The New Yorker articles from March 2004

The New Yorker archives from March 2004

TEN YEARS AFTER.(The Talk of the Town)
March 1, 2004... In 1994, President Clinton sent twenty thousand American troops to Haiti for a novel purpose in the history of American military interventions: to restore an elected government to power. Promoting democracy has become one of the Bush...

NOTHING BUT THE BEST.(The Talk of the Town)
March 1, 2004... At six minutes past noon last Tuesday, one of the four hundred or so reporters, columnists, and photographers who had assembled in the basement of Yankee Stadium took a cell-phone call, then quickly hung up. "A-Rod is in the building," she...

A NEW MALL.(The Talk of the Town)
March 1, 2004... The new Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle long ago dropped AOL from its title, and a good thing, too. It is hard enough to put up a twin-towered building in New York now without its having to bear the name of a legendary disaster; given the...

THE GUARD YEARS.(The Talk of the Town)
March 1, 2004... If this keeps up, the period between May, 1972, and May, 1973--the year in which almost no one seems to remember George W. Bush performing his duties as a member of the Alabama National Guard--will one day rank up there, mystery-wise, with the...

TAKE THIS JOB.(The Talk of the Town)
March 1, 2004... John Edwards's advance teams like to arrange the places where he appears on the campaign trail to resemble theatres in the round. Edwards holds forth from floor level or on a low stage, wearing a cordless clip-on microphone that leaves his arms...

THE UN-COMMUNICATOR.
March 1, 2004... From 1999, Elizabeth Kolbert on Mayor Rudy Giuliani Elizabeth Kolbert on covering City Hall The week before Christmas, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was the featured speaker at an awards ceremony honoring members of the New York City Law...

RABBLE-ROUSER.
March 1, 2004... I mentioned his name recently, apropos a recent book on F.D.R., and got back: "Westbrook Pegler? Who is he?" I was speaking with Roger Kimball, an author who is encyclopedically informed. On the other hand, Kimball, the managing editor of the...

THE SOLDIER.
March 1, 2004... I first met Benjamin K. in Zambia, one steamy midmorning in late December, 2001. I was drinking tea and reading at a picnic table on my parents' fish and banana farm, on the banks of the Zambezi River, near the Zimbabwe border, when the dogs...

HOMEBOY.
March 1, 2004... A guide to Lyle Lovett's recordings Klein, Texas, is halfway between Tomball and Spring, on the coastal plain north of Houston. The land is flat. The roads run straight along the old property lines and meet at right angles, like joints in...

NAILED.
March 1, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File In "The Passion of the Christ," Mel Gibson shows little interest in celebrating the electric charge of hope and redemption that Jesus Christ brought into the world. He largely ignores Jesus' heart-stopping...

GAME THEORY.
March 1, 2004... Chess is not friendly to prose. Chess is, after all, a sport, but there is almost no way to convey what's exciting about it to people who are not themselves deep students of the game. "Then, on move 21, came Black's crusher: a6!"--totally...

SELECT ALL.
March 1, 2004... A radio producer in Washington, D.C., got a promotion a few years ago on the grounds that he was a "good decision-maker." Self-deprecating to a fault, he reminded his bosses that many of the decisions he'd made since joining the station hadn't...

ENGLAND SWINGS.
March 1, 2004... Two institutions on the south bank of the Thames express the split personality of the London art world. Dr. Jekyll is the mighty Tate Modern, which, since a fumbling start in 2000, has developed gravitas and flair to go with its crowd-fetching...

SWAN SONGS.
March 1, 2004... This week, over the course of twenty-four hours, I saw three plays about suicide. I think I can say without fear of successful contradiction that this is a record. Of the twenty-four actors that I counted on the various stages, three did...

RICH AND STRANGE.
March 1, 2004... Ifirst heard the music of Thomas Ades on a gloomy spring day in Aldeburgh, England, in 1995. The composer was then twenty-four--a nervously confident youth who spoke in rumbling bass tones, like a very English Ving Rhames. The piece on display...

