The New Yorker articles from May 2003

The New Yorker archives from May 2003

Victoriana.(The Victorians; The Crimson Petal and the White; The Trail of the Serpent )(Book Review)
May 5, 2003... Better known for his prodigious output as a biographer--his subjects have included Tolstoy, Jesus, and C. S. Lewis--A. N. Wilson has returned to social history. The Victorians (W. W. Norton), Wilson's chronicle of nineteenth-century Britain,...

DOG BITES MAN.(Senator Rick Santorum's controversial Associated Press interview)
May 5, 2003... The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is the birthplace of Gertrude Stein, the Duchess of Windsor, and Andy Warhol. Pennsylvania's largest urban conglomeration, Philadelphia, is known as the City of Brotherly Love, and it also gave its name to the...

FIRST CITIES.("Art of the First Cities" exhibition of Early Bronze Age art at Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY)
May 5, 2003... News of the catastrophic looting of the National Museum in Baghdad coincided, in the most heartrending way, with the countdown to a long-planned exhibition, opening on May 8th at the Metropolitan Museum, of Early Bronze Age art from the region...

THE CONTRACTORS.(connections betweencontracts for rebuilding Iraq and fortune behind Osama bin Laden)
May 5, 2003... Back when Americans were still debating whether there was just cause for a preemptive strike against Iraq, few arguments were scrutinized more closely than the Bush Administration's contention that there were covert links between Al Qaeda and...

ACKNOWLEDGED.(Amazon.com book reviewer Francis McInerney)
May 5, 2003... The success of "The Da Vinci Code,"a new thriller by Dan Brown, isn't exactly a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but it certainly is astonishing, because novels by unheralded writers like Dan Brown almost never debut at the top of...

A GOOD NOSE.(makeup artist John Caglione, Jr.)(Interview)
May 5, 2003... What with the hubbub over Nicole Kidman's nose in "The Hours”--the film didn't get a best-makeup Oscar nomination because the nose was digitally enhanced--this is a good time to be a maker of bona-fide artificial noses. John Caglione,...

THE MARX BROTHER.(Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek)
May 5, 2003... Like all the small, oddly shaped European countries that emerged from the shadow of the Soviet bloc in the last decade of the twentieth century, Slovenia has needed to work hard to establish its place on the international stage. This has been...

THE PEOPLE ON THE BUS.
May 5, 2003... Lately, I like to ride the bus. I don't mean the double-decker tourist buses that, half empty, warily circle the city, like dazed displaced troop carriers, or the long-distance buses that come sighing into the Port Authority Terminal, where it...

SADDAM'S EAR.(Iraqi plastic surgeon Ala Bashir and his relationship with Saddam Hussein)
May 5, 2003... The day after the U.S. Army seized Saddam International Airport and renamed it Baghdad International, a man I knew, Dr. Ala Bashir, received a message from Saddam Hussein. Ala Bashir was a plastic surgeon who had had an unusually friendly...

DESPERATE MEASURES.(surgeon Francis Daniels Moore)
May 5, 2003... On November 28, 1942, an errant match set alight the paper fronds of a fake electric-lit palm tree in a corner of the Cocoanut Grove night club near Boston's theatre district and started one of the worst fires in American history. The flames...

MOTHER'S HELPERS.(Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children)(Book Review)
May 5, 2003... "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do."That is how Dr. Benjamin Spock opened his famous child-care manual of 1946, and according to Ann Hulbert's new book, "Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About...

THE FAR SIDE.(outsider artist Adolf Wolfli)
May 5, 2003... Adolf Wolfli, a Swiss madman, born in 1864, who spent the last thirty-five of his sixty-six years in a psychiatric hospital, is among the greatest of outsider artists. Indeed, he could serve as Exhibit A in a study of the outsider phenomenon:...

WATCHING WANDA.(Wanda at Large; Mr. Personality)(Television Program Review)
May 5, 2003... A couple of weeks ago, NBC ran a Museum of Television & Radio special called "Great Women of Television Comedy."It was a fairly patronizing concept in the first place--"Here's a little something for the ladies”--and the show didn't, and...

