The New Yorker articles from May 2005

The New Yorker archives from May 2005

HOLY ORDERS.(The Talk of the Town)(Pope Benedict XVI)
May 2, 2005... Cardinals of the Church of Rome do not normally hold press conferences to spin their choices, but that is precisely what many of them did last Wednesday, less than a day after they named Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Prefect of the...

NEW HACK CITY.(The Talk of the Town)(New York)
May 2, 2005... Certain natives blanched at the revelation, a couple of months ago, that the city's new Marketing department had applied for a trademark for the slogan "the World's Second Home," in reference to New York. Why aim so low? Actually, from a...

DRUNK MONK.(The Talk of the Town)(Kung-Fu)
May 2, 2005... There are only so many birthday-party venues where you wait around for the guest of honor in your socks. One of them is a Buddhist kung-fu temple. One night not long ago, about two hundred people left their shoes outside the door of the U.S.A....

THE WRITING WIFE.(The Talk of the Town)(Cheryl Howard)(Interview)
May 2, 2005... When Jackie Collins finally got around to updating her early- eighties classic, "Hollywood Wives," in 2001, she took care to insure that "Hollywood Wives: The New Generation" would reflect certain significant shifts in the culture of Los...

OIL CHANGE.(The Talk of the Town)(petroleum and the US)
May 2, 2005... It was sometime last spring that the dreaded words "oil shock" first began to appear regularly in commentary on the United States economy. As the price of oil rose past forty dollars a barrel, many economists and Wall Street analysts predicted...

A MODEL PATIENT.(modern medical training)
May 2, 2005... Four students in their third year at Harvard Medical School recently met a patient named Mr. Martin. The students' mentors, two physicians, told them that Martin had come to the emergency room complaining of abdominal pain that had grown...

ROMAN RENOVATION.(Piazza Augusto Imperatore)
May 2, 2005... Recent events at St. Peter's Square, in Rome, have demonstrated, among other things, the virtues of a piazza. Three million people entered Rome in the course of about five days, and almost all of them came to the piazza outside the basilica....

THE CLIMATE OF MAN--II.(Babylon)
May 2, 2005... The world's first empire was established forty-three hundred years ago, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The details of its founding, by Sargon of Akkad, have come down to us in a form somewhere between history and myth....

THE MASOCHISM CAMPAIGN.(Saturday)(Book Review)
May 2, 2005... Not long before making a series of visits to No. 10 Downing Street, I was reading the novel that everyone in London seemed to be poring over in the cafes and on the benches in St. James's Park--Ian McEwan's "Saturday," which is set on February...

GREEN MONSTER - A STARTLING ADDITION TO ASTOR PLACE.(apartment buildings)
May 2, 2005... The first thing you think when you see the new luxury apartment building at Astor Place--a slick, undulating tower clad in sparkly green glass--is that it doesn't belong in the neighborhood. The tone of Astor Place is set by places like Cooper...

THE KING OF SPAIN.(Celebrating Jordi Savall)(Concert Review)
May 2, 2005... When the Catalan viol player Jordi Savall presented three concerts at the Metropolitan Museum earlier this month, one musical border after another seemed to melt away--borders between past and present, composition and improvisation, "popular"...

ANGRY PEOPLE.(Crash)(Movie Review)
May 2, 2005... If there's an ill-tempered remark that has ever been uttered in the city of Los Angeles that hasn't found its way into Paul Haggis's "Crash," I can't imagine what it is. "Crash" (opening May 6th) is about the rage and foolishness produced by...

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT.(Malraux: A Life)(Book Review)
May 2, 2005... "Success has always been the greatest liar," Nietzsche wrote. " 'Great men' as they are venerated are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction." Andre Malraux tended to venerate, often uncritically, the colossi he met in the course of a...

THE MATT AND JUDY SHOW.(The Talk of the Town)(Investigative reporting)
May 9, 2005... It's beginning to look, in retrospect, as if Novak buried the lead. In his column for July 14, 2003, Robert Novak, the cable-TV growler and syndicated inside-dopester, wrote about backbiting within the Bush Administration over one of the...

DINOMITE.(The Talk of the Town)(American Museum of Natural History show)
May 9, 2005... Mark Norell is the all-knowing curator of the extremely cool, truly awesome, and very soon to open "Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries" show at the American Museum of Natural History. "He looks just like Steve Martin," a ten-year-old...

TWO DAMES.(The Talk of the Town)
May 9, 2005... Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, both holders of the title Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, flew in from London the other day to help promote the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of "Ladies in Lavender," in which they...

SURE BEATS WORK.(The Talk of the Town)(federal probation officer)(Chris Stanton)
May 9, 2005... When Chris Stanton was a federal probation officer in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, he specialized in keeping an eye on organized-crime figures who had recently been released from prison. "In some ways, they were the easiest offenders to...

