The New Yorker articles from November 2002

The New Yorker archives from November 2002

Over There.('Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes' and 'Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil')(Book Review)(Brief Article)
November 4, 2002... Eleven years ago, when Serge Gainsbourg, the Gitane-puffing demigod of French pop, died, France came to a virtual standstill, and President Francois Mitterand publicly eulogized the singer, songwriter, and film star as "our Baudelaire, our...

2000 AND TWO.(anniversary of 2000 election, and its ramifications on democracy)
November 4, 2002... Seven weeks ago, the first anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks was commemorated with appropriately solemn ceremony. November 7th marks another anniversary, the second, of another American injury. In terms of national...

DISHONORABLE DEGREES.(inaccuracy of information presented on resumes)
November 4, 2002... Twice a year, Jude M. Werra, of Jude M. Werra & Associates, a headhunting firm in Brookfield, Wisconsin, reviews the hundreds of resumes he has seen in the previous six months--the elegant, triumphant C.V.s of C.E.O.s and V.P.s--and he...

BANANA MAN.(Doug Fishbone uses bananas in art installation)
November 4, 2002... When people came across the pile of bananas that Doug Fishbone had arranged in the middle of Washington Street, in Brooklyn, the other day, they naturally had a lot of questions. They wanted to know how many bananas Fishbone had used (seventeen...

VHAT'S UP?(political supporter Isac Weinberger)
November 4, 2002... Of all the bad news that has recently hit the gubernatorial campaign of H. Carl McCall, none, perhaps, was more dispiriting than the fact, heretofore unreported, that Isac Weinberger, of Brooklyn, has pretty much conceded the race to George...

'NSPACE: DIARY OF A COSMONAUT.(what singer Lance Bass might say about being an astronaut)(Humor)
November 4, 2002... Pop star Lance Bass is back at Russia's cosmonaut center for a new training session, despite being excluded from the crew of a rocket heading to the international space station next month. The 'NSync singer, who was ordered to leave the Star...

ADOLPH GREEN.(composer remembered)
November 4, 2002... From the late thirties, when Adolph Green was one-third of the cabaret act "The Revuers" (his partners were Judy Holliday and his lifelong collaborator, Betty Comden), and until his death, last week, at the age of eighty-six, he never lost his...

THE GOLDEN BOUGH.(profile of Grant Hadwin, man who chopped down the giant golden spruce tree in Queen Charlottes Islands near Alaska and British Columbia)
November 4, 2002... There was only one giant golden spruce in the world, and, until a man named Grant Hadwin took a chainsaw to it, in 1997, it had stood for more than three hundred years in a steadily shrinking patch of old-growth forest in Port Clements, on the...

HOW TO BE A PRODUCER.(theatrical producer Daryl Roth)
November 4, 2002... The morning after "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?," by Edward Albee, opened in New York, the play's producers met with their advertising agents around a long table in an office above Times Square. If a production receives immediate critical...

MONDO BOND.(analysis of the James Bond films)
November 4, 2002... Geoffrey T. Hellman interviews Ian Fleming From 1963, Brendan Gill on "Dr. No" From 1964, Brendan Gill on "From Russia with Love" From 1983, Pauline Kael reviews "Octopussy" All right, pay attention, 007. Here are some things...

CRAZY EDDIE'S.('Movin' Out,' Richard Rodgers Theatre, New York, New York)(Theater Review)
November 4, 2002... Throughout her career, which is now almost forty years long, Twyla Tharp has been thinking about America, and also about teen-agers, who, in their recalcitrance and idealism, and in their gum-snapping cool, seem to be, for her, the primary...

PAPER TIGER.('Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers')(Book Review)
November 4, 2002... To anyone over a certain age (forty-five?), Daniel Ellsberg needs no introduction, but it would be quite a challenge to explain Ellsberg to someone who had never heard of him. There was this brilliant young man from the Midwest who in 1948 went...

CHINESE BOXES.('The Crazed')(Book Review)
November 4, 2002... There's an early Ha Jin story about a soldier who falls in love with a wireless operator solely on the basis of her telegraphic style. He's afraid she'll never be interested in a man like him: "His wrists were thick, and his square thumbs...

