The New Yorker articles from March 2002

The New Yorker archives from March 2002

Book currents.(two books)(Brief Article)
March 4, 2002... Legend has it that in the late nineteen-twenties the president of American Tobacco was sitting in his car at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street when he noticed nearby an overweight woman chewing gum and then, in a passing taxicab, a slim,...

Comment; blame Canada.(The Talk of the Town)
March 4, 2002... The Canadians may not have broken many records at the Salt Lake City Olympics, but they did do something more difficult: they smashed their national image. As everybody knows by now, the Canadian pairs ice-skating team of Jamie Sale and David...

West Wing watch; snookered by Bush.(The Talk of the Town)(Brief Article)(Interview)
March 4, 2002... In America, we don't have shadow cabinets or governments-in-waiting. What we have instead is "The West Wing," NBC's drama about a White House staff that, compared with the Bush White House, has bigger offices, better haircuts, more Democrats,...

The boards; enter Mr. Goldwyn.(theater)(The Talk of the Town)(Interview)
March 4, 2002... Alan King, the legendary standup comedian and actor, was in his second-floor dressing room the other morning at upper Broadway's cozy Promenade Theatre, where he was about to start rehearsing a new play, "Mr. Goldwyn," in which he takes on the...

General Tso dept.; big fat Brooklyn.(The Talk of the Town)
March 4, 2002... Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn's new borough president, threw the first of his annual parties celebrating the Chinese New Year in 1979, back when he was a freshman in the State Senate. A steadily growing guestlist has obliged Markowitz to change...

The financial page; TV on the cheap.(The Talk of the Town)
March 4, 2002... Six years ago, the cast members of the sitcom "Friends" threatened to walk out unless NBC agreed to renegotiate their contracts. Each of them was earning forty thousand dollars per episode, and they were now demanding six-figure deals. When...

The producers; the long-running act behind "Sweet Smell of Success."(David Brown, Ernest Lehman)(Interview)
March 4, 2002... One day in the summer of 1937, David Brown and Ernest Lehman decided to make their fortunes together by conquering the world of big-time magazines. They had grown up a few blocks from each other, in Woodmere, Long Island, and after college...

The riddler; meet the Marquis de Sade of the puzzle world.
March 4, 2002... When Henry Hook was fourteen years old, living in East Rutherford, New Jersey, his grandmother gave him a crossword jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. Designed by Eugene T. Maleska, who became a legendary editor of the Times crossword, the puzzle had...

Flesh on Flesh; a semi-Austenesque novel from Ian McEwan.('Atonement')
March 4, 2002... Ian McEwan, whose novels have tended to be short, smart, and saturnine, has produced a beautiful and majestic fictional panorama, "Atonement" (Doubleday; $26). The novel's first half takes place over two summer days in 1935, on a Surrey estate...

The good German; Gerhard Richter's triumphant sorrow.(Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York)
March 4, 2002... The German painter Gerhard Richter, who is the subject of a magnificent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, is famous for severity, hermeticism, and all-around, intimidating difficulty. His range of styles -- from Pop to minimal to...

Love and death; the Met unfurls "War and Peace."(opera)
March 4, 2002... To make an opera out of "War and Peace" seems like a conceptual mistake. Tolstoy's novel is, among other things, an assault on the great-man theory of history, dismantling the illusions of individuals and exposing the nameless, anarchistic...

King of kings; Bernie Mac rules the roost.('The Bernie Mac Show')
March 4, 2002... In one of the offstage scenes in "The Original Kings of Comedy," the 2000 concert film directed by Spike Lee that showcases four black standup performers, Bernie Mac is hanging around a basketball court with his fellow-comedians when he says to...

Calculating rhythm; "John Q." and "Crossroads."(two films)
March 4, 2002... Melodrama has often served as a vehicle for social protest in American movies, but "John Q.," which attacks the inequality of health care in this country, falls below even minimal standards of dramatic decency. "John Q." is a trashy,...

Book currents: imitations of life.(two books)(Brief Article)
March 11, 2002... A Scottish sheep is all very well, but with the recent announcement that a cute kitten had been cloned by the cutely named Genetic Savings & Clone company, biotechnology acquired its first credible mascot. It's the sort of media event that...

