The New Yorker articles from June 2004

The New Yorker archives from June 2004

BIG BIRD FLIES RIGHT.(seeking funding for public television, Public Broadcasting System president Pat Mitchell reaches out to conservatives)
June 7, 2004... A year and a half ago, Pat Mitchell, the president of the Public Broadcasting System, was invited to tea at Vice-President Cheney's house. The federal government is PBS's biggest patron, and Mitchell was happy to accept. There to greet her, on...

HARD LINES.(reflections on loss, and an appreciation of the late Walker Field)
June 7, 2004... One of my great-grandfathers, James Shepley, was born in Saco, Maine, in 1826, went to Bowdoin College, and set up a law practice in the frontier town of Red Cloud, Minnesota, where he had a hand in the writing of the state constitution. In his...

THE MANIPULATOR.(a critical look at the history and investigation of Ahmad Chalabi's role in the decision by the U.S. to invade Iraq)
June 7, 2004... The New Yorker's complete coverage of the conflict in Iraq Ahmad Chalabi, the wealthy Iraqi Shiite who spent more than a decade working for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, prides himself on his understanding of the United States and its...

JAZZ SINGER.(appreciation of jazz great Andy bey)
June 7, 2004... Artists generally age like the rest of us, bidding a grudging goodbye to the horsepower of youth and leaning on stories from earlier, faster days. Some, though, build slowly and keep the heat on. When it works, methods and habits fuse into a...

AMERICAN MASTER.(Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer)
June 7, 2004... Isaac Bashevis Singer was still alive when I began working at the Forward in 1990, though he no longer came into the office to deliver the stories and articles and serialized novels that the paper had published in Yiddish for more than fifty...

LIFE WORK.(exhibits of paintings by Agnes Martin, at PaceWildenstein gallery, NYC, and at Dia Beacon Center)
June 7, 2004... Agnes Martin, who is now ninety-two years old, has a show of surprising new paintings at PaceWildenstein on East Fifty-seventh Street. Meanwhile, an exhibition of twenty-one paintings from the years when she was emerging as an important artist,...

PANDEMONIUM.(the New York Philharmonic's festival of the music of Charles Ives)
June 7, 2004... I recently held in my hands the manuscript of Charles Ives's "Three Places in New England." The staff of the Music Library at Yale University left it out for me on a wooden table, and I hesitated before touching the pages, because no American...

BATTLE OF THE EXES.('Sight Unseen,' Biltmore Theater, New York City)(Theater Review)
June 7, 2004... Can you still recall youth's special quality of hope--"the hope that stings like chlorine," as the novelist Nick Hornby beautifully put it? Too often, in the bewildering passage of time, promise, like some tributary of the spirit, gets...

COLD COMFORT.('The Day After Tomorrow')(Movie Review)
June 7, 2004... "The Day After Tomorrow" is about a threat that confronts us all. Two things make the threat especially frightening. One, it is already in our midst and may, without warning, assume catastrophic proportions. Two, there is almost nothing that we...

NEW-TIME RELIGION.(The Talk of the Town)(John Kerry believes in separation of church and state, but it is difficult to say that the same is true of George W. Bush)
June 7, 2004... It isn't every day that the Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party is a junior senator from Massachusetts who was educated at an elite boarding school and an Ivy League college and whose political career was founded on his war heroism as...

FACE IN THE CROWD.(The Talk of the Town)(footage of Larry David shot at Dodger Stadium proves the alibi of Juan Catalan, resulting in the latter's release from prison)
June 7, 2004... In early May last year, a sixteen-year-old girl named Martha Puebla testified in a preliminary hearing in Los Angeles about a pair of murders that were allegedly committed by her ex-boyfriend, a reputed gang member named Jose (Peps) Ledesma....

ASK PASQUINO.(The Talk of the Town)(as they think back to the liberation of Rome from Nazi occupation, some Romans take a dim view of George W. Bush and Silvio Berlusconi)
June 7, 2004... President Bush arrives in Rome this Friday to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the caput mundi from Nazi occupation. The day promises a collision of two notions of America: the America that rolled into Rome from the south...

