The New Yorker articles from June 2005

The New Yorker archives from June 2005

LADIES FIRST.(The Talk of the Town; politics and presidential spouses)
June 6, 2005... The legal concept of the femme couverte, whereby a woman, upon marrying, was absorbed into the person of her husband, was described by the eighteenth-century British scholar Sir William Blackstone in terms that reached for the metaphysical....

INTERFAITH AT WORK.(Roundtable for Religious Leaders)(Panel Discussion)
June 6, 2005... A priest, a rabbi, and a judge walked into a bar. Well, not a bar, actually--it was too early in the morning, for one thing, and the Red Hook Community Justice Center doesn't serve booze. Also, there were three priests (two Episcopalians and a...

COOKIE MASTER.(The Talk of the Town; Donald Lau composes fortunes for Wonton Food, Inc. fortune cookies)
June 6, 2005... As a vice-president at Wonton Food, Inc., in Long Island City, Donald Lau manages the company's accounts payable and receivable, negotiates with insurers, and, somewhat incidentally, composes the fortunes that go inside the fortune cookies, of...

STINKY TOWN.(The Talk of the Town; Odorscreen meant to deal with foul city smells)
June 6, 2005... Summer, when the city becomes a giant convection oven, is smell season, so its opening day, coming as it did earlier this spring, before the recent cold snap, was something of a surprise. The mercury shot up above eighty, and all across the...

THY PITCHER'S WIFE.(The Talk of the Town)(Mets' pitcher Kris Benson's wife Anna)(Interview)
June 6, 2005... Anna Benson, the spectacularly attractive wife of the Mets' pitcher Kris Benson, has become a familiar presence in the sports pages lately. "Just because I went on the Howard Stern show last year and said that if my husband was unfaithful...

BEST IN CLASS.(valedictory)
June 6, 2005... Daniel Kennedy remembers when he still thought that valedictorians were a good thing. Kennedy, a wiry fifty-nine-year-old who has a stern buzz cut, was in 1997 the principal of Sarasota High School, in Sarasota, Florida. Toward the end of the...

LAST WORDS.(Marie Smith Jones)
June 6, 2005... The last full-blooded member of the Eyak nation, Chief Marie Smith Jones, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, in a two-story, tan-colored building posted with a notice that warns "No dogs" and "No water beds." On a gray Saturday last spring, I arranged...

THE MAN IN THE PALACE.(Hamid Karzai)
June 6, 2005... On May 11th, riots broke out in the city of Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. The violence followed a Newsweek story--which has since been retracted--on new allegations that American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Koran....

THE RETREAT.(Fellowship)
June 6, 2005... We met on Sundays at five-thirty. We chose partners and blindfolded them and led them down empty corridors at breakneck speeds, as an experiment in trust. We made collages about protecting the environment. We did skits about navigating the...

THE RECORD EFFECT.(How technology has transformed the sound of music)
June 6, 2005... Ninety-nine years ago, John Philip Sousa predicted that recordings would lead to the demise of music. The phonograph, he warned, would erode the finer instincts of the ear, end amateur playing and singing, and put professional musicians out of...

PERSONAL MATTERS.(New York City Ballet)
June 6, 2005... Like a poker player laying down a royal flush, New York City Ballet, at its spring gala, on May 4th, staged five ballets new to the company. What they added up to, though, was maybe a pair of sixes. Several of the ballets were just brief pas de...

UNMAKING THE WORLD.(Theater Review)
June 6, 2005... Pain unmakes the world. A simple toothache is enough to wreck your thinking. Pain somehow renders you inarticulate; in fact, it makes words impossible. Now let's talk about terror. As Hilaire Belloc said, terror causes a sudden "paralysis of...

LOOKING FOR HEROES.(Cinderella Man and The White Diamond )(Movie Review)
June 6, 2005... This is the story of James J. Braddock. Nice guy, born 1905, family man; takes up boxing, prospers, loses his touch; suffers in the Great Depression, breaks a hand, quits the ring; gets another chance, wins from nowhere, rises again, and winds...

FILIBLUSTER.
June 13, 2005... The battle in the United States Senate over judicial filibusters has been a field day for martial metaphors (such as "field day," an eighteenth-century term for a day of military exercises). On May 23rd, war clouds were gathering ominously over...

WATERGATE DAYS.(Henry Kissinger)
June 13, 2005... It was late in the evening on May 16, 1973, and I was in the Washington bureau of the Times, immersed in yet another story about Watergate. The paper had been overwhelmed by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's reporting for the Washington Post...

PLUNKED.(The Talk of the Town)(Craig Biggio)(Houston Astros)
June 13, 2005... The absence of Barry Bonds from this baseball season has put on hold the home-run-record watch. Smaller, less glamorous achievements will have to do. Fortunately, there is Craig Biggio, who comes to town with the Astros this week for a...

HERBERT WARREN WIND.(The Talk of the Town)
June 13, 2005... George Plimpton's theory of sportswriting was the smaller the ball, the better the literature. And while Plimpton never provided any historical evidence of a bard of marbles, he was probably right. Herbert Warren Wind, who wrote (mainly) about...

IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.(corporations, negative publicity)
June 13, 2005... In the early nineteen-eighties, American businesses discovered that they could manage crises, rather than merely stumble through them. The gold standard was Johnson & Johnson, whose deft maneuvering, after seven people died from ingesting...

