The New Yorker articles from November 2004

The New Yorker archives from November 2004

THE CHOICE.(The Talk of the Town)
November 1, 2004... Folder: The Campaign Trail This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in American memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction, reaching its apotheosis in the effort, undertaken by a supposedly independent...

THE BELIEVER.
November 1, 2004... On the night of October 5th, a group of Polish students, professors, military officers, and state officials crowded into a small auditorium at Warsaw University to hear Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, give a talk on the subject...

THE GREAT I AM.(Critical Essay)
November 1, 2004... In this age of widespread education and flagging creativity, new translations abound. The old standbys who nurtured our youth--Constance Garnett rendering the Russians, C. K. Scott Moncrieff putting his spin on Proust, the Muirs translating...

MEMENTO MORI.
November 1, 2004... The hypercivilized, unimaginably savage Aztecs made war almost tenderly, wielding wooden swords that were edged with bits of obsidian or flint and, in face-to-face combat, endeavoring not to kill their enemies but, commonly by striking at their...

1979.
November 1, 2004... In 1979, The Clash were experiencing some pressure. Whether they wanted it or not, punk rock had become their responsibility. In New York, the Ramones had come up with the musical idea of reducing rock to three chords, doubling the volume, and...

AFTERMATHS.(Movie Review)
November 1, 2004... The opening scene of Ian McEwan's "Enduring Love" has, since the novel was published, in 1998, achieved an enduring fame of its own. This may be the case, too, with the film of the book, which was adapted by Joe Penhall and directed by Roger...

THE CURSE OF CURSES.(The Talk of the Town)
November 8, 2004... Baseball, the other great fall distraction, has removed itself from the stage with its customary clarity and dispatch, but not before revealing itself to be a Lab puppy at heart. The Boston Red Sox, after eighty-six years of dreary or...

NOT ENJOYING IT.(The Talk of the Town)
November 8, 2004... The bigger a star you are in the movies, the closer the camera gets to your face. Those in below-the-title supporting roles appear mostly with their shoulders, and a character actor is seldom seen without his belly. It is only those whose...

THE STRUGGLE.(The Talk of the Town)
November 8, 2004... It was hard to find anyone at the recent anti-gay-marriage rally in Washington, D.C., who had a bad word to say about gays. Chandra Judy, who had come to the "Mayday for Marriage" rally on the Mall with her husband, Manford, and their...

THE CROSSING.(The Talk of the Town)
November 8, 2004... Marcey Tree in the Wind Stefancik is a receptionist at the Honda dealership in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, and the chief of the Turtle Band of the Ramapough, a Native American tribe based in northern New Jersey. Whenever Marcey crosses the...

MIXED MOTIVES.(The Talk of the Town)
November 8, 2004... When Americans are asked to rank professions in terms of honesty and ethics, insurance agents routinely end up near the bottom of the list--somewhere between politicians and car salesmen. Generally, insurers are seen as clever hucksters who...

CAN YOU FORGIVE HIM.
November 8, 2004... On the evening of March 6, 1835, Thomas Carlyle was resting in the parlor, which often served as his study, at 5 Cheyne Row in London. For the previous five months, he had been working ferociously on the manuscript of the "History of the French...

GETTING OVER IT.(Critical Essay)
November 8, 2004... When Tom Rath, the hero of Sloan Wilson's 1955 novel "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," comes home to Connecticut each day from his job in Manhattan, his wife mixes him a Martini. If he misses the train, he'll duck into the bar at Grand...

THE SPIRIT LEVEL.
November 8, 2004... Amos Oz is the best-known novelist in Israel. For eighteen years, he has lived in the desert outpost of Arad, a town of twenty-eight thousand, between Be'er Sheva and the Dead Sea. In the late afternoon, after a day at his desk, he often takes...

LEARNING TO SPY.
November 8, 2004... Philip D. Zelikow is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and an expert on the predicaments of government. He worked on the National Security Council for the first President Bush and wrote a book on German reunification with his...

ASK NOT, TELL NOT.(Book Review)
November 8, 2004... Catholics in the Washington, D.C., area were relieved of the proscription against eating meat on Friday, January 20, 1961, by special order of His Holiness Pope John XXIII, in recognition of the inauguration, that day, of the first Roman...

