The New Yorker articles from May 2002

The New Yorker archives from May 2002

Book currents; across the universe.(How the Universe Got Its Spots; The Prophet and the Astronomer)
May 6, 2002... If the universe is infinite, then its possibilities are infinite as well. But in HOW THE UNIVERSE GOT ITS SPOTS (Princeton) the astrophysicist Janna Levin insists that infinity works as a hypothetical concept only, and that it is not found in...

Comment; French follies.(French election)(The Talk of the Town)
May 6, 2002... Last Monday, on the afternoon following the first round of the French Presidential election, the Paris daily Le Monde ran a cartoon of the National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen piloting a small airplane toward two towers that were...

Houston postcard; an Enron yard sale.(The Talk of the Town)
May 6, 2002... Ever since Houston's economy shifted, in the nineteen-thirties, from timber and cotton to petrochemicals, people here have accustomed themselves to financial turbulence and its behavioral imperative: standing tough in the face of adversity....

Whatchamacallit dept.; the mind games.(The Talk of the Town)
May 6, 2002... If you had been sitting next to Frank Felberbaum at the U.S.A. Memory Championship, at Con Edison's headquarters, on Irving Place, the other day, you probably would have heard him recall his gold-medal performance at the World Memory...

Dept. of acceptability; butt out.(New York Times Advertising Acceptability Department)(The talk of the Town)
May 6, 2002... In 1986, when "Vienna: Lusthaus," an experimental theatre piece by the director Martha Clarke, was first performed at St. Clement's Church, on West Forty-sixth Street, the Times theatre critic Frank Rich hailed the steamy evocation of...

The financial page; waste away.(architect/author William McDonough)(The Talk of the Town)
May 6, 2002... Seventy years ago, the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge factory, in Dearborn, Michigan, was the show horse of the second industrial revolution. Spread out over a thousand acres, it included a steel mill, a power plant, glass and cement...

The newcomer; Senator John Edwards is this season's Democratic rising star.(Letter from Washington)
May 6, 2002... The 2004 Democratic Presidential campaign began more or less officially a few weekends ago, at the state conference of the Florida Democratic Party, in Orlando. So many Democrats are already running flat out for President that it was a relief...

Fellowship of the ring; Boss Tweed's monument just can't stay out of trouble.
May 6, 2002... On December 12, 1870, the New York Sun, a newspaper that had been hostile to Boss Tweed, suddenly proposed that a monument be raised in his honor. Whether the suggestion represented a change of heart or was just a joke -- the paper recommended...

An unsimple heart; a new biography of Flaubert distills his life.('Flaubert: A Life')
May 6, 2002... I once spent a year in the manuscript room of the old French National Library on the Rue de Richelieu. Toward the end of my stay, the curator offered to give me a going-away present: a day at my carrel with any manuscript in her archives. I had...

Sleuths.(two motion pictures)
May 6, 2002... Over the past few months, the theatres have been filled with thrillers, and some of the people making them are eager to escape formula without escaping too far -- that is, not so far that they leave the big audience behind. "Murder by Numbers,"...

Fancy Free.(stores in New York, New York)
May 6, 2002... "It's sort of very Westernized, but, like, really Eastern, too!" says the spiky-haired salesman at the new JEAN PAUL GAULTIER shop (759 Madison Ave.; 249-0235), describing the store's ambitious interior. The place does, in fact, look like the...

Across the Universe.('How the Universe Got Its Spots' and 'The Prophet and the Astronomer')(Book Review)
May 6, 2002... If the universe is infinite, then its possibilities are infinite as well. But in HOW THE UNIVERSE GOT ITS SPOTS (Princeton) the astrophysicist Janna Levin insists that infinity works as a hypothetical concept only, and that it is not found in...

FRENCH FOLLIES.(presidential elections in France)
May 6, 2002... Last Monday, on the afternoon following the first round of the French Presidential election, the Paris daily Le Monde ran a cartoon of the National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen piloting a small airplane toward two towers that were...

AN ENRON YARD SALE.(personal belongings of former Enron Corp. executives for sale)
May 6, 2002... Ever since Houston's economy shifted, in the nineteen-thirties, from timber and cotton to petrochemicals, people here have accustomed themselves to financial turbulence and its behavioral imperative: standing tough in the face of adversity....

