The New Yorker articles from May 2004

The New Yorker archives from May 2004

ON THE AIR.(The Talk of the Town)(environmental policy)
May 3, 2004... Last week, on Earth Day, George W. Bush paid a visit to the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve, in southern Maine. For the occasion, he wore an outdoorsy-looking blue shirt, and a jacket embroidered with the reserve's logo--a fish...

CHANGES.(The Talk of the Town)(feminism past and present)
May 3, 2004... One of the achievements of the feminist movement of the late sixties and early seventies, along with the winning of reproductive freedoms and the right to a paycheck equivalent to a man's, was the introduction of the orgasm as a proper topic...

WORD PROBLEM.(The Talk of the Town)(definition of genocide and the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks)
May 3, 2004... Among the many peculiarities of Times house style--such as the tradition, in the Book Review, that the word "odyssey" refer only to a journey that begins and ends in the same place--one of the more nettlesome has been the long-standing...

SUBSTITUTE.(The Talk of the Town)(college faculty labor disputes)
May 3, 2004... Even under normal circumstances, with the magnolias and the cherry trees in full bloom, it would have been tough last week for Columbia students to drag themselves to class, but, as luck would have it, hundreds of them were additionally...

PHILIP HAMBURGER.(The Talk of the Town)(Philip Hamburger, a journalist for the New Yorker for 65 years, is remembered.)(Obituary)(Biography)
May 3, 2004... From 1939, Philip Hamburger's first piece for The New Yorker From 2003, Philip Hamburger's last piece for The New Yorker Philip Hamburger, our friend and colleague at the magazine for sixty-five years, spent the last few months of his...

SELF INVENTIONS.(Surrealist artist and poet Dorothea Tanning at 93.)(Interview)(Biography)
May 3, 2004... In the summer of 1928, when the poet and painter Dorothea Tanning was eighteen and inching her way out of Galesburg, Illinois--a town of twenty-seven thousand Christian souls, twenty-four churches, and a public library where, under cover of a...

THE UPRISING.(Iraq War)
May 3, 2004... The day in mid-April that the Iraqi mujahideen executed an Italian security guard who had been taken hostage near Fallujah, I went dynamite fishing on the Tigris. My host was a Shiite cleric, Ayad Jamaluddin, whom I met in Baghdad last summer....

THE MISERY BROKER.(Raoul Felder has been a divorce lawyer for 41 years, and is still going strong.)(Interview)(Biography)
May 3, 2004... No. 437 Madison Avenue is an anonymous concrete and glass office tower just south of the Palace Hotel. On the thirtieth floor, to the left of the elevator bank, is a set of fake brown doors painted to resemble the entrance to a run-down Los...

STALKERS AND TALKERS.(Assassins)(Jumpers)(Theater Review)
May 3, 2004... Ever since Homo sapiens put down their clubs and started fighting one another with property, the vocabulary of murder has been inseparable from capitalism's bravado of success. "Making a killing," "killer instinct," "going for the kill," and...

DID BROWN MATTER?(Brown v. Board of Education)
May 3, 2004... From 1956, Bernard Taper on Thurgood Marshall and the N.A.A.C.P. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," the Court ruled...

BARE MINIMAL.(Two art exhibitions of Minimalist Art.)
May 3, 2004... A bicoastal brace of mighty exhibitions--"A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968," at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and "Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present," at the Guggenheim--scans...

IN THE NAME OF LOVE.(Laws of Attraction)(Monty Python's Life of Brian)(Movie Review)
May 3, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File To make a romantic comedy about lawyers is, if not a contradiction in terms, certainly something of a challenge, like trying to set a slasher movie in a petting zoo. Peter Howitt, who gave us "Sliding...

LOSING: THE VIRUS.(The Talk of the Town)(Yankee baseball)
May 10, 2004... In a wonderful 1943 novel, "I Am Thinking of My Darling," by Vincent McHugh, New York City is invaded by a previously unknown tropical virus that quickly grows to epidemic proportions and afflicts the entire population. The hero is a young city...