NANCY DREW'S FATHER.(Critical Essay)
November 8, 2004... The summer I was seven, a sudden adventure shanghaied my parents, and they hastily deposited me at my grandmother's home, in suburban New Jersey, for the weekend. I was sitting mournfully by the back-yard pool, without the prospect of a...

MASTERPIECES FOR SALE.
November 8, 2004... The English art dealer Joseph Duveen sold hundreds of Old Masters, for soaring prices, to American multimillionaires between the early years of the twentieth century and 1939, when he died, at the age of sixty-nine. Today, those works...

THE FURY AND THE JURY.
November 8, 2004... The first Gulf War came to us via satellite and without words. The road to Basra--the totem of that military cakewalk--was a silent spectacle of incineration. Now, in the second Gulf adventure, Americans can hear the war, but the wall of...

AMERICA, THE BALEFUL.
November 8, 2004... The darkest, grandest noise of the musical season so far--the fanfare to an angry American autumn--was Michael Gordon's film symphony "Decasia," as played by fifty-five furiously committed students from the Manhattan School of Music, at St....

NEW HEIGHTS.
November 8, 2004... People talk about what they call the perfect ballet body--long legs, long neck, high arches, pretty face--but most of history's great classical dancers haven't shown up with such an endowment. Vaslav Nijinsky, in the words of one of his...

NIGHT AND DAY.
November 8, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File Swaying from side to side at the piano, his back arched almost to the point of snapping, his head reaching for unseen lights, Jamie Foxx, as Ray Charles in "Ray," seems pulled upward to the heavens and...

BLUES.(The Talk of the Town)(presidential elections)
November 15, 2004... Philip Gourevitch on the search for a mandate Nancy Franklin on Election Night coverage James Surowiecki on the ownership society Here in the bluest borough of the bluest city of the bluest state in all our red-white-and-blue...

DEBOUCHING.(The Talk of the Town)(Buckley)
November 15, 2004... The driving directions to the Buckley residence overlooking Long Island Sound, in Stamford, include a caveat--the Buckleys being Yale people--for those travelling from New Haven: "You will need to turn left on debouching from I-95." It's a...

WHAT IF?(The Talk of the Town)
November 15, 2004... For the past several years, Robert Max Jackson, a professor of sociology at N.Y.U., has taught a freshman honors seminar called "What If? The Art and Science of Imagining a Society That Never Was," in which he poses a series of outlandish...

THE RISK SOCIETY.(The Talk of the Town)
November 15, 2004... Hendrik Hertzberg on four more years Philip Gourevitch on the search for a mandate Nancy Franklin on Election Night coverage George W. Bush was reelected last Tuesday not because of the job he did running the economy in his first...

BRINGING UP BABY.
November 15, 2004... When Jean-Marie Maier, of Sunrise, Florida, suspected that she was pregnant with her first child, she and her husband, Ken, did what many modern parents do: they bought a home pregnancy test, and, after celebrating the positive result, started...

THE END OF THE WORLD.
November 15, 2004... Although it appears every day around one o'clock, the Paris newspaper Le Monde is dated to the following morning, so that the paper one reads on Monday afternoon is written as though it were already Tuesday, and things that may happen today...

OUT ON THE STREET.
November 15, 2004... Jon Lee Anderson talks about what went wrong in Iraq On April 19, 2003, ten days after the fall of Baghdad, an advance "jump group" of Americans commanded by retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner was flown into the city to manage the...

TIGHT-ASSED RIVER.(Illinois river)
November 15, 2004... PEKIN -- The "Pekin wiggles" are halfway up the Illinois River, between the Mississippi River and Chicago. On the radio, other tows tell us how they are doing in the Pekin wiggles. During the forward watch, on this tow, the captain...

INVISIBLE CATHEDRAL.
November 15, 2004... From 1939, Lewis Mumford on the original MOMA building Paul Goldberger on Yoshio Taniguchi's elegant expansion of MOMA Times Square has been sanitized and skyscraperized; the subway cars are brightly lit inside and graffiti-free inside...

OUTSIDE THE BOX.
November 15, 2004... John Updike takes a walk through the new Modern From 1939, Lewis Mumford on the original MOMA building The first building that the Museum of Modern Art put up for itself, in 1939, wasn't sumptuous, like the Met, or extravagantly...