THE DRAWING BOARD.(various artists, drawings, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York)
November 4, 2002... The dryly titled "Drawing Now: Eight Propositions," a show at the Museum of Modern Art, in Queens, is a trailblazing event for an art world that has sorely needed one. Laura Hoptman, the curator of the exhibition, which runs until January 6th,...

STRING THEORY.(literature and fashion)
November 4, 2002... In my youth, I had a weakness for the esoteric. You could seduce me by reciting the poetry of any language I didn't speak. I was charmed by the gambler who introduced me to the Daily Racing Form and held rapt by the physicist who tried to...

DESPOTS AND FLESHPOTS.('The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui' at Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, New York, New York, and 'Flower Drum Song,' New York, New York)(Theater Review)
November 4, 2002... In the epilogue to "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui," Bertolt Brecht's 1941 Chicago-gangster parable about Hitler's ascent to power (revived by the National Actors Theatre at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, at Pace University), the...

MEN TROUBLE.('Roger Dodger' and 'The Truth About Charlie')(Movie Review)
November 4, 2002... The new Jonathan Demme picture, "The Truth About Charlie," concerns the beautiful Regina Lambert (Thandie Newton), who returns to Paris from vacation to learn that her husband has been killed and that, far worse, the furnishings have been...

In SoHo.(stores in SoHo part of New York, New York)(Directory)
November 11, 2002... "Well, I guess it's for . . . a couch?" a saleswoman at the Rem Koolhaas-designed PRADA store in SoHo (575 Broadway; 334-8888) says, showing off a fox-fur pillow ($2,360) so enormous that she can barely get her arms around it. Though any number...

The City, Revealed.(three books about New York, New York history)(Brief Article)(Bibliography)
November 11, 2002... "What news from New York?" F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in an imaginary conversation in "My Lost City," a 1936 essay. " 'Stocks go up. A baby murdered a gangster.' 'Nothing more?' " The city, in all its confounding glory, is the subject of...

PUBLIC LIFE.(funeral for Senator Paul Wellstone as a political event)
November 11, 2002... The memorial service for Senator Paul Wellstone, held last Tuesday evening in the Williams Arena, on the University of Minnesota campus, was overlong, excessively partisan, unpretentious, emotional (without being maudlin), and, above all,...

A CASE OF THE BLUES.(physical and psychological effects of argyria, silver poisoning, caused by dietary supplements )
November 11, 2002... The last time silver was a big issue in an American election was probably in 1896, when William Jennings Bryan was running on a pro-silver-based-currency platform and giving his famous "Cross of Gold" speech. Now silver is back, in Montana...

FINDERS KEEPER.(magazine Found publishes writings that are found)
November 11, 2002... The world is full of lost love letters if you know where to look. Davy Rothbart, the publisher of the magazine Found, knows where to look: the floors of city buses, the recycling bins behind Kinko's, the backstops of windblown ball fields....

LESS OR MORE.(discussions over building a monument at the former World Trade Center site in New York, New York)
November 11, 2002... When it comes to Ground Zero, just about the only thing that everyone agrees on is that there ought to be a memorial to the people who died there. No one, though, seems to have the slightest idea what this memorial should be, or whether it...

BOOM AND GLOOM.(relation of happiness to the economy)
November 11, 2002... A few years ago, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman conducted an odd experiment. He had a group of students eat a bowl of their favorite ice cream while listening to a particular piece of music eight days in a row. After the...

WHAT'S SO FUNNY?(psychologist Richard Wiseman researches humor)
November 11, 2002... One Saturday evening in late June, the master of ceremonies at the Ice House, a comedy club in Pasadena, California, told the audience that they were in for a special treat: Dr. Richard Wiseman, a British scientist who was on a quest to...

ATTILA'S HEADSET.(Washington Redskins coach Steve Spurrier)
November 11, 2002... In his debut performance as head coach of the Washington Redskins--a home victory over the Arizona Cardinals on September 8th--Steve Spurrier was among the injured. It was hardly surprising, given his flea-on-a-griddle exertions on the...