THE MIND GAMES.(Frank Felberbaum teaches people how to remember things; the Memoriad competition)
May 6, 2002... If you had been sitting next to Frank Felberbaum at the U.S.A. Memory Championship, at Con Edison's headquarters, on Irving Place, the other day, you probably would have heard him recall his gold-medal performance at the World Memory...

BUTT OUT.(advertisement for theater production changed after it is rejected)
May 6, 2002... In 1986, when "Vienna: Lusthaus," an experimental theatre piece by the director Martha Clarke, was first performed at St. Clement's Church, on West Forty-sixth Street, the Times theatre critic Frank Rich hailed the steamy evocation of...

WASTE AWAY.('Cradle to Cradle')(Book Review)
May 6, 2002... Seventy years ago, the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge factory, in Dearborn, Michigan, was the show horse of the second industrial revolution. Spread out over a thousand acres, it included a steel mill, a power plant, glass and cement...

THE NEWCOMER.(Senator John Edwards may be gearing to run for president in 2004)
May 6, 2002... The 2004 Democratic Presidential campaign began more or less officially a few weekends ago, at the state conference of the Florida Democratic Party, in Orlando. So many Democrats are already running flat out for President that it was a relief...

FELLOWship of the ring.(life of William Marcy 'Boss' Tweed; restoration of New York County Courthouse)
May 6, 2002... On December 12, 1870, the New York Sun, a newspaper that had been hostile to Boss Tweed, suddenly proposed that a monument be raised in his honor. Whether the suggestion represented a change of heart or was just a joke--the paper recommended...

RAGE AND REASON.(PLO representative Sari Nusseibeh)
May 6, 2002... Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestine Liberation Organization's chief representative in Jerusalem, is perhaps the most moderate adviser in the councils of Yasir Arafat. (He is no doubt the only one to have worked on a kibbutz or to have written a...

AN UNSIMPLE HEART.('Flaubert: A Life')(Book Review)
May 6, 2002... I once spent a year in the manuscript room of the old French National Library on the Rue de Richelieu. Toward the end of my stay, the curator offered to give me a going-away present: a day at my carrel with any manuscript in her archives. I had...

LOVE BITES.('Private Lives')(Theater Review)
May 6, 2002... On Noel Coward's bookplates was a caricature of him winking--a gesture that announced both his raffish insouciance and his high-camp refusal to suffer. Coward was his own unrepentant invention, and he made a myth of his separation from others....

SLEUTHS.('Murder by Numbers')('Changing Lanes')(Movie Review)
May 6, 2002... Over the past few months, the theatres have been filled with thrillers, and some of the people making them are eager to escape formula without escaping too far--that is, not so far that they leave the big audience behind. "Murder by Numbers,"...

Old dogs, old tricks.(Pop Notes)(three sound recordings)
May 13, 2002... "45," the leadoff track on Elvis Costello's new album, "When I Was Cruel" (Island), is the cleverest song Costello has written in years, and that's saying something. The title refers to 1945 and the birth of postwar Britain, but also to the...

Book currents: growth industry.(two books)(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... With the coming of spring, the Modern Library recently began a new series of classic books on gardening, literary excursions on the art and ethos of gardens, which the general editor of the series, Michael Pollan, likens to a conversation that...

Comment: silly ideas.(The Talk of the Town)(academic freedom in Missouri)
May 13, 2002... Academic-freedom cases frequently are fuzzy. Sometimes they involve professors who use offensive language in the sincere hope of annoying people. Sometimes they involve activities that are not included in the job description -- things said and...

Checking it twice dept.; here's johnnie.(The Talk of the Town)(Johnnie Thomas's name on master terrorist list because it is the same name used as an alias by a male murder suspect)
May 13, 2002... If you happened to take the US Airways shuttle from Logan to LaGuardia on March 23rd, you might have been stuck for a good while behind Johnnie Thomas, a seventy-year-old African-American woman at the head of the check-in line. The ticket agent...

Opening night: an art-house epic.(The Talk of the Town)(benefit screening of new film 'Cremaster 3')
May 13, 2002... By the middle of last week, outside the Ziegfeld Theatre, a line had begun to form of would-be patrons of "Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones," which opens on May 16th. If the "Star Wars" aficionados had gained entrance to the theatre...

The pictures: a billion-dollar man.(The Talk of the Town)(producer Mace Neufeld)
May 13, 2002... Coming soon to the big screen is "The Sum of All Fears," the fourth, most terrifying, and most comprehensive of the Tom Clancy-based action thrillers. This one incorporates everything: international spies, neo-Nazis, corrupt Russian generals,...

