The New Yorker articles from March 2005

The New Yorker archives from March 2005

BELIEVER.(author Hunter S. Thompson)(Obituary)
March 7, 2005... Hunter S. Thompson, who killed himself last week in his house in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, was a high-strung, thin-skinned, programmatically dissipated workaholic, inveterately suspicious of authority, perpetually worried that his best...

DR. JUICE.(Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big)(Book Review)
March 7, 2005... Behold the Chemist, Jose Canseco: former American League M.V.P., Madonna's onetime "bat boy," best-selling author, peerless narcissist. He is forty, and retired from baseball, although you wouldn't know it to look at his arms and chest, still...

THE POLLIES.(Pollie Awards ceremony)
March 7, 2005... Depending on whom you ask, the Pollie Awards, which the American Association of Political Consultants has been handing out since 1985, are either the Oscars or the Golden Globes of the campaign industry. On a recent Saturday night, about three...

TWO PENS.(high-technology writing equipment)
March 7, 2005... Until now, man's relationship with the pen has been relatively straightforward. Few people stopped to wonder whether the "I" who scribbles the "Sorry I backed into your new car" note is separate, in some important ontological way, from the...

OUR MAN IN MEDAN.(Paul Berg, United States consul-general in Medan, Indonesia)(Interview)
March 7, 2005... Jalan Wali Kota is a fashionable street in what had been until the past couple of months a rather unfashionable city: Medan, Indonesia. It may be the biggest city on Sumatra and home to two and a half million people, but, aside from the Palace...

BLOWING UP THE SENATE.(possible reform of legislative filibusters over President George W. Bush's judicial nominations)
March 7, 2005... Most popular histories of Congress include an exchange, very likely apocryphal, in which Washington and Jefferson discuss the difference between the House and the Senate. "Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer?" Washington asks. "To...

SIGN-OFF.(television news anchorman Dan Rather)(Interview)
March 7, 2005... On the door to Dan Rather's office at CBS are two fading gold lines of script: "Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, / That here, obedient to their laws, we lie." The quotation, Rather told me--the words of the Spartans who died holding...

VOLTAIRE'S GARDEN.(Voltaire in Exile)(Book Review)
March 7, 2005... Voltaire, like God, whom he patronized, is always there. "No authors ever had so much fame in their own life-time as Pope and Voltaire," Dr. Johnson dogmatized in the late eighteenth century, and though Pope still sings for those with ears to...

Literary Lives.(V.S. Pritchett: A Working Life)(K)(Madame de Stael)(February House)(Book Review)
March 7, 2005... February House, by Sherill Tippins (Houghton Mifflin; $24). In 1940, George Davis, an editor recently fired from Harper's Bazaar, rented a dilapidated house in Brooklyn Heights in which he installed brilliant, volatile artists, who spent the...

VISION QUEST.(Medium)(Television Program Review)
March 7, 2005... Is there anything more boring than other people's dreams? Much as we may find our friends interesting, their dreams, unless they involve a vivid catastrophe, or include us, are opaque and unrevealing; they also remind us that we're all...

DRAWING LINES.(Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, exhibit)
March 7, 2005... Cy Twombly was twenty-five years old in 1953, when, at the borrowed studio of Robert Rauschenberg, on Fulton Street, he made some of the inauspicious-looking monoprints and pencil drawings that open "Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper,"...

RING MY BELL.(development, marketing of musical ringtones for wireless telephones)
March 7, 2005... In 1997, your cell phone could make two kinds of sounds. It could "ring"--our anachronistic word for the electronic trill that phones produce when you receive a call--or it could play a single-line melody, like "Fur Elise." If you've ever heard...

DEVILMENT.(Be Cool)(Movie Review)
March 7, 2005... In "Be Cool," the sequel to the 1995 comedy "Get Shorty," Vince Vaughn's eyes come alive for the first time. Ever since Vaughn appeared in "Swingers," in 1996, he has been a slightly mysterious presence. In that movie, he was furiously...