THE NEXT CRASH.(housing markets across the country )
November 11, 2002... On July 8, 1949, the Long Island Star Journal published a full-page ad for a community of affordable homes that the developer Levitt & Sons was building on a tract of farmland near Farmingdale, about twenty miles east of Queens. The ad featured...

DAYDREAMING ON PAPER.(cartoonist Jack Ziegler)(Brief Article)
November 11, 2002... Many cartoonists are content to pursue traditional comedy by traditional means, to walk the well-trodden, carefully landscaped paths of classic setups and classic punch lines. In this context, Jack Ziegler is an off-road vehicle. He is, of...

OUR HEROES.(in comics and cartoons)(Brief Article)
November 11, 2002... For graphic forms that are considered close relatives, the superhero comic and the panel cartoon couldn't be more different in their presentation of human (or animal) nature. The superhero comic views beings as super (or, in some cases,...

LEADING LADIES.(illustrator Helen Elna Hokinson)(Brief Article)
November 11, 2002... Helen Elna Hokinson, born in rural Illinois in 1893, moved east to New York in 1920 to pursue a career as an illustrator. Five years later, she caught on at the brand-new New Yorker, which began sending her to illustrate cultural events: music...

UNDERWORLD.(the Five Points in New York and 'The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld' by Herbert Asbury)
November 11, 2002... I went searching for the Five Points when I first came to New York, and couldn't find them anywhere. Not a single point left sticking up, it seemed, even in the thornier city of the early eighties. The Five Points, I knew from the book I...

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR.('Child of My Heart')(Book Review)
November 11, 2002... Reading Alice McDermott's new novel, "Child of My Heart" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $23), we know that a child is going to die--the book is strewn with omens--but we don't know which one. Could it be Theresa? She is our narrator, looking back on...

RED LOVES REX, ALAS.(books by Frederic Tuten)
November 11, 2002... Once upon a time--in 1971, if you must know--I read a slender book that seemed to me original, droll, and mysteriously precious. Wrapped in a posterish Roy Lichtenstein dust jacket, and set in narrow-measure boldface sans serif, Frederic...

RESTORATION.(management of Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, England)
November 11, 2002... English audiences produce an unmistakable noise at the end of a great night of theatre--a revved-up, rapid-fire applause that is almost caffeinating in its effect. That noise erupted after a recent performance of Alban Berg's "Wozzeck" at the...

BREAKING THROUGH.('8 Mile' and 'Frida')(Movie Review)
November 11, 2002... In Eminem's first movie, "8 Mile," the white rap star is hooded in about five different ways at once: There's a Nike knit cap on his head and, above that, the top of a maroon sweatshirt. His eyelids are partly lowered, his ears are covered with...

Rail Life.(books on trains and rail travel)(Bibliography)
November 18, 2002... In TRAVEL BY TRAIN (Indiana), Michael E. Zega and John E. Gruber show how the spread of railroads across America coincided with the birth of modern advertising techniques to produce a blizzard of railway posters. Early, wordy efforts based on...

SOUND OF A TREE FALLING.(the serious environmental threat posed by the Bush administration)
November 18, 2002... The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, often described as the last truly unspoiled place in America, was created in its current form on December 2, 1980, in the closing days of the Carter Administration. At that time, part of the...

ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN.(law professor Michael Perlin uses Bob Dylan lyrics for article titles)
November 18, 2002... Among the empty-handed painters and seasick sailors who will be going to see Bob Dylan perform this week at Madison Square Garden is a fifty-six-year-old New York Law School professor named Michael Perlin, who has written a dozen books and...

UNSEEN TV.('The Other Network')( theater showing of failed TV pilots)(Theater Review)
November 18, 2002... Only one force could forestall the completion of Mozart's Requiem or Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon": death. And only one force could forestall the completion of Ben Stiller's television series "Heat-Vision and Jack": Fox. Back in 1999,...

MAN ON, MAN OFF.(Pivit: a sports board being used for conditioning by sumo wrestlers )
November 18, 2002... The vanguard of sumo wrestling these days is not in Osaka or Kyoto but in and around New York, where a few top sumotori have been honing their skills in anticipation of the World Sumo Championships, which are to be held this month in Poland....