Tables for two.(restaurant)
March 11, 2002... THE HARRISON 355 Greenwich St. (274-9310) -- Jimmy Bradley and Danny Abrams, an extroverted young chef-restaurateur duo, were apparently just getting started a couple of years ago when they opened the Red Cat, a favorite Chelsea bistro that...

Comment; read all about it.(The Talk of the Town)
March 11, 2002... Things may be a bit better. Spring- training games have begun, the very early forsythia already feels old, and here's a nice ongoing book fight to brighten your mornings. As the Chicago Tribune reports, Nancy Pearl, the executive director of...

Double Dept.: a beautiful hand.(The Talk of the Town)
March 11, 2002... Dave Bayer's hands are broad and slightly hairy, with wide thumbs and a few small scabs -- abrasions from a recent rock-climbing trip. At first glance, they're nothing special, but when viewed from certain angles they look a lot like Russell...

Dept. of Delay: a Gehry for Los Los Angeles.(The Talk of the Town)
March 11, 2002... Even if you are the most acclaimed architect in the world, it isn't always easy to turn your ideas into real buildings. In 1988, Frank Gehry was hired to design a new hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; it was to be funded by Lillian Disney,...

First night out: kinds of kids.(The Talk of the Town)
March 11, 2002... If you attend private school in Manhattan, by the time you're in the sixth grade you have probably heard of the Goddard Gaieties. These are dances -- one or two each year -- that are held for middle-school students in the basement of either the...

Cold comfort: after decades of research, the common cold has revealed only some of its mysteries.(Medical Dispatch)
March 11, 2002... There is, when you look into it, not a lot that makes sense about the common cold. For one thing, there is the name. As cold experts have pointed out, in almost all Indo-European languages one of the words or phrases for the malady plays on the...

The torch singer.(Patti Smith)
March 11, 2002... Patti Smith grew up in a semi-rural, working-class neighborhood in southern New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Her mother was a waitress and her father worked the swing shift at a Honeywell plant, assembling thermostats....

Between the mountains.(Letter from Kashmir)
March 11, 2002... When the French doctor Francois Bernier entered the Kashmir Valley for the first time, in 1665, he was astounded by what he found. "In truth," he wrote, it "surpasses in beauty all that my warm imagination had anticipated. It is not indeed...

Warhol in bloom: putting the Pop artist in perspective.(The Critics)
March 11, 2002... The Andy Warhol retrospective, which began in Berlin last year and has just opened at the Tate Modern, in London, demonstrates a number of interesting things. The first is that Warhol, fifteen years after his death, remains a contemporary; the...

Can you forgive him? A right-wing conspirator comes clean.('Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative')
March 11, 2002... If a tale of political migration is to have any real punch, it needs a touch of passionate intensity -- and, as Yeats pointed out, that's what the worst are full of. The journey from moderate liberalism to moderate conservatism or vice versa is...

War stories: revisiting the ruins of Bosnia.('Necessary Targets')
March 11, 2002... "Eve Ensler Wants to Save the World," a recent Times Magazine article on the playwright and activist declared in its title, before going on to disparage her for, among other things, having been moved to tears by telling the story of a Bosnian...

Good guys: 'We Were Soldiers' and '40 Days and 40 Nights.'
March 11, 2002... "We Were Soldiers," the new Mel Gibson movie, takes the Vietnam War away from the reporters, novelists, and film directors who have long portrayed it as a uniquely strange and alienating experience. In this version, Vietnam is no longer...

Get on the bus.(bus to Ikea in New Jersey)(On and Off the Avenue)
March 18, 2002... Twenty minutes after it leaves the Port Authority, the free weekend bus to IKEA in Elizabeth, New Jersey (New Jersey Turnpike, exit 13A; 908-289-4488; 800-BUS-IKEA), pulls up to the store and a load of slightly befuddled Manhattanites -- among...

Wing Men.(three books)(Book Currents)(Brief Article)
March 18, 2002... Twitchers, dudes, stringers, and robin strokers -- are your ears burning? The English writer and environmentalist Mark Cocker has been watching you through his binoculars and has documented your idiosyncrasies in BIRDERS: TALES OF A TRIBE...