BLUE BLOOD.(presidential elections)
November 15, 2004... Hendrik Hertzberg on four more years Philip Gourevitch on the search for a mandate James Surowiecki on the ownership society Though there has not yet been a poll to prove the validity of this claim, it's probably fair to say that...

ILLUSTRATED LIFE.(movie industry)
November 15, 2004... The Current Cinema The Film File Meet Bob, Helen, Violet the teen-age grump, her younger brother Dash, and baby Jack Jack. These are the Parrs, their very name redolent of the decently average. They are the stars of "The Incredibles,"...

THE OLD MAN.(The Talk of the Town)(Obituary)(Biography)
November 22, 2004... Modest in his personal habits and his material desires, Yasir Arafat was grandiose only in his sense of mission. By bringing low "the Zionist entity," he would win the most glorious Muslim victory since the noble Saladin drove the Crusaders out...

NOWHERE.(The Talk of the Town)
November 22, 2004... Larry Kramer delivered a long and fiery speech at Cooper Union last Sunday night. That, of course, was nothing new. Kramer, the playwright who founded the activist group act up and was the signature voice of the age of aids, is famous for his...

CINDERELLA STORY.(The Talk of the Town)
November 22, 2004... So you want to be a princess. Well, you'll have to come up with something a little less ambitious, like duchess or viscountess, because, for all the recent talk about how "we're moving in the right direction" on the job front in this country,...

UNZIPPED.(The Talk of the Town)
November 22, 2004... The sound of two worlds colliding can be, and sometimes is, as harmonious as the sound of one hand clapping. And, indeed, on a recent Saturday night no jarring dissonances marred the densely crowded opening of "XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits," an...

RESONATING.(The Talk of the Town)
November 22, 2004... Afew weeks ago, Sam Shepard's new play, "The God of Hell," was wrapping up rehearsals at the Actors Studio Drama School Theatre, in the Village. Randy Quaid and three other actors make up the cast. "Sam calls 'The God of Hell' a comedy,...

SOMETHING BORROWED.
November 22, 2004... One day this spring, a psychiatrist named Dorothy Lewis got a call from her friend Betty, who works in New York City. Betty had just seen a Broadway play called "Frozen," written by the British playwright Bryony Lavery. "She said, 'Somehow it...

LONG VOYAGE HOME.
November 22, 2004... It wasn't all pretty. Yes, it's Sox triumphant--the Sox won; the Red Sox are World Champions; it happened, it's over--so why remind ourselves that this year's World Series, a four-game Boston sweep over the St. Louis Cardinals, was a certified...

TAKING THE VEIL.
November 22, 2004... Not long ago, in Paris, I met a young Muslim woman named Djamila Benrehab, who, at the age of twenty, had donned not only a black head scarf but a billowy black abaya and, under it all, a tight black bandanna to her eyebrows that left only the...

IN AND OUT OF LOVE.(Biography)
November 22, 2004... Let me tell you a story. In a Catholic school in a small town in rural Spain, two boys, Ignacio and Enrique, fell in love. They went to the movies together and touched each other--a consummation of sorts. But the boys were only eleven, and...

GET HAPPY.(Richard Wilbur)
November 22, 2004... In 1953, literary history--acting through the good offices of Edna Ward, of Wellesley, Massachusetts--brought together two of the most gifted, and least similar, American poets of the postwar era. Mrs. Ward was the mother-in-law of Richard...

LOST BOYS.(Biography)
November 22, 2004... Almost a hundred years ago, at half past eight on the evening of December 27, 1904, the curtain went up at the Duke of York's Theatre, in London, to reveal, among other things, a man dressed as a dog. The man was an actor named Arthur Lupino,...

THE CHARMER.(Raphael)(Biography)
November 22, 2004... "What he had of art, he had from me," Michelangelo complained of Raphael, whose early career, from 1500 to 1513, is the subject of an enticing exhibition, "Raphael: From Urbino to Rome," at the National Gallery in London. Michelangelo, who was...

SOUL SKETCHES.
November 22, 2004... By his own admission, Tennessee Williams was a hysteric; his oeuvre is perhaps the world's greatest testament to the hysteric's autoeroticism. "For love I make characters," he said. Williams's involvement with his fantasy world was so intense...