STONE'S GLASS HOUSE.(A. Conger Goodyear House, Old Westbury, Long Island, designed by Edward Durell Stone)
November 18, 2002... Edward Durell Stone is best known for buildings that people will always feel a little funny about, like the syrupy Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art, at 2 Columbus Circle. But he ought to be remembered for things like the A. Conger...

ORDER OF BATTLE.(anticipating the war in Iraq, possibly followed by another in North Korea)
November 18, 2002... One of the dramatic moments in Robert Caro's "Master of the Senate"--a book in which few moments aren't dramatic--involves a bit of intrigue with an official called the Reading Clerk of the House of Representatives. After the House passes a...

THE EXPERIMENT.(conversations with author Orhan Pamuk, and others in Turkey, reveal little support for the likely US war with Iraq)
November 18, 2002... Five hundred years ago in Constantinople, at the height of the Islamic empire, a young prince named Cihangir lived with his father, Suleyman the Magnificent, who was the most revered of the Ottoman sultans. Cihangir cut a pallid figure in the...

RESCUE AT QUECREEK.(Quecreek coal mine disaster)
November 18, 2002... Shortly after 1:30 A.M. on Thursday, July 25th, a Somerset, Pennsylvania, dairy farmer named Bill Arnold and his wife, Lori, were startled from sleep by the insistent yelping of their dog, Pitch, who had fixed on some commotion outside. Arnold...

THE SILVER SPIRE.('The Chrysler Building: Creating a New York Icon, Day by Day')(Book Review)
November 18, 2002... On a mild October day in 1929, the architect William Van Alen stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, shaking with fear as he stared at a spot a few blocks east and very high up. Nearly eighty stories in the air, from out...

HAPPY DAYS.('Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self')(Book Review)
November 18, 2002... Late in December, 1867, Charles Dickens lost his pocket diary. In a letter to his sister-in-law, he described its disappearance as something " 'which,' as Mr Pepys would add, 'do trouble me mightily.' " Dickens preferred to destroy his diaries...

SHADOW PLAYS.('Hollywood Arms')(Theater Review)
November 18, 2002... "Hollywood Arms" (directed by Harold Prince, at the Cort Theatre) is also the name of the cheap and cheerful residential hotel in Los Angeles where Carol Burnett, who wrote the autobiographical play with her late daughter, Carrie Hamilton, grew...

DESHABILLE CHIC.(exhibition of women's fashions, past and present, Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, New York )
November 18, 2002... Patrons of couture generally fall into two categories: wives (or ex-wives) and their husbands' other women. There is a show for each at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology and, rather like marriage and adultery, they offer a...

WASHINGTON MYSTERY.('Katharine Graham's Washington')(Book Review)
November 18, 2002... In 1997, Katharine Graham published her autobiography, "Personal History," a book that succeeded on several levels. Mrs. Graham, who was the publisher of the Washington Post and then chairman of the company, knew a lot of interesting people and...

THE SPANISH LESSON.('Manet/Velazquez: The Spanish Manner in the Nineteenth Century' exhibition at the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)
November 18, 2002... Edouard Manet invented modern--and, while he was at it, postmodern--art. He did it in 1858, when he was twenty-six years old, by modelling his style on seventeenth-century Spanish painting, which was alien to the Italianate tradition in which...

WORLDS APART.(two motion pictures)(Movie Review)
November 18, 2002... The new Todd Haynes film, "Far from Heaven," is set in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1957. Boy, is it set in 1957. The music is right, the decor is right, the pitcher of Daiquiris is right, and even the title of the movie looks right in the opening...

All About Attire.(books on men's clothing and fashions)(Brief Article)(Bibliography)
November 25, 2002... Alan Flusser, who is the president of a men's-clothing company, thanks his Buddhist mentor on the dedication page of DRESSING THE MAN (HarperCollins), and his book offers a meditative--and encyclopedic--look at the state of male fashion. To...