Comment; in a dark time.(Israeli/Palestinian conflict)(The Talk of the Town)
March 18, 2002... In 1988, a left-wing Israeli historian and journalist named Benny Morris published "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949," which challenged the traditional Zionist view that the problems of the Palestinian Arabs were entirely...

Water dept.; going dry.(The Talk of the Town)
March 18, 2002... Another week without rain, more pictures of reservoirs at low tide. New York is facing a summer of brown lawns, short showers, dirty cars, and guilty flushes, amid predictions that even a regular storm diet may not be enough to stave off...

Whodunit dept.; the anthrax culprit.(The Talk of the Town)
March 18, 2002... Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a slight woman with short graying hair and deeply concerned hazel eyes, who works out of a small office at the State University of New York at Purchase, thinks she knows who was responsible for the anthrax attacks last...

In the galleries; art cops.(Pace University, New York, New York)(The Talk of the Town)
March 18, 2002... Alberto Goris and Salvatore Zisa, a pair of thirty-four-year-old narcotics detectives and self-taught painters, enjoy spending Sundays on Museum Mile, even though, as Goris says, "Our wives are like, 'You just went to the museum!' " The other...

The financial page; fare games.(The Talk of the Town)
March 18, 2002... Afew months ago, a team of trained researchers infiltrated the rush-hour crowds in midtown Manhattan, took up positions on busy street corners, and began gesticulating wildly. No one noticed, because the researchers were doing what a lot of...

Helping hands; how foreign aid could benefit everybody.(Annals of Economics)
March 18, 2002... Last summer, the economist William Easterly published a book entitled "The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics," in which he described how governments in many poor countries, particularly in Africa,...

The supercop scenario; can one man's obsession change the nature of police training?
March 18, 2002... On several chilly nights last November, from ten o'clock until six in the morning, a college campus in Missouri was transformed into an imaginary metropolis, Corps City East, meant to be one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in America. Drama...

Tilda moments; tracking the elusive anti-star.(film star Tilda Swinton)
March 18, 2002... This is what happens. A young woman wearing a white lab coat is sitting in a cafeteria, keeping her thoughts to herself, when a man carrying a tray sits down across from her. Striking up a conversation, he tells the woman -- her name is Joyce...

Shopping rebellion; what the kids want.(Letter from Tokyo)
March 18, 2002... Takeshita Street, in the Harajuku district of Tokyo, is the equivalent of Eighth Street in New York: it is a narrow commercial passageway, crammed with stores selling imported Levi's, baby-doll T-shirts, and platform boots that have all the...

The white dress; what should nurses wear?
March 18, 2002... One morning last fall, the designer Yeohlee Teng was standing outside her office building, on Seventh Avenue at Thirty-ninth Street, waiting for a ride to the hospital. Yeohlee designs and owns the line of pricey but practical women's...

Swann song; Yves Saint Laurent bids adieu.(fashion designer retires)
March 18, 2002... Of all the garments I have loved and lost, there is one whose perfection gave me such happiness that I've spent decades hoping it will surface in some thrift shop, and when I'm in Paris I never fail to check at the Pere Lachaise of couture,...

"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide.
March 18, 2002... "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power (Basic; $30). In the wake of the Holocaust, United States policymakers have been rhetorically committed to the idea of preventing genocide, and yet they have consistently...

Number 9 Dream.
March 18, 2002... Number9Dream, by David Mitchell (Random House; $24.95). Mitchell's new novel has been described as a cross between Don DeLillo and William Gibson, and although that's a perfectly serviceable cocktail-party formula, it doesn't do justice to this...

Red Water.(Brief Article)
March 18, 2002... Red Water, by Judith Freeman (Pantheon; $24). Unlike most historical novels, this one, which opens with a man's execution, doesn't pander to contemporary values. The condemned is a charismatic Mormon leader who participated in the massacre of a...

New Collected Poems.(Brief Article)
March 18, 2002... New Collected Poems, by George Oppen, edited by Michael Davidson (New Di- rections; $37.95). Oppen, a Commu- nist and an objectivist poet deeply in- fluenced by Pound and Williams, believed that there were no ideas except in things, but he also...

The music man; Mark Morris at BAM.(Brooklyn Academy of Music)(dance)
March 18, 2002... Mark Morris has said that he likes music better than dance. The mere fact that the Mark Morris Dance Group always performs to live music is remarkable. (Almost all modern-dance companies now use tape.) Then there is the matter of quality. If,...