NUKE 'EM.(The Talk of the Town)(judicial appointments)
March 14, 2005... During his first four years as President, George W. Bush nominated fifty-two men and women for seats on the Circuit Courts of Appeals. The Senate confirmed thirty-five of them. During the previous Presidential term, Bill Clinton's second,...

CRED.(The Talk of the Town)
March 14, 2005... It is no sign of disrespect that the city's plan for counting its over-all homeless population is modelled, in part, on wildlife research--estimating harvestable stocks of Danish fish, or observing the density of elk on the Olympic Peninsula....

REPRIEVE.(The Talk of the Town)(Martin Soto-Fong)
March 14, 2005... Martin Soto-Fong was seventeen years old on June 24, 1992, when three employees of the El Grande Market, in Tucson, Arizona, were gunned down during an apparent robbery. Soto-Fong and two others were convicted and sentenced to death for the...

MONKEY BIDNESS.(The Talk of the Town)(monkeys)
March 14, 2005... Criticize if you like, but no way was it the monkey's fault. The monkey, who, given the option, would probably choose to remain nameless, was evidently content to perch in a palm tree near the Undumo River in northern Bolivia, twelve miles from...

NET WORTH.(The Talk of the Town)(National Hockey League)
March 14, 2005... Aside from the usual consortium of Zamboni drivers and Don Cherry fanatics, few people mourned when the National Hockey League cancelled its season, a few weeks ago, after the owners and the players failed to come to a new labor agreement. But...

LOST SON.(Iraq War)(Column)
March 14, 2005... This happened on Interstate 78, in New Jersey, in November of 2003: While listening to a story on NPR's "Morning Edition" about a National Guardsman who'd been killed in Iraq, I found myself in tears. At the time, I was driving from Manhattan...

THE SCENT OF THE NILE.(Francois Coty)
March 14, 2005... From 1930, a Profile of the perfumer Francois Coty On a sunny afternoon last June, the French perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena arrived at the offices of Hermes, the luxury-goods maker, in Pantin, just north of Paris, to present his first...

HANDS AND EYES.(fashion design)
March 14, 2005... Milan was cold and foggy, and although it was still midafternoon when I arrived outside the Dolce & Gabbana showroom, at 7 Via Santa Cecilia, the January day was already growing dark. The city had been under a blanket of subalpine fog for days,...

INTELLIGENT DESIGN.(Rem Kohlhaas)
March 14, 2005... Before he can build, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas likes to say, he must first seduce a client with his vision--a process that he describes as "foreplay." As with most things Koolhaas does, his strategy for eliciting desire is unorthodox....

SMASHED.(Charles Bukowski)(Critical Essay)
March 14, 2005... In the third edition of "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry," in which poets appear in order of birth, the class of 1920 fields a strong team, including Howard Nemerov and Amy Clampitt. If you were to browse the poetry...

MIXED MESSAGES.(Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)(Book Review)
March 14, 2005... Jonathan Safran Foer, born in 1977, came out swinging in 2002, with the publication of his astounding, clownish, tender, intricately and extravagantly plotted novel "Everything Is Illuminated." From the hilarious overreacher's English of the...

SCOUNDREL TIME.(Romance)(The Last Days of Judas Iscariot)(Theater Review)
March 14, 2005... History, H. G. Wells once said, is "a race between education and catastrophe." Sometimes--now, for instance--catastrophe appears to be winning, and the contest is almost too unbearable to watch. In such deracinated moments, only a world turned...

MODEL CITIZENS.(Critical Essay)
March 14, 2005... If you watched the first episode of the fourth installment of UPN's "America's Next Top Model" last week, you may have noticed that I was not one of the contestants competing for the hundred-thousand-dollar contract with Cover Girl cosmetics,...

BEGINNINGS.(Head On)(Movie Review)
March 14, 2005... A film that starts with not one but two attempted suicides could never be accused of overdosing on the feel-good factor. Yet it would be a pity if the new German picture "Head On," which plays through March at the Angelika Film Center, were to...