BURR VS. HAMILTON.(The Talk of the Town)(descendants prepare to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr duel with a rre-enactment)
June 7, 2004... The Inwood Canoe Club is Manhattan's oldest paddling collective. In its hundred-year existence, it has produced several Olympians, though these days, thanks to its new commodore, Antonio Burr, it is a more recreational and democratic...

INCOMPREHENSIBLE.(The Talk of the Town)(dorkbot, a group that holds meeting that feature odd and artistic ways of using electrical devices, is the brainchild of Douglas Repetto, who teaches computer music at Columbia)
June 7, 2004... The motto of dorkbot, a group that holds meetings once a month in Manhattan, except in the summer, and in fourteen other cities, including Sofia, Bulgaria, and Mumbai, India, is "People doing strange things with electricity." At a dorkbot...

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY.(The Talk of the Town)(comparing the campaign funds of George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry)
June 14, 2004... One of the sillier interludes of the current campaign season--or seasons, since the damn thing is going to end up spreading across all four by the time it gets through with us--was the mini-flap over when John Kerry would "accept" the...

A DEMOCRATIC IRAQ?(The Talk of the Town)(group of Democratic Americans working for the Coalition Provisional Authority, Donkeys in the Desert, urges Sen. John Kerry to visit Iraq )
June 14, 2004... In late April, a group of Americans serving in Iraq sent a letter to John Kerry, appealing to the candidate as both an ex-soldier and a peace seeker. It read, in part, "Put bluntly: we believe you need to get over here, suck in some sand and...

THE NEW PORTRAIT.(The Talk of the Town)(the new society portrait is a short animated film, like that made by Jeffrey Scher of NYC attorney and socialite Susan Shin)
June 14, 2004... Those who bemoan the navel-gazing tendencies of contemporary art will be relieved to know that in some precincts the forces that shaped Velazquez, Gainsborough, and Sargent--patronage and vanity--still drive innovations in the market. Several...

PERK HOGS.(The Talk of the Town)(long-term stock performance of perk-laden firms is much worse than that of firms that eschew executive perks)
June 14, 2004... In the 1957 comedy "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" the late Tony Randall played an adman yearning to ascend the corporate ladder. Rock Hunter wants more authority and a higher salary, of course, but he's really after something more tangible:...

THE PRINCE OF POSSIBILITY.(recalling Ken Kesey's 1964 bus cross-country bus trip, and his life in exile in Mexico in 1966)
June 14, 2004... In 1964, Ken Kesey was working in a cabin so deep in the redwoods south of San Francisco that its indifferently painted interior walls seemed to grow seaweed instead of mold. Despite its glass doors, the cabin held the winter light for little...

HOMECOMING, WITH TURTLE.(a hellish vacation in Santo Domingo)
June 14, 2004... That summer! Eleven years ago, and I still remember every bit of it. Me and the girlfriend had decided to spend our vacation in Santo Domingo, a big milestone for me, one of the biggest, really: my first time "home" in nearly twenty years....

NIGHTTIME IN THE POOL.(travel in Central America, and swimming in a murky pool in Mexico)
June 14, 2004... Student days, summer in the Tropics. We were four: me and my wife, my wife's sister, Linda, and Linda's husband, Scottie. For a month, we had been travelling in Belize and Guatemala, having taken the bus from Belize City through Belmopan and up...

BLOCKED.(a look at writer's block)
June 14, 2004... "Yesterday was my Birth Day," Coleridge wrote in his notebook in 1804, when he was thirty-two. "So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month.--O Sorrow and Shame. . . . I have done nothing!" It was true. Most of...

TRAIN IN VAIN.(recalling riding freight trains)
June 14, 2004... My father's agoraphobia made leaving the house a spooky and ritualistic process, ruled by mysterious tempers, but with enough drugs it sometimes happened, and we were off, the whole family, on vacation! The very drugs that loosened his nerves...

LOST IN TRANSLATION.(analysis of Bernard Lewis role as a cheerleader for the war in Iraq)
June 14, 2004... In the course of a distinguished academic career at the University of London and at Princeton, Bernard Lewis has never been afraid to dip his scholarly hands in the muck of current affairs. A mentor to Henry (Scoop) Jackson in the early...

THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE.('The Jury' and 'Summerland')(Television Program Review)
June 14, 2004... I'm so ashamed. Two new series are going head to head this summer on Tuesdays at nine. One of them, "The Jury," on Fox, is a serious drama made by people who have won Oscars, Emmys, and Peabody Awards, which focusses on juries in New York...

SMORGASBORD.(profile of Ingmar Bergman)
June 14, 2004... From 1999, John Lahr profiles Ingmar Bergman The social life of the moviegoer, rarely effervescent, is about to lose more of its sparkle. Film Forum is presenting a six-week retrospective, through July 1st, of the work of Ingmar Bergman....

OUT OF THE WOODS.(recalling a rainy vacation in an grim Oregon vacation rental house)
June 14, 2004... It was an awful house. A broker would have called it a charming Swiss chalet; what it should have been called, really, was a dingy A-frame, mud-brown, damp, afflicted with an air of unrelieved gloom. An ad might have claimed that it was nestled...

WINNER.(The Talk of the Town)(why Ronald Reagan was a rather poor President in many ways)
June 28, 2004... From 1995, Edmund Morris on Reagan's handwritten farewell to public life Edmund Morris on the late President's many roles On January 20, 1981, the day a sixty-nine-year-old ex-movie star, ex-TV host, ex-liberal Democrat, ex-radio...

TIME SERVED.(The Talk of the Town)(FBI tears out letters to the editor in magazine received by shoe bomber Richard Reid in prison)
June 28, 2004... Some months ago, Betty Satterwhite, who edits the letters section at Time, got a call from a federal defender in Boston who was representing Richard Reid, the infamous shoe bomber, in a court appeal. Reid, it turned out, was a devoted Time...

WORSE THAN HIS BITE.(The Talk of the Town)(New York City noise ordinance sets limit on the barking of dogs)
June 28, 2004... Good schools, abundant day-care options, probably more discarded chicken bones per block than you'll find in any other town: the relative lack of green space notwithstanding, it was possible, until recently, to consider New York City an...

GROSS AND GROSSER.(The Talk of the Town)(Grady Hendrix helped found the New York Asian Film Festival, in order to screen the latest 'J-horror' films, among others, at Anthology Film Archives, in East Greenwich Village)
June 28, 2004... Fans of Japanese horror films appear to be related to those mysterious people who like to get out of their cars to inspect roadkill, or those who watch bypass surgery on public television--except that they are devotees of a much darker and...

PLAN B.(Israel's expanding relationship with Iraqi Kurds is rooted in its fear of Iran's nuclear program and intentions in the Middle East, as U.S. rushes to install former Baathist thug Iyad Allawi as interim Prime Minister of Iraq)
June 28, 2004... The New Yorker's complete coverage of the conflict in Iraq In July, 2003, two months after President Bush declared victory in Iraq, the war, far from winding down, reached a critical point. Israel, which had been among the war's most...

SUPERMODERATE.(the movie career, political rise and governing style of actor and Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger)
June 28, 2004... In late April, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was about to address some five thousand travel-industry representatives from around the world who had gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center for their annual trade show. But first they were...

SILENT MASTER.('The Master')(Book Review)
June 28, 2004... Fiction about actual historical persons, so intrinsically conflicted and impure, feels like part of postmodernism's rampant eclecticism. True, examples exist before the twentieth century, in, say, Tolstoy's depiction of Napoleon and the Russian...

BAD COMMA.(a critical look at the book 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' )
June 28, 2004... The first punctuation mistake in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is...

SINGLES.(update on what's new in popular music)
June 28, 2004... Anyone who has lived through a summer in the city knows that there is no force in the world stronger than girls singing along to the radio while skipping rope. Without them, the season might as well merge with spring and be done with it. A song...

GEORGE & ME.('Fahrenheit 9/11')(Movie Review)
June 28, 2004... From February, Larissa MacFarquhar profiles Michael Moore Movie Listings The Film File In Michael Moore's new documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," George W. Bush sets his jaw, leans forward, and tells a group of reporters that...

THE FOX BOX.(new programming on the Fox television network)
June 28, 2004... Fox has changed the face of network television. What, you didn't get the press release? That's what it says: "summer 2004: fox changes the face of network television." The revolution--another word that Fox has been using to describe its extreme...