DI NASTIES.(comparison: dynasties of the Bushes and the Windsors)
November 25, 2002... November has been such an all-round triumph for the Bushes, what with the President's sweep of the congressional races, the thumping reelection of the President's kid brother to the governorship of Florida, and the fifteen-nil Security Council...

AN EAST-WEST THING.(employees in the New York City Saks Fifth Avenue store comment on Winona Ryder's activies in the Beverly Hills branch )
November 25, 2002... It may take decades for historians to produce a satisfactory analysis of the Winona Ryder shoplifting trial. As the world now knows, a jury in Beverly Hills recently convicted Ryder of two felony counts relating to her attempted theft of...

STILL PUMPED UP.(celebrating the 25th anniversary of the 'Pumping Iron' motion picture )
November 25, 2002... What with the budget crisis, the reappearance of the homeless, and the return of swingers' parties, the city is beginning to resemble its nineteen-seventies self--or so it seemed at the Whitney one night last week, when Arnold Schwarzenegger,...

KNOW EINSTEIN.(Albert Einstein exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York)(Biography)
November 25, 2002... "My dear kitten,'' Albert Einstein wrote, in 1901, to his first wife, the physicist Mileva Maric. "I just read a wonderful paper by Lenard on the generation of cathode rays by ultraviolet light." The romance didn't last. By 1914, Einstein had...

THE MOTOR CITY MIRAGE.(American automakers' domination of the SUV market provided profits in the 1990s, but foreign automakers are now producing good SUVs of their own )
November 25, 2002... In January, 1994, Detroit turned its annual auto show into a giant coming-out party for the American automobile industry, a kind of Crystal Palace Exhibition for the Big Three. The previous decade and a half had been dismal for Ford, Chrysler,...

THE CALCULATOR.(Kenneth Feinberg, of the Victim Compensation Fund)
November 25, 2002... A little more than a year after September 11th, Kenneth Feinberg, who holds the title of special master of the Victim Compensation Fund, met with a group of firefighters in his midtown office. Feinberg, who is fifty-seven, has a long face, a...

KISS KISS, BANG BANG.(2002 baseball pennant race and World Series)
November 25, 2002... Before the Anaheim Angels ran onto the field for home ballgames this fall, you heard the loudspeakers at Edison Field putting out "Back in the Saddle Again," but the hokey touch may not fit them much longer. The Angels, who went forty-one years...

THE GIFT.(Paul Simon, his career, and his songwriting process)(Biography)
November 25, 2002... Last spring, shortly before Paul Simon began rehearsing his band for a tour of Europe, he wrote three fragments of music--the first to occur to him in a year and a half. It was as long a dry period as he had ever been through. I went one night...

NO PLACE TO HIDE.(a visit to Iraq is described)
November 25, 2002... The land around the Abu Ghraib prison, twenty miles west of Baghdad, is barren and dusty. Run-down garages and grubby car-repair shops line the road near the prison's main gate, which is within sight of the grand highway that Saddam Hussein...

A LA CARTE.(exhibtion of New York City menus for 1900-1924, at the New York Public Library )(Brief Article)
November 25, 2002... Consider now the menu: it spins, perhaps, but it does not sow. It simply lies there or, rather, allows itself to be propped up while, like a politician or a winning child, it promises big, and then delivers what it delivers. Yet the menu...

WHAT COMES NATURALLY.('The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature')(Book Review)
November 25, 2002... "The new sciences of human nature." Well, why not? The old sciences of human nature didn't have such a fabulous track record. They gave us segregated drinking fountains, "invented spelling," and the glass ceiling--all consequences of scientific...

DIRECTOR'S CUT.('A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking')(Book Review)
November 25, 2002... "They love me in France" is the last, best hope of a Hollywood filmmaker in search of a second act. This refrain is the farcical residue of an aesthetic revolution that shook France half a century ago. In the nineteen-fifties, Francois...

OBSESSIONS.(two motion pictures)(Movie Review)
November 25, 2002... From 1988, Pauline Kael reviews "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" In a shiny Madrid clinic, Benigno (Javier Camara), a male nurse who is one of the two heroes of Pedro Almodovar's "Talk to Her," washes the body of a patient named...