BOLTONISM.(The Talk of the Town)(John Bolton)
March 21, 2005... Barring a sudden and improbable outbreak of independent judgment in the Senate, John Bolton will soon be confirmed as President Bush's Ambassador to the United Nations, an institution he openly disdains. "It is a President's prerogative to name...

WINDSORS IN TIGHTS.(The Talk of the Town)(Diana the Princess)(Dance Review)
March 21, 2005... If the forthcoming nuptials of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles are to be celebrated in a work of art, what form should that work take? A set of postage stamps is to be issued (English stamps are adhesive these days, thus depriving...

YOU SAY TOMATO.(The Talk of the Town)
March 21, 2005... Two years ago, New Jersey counted among its state symbols an official folk dance (the square dance), dinosaur (the duck-billed Hadrosaurus foulkii), and tall ship (the A. J. Meerwald), not to mention the obligatory flag, bird, and tree, but it...

STITCHES.(The Talk of the Town)(knitting)
March 21, 2005... To the well-worn list of the comparative advantages of suburban life--bigger houses, lower taxes, safer schools--the inhabitants of Westchester County have recently added another: better knitting. For this civic coup they can thank Kevin...

CHECK, PLEASE!(The Talk of the Town)(restaurants)
March 21, 2005... Diners browsing their options on Macdougal Street who happened upon a restaurant called Babu in its first few weeks of opening, earlier this year, were met with several surprises. The first was the incongruity of finding a place like...

THE UNBRANDING.(Joseph Biden)
March 21, 2005... Joseph Biden, the senior senator from Delaware, is the Democratic Party's main spokesman on international affairs; he is also a man who, on occasion, seems not to know, when sentences leave his mouth, where they are going or what they are meant...

THE OTHER SISTER.(Nathaniel Hawthorne)(Biography)
March 21, 2005... On the evening of November 11, 1837, Nathaniel Hawthorne, accompanied by his sisters, Elizabeth (Ebe) and Louisa, stopped at the Peabody home, in Salem, Massachusetts. It was Hawthorne's first visit to the family, though he lived just a few...

SECRET AGENT MAN.(Dave Wirtschafter)
March 21, 2005... On a cool evening last October, rain was soaking the photographers who lined a red carpet in front of the Buffalo Club, in Santa Monica. They were waiting for the film star Ewan McGregor, the guest of honor at a party celebrating "Long Way...

JESUS IN THE CLASSROOM.(schooling in Cupertino)
March 21, 2005... Cupertino, California, is situated at the edge of the Santa Cruz Mountains below San Francisco Bay, sloping eastward into the flatlands of the Santa Clara Valley, more familiarly known as Silicon Valley. The city, which covers roughly eleven...

LOOKING BACK.(Diane Arbus)
March 21, 2005... The revolutionary photographer Diane Arbus, who died in 1971, at the age of forty-eight, said, "A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know." That's not quite right, on the evidence of "Diane Arbus:...

THE END OF THE WORLD.(The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time)(Book Review)
March 21, 2005... The Black Death, the pandemic of bubonic plague that hit Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, is like a disaster movie: a menace stalks the land; cries go up in the streets; millions of people die, not including you and me. Therefore, like...

TRUE GRIME.(Run the Road)(Sound Recording Review)
March 21, 2005... Pop-music purists invariably tell the same story about their favorite music. Whatever the genre--R. & B., classic punk, dance-hall reggae, Celtic lullabies--a purist will say that it was better at its inception, when the sound was an expression...

SOLOS AND SOLITARIES.(Woman Before a Glass)(Theater Review)
March 21, 2005... The secret to performance, Charlie Chaplin once quipped, is "entrances and exits." This issue bedevils the one-person show--a genre that is, for obvious commercial reasons, attractive to producers and, for obvious dramaturgical reasons,...

DOUBLE TROUBLE.(Melinda and Melinda)(Movie Review)
March 21, 2005... Imagine Neil Simon and Arthur Miller engaged in a mettlesome debate: Is life a comedy or a tragedy? Is our "deeper reality" a joke or a catastrophe? That's the idea behind Woody Allen's new movie, "Melinda and Melinda." At a restaurant in the...