PRIVATE WORLDS.(The Dancer Upstairs)(A Mighty Wind)(Movie Review)
May 5, 2003... Throughout the first forty minutes or so of John Malkovich's "The Dancer Upstairs,"I wanted to walk out. This political-manhunt movie, starring the Spanish actor Javier Bardem (from "Before Night Falls”), is set in a nameless and spooked...

Fathers and Sons.(Book Review)
May 12, 2003... The Yale professor of medicine Sherwin Nuland begins LOST IN AMERICA: A JOURNEY WITH MY FATHER (Knopf) by evoking the depression that in his forties so debilitated him that only one doctor protested against his being lobotomized. This was, he...

BUSHONOMICS.
May 12, 2003... Economics has never been the Bush family's thing. The first President Bush was so bored by financial briefings that he sometimes dozed off during them. The second hasn't been caught napping yet, but it's fair to say that the economy isn't his...

THE JOB.
May 12, 2003... As banks go, the HSBC at 265 Broadway, across the street from City Hall Park, is fairly inviting. A sign--"Welcome to the City Hall Branch”--greets you as you walk in, and a TV hangs from the ceiling, broadcasting CNBC. Four red chairs...

AN INSTRUMENTAL MAN.
May 12, 2003... Mark Stewart rarely leaves his apartment in Brooklyn without an instrument of his own design, usually a chaladoo. A chaladoo is a version of a chalumeau, a Baroque clarinet with finger holes instead of keys. The chaladoo has the profile of a...

THE HIGH COST OF ILLNESS.
May 12, 2003... From the moment news of the sars epidemic broke, analysts have been busy trying to calculate its economic costs. The absence of tourists and shoppers in places like Hong Kong and Singapore means billions of dollars in lost sales. Beijing has...

SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE.
May 12, 2003... They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal--a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their...

DEATH OF A CHEF.
May 12, 2003... Poularde Alexandre Dumaine, a two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-dollar chicken offered at La C?te d'Or, Bernard Loiseau's gastronomic temple in Burgundy, is filled with julienned leeks and carrots, lightly basted and seasoned with salt and pepper,...

THE CONTROLLER.
May 12, 2003... Politics is a field with a lot of former practitioners: there is a high failure rate, and success comes tinged with a gnawing nervousness that makes it not worthwhile for everybody. Robert Edgeworth, a Virgil scholar who teaches at Louisiana...

PURE PLEASURE.
May 12, 2003... Baseball joy can be fleeting--just ask George Steinbrenner--but there's a lot of it around in May. Just now, the Cubs, under their new manager, Dusty Baker, are in first place in their division; the Red Sox hang a bare three games behind the...

THE FAMILY ACT.(Theater Review)
May 12, 2003... By the end of "Gypsy"(now in revival at the Shubert), the show's heroine, Louise (Tammy Blanchard), has triumphed over the odds that appeared to be stacked against her--lack of money, lack of encouragement, and the blind fidelity of her mother,...

WHISTLER'S CHIC.
May 12, 2003... James McNeill Whistler is among the greatest of painters when you are in the mood for him and oddly daunting when you aren't. He was a radical dandy, who imbued the nuances of style with something like moral zeal. Taking him seriously, as he...

STANDUP GUYS.("Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s")(Book Review)
May 12, 2003... Anyone can make jokes about books on comedy. Even the grumpy-belletrist-in-a-bow-tie type can tap the dottle out of his pipe long enough to harrumph out the old one about how Mr. Murkle seems to have got comedy down and broken its arm, while...

THE THIRTEENTH STEP.(Book Review)
May 12, 2003... It's one thing merely to ruin your life; to turn it into a mangled, fuming heap of wreckage requires something special--a taste for the theatrical. In fact, part of the genius of the Twelve Step recovery program lies in its ritualized...

UNUSUAL SUSPECTS.(Movie Review)
May 12, 2003... The sequel to "X-Men"is entitled "X2,"which cunningly suggests that we may be getting double the pleasure for our money. The first film, which came out in 2000, concerned a team of "mutants”--creatures who, more often than not, resemble...