RECKLESS DRIVER.(The Talk of the Town)
March 8, 2004... More than any other single person, Ralph Nader is responsible for the existence of automobiles that have seat belts, padded dashboards, air bags, non-impaling steering columns, and gas tanks that don't readily explode when the car gets...

PASSIONS, PAST AND PRESENT.(The Talk of the Town)
March 8, 2004... David Denby on "The Passion of the Christ" Last week, while the critics, the clergy, and the professional opinion-providers were caught up in the opening, on Ash Wednesday, of "The Passion of the Christ," it seemed a good idea to ask...

THE PUTIN TOOTHPICK.(The Talk of the Town)
March 8, 2004... Among the many signs that the democratic impulse in Russia is beating a gloomy retreat these days is the appearance in restaurants and cafes of the "Putin toothpick." This requires a word of explanation, perhaps. On March 14th, Russians...

MORE.(The Talk of the Town)
March 8, 2004... What you don't know about Yeardley Smith is probably a lot. She itemized examples last week, before a rehearsal for her autobiographical one-woman play, "More" (which she wrote), at the Union Square Theatre: "You don't know that I was in...

BOARD STIFFS.(The Talk of the Town)
March 8, 2004... Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz, at Tyco. John, Timothy, and Michael Rigas, at Adelphia. Scott Sullivan, at WorldCom. Andrew Fastow and Jeffrey Skilling, at Enron. Three years after the biggest wave of corporate scandals since the...

THE DEAL.
March 8, 2004... On February 4th, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is revered in Pakistan as the father of the country's nuclear bomb, appeared on a state-run television network in Islamabad and confessed that he had been solely responsible for operating an...

MY AMENDMENT.
March 8, 2004... A s an obscure, middle-aged, heterosexual short-story writer, I am often asked, George, do you have any feelings about Same-Sex Marriage? To which I answer, Actually, yes, I do. Like any sane person, I am against Same-Sex Marriage, and...

BE LIKE DEE.
March 8, 2004... The most identifiable profile in the state of Connecticut--big nose, big grin, long brown hair pulled back in a bun, which you can spot bouncing up the court from any seat in the Hartford Civic Center--belongs to Diana Taurasi, who plays...

THE MEASURE OF AMERICA.
March 8, 2004... Along with the Ferris wheel, the hamburger, Cracker Jack, Aunt Jemima, the zipper, Juicy Fruit, and the vertical file, the word "anthropology" was introduced to a vast number of Americans at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Marking...

THE CASUALTY.
March 8, 2004... Dan Baum talks about the pains of war From 1942, the diary of a sergeant wounded in the Second World War From 1943, Philip Hamburger visits a veterans' hospital When people talk about the Army being good for a certain kind of young...

LET'S GO SWIMMING.
March 8, 2004... This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary. It ends with a gentle and brilliant musician dying in New York long before his time. In between, the cellist, Arthur...

OUT OF TIME.
March 8, 2004... Parmigianino was born Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola in Parma, in 1503, and died in exile nearby, at the age of thirty-seven, after having helped to initiate Mannerism, the tendency toward high-strung, strained expressiveness which became a...

MOTHER COURAGE.
March 8, 2004... I grew up in a family that, save for its stray neuroses, was entirely typical of its place and time--the suburbs of New York in the late nineteen-sixties. My father, a doctor, left for work at eight and came back at six, except on Tuesdays,...

BITTERSWEET.
March 8, 2004... The thrill of "Fiddler on the Roof" (at the Minskoff) begins with its first beat, when the beleaguered milkman Tevye (the bighearted Alfred Molina) describes the precariousness of shtetl life. "And how do we keep our balance?" he asks us. "That...

WOMEN AND THE SYSTEM.
March 8, 2004... David Denby on "The Passion of the Christ" Movie Listings The Film File Christiane (Katrin Sass), the saintly Communist in the German social comedy "Goodbye, Lenin!," has a noble brow, a steady gaze, and fine, straight hair. She's...