APPLICATION FOR PERMANENT CANADIAN RESIDENCE.
November 22, 2004... (Please use a soft pencil.) 1. Did you say you were thinking about coming up to live in Canada? Undecided___ Maybe___ Awfully big step___ Other___ The clearer your intentions, the better our government can estimate how many...

MORE WAR.(The Talk of the Town)
November 29, 2004... "The city has been seized. We have liberated the city of Falluja," General John Abizaid declared on November 14th, six days after the Marines began their assault on Iraq's notorious insurgent stronghold. The Sunni warlords who had run Falluja...

FOUND.(The Talk of the Town)
November 29, 2004... The new exhibition in the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art--"China: Dawn of a Golden Age"--opens with a beautiful parade of bronze figures. There are fourteen horses, four chariots, ten human riders, and three attendants on...

FARM TEAM.(The Talk of the Town)
November 29, 2004... The aftermath of an election follows a certain predictable cycle: mourning (on the part of the losers) gives way to soul-searching (both sides), and soon enough the speculative horse race is in full swing, with future contenders jockeying for...

PSST! GOT MILK?(The Talk of the Town)
November 29, 2004... In a Hell's Kitchen basement the other day, Manhattan's first shipment of raw milk--unpasteurized, unlicensed, unhomogenized, and illegally transported across state lines--was delivered to the grateful, if wary, members of a private raw-milk...

WHY GOLD?(The Talk of the Town)
November 29, 2004... One of the perks of stardom is the indulgence of unusual requests. Ozzy Osbourne used to require the presence backstage of an ear, nose, and throat specialist who could administer B-12 shots. Guns N' Roses demanded Dom Perignon and Wonder...

THE COMFORT ZONE.(Short Story)
November 29, 2004... In May, 1970, a few nights after the Kent State shootings, my father and my brother Tom, who was nineteen, started fighting. They weren't fighting about the Vietnam War, which both of them opposed. The fight was probably about a lot of...

FINE DISTURBANCES.(border patroling)
November 29, 2004... United States Border Patrol operations above the Texas stretch of the Rio Grande often begin with a single tracker on foot, staring at the earth. In the Border Patrol, tracking is called cutting sign. "Cutting" is looking; "sign" is evidence....

OLD FAITHFUL.(Short Story)
November 29, 2004... Out of nowhere I developed this lump. I think it was a cyst or a boil, one of those words you associate with trolls, and it was right on my tailbone, like a peach pit. That's what it felt like, anyway. I was afraid to look. At first it was just...

THE EMIGRE.
November 29, 2004... In the spring of 1939, the father of the historian Peter Gay had a fateful premonition. As Gay writes in his memoir, "My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin," he and his parents were booked on a ship called the St. Louis, scheduled to...

THE HITMAKER.(Biography)
November 29, 2004... George S. Kaufman, a founding wit of the Algonquin Round Table and probably the greatest hitmaker in Broadway history--"You Can't Take It with You," "The Man Who Came to Dinner," "Of Thee I Sing," and a score more--is currently being...

WHY WORK.(Biography)
November 29, 2004... In the fall of 1897, Max Weber suffered a nervous breakdown. He was thirty-three years old--still quite young, in the rigidly hierarchical world of German academia--and occupied a prestigious chair in political economics at the University of...

SHADOWBOXING.(Theater Review)
November 29, 2004... "Straight male seeks Bush supporter for fair, physical fight," someone wrote in a widely distributed Web-site posting last week. But onstage the fight for an alternative vision of America is beginning not with a show of force but with a show of...

MAESTRO NORTH.(music conductors)
November 29, 2004... James Levine is a happy man. Or so it seemed when I talked to him earlier this month, in his office at Symphony Hall in Boston. The man who leads the two most venerable institutions in American music--the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston...

PLAYING DOCTOR.(Television Program Review)
November 29, 2004... You wouldn't wish the terrific scene-stealers Oliver Platt and Blythe Danner as co-stars on the lead actor of a TV series, but Hank Azaria, as the main character, a successful middle-aged psychiatrist, in the new Showtime Sunday-night series...

SEX APPEAL.(Movie Review)
November 29, 2004... Liam Neeson is six feet four inches tall, with a rugby player's broken nose, sleepy eyes, and a foghorn voice that can fall to a soothing caress. He has scale and range--he can be volcanically angry and touchingly gentle. Yet Neeson's movie...