Going, Going, Gone.('Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers')(Book Review)
May 19, 2003... In the twelfth century, the bazaars of Arabia were known to offer an exotic and allegedly salutary concoction called "mellified man”--essentially human remains steeped in honey. Mellified man was also known as "human mummy confection,"and...

MARCHES AND PARADES.(Iraq War)
May 19, 2003... comment The sight of President Bush taking his extraordinary victory lap earlier this month aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln made it more difficult to argue with those (a planet-wide majority, if we can believe the international...

TWO BUCKS.(value of money)
May 19, 2003... Two dollars doesn't buy much--half a hot dog at Yankee Stadium, one shined shoe outside Grand Central--but it is twice as much as one, and everybody, unfortunately, is acquainted with the value of a dollar. Two dollars will get you a roll of...

READY OR NOT.(preparedness plans in case of emergency)
May 19, 2003... HERE IN THE HOMELAND The Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, was at the Fire Museum in SoHo last week, at a breakfast meeting to promote his department's new antiterrorism public-information campaign, which is called Ready. The...

COGNITO.(singer Yoko Ono)(Interview)
May 19, 2003... AT TEA On a recent sunny Friday afternoon, Yoko Ono was sipping an iced coffee at La Lanterna di Vittorio, one of the less touristy caf?s in Greenwich Village, and reflecting on life at the age of seventy. She wore black jeans, black su?de...

CAKES.(Chinese food cart vendor in New York, New York)
May 19, 2003... SALES DEPT. The other day in Chinatown, at the corner of Bowery and Grand, David Chen, the seventy-year-old, five-foot-three Cantonese-born owner and proprietor of a small food cart, was going about his business. There was no hint of any...

ACCOUNTANTS IN THE SKY.(highlights about New York politics)
May 19, 2003... Before I worked in Albany, I had always wanted to be a political reporter, perhaps because I had no real idea what the job entailed. I arrived there on December 31, 1986, the eve of Mario Cuomo's second inaugural, and almost immediately was...

THE MISSION.(art enthusiast Heiner Friedrich and the Dia Art Foundation)
May 19, 2003... "I have nothing to say about works of art,"said Heiner Friedrich, who rarely talks about anything else. "They speak for themselves, very clearly and very powerfully."His voluminous black raincoat and crimson scarf, cast aside as he entered the...

THE AIDS REBEL.(South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat)
May 19, 2003... Khayelitsha is a sprawling, ramshackle township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. Most of the settlement's residents live in huts that have been constructed with corrugated tin and insulated with cardboard, plastic tarps, and sheet...

THE UNREAL THING.(influence of 'The Matrix')
May 19, 2003... David Denby on the original "Matrix" For the past four years, a lot of people have been obsessed with the movie "The Matrix."As the sequel, "The Matrix Reloaded,"arrived in theatres this week, it was obvious that the strange, violent...

FOGBOUND.('Long Day's Journey Into Night,' Plymouth Theatre, New York, New York)(Theater Review)
May 19, 2003... In his masterpiece "Long Day's Journey Into Night"(superbly revived at the Plymouth), Eugene O'Neill brought his own spectral, heartbroken family--"the four haunted Tyrones,"he called them--to the stage. Here, in the course of a single day in...

THOSE LIPS, THOSE EYES.('Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino')(Book Review)
May 19, 2003... One imagines how it might have been--without the sudden death, in New York, at thirty-one; without the riotous mourners outside the Frank E. Campbell funeral home; without the subsequent female-fan suicides, or the "lady in black"showing up at...

BIOPERVERSITY.('Oryx and Crake')(Book Review)
May 19, 2003... The novelist Margaret Atwood has wandered off from us before: once, in 1986, to the mid-twenty-first century, for a feminist dystopia, "The Handmaid's Tale,"in which women are enslaved according to their reproductive usefulness; another time,...

GRAND ILLUSIONS.('Kiki & Herb: Coup de Theatre,' Cherry Lane, New York, New York)(Theater Review)
May 19, 2003... It is said of many show-business legends that they lose touch with the ordinary world and become cartoons of their former selves. The opulently dissipated Kiki DuRane--a sixty-something lounge singer who tours ad nauseam with a doleful...

