERS' HELPER.(Institute of Living)
June 9, 2003... In 1860, the Hartford Retreat for the Insane hired Frederick Law Olmsted to redesign the grounds of the sanitarium, which had been founded in 1824 as the nation's third mental hospital. Olmsted had presented his design for Central Park in 1858,...

THE LIGHT STUFF.(Jon Conrad)
June 9, 2003... "Starting one, clear one!"Jon Conrad called out. As the port-side propeller of the Spirit of America, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company's newest blimp, whirred to life, Conrad sat up straight in his high-backed pilot's chair. His goal this...

THE FIGHTER.(Biography)
June 9, 2003... When Robert Lowell was alive, you could barely make him out beneath a forest of garlands. In April, 1947, after the publication of his second book, "Lord Weary's Castle,"he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize. Life...

SUPERIOR PERSON.('Curzon')
June 9, 2003... They don't make empires the way they used to. Take the imperial brag. Here is George Nathaniel, Viscount Curzon--the most grandiloquent, if not the greatest, Viceroy of India--and the subject of David Gilmour's elegant biography,...

Grecian Formulas.('All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten')('The Songs of the Kings')('Sappho's Leap')('The Parthenon')(Book Review)
June 9, 2003... All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten, by Christopher Logue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $18). The mounting pressure of a city siege, two politician-generals invoking gods, the amount of dust in the Middle...

LAST THOUGHTS.('The Death of Franz Liszt')(Book Review)
June 9, 2003... "The Death of Franz Liszt,"a new book by Alan Walker, belongs to the curious subgenre of books about the deaths of composers. In truth, I know of only two others, but each is a macabre little classic. One is Alexander Poznansky's sober-minded...

BOYS WON'T BE BOYS.('Master Harold ... and the Boys')(Theater Review)
June 9, 2003... The "boys"of Athol Fugard's " 'Master Harold' . . . and the Boys"(revived at the Royale, under the direction of Lonny Price) are two adult black South Africans, Willie (Michael Boatman) and Sam (Danny Glover), who work at the St. Georges Park...

FISHY BUSINESS.(Movie Review)
June 9, 2003... There is much to be said for any movie in which Allison Janney plays a starfish. Fans of "The West Wing"are so used to seeing her in the guise of a tall White House press secretary that they may need time to adjust to her as a pink sticky thing...

It Takes a Planet.
June 16, 2003... Not all parents would hang off the deck of a houseboat in Borneo to check for swimming pythons or rent anti-leech socks for a walk in a rhino sanctuary in Vietnam. But the environmental reporter Daniel Glick, trying to regain his balance after...

MIGHT AND RIGHT.
June 16, 2003... Two weeks ago, on the first day of his first foreign trip since the fall of Baghdad, President Bush went to Auschwitz. The symbolism could not have been more heavy-handed: with the international press full of images of the grisly excavations of...

LITTLE HELPER.
June 16, 2003... Where would we be without Valium? Certainly not in Nutley, New Jersey, savoring the soft Klonopin light of a warm spring day. Nutley, ten minutes west of the Lincoln Tunnel, is home to the corporate campus of the Roche pharmaceutical company,...

HITTING 'EM UP.
June 16, 2003... At eight o'clock last Tuesday night, Cynthia Williams worked her way to the front of a packed crowd at Suite 16, a night club in Chelsea. Williams, who is black, with dyed-blond hair, jumped up and down, screaming, "I love him! I just love...

CALLING ALL CARS.
June 16, 2003... Winter is the season for fires. Night watchman in a warehouse plugs in a space heater and goes on his rounds, the wiring overloads, the area's desolate, so the fire grows until you get the kind of conflagration that Robert and Steven Gessmann...

ALL IN THE FAMILY.
June 16, 2003... It isn't every day that you find Ralph Nader, Trent Lott, Ted Turner, the N.R.A., and now all on the same side of an issue, but last week they were united in condemning the Federal Communications Commission's decision to relax rules regulating...

WHAT HELEN KELLER SAW.
June 16, 2003... Suspicion stalks fame; incredulity stalks great fame. At least three times--at the ages of eleven, twenty-three, and fifty-two--Helen Keller was assaulted by accusation, doubt, and overt disbelief. She was the butt of skeptics and the cynosure...

First Novels.(Book Review)
June 16, 2003... Liars and Saints, by Maile Meloy (Scribner; $24). How much calamity can you pack into two hundred and sixty pages? Teen-age pregnancy, murder, and terminal cancer are just some of the things the Santerres, a Catholic family in California, have...