Nine lives dept.: bookstore cat.(The Talk of the Town)(Gotham Book Mart's cat)
May 13, 2002... The first time Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, laid eyes on his enormous orange tabby cat, it was chasing three smaller cats around his sister's house in San Diego and pursuing an occasional seagull up and down her porch...

After Strom; can a cracker-barrel fabulist capture South Carolina's Senate seat?(Democratic candidate Alex Sanders)
May 13, 2002... "Do you want to know what I do all day?" asked Alex Sanders, who is the Democratic candidate seeking to replace Strom Thurmond as United States senator from South Carolina this year. "I sit at a desk with a telephone. A woman named Ashley...

Waiting for war; elections are a few weeks away, and the country is bracing for an explosion.(Columbia)
May 13, 2002... The power failure that knocked out the lights in the greater part of Colombia in March was not, it turned out, the result of a bomb. As officials explained to a skittish public two days later, it was the result of a hundred and seventy bombs,...

Public nuisance.(author Larry Kramer warned about AIDS)
May 13, 2002... A long and vituperative essay appeared on the front page of the March 14, 1983, issue of a weekly newspaper called the New York Native. The Native was the city's only significant gay publication at the time, and anything printed there was...

The collector: the conquests and canvases of Peggy Guggenheim.
May 13, 2002... Entering Picasso's studio in Paris, in 1940, Peggy Guggenheim found the Master surrounded by a group of admirers. Her artistic mission for the past several months -- to buy a picture a day -- was widely known; most artists and dealers,...

Briefly noted.(four books)(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Oaxaca Journal, by Oliver Sacks (National Geographic; $20). The eminent neurologist is also a fern lover, and this book is his record of a ten-day "fern foray" in southern Mexico. It is light and fastmoving, unburdened by library research but...

Tangled webs: "Spider-Man" and "The Lady and the Duke."(two motion pictures)
May 13, 2002... What happens to movies? Whom should we blame when a big studio picture goes astray, or does it have an entropy of its own? To be specific: how come "Spider-Man" begins in such good humor and ends, like Eensy-Weensy, completely up the spout? The...

Orpheus ascending: Monteverdi triumphs in Brooklyn.(three operas)
May 13, 2002... Portraits of Claudio Monteverdi show a pale, stern man with vaguely haunted eyes. He could be mistaken for a Renaissance prelate of intellectual bent, one who tried to keep the world and its pleasures at a distance. This ascetic-looking...

Back to the woods: witches, wolves, and wish fulfillment.('Into the Woods')
May 13, 2002... It is a coincidence that the first Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 1987 fairy-tale-derived musical "Into the Woods" has arrived in New York, at the Broadhurst, at this particular moment, but the timing could not have been...

Growth Industry.(books about gardening)(Brief Article)(Bibliography)
May 13, 2002... With the coming of spring, the Modern Library recently began a new series of classic books on gardening, literary excursions on the art and ethos of gardens, which the general editor of the series, Michael Pollan, likens to a conversation that...

SILLY IDEAS.(principle of academic freedom leads to sanctions against university that employs professor of controversial article)
May 13, 2002... Academic-freedom cases frequently are fuzzy. Sometimes they involve professors who use offensive language in the sincere hope of annoying people. Sometimes they involve activities that are not included in the job description--things said and...

HERE'S JOHNNIE.(woman whose name was put on list of suspected terrorists used by airlines)
May 13, 2002... If you happened to take the US Airways shuttle from Logan to LaGuardia on March 23rd, you might have been stuck for a good while behind Johnnie Thomas, a seventy-year-old African-American woman at the head of the check-in line. The ticket agent...

AN ART-HOUSE EPIC.(premiere of 'Cremaster 3' film by Matthew Barney)
May 13, 2002... By the middle of last week, outside the Ziegfeld Theatre, a line had begun to form of would-be patrons of "Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones," which opens on May 16th. If the "Star Wars" aficionados had gained entrance to the theatre...

A BILLION-DOLLAR MAN.(film producer Mace Neufeld and films he produced that have earned a total of at least $1 billion)
May 13, 2002... Coming soon to the big screen is "The Sum of All Fears," the fourth, most terrifying, and most comprehensive of the Tom Clancy-based action thrillers. This one incorporates everything: international spies, neo-Nazis, corrupt Russian generals,...