TURBULENCE.(Short Story)
June 13, 2005... On the flight to Raleigh, I sneezed, and the cough drop I'd been sucking on shot from my mouth, ricocheted off my folded tray table, and landed, as I remember it, in the lap of the woman beside me, who was asleep and had her arms folded across...

SOMEONE SAYS YES TO IT.(The Making of Americans)(Critical Essay)
June 13, 2005... I I think it is safe to say that most well-read people in the English-speaking world have not read "The Making of Americans." The book (in its only available edition) is nine hundred and twenty-five pages long and is set in small dense...

METROPOLITAN.(William Dean Howells )
June 13, 2005... Almost the first thing that every essay about the nineteenth-century American novelist William Dean Howells announces is that no one writes essays about William Dean Howells anymore; his eclipse is his identity. Yet in every decade since his...

THE GREAT GAME GONE.(Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation)(Book Review)
June 13, 2005... The spy thriller still pines for the Soviet Union. No post-Iron Curtain intrigue, no replay of the British Empire's Great Game in Afghanistan or its intrusions into the Middle East, no elaborate "security measures," no double-double cross in...

SWEET AND SOUR.(Curtain Raiser)(BFE)(Theater Review)
June 13, 2005... In the late fifties, Mike Nichols and Elaine May improvised their way into American theatre history. Their intellectual high-wire act took sketch comedy from the ersatz to the authentic, and Nichols and May became the bedrock beneath all the...

THE KILLING FIELDS.(The Inside)(Television Program Review)
June 13, 2005... The new Fox Wednesday-night drama, "The Inside," about an F.B.I. profiler whose own personal history makes her all too suited for the job, wastes no time playing its trump card--and that card is not the profiler. It's Peter Coyote, in the role...

AIMING LOW.(Batman Begins)(Mr. & Mrs. Smith)(Movie Review)
June 13, 2005... A young movie director on the verge of launching a summer hit would hardly seem to qualify as a victim, yet Hollywood can make casualties of even its heroes. Christopher Nolan, the thirty-four-year-old London-born director of "Batman Begins,"...

WATCHED POT.(Department of Justice)
June 27, 2005... If hard cases make bad law, as a three-hundred-year-old courthouse saying has it, then the case of Gonzales et al. v. Raich et al. ought to have been easy and good. The case is--or appears to be--about marijuana and illness. On one side is...

TYSON'S CORNER.(Mike Tyson )(Biography)
June 27, 2005... It is always perilous to predict the end of anything (ask Francis Fukuyama), but it was surely an adequate sign of boxing's eclipse that, among the fifteen thousand people who paid to see Mike Tyson fight a very tall tomato can named Kevin...

TO BOLDLY GO.(The Talk of the Town;actor Leonard Nimoy's photo exhibit "Maximum Beauty" )(Interview)
June 27, 2005... An unflinchingly critical review of Kirstie Alley's show "Fat Actress" was delivered from an unexpected quarter recently: the desk of Leonard Nimoy, who described the program as "ghastly" and "hypocritical." "Have you seen it?" Nimoy asked,...

STADIA MANIA.(stadiums)
June 27, 2005... A couple of weeks ago, after parliamentary maneuvering killed the Mayor's plans for a football stadium on Manhattan's West Side, a lament went up, among city planners and real-estate developers, that it had become impossible to get things done...

COPS AND ROBBERS.(Securities and Exchange Commission)
June 27, 2005... Allen Wolfson was a Renaissance man, in his own way. Between 1999 and 2002, he was involved in the stock-market rise of at least seven companies. Freedom Surf made wet suits and surf apparel. Learner's World ran a day-care center. Stem Genetics...

GOD AND COUNTRY.(Patrick Henry College)
June 27, 2005... In the last days before the 2004 Presidential election, Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville, Virginia, excused all its students from classes, because so many of them were working on campaigns or wanted to go to the swing states to get out...

PAINTING THE TOWN.(Edi Rama)(Biography)
June 27, 2005... Edi Rama is the mayor of Tirana, Albania, and it's safe to say that the Balkans have never produced a politician so beguiling. You see him everywhere: six feet six, three-day beard, baggy black pachuco pants, funky black vest, red shirt, red...

THE CROSSING.(Poppa Neutrino)(Biography)
June 27, 2005... Twenty-one years ago, David Pearlman decided that he should have a new name, and began calling himself by the first one that came to him: Poppa Neutrino. A neutrino is an itinerant particle so small that it can hardly be detected. Pearlman, who...

FAT MAN.(Herman Kahn)(Biography)
June 27, 2005... From 1969, Kahn shares his plan for doubling the size of Central Park. Herman Kahn was the heavyweight of the Megadeath Intellectuals, the men who, in the early years of the Cold War, made it their business to think about the unthinkable,...

KICKING UP DUST.(Anton Chekhov)(Biography)
June 27, 2005... Of all the modernist playwrights whose work is still performed in repertory, Anton Chekhov is generally considered the most modern. In his five best-known plays--all written between 1887 and 1903--the winds of change are never gentle; they...

SOUND AND VISION.
June 27, 2005... Some of the most compelling film music of the past year appeared not on the big screen but on the small one. Michael Giacchino's score for the TV show "Lost"--the tale of several dozen plane-crash survivors marooned on a vaguely supernatural,...

BEWILDERED.(Bewitched)(Me and You and Everyone We Know)(Movie Review)
June 27, 2005... Movie Listings The Film File What is the connection between the following titles: "Bewitched," "The Dukes of Hazzard," "Get Smart," "I Dream of Jeannie"? First, they are all current or forthcoming features on the movie schedule....