DISORDERLY CONDUCT.(Television Program Review)
June 16, 2003... June being the most favored month for weddings, many people will be too busy making their preparations, tying the knot, and honeymooning in Tuscany to watch "Out of Order," the five-part Showtime miniseries that began on June 1st and will air...

TRAFFIC JAMS.(Movie Review)
June 16, 2003... In "The Italian Job," Edward Norton, pulling his chin down and showing off a mean little spot of beard, plays a bad egg with superlative skill. Norton is a thief who betrays his colleagues, and he gives each of his lines a nasty little sting....

Branch Library.(Book Review)
June 30, 2003... The great nineteenth-century American preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher called them "tabernacles of the air." They were depicted as soaring colossi on luminous canvases by the likes of Thomas Cole, and their virtues--stately posture,...

SAMMY'S SIN.
June 30, 2003... Sammy Sosa, downcast and repentant, has finished serving his seven-day suspension from baseball for corking his bat, and is back in the middle of the Cubs' batting order, hoping for redemption and a few fat pitches down the line. Replays of his...

OOPS.(corporate law)
June 30, 2003... The city's white-shoe law firms have taken a serious hit in the recent economic downturn, but Summer Associate Season, that debauched perennial perkfest for rising 3Ls at Harvard and Fordham and Yale, is up and running (and only slightly...

DOM AND CHER.
June 30, 2003... The other night, the comedian Dom Irrera sat on a ratty sofa backstage at Madison Square Garden, waiting to go on as Cher's opening act. The platters of crudites and bite-size Mr. Goodbars on his dressing-room table looked as if they'd gone...

AN AGREEABLE WITNESS.
June 30, 2003... Martha Stewart addressed the court just once during the brief hearing in her criminal case which was held last week in downtown Manhattan. Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum was about to approve what she called a "very leisurely" trial schedule...

THE MEAT DOCTOR.
June 30, 2003... Most weekdays, Sol Forman ate both lunch and dinner at the legendary steakhouse Peter Luger, which was situated across the street from a metalworking factory he owned, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. In 1950, the restaurant's owners...

TUMULT IN THE NEWSROOM.(New York Times)
June 30, 2003... Not long after I graduated from college, I went to work at the Times as a copyboy, or, in more enlightened terms, copy person. The job title was left over from the days of typewriters, when stories were filed on sheaves of carbon paper known as...

CRAWLING WITH TROUBLE.(B&B Worm Farms, Meeker, Oklahoma)
June 30, 2003... WELEETKA, OKLAHOMA -- One thing that attracted Gary Williams to worm farming was the prospect of watching his investment literally grow--as opposed to the stock market, where, he'd discovered, money had a way of disappearing before you had...

THE NEW WAR MACHINE.(Donald Rumsfeld, et al)
June 30, 2003... The first shots fired by American forces in the global war on terrorism came on October 7, 2001, in a barrage of Tomahawk missiles and bomber strikes that hit Kabul, Kandahar, and other cities in Afghanistan. The American public heard that day...

BECOMING THE HULK.('The Hulk')(Movie Review)
June 30, 2003... From last October until the end of May, the director Ang Lee was holed up at George Lucas's Industrial Light + Magic, in San Rafael, eleven miles north of San Francisco, working fifteen hours a day with the eponymous star of his eighth film,...

SHALL WE ROCK.(annual Bang on a Can )
June 30, 2003... In the nineteen-twenties, various composers, not a few of them French, set out to write music inspired by jazz. The idea was that jazz would serve as raw material for the ultra-sophisticated imagination of the classical flaneur. It did not...

BLACK AND WHITE BALL.('Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession')(Theater Review)
June 30, 2003... About thirty minutes into Joy Gregory and David Schwimmer's adaptation of Studs Terkel's 1992 oral history "Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession" (a Lookingglass Theatre Company premiere at the Water Tower...

THE HUMAN TOUCH.('HereAfter')(Theater Review)
June 30, 2003... On the surface, American Ballet Theatre looks as though it's becoming more and more like itself, a conservative opera-house troupe delivering the old-time religion--"Swan Lake," guest stars, multiple pirouettes--while now and then also putting...

AMERICAN ELECTRIC.(Benjamin Franklin)
June 30, 2003... We are said to be living in an icon-smashing age, but the odd thing is how few shards can be found on the floor. Joe DiMaggio may now be chilly and Bing Crosby charmless, but the essential pantheon of heroes remains in place. Lincoln, John...

DAYS OF PLAGUE.('28 Days Later')(Movie Review)
June 30, 2003... To those of us who believe that movies should thrive on the fleeting gesture and encourage a healthy suspicion of the grand, the new British horror film "28 Days Later" will come as good news. "Do you want us to find a cure and save the world...