BOOKSTORE CAT.(Gotham Book Mart bookstore in New York, New York, is for sale; tale of store's cat)
May 13, 2002... The first time Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, laid eyes on his enormous orange tabby cat, it was chasing three smaller cats around his sister's house in San Diego and pursuing an occasional seagull up and down her porch...

AFTER STROM.(congressional candidate Alex Sanders, who is vying with other candidates to replace retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond )
May 13, 2002... "Do you want to know what I do all day?" asked Alex Sanders, who is the Democratic candidate seeking to replace Strom Thurmond as United States senator from South Carolina this year. "I sit at a desk with a telephone. A woman named Ashley...

WAITING FOR WAR.(strained political and social conditions in Colombia )
May 13, 2002... The power failure that knocked out the lights in the greater part of Colombia in March was not, it turned out, the result of a bomb. As officials explained to a skittish public two days later, it was the result of a hundred and seventy bombs,...

PUBLIC NUISANCE.(gay activist Larry Kramer)(Interview)
May 13, 2002... A long and vituperative essay appeared on the front page of the March 14, 1983, issue of a weekly newspaper called the New York Native. The Native was the city's only significant gay publication at the time, and anything printed there was...

THE COLLECTOR.('Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim')(Book Review)
May 13, 2002... Entering Picasso's studio in Paris, in 1940, Peggy Guggenheim found the Master surrounded by a group of admirers. Her artistic mission for the past several months--to buy a picture a day--was widely known; most artists and dealers, anticipating...

TANGLED WEBS.(movie criticism)
May 13, 2002... What happens to movies? Whom should we blame when a big studio picture goes astray, or does it have an entropy of its own? To be specific: how come "Spider-Man" begins in such good humor and ends, like Eensy-Weensy, completely up the spout? The...

ORPHEUS ASCENDING.('Orfeo,' 'The Coronation of Poppea,' 'The Return of Ulysses' operas)(Opera Review)
May 13, 2002... Portraits of Claudio Monteverdi show a pale, stern man with vaguely haunted eyes. He could be mistaken for a Renaissance prelate of intellectual bent, one who tried to keep the world and its pleasures at a distance. This ascetic-looking...

BACK TO THE WOODS.('Into the Woods' at the Broadhurst Theater, New York, New York and 'The Man Who Had All the Luck: A Fable' at Virginia Theatre)(Theater Review)
May 13, 2002... It is a coincidence that the first Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 1987 fairy-tale-derived musical "Into the Woods" has arrived in New York, at the Broadhurst, at this particular moment, but the timing could not have...

Garage sale.(On and Off the Avenue)
May 20, 2002... "I've been standing out here in my underwear for thirteen years," says Illisa, the preeminent vintage-lingerie vender at the GARAGE (112 W. 25th St.; 647-0707), the beloved weekends-only haunt in the heart of Chelsea's antiques and collectibles...

Solitary men.(Book Currents)(two books)
May 20, 2002... If you spent the last weekend in April at the Merlefest bluegrass festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you may have run across a tall, handsome tepee dweller in buckskins. That was Eustace Conway, an idealistic Luddite who "heritage farms"...

Comment; bad envoronments.(The Talk of the Town)(Bush administration environmental policy)
May 20, 2002... Many of the mountains of West Virginia have no tops. These were "removed," as in the mining practice known as "mountaintop removal," by companies seeking to get at the coal beneath. Earlier this month, one of the few limits on this highly...

Ink; prep-school novelist.(The Talk of the Town)(Nick McDonnell)
May 20, 2002... Nick McDonell is a Harvard-bound eighteen-year-old with sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, a heavy brow, and a satirical first novel. It is called "Twelve," and its subject is underage depravity in the 10021 Zip Code. Thirty thousand copies of the...

Men in dresses dept.; remembering Milton Berle.(The Talk of the Town)(Obituary)
May 20, 2002... About two hundred and fifty people packed the Friars Club the other day for a memorial tribute to Milton Berle, Abbot Emeritus of the ninety-eight-year-old fraternal association, which is made up mostly of entertainers and comics. Berle was a...

No moss dept.; when the blimp comes down.(The Talk of the Town)(Rolling Stones)
May 20, 2002... Best ever Rolling Stones tour publicity stunt? No contest. "Flatbed truck," James Karnbach said. He was standing behind a fence in Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx, where the Stones were scheduled to announce a new world tour to an audience of...