WEDDED BLITZ.(The Talk of the Town)
March 15, 2004... The deliberations of the editorial board of the Baylor Lariat do not normally attract widespread notice beyond the environs of Waco, Texas--or within them, for that matter--but these are not normal times, and the Lariat's editorial the other...

SLUMP.(The Talk of the Town)
March 15, 2004... Hockey is a roughneck pastime from the Canadian prairie that was persuaded to leave the windswept town it was raised in, among miners and farmers and nuns who rapped its knuckles with rulers, and move to the city and try and hold down a job....

RINK RAT IN CHIEF?(The Talk of the Town)
March 15, 2004... John Kerry's prep-school alma mater, St. Paul's, is sometimes known as "the cradle of American hockey." There, in Concord, New Hampshire, on the black ice of the Lower School Pond, boys from the school's three intramural clubs--Old Hundred,...

PUCK FLICK.(The Talk of the Town)
March 15, 2004... Few things rate higher on the dork meter than going to see "Miracle" with a hockey stick in your hands. "Miracle," of course, is the new movie about the United States hockey team's upset of the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Olympic Games, in Lake...

BRING ON THE NANOBUBBLE.(The Talk of the Town)
March 15, 2004... In the early sixties, investors stumbled on a neat trick: if a company had "tron" or "tronics" in its name, its stock was a hit. This was the dawn of the computer age, and a host of businesses straight out of "The Jetsons"--Astron, Transitron,...

THE CUBAN STRATEGY.
March 15, 2004... William Finnegan discusses Cuban Miami and why the Republicans are worried Last summer, out in the sunlit seas of the Florida Straits, the United States Coast Guard came upon a green 1951 Chevrolet flatbed truck motoring north from Cuba....

THE KIMONO.
March 15, 2004... One evening not long ago, while I was walking down a set of stairs at the New York Public Library, it occurred to me, as it had on occasions in the past, that there are people in the world who believe in an afterlife, and people who don't; and...

THE DESIGNER.
March 15, 2004... Last month, ten days before Miuccia Prada was scheduled to present her collection of women's clothing for the 2004 fall season in Milan, she began, in her own words, to "freak out." The day before, she had been relaxed, amiable, and...

GUNS 'N' ROSES.
March 15, 2004... When Europeans call George Bush a cowboy, they mean that he's reckless and arrogant and a bully. Cowboys swagger through foreign landscapes, causing trouble. They carry guns and shoot people. But cowboys have really sexy gear, as has been...

THE TERRAZZO JUNGLE.
March 15, 2004... From 1956, a visit with Victor Gruen, by Andy Logan and Brendan Gill Victor Gruen was short, stout, and unstoppable, with a wild head of hair and eyebrows like unpruned hedgerows. According to a profile in Fortune (and people loved to...

BLAIR HOUSE.
March 15, 2004... One short year ago, Jayson Blair was, for all that readers of the Times knew, a reporter in good standing, and Howell Raines was the paper's triumphantly successful, though not well-loved, executive editor. The rather abrupt pace of...

ROOTS.
March 15, 2004... My father had a secretary named Barbara who kept his books and managed his life for twenty years. I don't think he knew much about her, except that she lived in Brooklyn with a diabetic sister and had a son in the Army. The son was a decorated...

DECENT EXPOSURE.
March 15, 2004... My editors wanted me to say something about the Academy Awards broadcast, but, afraid that in response to their request I might--either accidentally or accidentally on purpose--expose a body part, they imposed an eight-day delay on me. In the...

KING FOR A DAY.
March 15, 2004... Can an actor who has spent the greater part of his life onstage--an actor who has been lauded in a wide variety of roles both here and abroad--be too old to play King Lear, by the time he gets around to it? Of course, age is not the problem...