LEAVING AILEY.(The Talk of the Town)(Dudley Williams last dance performance)
May 9, 2005... Dudley Williams looks like something out of an eighteenth-century engraving--all line. His bald head is shaped like an egg; his feet taper to a point. His elegant, spidery hands are always in the air, talking. At sixty-six, Williams is, to his...

A LITTLE LEARNING.(UnderSecretary of Defense for Policy)(Douglas J. Feith)
May 9, 2005... Douglas J. Feith, who is the UnderSecretary of Defense for Policy, lives in one of the better Maryland suburbs, on a street of large and unhandsome Colonial homes. The interior of Feith's house has space and light, but it is furnished in a...

THE DIARIST.(English novelist E. M. Delafield)
May 9, 2005... In September of 1925, the English novelist E. M. Delafield, who in private life was known as Mrs. Elizabeth Dashwood, was interviewed by the Western Morning News, Devon's leading newspaper. The occasion was her appointment, at the age of...

THE CLIMATE OF MAN--III.
May 9, 2005... The Climate of Man-I The Climate of Man-II Elizabeth Kolbert discusses climate change In February, 2003, a series of ads on the theme of inundation began appearing on Dutch TV. The ads were sponsored by the Netherlands' Ministry...

THE COLOSSUS.(Sonny Rollins)(Saxophonists)
May 9, 2005... Not long ago, the jazz drummer Victor Lewis was hanging out at the Village Vanguard, and declared that he had finally decided what he wanted to be when he became an old man: Sonny Rollins. Lewis had recently performed with Rollins in Antibes....

SPRING STEPS.(Martha Graham Dance Company development)
May 9, 2005... Last month, New York's dance audience was offered something it isn't used to anymore: a bonanza. First came the Martha Graham Dance Company, at City Center. The Graham troupe is still recovering from the terrible period it went through in the...

BITTER BAMBOO.
May 9, 2005... China, experts agree, is the nation of the future; its immense population, its acrobatic blend of totalitarian controls and booming free enterprise, and the commercial and intellectual success its emigrants have enjoyed in nations from Malaysia...

PARKED CARS.(Bay Area artist Robert Bechtle)
May 9, 2005... I first encountered the underrated Bay Area artist Robert Bechtle's great painting " '61 Pontiac" (1968-69), which is in his present retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in a 1969 group show in New York. It was among the...

SURVIVORS.(Theater Review)
May 9, 2005... Tennessee Williams's masterpiece "A Streetcar Named Desire" (being revived in a Roundabout Theatre production at Studio 54) opened in 1947; the play, as Arthur Miller said, planted "the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theatre." Among...

PERSONAL BATTLES.(Kingdom of Heaven )(movie)(Movie Review)
May 9, 2005... Here's a tough one. Why should "Gladiator" be such a storm of a movie and "Kingdom of Heaven" such a damp gust? After all, they share a fine director, Ridley Scott. Both are set in distant lands: the first in ancient Rome, the second in the...

FOOTNOTES.(The Talk of the Town)
May 16, 2005... The new Iraqi government that was sworn in last week, after the first democratic elections in the country's history, took three months to create. It is due to expire, according to a timetable set by the United Nations, by December (after the...

WHERE THEY ARE NOW.(The Talk of the Town)(photography)
May 16, 2005... Populated by hundreds of nameless characters, Diane Arbus's portraits conjure infinite imaginary biographies. Ever since the Metropolitan Museum opened its retrospective of Arbus's photographs, in March, her subjects have been turning up to...

DOMINGO'S NEW NOSE.(The Talk of the Town)(Placido Domingo )
May 16, 2005... In order to rehearse for his lead role in "Cyrano de Bergerac," which opens in a new production at the Met on May 13th, Placido Domingo has been wearing, along with his street clothes, three items characteristic of the swashbuckling nobleman:...

THE DISCIPLINARIAN.(The Talk of the Town)(Bob Watson)
May 16, 2005... Bob Watson, who is now fifty-nine, is a baseball lifer. After nineteen seasons as a big-league outfielder and first baseman, he turned to coaching, and then served for several seasons as the general manager of the Astros and the Yankees. Now he...

HELLO, CLEVELAND.(The Talk of the Town)
May 16, 2005... In the summer of 1924, a Kansas City band called the Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra did something unusual: it went on tour. Popular as live music was, bands in those days tended to serve as house orchestras or to play long stands in...

THE UPSTART.(Leslie Crocker Snyder )
May 16, 2005... At almost every campaign appearance in the race for Manhattan District Attorney, Leslie Crocker Snyder talks about how she came to prosecute murder cases. In 1968, when she was twenty-five, she joined the staff of Frank Hogan, who was then the...