THE CANDIDATE.(The Talk of the Town)(Frank Barbaro's Congressional run)
May 10, 2004... One recent morning in Brooklyn, Frank Barbaro--seventy-six, a onetime longshoreman, a retired State Supreme Court judge, and a former state assemblyman--put on a blue suit, a blue shirt, and a red patterned tie, drove to Staten Island, then...

A BOTTLE OF WINE.(The Talk of the Town)
May 10, 2004... The practice of drinking wine and then finding something to say about it has always had a certain national character. English wine writers, for example, are fusty and understated; Americans, democratic and exuberant (Europeans might say...

COMPLEX PROCESS.(The Talk of the Town)(discourse analysis and leadership potential)
May 10, 2004... Kathryn Cason likes watching Tim Russert grill political candidates on "Meet the Press." She likes to see them stammer and squirm when they are forced to answer questions for which they are not prepared, and she likes to comb through the...

TEAM PLAYERS.(The Talk of the Town)(US military policy and the intelligence community)
May 10, 2004... James Surowiecki talks about intelligence agencies and managing secrecy Amid the contentiousness and acrimony of the debate over September 11th and the war in Iraq, the one thing that almost everyone seems to agree on is that the American...

TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB.(Iraqi war prisoners)
May 10, 2004... Additional images of the torture of Iraqi prisoners The New Yorker's complete coverage of the conflict in Iraq In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world's most notorious prisons, with...

KERRY'S TRIALS.(excerpt from Joe Klein's '2002: A Profile of John Kerry')(Excerpt)
May 10, 2004... From 2002, a Profile of John Kerry, by Joe Klein The New Yorker's complete coverage of the 2004 Presidential race John Kerry graduated from Boston College Law School in 1976, when he was thirty-two years old and on the brink of...

SHOE DREAMS.(Italian shoemaker Diego Della Valle)(Interview)
May 10, 2004... Casette d'Ete, a town in the Italian province of Le Marche, has been a center of shoemaking in Italy for almost a century. There are thousands of shoe manufacturers in the region, mostly small factories employing about a hundred people each,...

GADFLY.(satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, his character Evita Bezuidenhout, and South African politics)
May 10, 2004... Pieter-Dirk Uys often refers to Evita Bezuidenhout as "the most famous white woman in South Africa." Not long ago, I happened to be visiting Uys, the country's leading satirist, on a day when Mrs. Bezuidenhout's name had appeared in the...

LAST OF THE METROZOIDS.(personal memoriam to art historian Kirk Varnedoe)(Obituary)
May 10, 2004... In the spring of 2003, the American art historian Kirk Varnedoe accepted the title of head coach of a football team called the Giant Metrozoids, which practiced then every week in Central Park. It was a busy time for him. He had just become a...

IN THE SOUP.(Plan of Attack)(Book Review)
May 10, 2004... When is the publication of a book not just the publication of a book? Not much of a riddle, that, because the answer, just now, is obvious: when the author of the book is Bob Woodward. That singular circumstance turns the publication into a...

RAZZMATAZZ.(dance production)
May 10, 2004... What would our American dance producers do without European goods to sell? Give up, probably. At series like bam's Next Wave Festival and the Lincoln Center Festival, a good seat usually costs fifty dollars or more. At such prices, you need to...

LOONEY TUNES.(The Saddest Music in the World)(Mean Girls)(Movie Review)
May 10, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File The films of the Canadian director Guy Maddin are an acquired taste, and there is a furtive, joyous air of conspiracy among those who have made the acquisition. They have seen "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs"...

PUFFY AND FLUFFY.(A Raisin in the Sun)(Critical Essay)
May 10, 2004... "Never in the history of the American theatre had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage," James Baldwin wrote in "Sweet Lorraine," an essay about the 1959 debut of "A Raisin in the Sun" and the play's...

HEARTS AND MINDS.(The Talk of the Town)(Iraq War)
May 17, 2004... In the days of Saddam Hussein, hangings at Abu Ghraib prison took place on Wednesdays and Sundays--up to fifty or sixty a day, year after year, decade after decade. Prisoners were often shuttled to Abu Ghraib--a vast complex twenty miles west...