MEN'S SECRETS.
March 15, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File Nine months have passed since the last Cannes Film Festival, and we are still reaping the benefits, or, if you prefer, suffering the consequences. It would appear that the mood du jour on the sunny Riviera...

VICE SQUADS.(The Talk of the Town)
March 22, 2004... Goodness, that was exciting, wasn't it? We have a nominee! Two of them, in fact: a Democrat, John Kerry, and a Republican, George W. Bush. And it didn't take all that long--not even eight weeks from the eve of the Iowa caucuses, when Howard...

MAHARISHI PREP.(The Talk of the Town)
March 22, 2004... Ben Pollack is a preternaturally self-possessed eleventh grader from Fairfield, Iowa, who is considering a career in public relations, because, he says, "I love speaking to people about what I feel, and what I believe in." Such a...

REAL BOHEMIANS.(The Talk of the Town)
March 22, 2004... The other night, at the National Arts Club, a couple of hundred admirers of the poet Jane Mayhall got together for a reading from her work. (Her previous book came out in 1973; her new book, "Sleeping Late on Judgment Day," has just been...

MAN BLAMES DOG.(The Talk of the Town)
March 22, 2004... Pity the poor dog. In this time of heightened fear--of drugs, of bombs, of the things we humans might do to one another--man increasingly asks so much of him. Last week, dog crews patrolled New York's subway tunnels, while along our borders new...

AFTERTASTE.(The Talk of the Town)
March 22, 2004... One last lunch at La Cote Basque. The classic, famous old restaurant was closing on March 7th, as its chef-proprietor, Jean-Jacques Rachou, neared seventy. Along with the deaths of Lutece and Gage & Tollner, the event marked the end of...

ROAD RAGE.
March 22, 2004... Kathy Gannon talks about reconstruction and warlord rule in Afghanistan Mullah Muhammad Khaksar is a burly man in his early forties with a thick, curly beard that falls halfway down his chest. He lives in a modest house in a poor suburb of...

HOMECOMING QUEENS.
March 22, 2004... Omaha, Nebraska The most concise explanation I've heard for how and why the art of female impersonation has declined in Omaha was articulated not long ago by Davide Butson, an Omaha native and occasional drag queen who now lives in Hong...

A BAD THING.
March 22, 2004... From 2003, Jeffrey Toobin at lunch with the embattled Martha Stewart From 2000, Joan Didion on the powerful appeal of Martha Stewart The cult of the chief executive reached its apogee in the nineteen-nineties, a period when C.E.O.s...

A BAD THING.
March 22, 2004... onstage by richard avedon meistersinger In a vocal category associated with ancient priests and irate giants, Rene Pape is an operatic rarity: the bass as romantic hero. Though it does no harm that Pape is young and...

TIMES REGAINED.
March 22, 2004... This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the decision to take an hourglass-shaped traffic funnel between Forty-second Street and Forty-seventh Street on Broadway, which had been called Longacre Square, and rename it after the New York...

REVELATIONS.(Concert Review)
March 22, 2004... The most ethereally beautiful music of the twentieth century was first heard on a brutally cold January night in 1941, at the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp, in Gorlitz, Germany. The composer was Olivier Messiaen, the work "Quartet for the...

DRASTIC CLASSIC.
March 22, 2004... How nice, in these gray days on the ballet scene, to have Karole Armitage come back to New York, in a classical mood. In the nineteen-eighties, Armitage was a big presence in the downtown dance world. That's when dance caught up with...

WHAT'S NEW.
March 22, 2004... The new Whitney Biennial is startlingly good. It is better--more serious, more pleasurable--than anyone, perhaps even the curators, Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, could have expected, given the general exhaustion and...

DON'T LOOK BACK.(Movie Review)
March 22, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File Do you feel clever, punk? Well, do you? Because that's the only way to get your head around the latest Charlie Kaufman flick. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is written by Kaufman, directed by...