A HARD FAITH.(Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger)
May 16, 2005... For many Catholics, the white smoke that curled into the Vatican sky in the early evening of April 19th quickly came to be seen as a distress signal. When it was revealed that the new Pope was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who had adopted the name...

THE MUMMY DOCTOR.(Arthur Aufderheide)
May 16, 2005... At the end of a steep, potholed lane in Duluth, Minnesota, is a three-story brick former elementary school that sits atop a knoll, nearly hidden by a grove of apple and chokecherry trees. A creek flows beneath the building's foundation, through...

DAH-LING.(Tallulah Bankhead)(Biography)
May 16, 2005... Most famous stage actors tactfully fade away. Who today is interested in Katharine Cornell, that First Lady of the American Theatre? Or that other First Lady, Helen Hayes? Or that First among Firsts, Ethel Barrymore? (Well, yes, she was the...

BRAIN CANDY.(intelligence quotient)
May 16, 2005... Twenty years ago, a political philosopher named James Flynn uncovered a curious fact. Americans--at least, as measured by I.Q. tests--were getting smarter. This fact had been obscured for years, because the people who give I.Q. tests...

THE DECLAIMERS.
May 16, 2005... Rock music has rarely encouraged clarity. The most celebrated rock artists of the nineties were proud obscurantists: Beck's songs sounded like Dadaist poems; Nirvana's Kurt Cobain substituted fragments for stories; and Pavement's Stephen...

HILL STREET BLUES.(Theater Review)
May 16, 2005... The world premiere of August Wilson's "Radio Golf," at the Yale Repertory, in New Haven, two weeks ago, made a little bit of American theatre history. "Radio Golf," directed by Timothy Douglas, is the final installment of Wilson's...

ROYALTY.(Kings and Queen)(Monster-in-Law)(Movie Review)
May 16, 2005... In "Kings and Queen," Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), a Parisian bourgeoise and gallery manager in her thirties, goes to Grenoble to visit her father, a famous writer and teacher, who is looking after her son for the summer. But the father becomes...

BLAIR'S BUSHY TAIL.(reelection of British Prime Minister Tony Blair)
May 23, 2005... The results of the United Kingdom's general election a week ago last Thursday bring to mind a crowded neighborhood pub half an hour before closing time. The noise level is high, the patrons' moods range from giddy to morose, and the bar is...

U.N. ON ICE.(possible temporary relocation of United Nations headquarters to Brooklyn, New York)
May 23, 2005... Last week, a United Nations report revealed that the U.N. was considering a temporary move to Brooklyn, in 2007, to make way for a very expensive five-year renovation of its headquarters, in Turtle Bay. Brooklyn: the borough's boosters preened,...

WRITERS AT WORK.(Novel, exhibition of writers at work in specially-designed environments at the Flux Factory)
May 23, 2005... A room of one's own, in which to write: it's an old and chronically romanticized idea--the solitary space, with an ashtray, an Olivetti, the morning light just so. Each writer has his own preferences and fetishes, of course. For Proust, it was...

TREE COUNT.(Bram Gunther, New York City's forestry and horticulture director)(citywide census of street trees)(Interview)
May 23, 2005... As a "thoroughly, thoroughly urban person," growing up on West Sixty-sixth Street, Bram Gunther didn't care what type of trees were on his block. Gunther is the city's deputy director of forestry and horticulture, and he now knows that his old...

MR. G.(actor Robert Goulet)(Interview)
May 23, 2005... If you had been sitting in front of the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in St. Patrick's Cathedral, the other morning, you might have noticed that the handsome, square-jawed man kneeling next to you (aviator-framed glasses, black turtleneck,...

HIGHER RISK.(methamphetamine use by gay men and spread of HIV, venereal diseases)
May 23, 2005... San Francisco's Magnet center is hard to miss. It occupies a storefront directly across the street from Badlands, a city landmark of its kind, at Eighteenth and Castro Streets, perhaps the gayest address in the world. Magnet is a drop-in clinic...

TEEN SPIRIT.(soccer player Freddy Adu)(Biography)
May 23, 2005... In certain company, talking about the state of American soccer, particularly professional soccer, can be a little like talking about urban renewal: a boom is always just around the corner. The infrastructure, for instance, is already in place,...

THE SPY WHO LOVED US.(Vietnamese spy Pham Xuan An)(Interview)
May 23, 2005... "Here is Pham Xuan An now," Time's last reporter in Vietnam cabled the magazine's New York headquarters on April 29, 1975. "All American correspondents evacuated because of emergency. The office of Time is now manned by Pham Xuan An." An filed...