CITIES AND SONGS.(The Talk of the Town)(Jane Jacobs )(Interview)(Biography)
May 17, 2004... Jane Jacobs, the matchless analyst of all things urban, returned to New York the other day and looked around her. In the forty-plus years since her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" appeared, her views, which then seemed...

ISN'T IT ROMANTIC?(The Talk of the Town)(Melanie Craft)
May 17, 2004... Among romance novelists, as among porn stars and career criminals, the use of a pseudonym is a time-honored practice: the best-selling author Carly Phillips is also the slightly worse-selling author Karen Drogin, while Jayne Ann Krentz and...

A KERRY REPUBLICAN.(The Talk of the Town)(Republican Grant Winthrop campaigns for Democrat John Kerry)
May 17, 2004... Someday, no doubt, students of class politics will reach a consensus on precisely when it was that George W. Bush's chucking of his family's patrician--and moderate--ethos reached the point of irretrievability. (Was it when he said he didn't...

FAMILY BUSINESS.(The Talk of the Town)(clothing industry)
May 17, 2004... The entire Ermenegildo Zegna clan flew in from Italy's Piedmont region the other evening to celebrate the opening of their new clothing store on Fifth Avenue. Three generations of Zegnas--including the eighty-year-old president, Angelo; his...

CHAIN OF COMMAND.(torture of Iraqi prisoners)
May 17, 2004... In his devastating report on conditions at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, Major General Antonio M. Taguba singled out only three military men for praise. One of them, Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, should be commended,...

PROJECT KNUCKLEBALL.(baseball)
May 17, 2004... As season-ending home runs go, Aaron Boone's eleventh-inning shot for the Yankees against the Red Sox last October looks pretty unimpressive in retrospect. Watch the video replay once more: a paunchy, goateed pitcher, his cap pulled down low,...

CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE.(Iraq War)
May 17, 2004... On the March morning I visited the Baghdad morgue, which is in a decaying neighborhood near the Tigris River, a young forensic-medicine specialist named Dr. Bashir Shaker was on duty. It was the day after Ashura, one of the most important...

THE SILVER THIEF.
May 17, 2004... Sometime during the early hours of January 29, 2002, a great deal of sterling silver vanished from a mansion near Rhinebeck, New York. The mansion, known as Edgewater, was built in 1823 and for decades was the home of a family named Donaldson....

PATRIOT GAMES.(Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity)(Book Review)
May 17, 2004... In polls conducted during the past fifteen years, between ninety-six and ninety-eight per cent of all Americans said that they were "very" proud or "quite" proud of their country. When young Americans were asked whether they wanted to do...

STRIKING GOLD.(Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557), Metropolitan Museum)
May 17, 2004... "The city was desolate, lying dead, naked, soundless, having neither form nor beauty." This was Constantinople in late May, 1453, when Ottoman armies extinguished the eleven-century dominion of the Byzantine Empire. The writer, a...

IGNORE THE CONDUCTOR.(composer Timothy Andres)(Interview)
May 17, 2004... When Timothy Andres was seven, his father, a computer specialist, brought home a teach-yourself-piano computer program. Andres was done with it in three weeks. He is now a freshman at Yale, and his musical progress is still accelerating. For...

TROUBLE IN MIND.(Guinea Pig Solo)(Bug)(Theater Review)
May 17, 2004... At the time of his death, in 1837, Georg Buchner, the influential German dramatist, novelist, and essayist, left behind some unfinished works. Of them, "Woyzeck," a morality play that details a lowly soldier's slow descent into madness, remains...

HEROES.(motion picture 'Troy')(Movie Review)
May 17, 2004... The Bible is so varied and so richly suggestive as a narrative source that moviemakers can go low ("The Ten Commandments," "The Passion of the Christ") or high ("The Gospel According to St. Matthew") and get away with either strategy....

UNCONVENTIONAL WAR.(The Talk of the Town)(abuse of prisoners by American military at Abu Ghraib is part of a pattern of contempt for international law and judicial process that stemmed from the top of the Bush administration)
May 24, 2004... One passage of the Declaration of Independence which seldom gets quoted in Fourth of July oratory is the final item on the long list of George III's "injuries and usurpations." It's the bit where the delegates to the Continental Congress accuse...