Postscript; a New York horse.(The Talk of the Town)(Seattle Slew)
May 20, 2002... New Yorkers can be born anywhere. Then one day they just show up here and fit right in. Seattle Slew, who died last week, at the age of twenty-eight, was that sort of New Yorker. He had the native blend of showmanship and come-from-behind...

The financial page; doom, incorporated.(The Talk of the Town)(Amazon.com detractor)
May 20, 2002... In the summer of 2000, a Wall Street star was born. Ravi Suria, a young bond analyst at Lehman Brothers, issued a twenty-seven-page indictment of Amazon.com, depicting it as an inept company with poor credit and "the financial characteristics...

A year of trouble; a city subverts itself.(Cincinnati, Ohio)
May 20, 2002... Late on the night of Friday, April 6, 2001, so late it was already well into Saturday morning, a young man named Timothy Thomas went out for a pack of cigarettes in a near-downtown Cincinnati neighborhood known as Over-the-Rhine. Thomas lived a...

A man-child in lotusland; inside the big world of Shaquille O'Neal.
May 20, 2002... Shaquille O'Neal, the Los Angeles Lakers center, lives, during the basketball season, in a large cream-colored mansion at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac in Beverly Hills. The exterior of O'Neal's house is discreetly opulent, and it is not until...

A hole in the city.(Portfolio by Joel Meyerowitz)
May 20, 2002... Bordered on the north by Vesey Street, on the south by Liberty, on the east by Church, and on the west by West Street, the World Trade Center site comprises sixteen acres. Without the towers, it seems improbably small, as does the rest of lower...

Groundwork; how the future of Ground Zero is being resolved.(The Sky Line)(New York City)
May 20, 2002... For much of the eighteenth century, Greenwich Street marked the western edge of Manhattan. It ran along the Hudson River from the southern tip of the island to a rural precinct -- Greenwich Village -- two miles north. By 1800, after landfills...

The queen's heart; in time for her Golden Jubilee, two biographies of Elizabeth II.(two books)
May 20, 2002... Word of the car crash reached Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, at one o'clock in the morning of August 31, 1997. Word of the death came through at four. Prince Charles was in residence, with his sons; the Queen advised him not to wake them (they...

Exile on Wall Street; soul-searching at Cramer Partners.('Confessions of a Street Addict')
May 20, 2002... At the peak of his Wall Street success, James J. Cramer would get up at 3:45 A.M. at his home, in Summit, New Jersey, and go online and write a short article for the investment Web site he had co-founded, TheStreet.com. Then his chauffeur would...

Star struck; "Attack of the Clones" and "Hollywood Ending."(two films)
May 20, 2002... When the first "Star Wars" movie came out, in 1977, many of us admired it as an enormous spoof. Despite some startlingly fresh elements -- enchanted landscapes, a bestiary of snouted, furred, and beaked creatures gurgling in Urdu -- the movie...

Garage Sale.(vendors at Garage collective in New York City's Chelsea district)
May 20, 2002... "I've been standing out here in my underwear for thirteen years," says Illisa, the preeminent vintage-lingerie vender at the GARAGE (112 W. 25th St.; 647-0707), the beloved weekends-only haunt in the heart of Chelsea's antiques and collectibles...

Solitary Men.(THE LAST AMERICAN MAN; SEA ROOM )(Book Review)
May 20, 2002... If you spent the last weekend in April at the Merlefest bluegrass festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you may have run across a tall, handsome tepee dweller in buckskins. That was Eustace Conway, an idealistic Luddite who "heritage farms"...

BAD ENVIRONMENTS.(Bush administration seriously weakens environmental protection policies)
May 20, 2002... Many of the mountains of West Virginia have no tops. These were "removed," as in the mining practice known as "mountaintop removal," by companies seeking to get at the coal beneath. Earlier this month, one of the few limits on this highly...

PREP--SCHOOL NOVELIST.(Nick McDonell)
May 20, 2002... Nick McDonell is a Harvard-bound eighteen-year-old with sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, a heavy brow, and a satirical first novel. It is called "Twelve," and its subject is underage depravity in the 10021 Zip Code. Thirty thousand copies of the...