UNTRUSTWORTHY.(The Talk of the Town)(Social Security and trust funds)
March 28, 2005... As an institution, the trust fund has been good to the Bush clan. Thanks to this ingenious financial tool, through which part of a family fortune can be protected for its intended beneficiaries, George W., among other Bushes, has been spared...

POPSTROLOGICALLY SPEAKING.(The Talk of the Town)(Popstrology)(Book Review)
March 28, 2005... What a week. Well, maybe not, but, still, the news of the world summoned up the usual apprehension and puzzlement. Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Iger, the brothers Giambi, Lil' Kim: how is a guy to make sense of it all? A fresh approach is always...

STREETCAR UPDATE.(The Talk of the Town)(Natasha Richardson)(Edward Hall)(Interview)
March 28, 2005... The Roundabout Theatre's production of Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire"--the play's sixth on Broadway since the original, with Marlon Brando, opened, fifty-eight years ago--begins previews next week at Studio 54. After rehearsal...

SOFTBALL.(The Talk of the Town)(baseball players and steroids)
March 28, 2005... Over coffee in the cafeteria of the Rayburn House Office Building early Thursday morning, several congressional staffers acknowledged the obvious: baseball had come to Washington, and the politics of sport was threatening to supplant the sport...

LOCAL ZEROES.(The Talk of the Town)(Richard Scrushy)
March 28, 2005... Three years ago, Richard Scrushy embodied the hoariest of American myths. He was the home-town boy made good, the scrappy local who went from the community college to the executive suite. His town was Birmingham, Alabama, and his company was...

PLAYING OUT OF THE SNOW.(golf courses)
March 28, 2005... I own a pair of snowshoes that I bought for golf. I have a photograph of myself wearing them on the first tee of the little nine-hole club that I belong to, in northwestern Connecticut, after a huge blizzard in 1996. Two of my regular golf...

THE NEW PITCH.(advertising)
March 28, 2005... In the introduction to his 1963 best-seller, "Confessions of an Advertising Man," David Ogilvy apologized for writing "in the old-fashioned first person singular." In the intervening decades--the years of, among others, Madonna and Donald...

SUPREME CONFIDENCE.(Antonin Scalia)
March 28, 2005... Lining up to hear a Supreme Court Justice speak is more like lining up for a rock concert than you might think. This is especially true if the speech is on a college campus and the speaker in question is Justice Antonin Scalia. Ruth Bader...

MARCH MADNESS.(Spamalot)(Theater Review)
March 28, 2005... Silliness is an assertion of youthfulness, a playful raspberry blown at everything that weighs us down--history, theology, psychology, and, especially, mortality. If you're looking for a theme to the inspired antics of "Spamalot" (at the...

INCOMMENSURABILITY.(Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography)(Book Review)
March 28, 2005... Joakim Garff, an associate professor at the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen, in a brief preface to his monumental "Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography" (translated from the Danish by Bruce H. Kirmmse; Princeton;...

SOMETHING ABOUT KATHY.(Never Let Me Go)(Book Review)
March 28, 2005... Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" (Knopf; $24) is a novel about a young woman named Kathy H., and her friendships with two schoolmates, Ruth and Tommy. The triangle is a standard one: Kathy is attracted to Tommy; Tommy gets involved with Ruth,...

KAFKA SINGS.(Kafka's Trial)(Opera Review)
March 28, 2005... The Danish composer Poul Ruders is one of contemporary music's free agents--a lover of sweet melodies with a yen for dark chords, a comedian with a flair for apocalypse. His previous opera, "The Handmaid's Tale," made sonic thunder out of...

REVENGE.(The Ring Two)(Movie Review)
March 28, 2005... A successful journalist and single mother, Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), moves from Seattle to the small coastal town of Astoria, Oregon. She makes the change, accompanied by her young son, Aidan (David Dorfman), for all the usual reasons. One,...