A PICASSO FACE-LIFT.(The Talk of the Town)(Museum of Modern Art conservation experts are doing a major restoration of Picasso's painting 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon')
May 24, 2004... It takes steady nerves to operate on a ninety-seven-year-old patient, especially when the patient is: (1) eight feet tall; (2) not sick; and (3) the cornerstone of modern art. For the past six months, Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," born...

WRECKED AGAIN.(The Talk of the Town)(filming New York City disaster scenes for the film 'The Day After Tomorrow')
May 24, 2004... If you're planning to depict an attack on New York City in a disaster film, you need to bring your A game. For the same reason that deadly-virus movies are usually set in aseptic laboratories or, interchangeably, in the suburbs, radioactive...

SH-H-H.(The Talk of the Town)(pianist Philippe Bianconi discusses the silent movement in Erwin Schulhoff's 'Five Picturesques')
May 24, 2004... One recent morning, the French pianist Philippe Bianconi sat at a scruffy old Steinway in a practice room tucked away in the 92nd Street Y looking at the score in front of him with some perplexity. A slight man, with glasses and a wily,...

PITCHING RUBBERS.(The Talk of the Town)(Brent Quinn and South African campaign to promote condom use, 'The Three Amigos,' featuring three talking prophylactics)
May 24, 2004... "We really need to destigmatize the condom," Brent Quinn said the other day, as he sipped from a Margarita. "Let's make the condom lovable. It's kind of a crap word. If you say, 'Hey, have you got an Amigo?' it's a bit more lovable." ...

THE GRAY ZONE.(the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal can be traced back to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's alleged approval of expansion of a secret interrogation program )
May 24, 2004... Hendrik Hertzberg on the laws of war Seymour M. Hersh's first report on the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by the U.S. Army Seymour M. Hersh on how the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster The Abu Ghraib prison pictures ...

RICHES OF EMBARRASSMENT.(appreciation of author Peter De Vries)
May 24, 2004... Peter De Vries once observed that "comedy deals with that portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy." Few writers have understood literary comedy as well as De Vries, and few comic novelists have had his grasp of tragedy. The...

THE SQUID HUNTER.(searching for giant squid thought to inhabit the seas near New Zealand, with marine biologist Steve O'Shea)
May 24, 2004... An interview with David Grann. On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat...

BUFFALO TIM.(Tim Russert depicts his relationship with his father in his book 'Big Russ & Me')
May 24, 2004... Father's Day has always been a difficult time for me. It isn't that I don't have a father; rather, it's that, every year at about this time, from the sky descends a giant fixed template of American Dad-dom, which, alas, fits my father very...

FIREWORKS.(singer and pianist Nellie McKay)
May 24, 2004... The nineteen-year-old singer and pianist Nellie McKay has said repeatedly that she wants to be famous, and she has generated a small bible of press clippings to nudge the process along. It's a fun read. McKay pushes her politics (peta activist,...

HIGH-TECH BIBLIOPHILIA.(Rem Koolhaas's new Seattle public library building is thrilling in its design)
May 24, 2004... If you wanted to build a new library downtown somewhere, Rem Koolhaas is probably the last architect you would think to hire. For years, Koolhaas has been ranting about how traditional cities don't matter anymore, and how the rise of new...

SYLVIA GROWS UP.(Mark Morris creates new production of 'Sylvia' for San Francisco Ballet)
May 24, 2004... The great surprise, and much of the beauty, of Mark Morris's new "Sylvia," for San Francisco Ballet--it opened late last month at the War Memorial Opera House--is that Morris took the ballet's story completely seriously. "Sylvia," based on a...

CREATING MONSTERS.('Van Helsing' and 'Control Room')(Movie Review)
May 24, 2004... So there you are, trotting along in your horse-drawn carriage in the year 1888. It is a pleasant scene, although you might have chosen not to find your left-hand wheels spinning vainly over the brink of a ravine. The fact that the carriage...