EVERYTHING IN SIGHT.(artist Robert Rauschenberg)(Interview)
May 23, 2005... Captiva and Sanibel, two small barrier islands off Florida's southwest coast near Fort Myers, caught the full force of last summer's Hurricane Charley. The Category 4 storm caused an estimated fourteen billion dollars in property damage on the...

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE.(exhibition of works by fashion designers Coco Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld at Metropolitan Museum)
May 23, 2005... I once had a chance to buy a couture suit by Chanel that was made sometime in the nineteen-fifties, her comeback years. She had closed her maison de couture, on the Rue Cambon, when war was declared in 1939, and reopened it in 1954, when she...

NATIONAL TREASURE.(1776)(Book Review)
May 23, 2005... As scenes of heroism go, it was an odd one. In the third week of July, 1776, only days after Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress, His Excellency General George Washington, commander-in-chief...

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR.(Lost)(Television Program Review)
May 23, 2005... Until last fall, ABC's entertainment division had been having such a bad time of it for so long that, as with the used gum that kids offer each other, its initials could have stood for Already Been Chewed. This season, it has been a...

SPACE CASE.(Star Wars: Episode III--Revenge of the Sith)(Movie Review)
May 23, 2005... Penelope Gilliatt on the original "Star Wars," from June, 1977 Pauline Kael on the original "Star Wars," from September, 1977 The Current Cinema Movie Listings The Film File Sith. What kind of a word is that? Sith. It...

BIG NEWS WEEK.(scandal over Newsweek reports on alleged desecration of Koran by interrogators at Guantanamo Bay )
May 30, 2005... The one person most directly responsible for touching off the current frenzy over alleged Koran abuse by American interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, more than anybody at Newsweek, was a Pakistani politician named Imran Khan....

GIRLS BEHAVING BADLY.(discord and legal battle within organization Guerrilla Girls)
May 30, 2005... In 1985, a small group of feminist artists noticed that an exhibition of contemporary art at the Museum of Modern Art featured a hundred and forty-eight men artists and only seventeen women. The women decided to mount a protest over this...

THE VILLAGE HILLS.(Leonie Haimson, Save the Mounds)(Interview)
May 30, 2005... Leonie Haimson, who lives just off Washington Square Park and heads a group of Village residents informally known as Save the Mounds, has been advised that, for public-relations reasons, it might be better to refer to the three asphalt bumps in...

MODERN AT NINETY.(David Rockefeller)(Interview)(Biography)
May 30, 2005... David Rockefeller, who will be ninety on June 12th, is celebrating his birthday a week early, at the Museum of Modern Art's annual benefit Party in the Garden. He could hardly ask for a more appropriate spot, because, as he likes to say, he was...

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE.(The Talk of the Town)(geography still vital when it comes to medical care)
May 30, 2005... Everyone seems to agree that the American health-care system is broken, yet no one can agree on how to fix it. Part of the problem is that there is no American health-care system. Instead, there are hundreds of local health-care systems, each...

DEVOLUTION.(Intelligent design )
May 30, 2005... If you are in ninth grade and live in Dover, Pennsylvania, you are learning things in your biology class that differ considerably from what your peers just a few miles away are learning. In particular, you are learning that Darwin's theory of...

A NEW BEGINNING.
May 30, 2005... In the lives of cities, boldness and vision rarely follow catastrophe. Chicago rebuilt itself in sturdy but mundane fashion after its great fire, in 1871; it was thirty-eight years before Daniel Burnham created the sweeping master plan that...

MCCAIN'S PARTY.(John McCain)
May 30, 2005... Watched closely by a North Vietnamese guard, a dirty, feeble-looking young man on crutches, carrying a slop bucket, inched forward in slow, painful steps, and then, with a huge effort, hoisted the bucket, emptying it into an open, fetid trough....

THE GREAT DIVIDE.(Miss Julie)(Theater Review)
May 30, 2005... August Strindberg (1849-1912) was among the first modern playwrights to examine the Gordian knot of family, class differences, and sexual desire. In his brilliant and bitter and sometimes mad work, men are generally predisposed not to like...

THE WAVES.
May 30, 2005... It was in Paris that the liquid revolution of "Tristan und Isolde" first entered the bloodstream of the world. Wagner conducted the Prelude to the opera at three concerts in 1860, baffling most of the audience with his art of endless melody,...

STRING THEORY.
May 30, 2005... "Jasper Johns: Catenary," a large show of paintings, drawings, and prints at the Matthew Marks Gallery, is advertised as a return to form. In the opening sentence of the catalogue's introduction, the art historian Scott Rothkopf writes,...

FREE CHOICE.
May 30, 2005... As everyone knows, John Wayne always played John Wayne. He was terrific at it, but it was a limited role. Given his bulk and his peculiar ambulatory sway, could it have been any different? There are other kinds of actors, of course, for whom...