Night for day; Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" on Broadway.(two theater productions)
March 18, 2002... A great play allows itself to be seen through many lenses. Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary next January and which is being given a masterly revival by Richard Eyre, at the Virginia Theatre, can be...

Sunshine boys.(Book Currents: three books)(Brief Article)
March 25, 2002... "He is the best PUDDING for mosquitoes that I ever saw. They work on him fast and vicious." The subject of this impish characterization, offered by the Palm Beach Post in 1918, was Addison Mizner, the three-hundred-pound bon vivant and Jazz Age...

Comment: best picture.(The Talk of the Town)(campaigning for the Oscar)
March 25, 2002... In 1989, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, wishing to minimize the wounded feelings that can accompany being tagged a loser, changed the formula by which the envelope-rippers announce the recipients of the Oscars. The federal...

Ink: the watchdog of Ocean Parkway.(The Talk of the Town)(Reba Shimansky)
March 25, 2002... It was question-and-answer time at the Barnes & Noble on Broadway at Eighty-second Street on a recent Friday night. Frank Bruni, a reporter for the Times, had just finished reading from "Ambling Into History," his account of George W. Bush's...

Mad as hell dept.: the Basho of honk.(The Talk of the Town)(Aaron Naparstek)
March 25, 2002... Most New Yorkers, at some point or other, have been tempted to hurl semi-solid objects at automobiles operated by drivers who lean too heavily on the horn. A few days before Christmas, Aaron Naparstek had the urge. It was around noon. He was...

At the museums: MOMA on the move.(The Talk of the Town)(Museum of Modern Art)
March 25, 2002... Last week, the Museum of Modern Art moved its hundred-and-eighty-thousand-volume library to a new, temporary home in Long Island City, Queens. A lavishly refitted factory once occupied by Swingline, the stapler company, will be MOMA's...

Dept. of Hoopla; heads talking again.(The Talk of the Town)(reunion of the rock group Talking Heads)
March 25, 2002... Whatever alarming images the phrase "international voting body of about a thousand rock experts" might conjure, let's give that hoary community some credit. It accomplished, in a single ballot, what the four former members of Talking Heads...

The high mark: mountains, grizzlies, and the smell of exhaust in the morning.(U.S. Journal)(Cooke City, Montana)
March 25, 2002... For residents of Cooke City, Montana, where winter customarily announces itself before Halloween and sticks around well into May, occasionally into June, the official arrival of spring is an incidental fact. Not counting dogs and cats, Cooke...

The great terror.(Saddam Hussein against the Kurds)
March 25, 2002... In the late morning of March 16, 1988, an Iraqi Air Force helicopter appeared over the city of Halabja, which is about fifteen miles from the border with Iran. The Iran-Iraq War was then in its eighth year, and Halabja was near the front lines....

Endless love: the return of E.T.(motion picture "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial')
March 25, 2002... The nominations for Best Picture in the Academy Awards for 1982 were as follows: "Gandhi," "Tootsie," "Missing," "The Verdict," and "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial." The award went to Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi," a film that, like "A Bridge...

The social life of paper: looking for method in the mess.(in defense of messy desks)
March 25, 2002... On a busy day, a typical air-traffic controller might be in charge of as many as twenty-five airplanes at a time -- some ascending, some descending, each at a different altitude and travelling at a different speed. He peers at a large,...

Report from Ground Zero.(Brief Article)
March 25, 2002... Report from Ground Zero, by Dennis Smith (Viking; $24.95). The firstperson narratives in this account of the rescue efforts at the World Trade Center constitute a tremendously powerful chronicle of September 11th. The language of the...

Do it yourself; biennial follies at the Whitney.
March 25, 2002... Lawrence R. Rinder, the chief curator of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum, introduces the busy but extraordinarily bland Whitney Biennial by invoking the events of September 11th. "There is a profound sense of being at the most portentous...

High-tech emporiums; Prada and Toys R Us have much in common.
March 25, 2002... In 1948, Frank Lloyd Wright redesigned a home-furnishings shop on Maiden Lane in San Francisco for Lillian and Vere Morris. His plan called for a multistory interior space but no traditional display windows, which worried the Morrises, and...