SCHOOL DAYS.('L'Auberge Espagnole' and 'The Shape of Things')(Movie Review)
May 19, 2003... C?dric Klapisch, the talented director of "When the Cat's Away,"wrote his new picture, "L'Auberge Espagnole,"in less than two weeks, cast it on the fly in different European cities, and shot it in Barcelona with a lightweight digital camera....

To a Tee.(books on golf)(Brief Article)
May 26, 2003... "Just remember the three ups,"a seasoned caddy tells the sportswriter Rick Reilly, before Reilly makes his caddying d?but at the Masters. "Show up, keep up, and shut up."In Who's Your Caddy? (Doubleday), he carries the bag for the likes of...

L'AFFAIRE BLAIR.(journalistic misconduct by Jayson Blair)
May 26, 2003... comment In "The Fabulist: A Novel,"published last week by Simon & Schuster, Stephen Glass, once a young star writer for The New Republic, who, in 1998, was fired for fabricating a spectacular series of stories, tells the story of "Stephen...

A DOLLAR, A DREAM.(Arkansas state legislator Jim Lendall proposes that state gamble on lottery)
May 26, 2003... Budget crises are traditionally good news for gamblers. Determined not to raise taxes in the face of a severe deficit that promises unpopular spending cuts--zoos and firehouses closed, garbage and schoolchildren left behind--Governor George...

NOVELIZATION.(Robert Cort, author of Action!)(Interview)
May 26, 2003... Robert Cort, at the age of fifty-six, is the beau ideal of a certain kind of nearly vanished Hollywood producer. At lunch recently, in his customary booth at Morton's, in West Hollywood, he wore white silk trousers, a green nailhead jacket,...

IN WALL STREET WE TRUST.(customer loyalty to securities firms)
May 26, 2003... the financial page Last year, Merrill Lynch was accused of defrauding its clients by giving them corrupt advice about which stocks to buy. Internal e-mails demonstrated that its research analysts had publicly recommended stocks that...

ADVICE AND DISSENT.(political battles over federal judicial confirmations)
May 26, 2003... Ever since the Republicans took control of the Senate in January, Orrin Hatch, the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has sought to use his party's one-vote advantage on the nineteen-member panel to speed President Bush's judicial...

THE STRONGMAN.(Shiv Sena party head Bal Thackeray )
May 26, 2003... On the morning of his son Uddhav's forty-second birthday, Bal Thackeray retreated upstairs to his private living room, in order to avoid the crowds. From his window, he could see hundreds of his supporters outside in the street, standing in...

VOX FOX.(Fox News CEO Roger Ailes)
May 26, 2003... One morning not long ago, the co-hosts of "Fox & Friends,"the Fox News network's raucous and right-leaning version of the "Today"show, were promoting Fox-branded merchandise such as baseball caps and soap-on-a-rope when Steve Doocy, a...

ROMANCE.(car trips in the 1930s)
May 26, 2003... One spring Saturday when I was seven going on eight, my mother brought me with her on an automobile outing with her young lover and future husband, E. B. White. She took our family car, a slope-nosed Franklin sedan, and we must have met Andy by...

A GREAT MUSIC.(God's Secretaries)(Book Review)
May 26, 2003... Every afternoon in England, between about three and six o'clock, candles are lit in the great cathedrals and abbeys and college chapels, and the antique rite known as Evensong is observed. "Sung"would be more accurate than "observed”;...

LAUGHTER IN THE DARK.(Writer's Block)(Theater Review)
May 26, 2003... For nearly fifty years, Woody Allen has spun the dross of morbidity into the gold of comedy. The results of this alchemy have been precious and far-reaching. No modern comedian can match Allen's range or the quality of his output. His humor...

SEX AND THE SIXTIES GIRL.(Down with Love)(Movie Review)
May 26, 2003... The opening credits of "Down with Love"are a thing of beauty, but then opening credits have become the best reason to make it to the movies on time. For pure visual snap, there has been nothing in the past year to match the credits of...