REMEMBERING MILTON BERLE.
May 20, 2002... About two hundred and fifty people packed the Friars Club the other day for a memorial tribute to Milton Berle, Abbot Emeritus of the ninety-eight-year-old fraternal association, which is made up mostly of entertainers and comics. Berle was a...

A NEW YORK HORSE.(Seattle Slew)(Brief Article)
May 20, 2002... New Yorkers can be born anywhere. Then one day they just show up here and fit right in. Seattle Slew, who died last week, at the age of twenty-eight, was that sort of New Yorker. He had the native blend of showmanship and come-from-behind...

WHEN THE BLIMP COMES DOWN.(Rolling Stones tour publicity stunt)
May 20, 2002... Best ever Rolling Stones tour publicity stunt? No contest. "Flatbed truck," James Karnbach said. He was standing behind a fence in Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx, where the Stones were scheduled to announce a new world tour to an audience of...

DOOM, INCORPORATED.(Ravi Suria's dire predictions about Amazon.com fail to materialize)
May 20, 2002... In the summer of 2000, a Wall Street star was born. Ravi Suria, a young bond analyst at Lehman Brothers, issued a twenty-seven-page indictment of Amazon.com, depicting it as an inept company with poor credit and "the financial characteristics...

A YEAR OF TROUBLE.(racial strife in Cincinnati, OH)
May 20, 2002... CINCINNATI, OHIO Late on the night of Friday, April 6, 2001, so late it was already well into Saturday morning, a young man named Timothy Thomas went out for a pack of cigarettes in a near-downtown Cincinnati neighborhood known as...

A man--child in lotusland.(basketball player Shaquille O'Neal)(Interview)
May 20, 2002... Shaquille O'Neal, the Los Angeles Lakers center, lives, during the basketball season, in a large cream-colored mansion at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac in Beverly Hills. The exterior of O'Neal's house is discreetly opulent, and it is not until...

A HOLE IN THE CITY.(World Trade Center site)
May 20, 2002... Bordered on the north by Vesey Street, on the south by Liberty, on the east by Church, and on the west by West Street, the World Trade Center site comprises sixteen acres. Without the towers, it seems improbably small, as does the rest of lower...

GROUNDWORK.(plans for World Trade Center site)
May 20, 2002... For much of the eighteenth century, Greenwich Street marked the western edge of Manhattan. It ran along the Hudson River from the southern tip of the island to a rural precinct--Greenwich Village--two miles north. By 1800, after landfills had...

THE QUEEN'S HEART.("Monarch: The Life and Reign of Elizabeth II")("The Monarchy: An Oral Biography of Elizabeth II")(Book Review)
May 20, 2002... Word of the car crash reached Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, at one o'clock in the morning of August 31, 1997. Word of the death came through at four. Prince Charles was in residence, with his sons; the Queen advised him not to wake them (they...

EXILE ON WALL STREET.("Confessions of a Street Addict")(Book Review)
May 20, 2002... At the peak of his Wall Street success, James J. Cramer would get up at 3:45 A.M. at his home, in Summit, New Jersey, and go online and write a short article for the investment Web site he had co-founded, TheStreet.com. Then his chauffeur would...

STAR STRUCK.("Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones"; "Hollywood Ending")(Movie Review)
May 20, 2002... From 1977, Penelope Gilliatt on "Star Wars" From 1977, Pauline Kael on "Star Wars" From 1980, Roger Angell on "The Empire Strikes Back" From 1983, Pauline Kael on "Return of the Jedi" From 1999, Anthony Lane on "Episode I--The...

Book currents: beached.(three books)
May 27, 2002... Before the era of overpopulated time-shares, minivans, and Lizzie Grubman, Long Island's East End was famed as the "premier retreat for America's artistic and literary luminaries." So write Helen A. Harrison and Constance Ayers Denne in...

Comment: it's a deal.(The Talk of the Town)(nuclear arms treaty)
May 27, 2002... Reykjavik -- ring a bell? The capital of Iceland, and the site of one of the gaudiest missed opportunities of the twentieth century. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev went there in October of 1986 for a long weekend, and in an exhilarating...

The bench: country-club courtroom.(The Talk of the Town)(trial Michael Skakel for the murder of Martha Moxley in 1975)
May 27, 2002... The atmosphere around the trial of Michael Skakel last week was curiously genteel. Skakel, of course, is the so-called Kennedy cousin (actually, he is Ethel Kennedy's nephew) who is charged with murdering his friend Martha Moxley with a golf...