AFTER MADRID.(The Talk of the Town)(Al Qaeda)
March 29, 2004... In less than a decade, the stateless soldiers of Al Qaeda, to say nothing of the many cells of like-minded yet unaligned fanatics hoping to die in assaults against liberal democracy, have changed the rules of global politics. Exploiting little...

JAM OFF.(The Talk of the Town)(The Jammys)
March 29, 2004... The producers of awards shows tend to be anxious about time: performers and presenters are urged not to squander it, in the interest of keeping to a TV schedule. You wouldn't think that the Jammys would share this concern. For one thing, they...

STREET CRIME.(The Talk of the Town)(Iraq)(Column)
March 29, 2004... The blast from the bomb that blew up the Mount Lebanon Hotel in Baghdad in mid-March knocked me out of my chair and sent my coffee flying out of its cup. A few seconds later, there was a burst from what sounded like a Kalashnikov. Gunfire has...

THE REAL ORKUT.(The Talk of the Town)(www.orkut.com)
March 29, 2004... Last month, the first e-mail asking recipients to join a Web site called www.orkut.com sped its way around the globe. The description of Orkut was a bit of a mouthful: "a community of friends and trusted acquaintances that connects individuals...

PEPSI DEGENERATION.(The Talk of the Town)("The Deconstruction of Pepsi-Cola" a series of photographs by Vera Lutter)
March 29, 2004... When Pepsi-Cola erected its big red neon sign in Long Island City, along the Queens side of the East River, in 1936, ships would steam up to the plant below it and unload sacks of sugar from Havana. Soda hasn't been bottled there for five years...

THE BUDDHA'S DAUGHTER.(Yabshi Pan Rinzinwangmo)(Interview)
March 29, 2004... I never met the tenth Panchen Lama, who died at his monastery in Tibet in 1989, but I was introduced to his family in Beijing in the mid-nineties, and recently I went to Washington to see his daughter, Yabshi Pan Rinzinwangmo, a twenty-year-old...

REPORTING IT ALL.(A. J. Liebling)(Biography)
March 29, 2004... From 1955, a classic boxing piece by A. J. Liebling From the start of the American republic, the most tantalizing means of indulging a youthful desire for escape and re-creation has been the sojourn in Paris. It's a long tradition, amply...

THE CHURN.(Cameron County, Texas narrative)(Fruit of the Loom Inc. plant closure)
March 29, 2004... An interview with Katherine Boo, with photographs by Gilles Peress Last August, in a corner of South Texas where local newspapers still call businesses "corporate citizens," an emergency vehicle paid a visit to a highly fortified underwear...

THE GATES TO THE CITY.(Central Park, New York, New York)(Christo)
March 29, 2004... Late November in Central Park, an afternoon of brilliant sun and boreal winds. I am with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artist-entrepreneurs, who have agreed to show me some of the sites for "The Gates," their long-delayed Central Park project....

FOLK HERO.(Woody Guthrie as remembered by Arlo Guthrie and Bob Dylan)(Biography)
March 29, 2004... The folksinger Arlo Guthrie likes to tell a story about his father, the legendary Woody Guthrie, who died in 1967, at the age of fifty-five. When he was a toddler, Arlo says, Guthrie gave him a Gibson acoustic guitar for his birthday. Several...

SLOW BURN.("Come Away with Me" by Norah Jones)(Sound Recording Review)
March 29, 2004... Norah Jones is apparently very boring. Recent reviews of her new album, "Feels Like Home," use words like "tepid," "blank," and "dull" to describe her music. She has been referred to more than once as Snorah Jones. But there are at least...

STUCK.("Frozen")(Movie Review)
March 29, 2004... There is probably no greater horror than that of a child being abducted from his mother and having his barely formed life cut short. And there is probably no actress with greater skill at conveying wounded gentility and moral confusion than...

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD.("Dogville")(Movie Review)
March 29, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File A train chugs into a station, and the audience screams in terror and ducks under the seats. It is 1895, everyone's favorite moment in film history--the time of naivete when the cinema was born. The...