The New Yorker articles from October 2002

The New Yorker archives from October 2002

Funny Men.(Brief Article)
October 7, 2002... "Put 'em both up, insect, before I comb your hair with lead" is not a promising start to a friendship. But with the first line ever exchanged on film between Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, in "The Lucky Dog" (1921), the two were already "in...

RESENTMENTS.(Brief Article)
October 7, 2002... Remember Germany four years ago? The Social Democrats were back. Gerhard Schroder had just been elected Chancellor. And the pundits were smiling, because Schroder seemed like such a plastic pastiche of a character, a bellwether of the liberal...

CARRY ON.(airplanes)(Brief Article)
October 7, 2002... There are things you can carry onto an airplane, and things you cannot. Since September 11th, various objects, and not just knives and guns, have been banned from the cabins of commercial flights: hockey sticks, corkscrews, cricket bats, toy...

THE OLD BONG GAME.
October 7, 2002... The New York Mets ended their lacklustre season this past weekend amid allegations of widespread marijuana use. The initial report didn't name names--of sources or of players--except for those of Tony Tarasco and Mark Corey, benchwarmers who a...

BIG KAHUNA.(Brief Article)
October 7, 2002... A kahuna is a master of Hawaiian esoteric practices. Recently, Mariko Gordon and Hugh Cosman engaged a kahuna to bless their house on Manhattan Avenue, between 105th and 106th Streets, which they were moving into after spending two years...

THE BRIBE EFFECT.(Salomon Smith Barney)(Brief Article)
October 7, 2002... Salomon Smith Barney, like so many firms on Wall Street, seeks to please its clients. On June 24, 1997, when it was still Salomon Brothers, it offered one of those clients, Bernie Ebbers, the C.E.O. of WorldCom, the opportunity to buy more than...

THE CHAIRMAN.
October 7, 2002... Last year, my middle son, in eighth grade and encountering his first fairly serious American-history course, indignantly reported that the whole subject was incomprehensible. I was shocked. What about Gettysburg and the Declaration of...

THE IN-LAW.
October 7, 2002... A guide to Willie Nelson's recordings Nine-forty-five on a Thursday morning, and the songwriter and singer Willie Nelson is on a bus parked on the north side of West Fifty-third Street, steaming soy milk for a friend's decaffeinated...

THE CASE OF ANNA H.
October 7, 2002... In January of 1999, I received the following letter, from a woman I will call Anna H.: Dear Dr. Sacks,, My (very unusual) problem, in one sentence, and in non-medical terms, is:, I can't read. I can't read music, or anything else., In the...

OUR NEW BEST FRIEND.(Sao Tome)(Brief Article)
October 7, 2002... Until recently, the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, an island nation off the west coast of Africa, was significant only to stamp collectors and a few wealthy sportfishermen. Sao Tome, which is the collective name most outsiders...

EMINENCE ROSE.(Brief Article)
October 7, 2002... Francine du Plessix Gray on Marie-Antoinette I spent my summer vacation reading four biographies of Mme. de Pompadour in a row. When a subject is ineffably delicious and none too wholesome, l'appetit vient en mangeant, and my appetite for...

MIAMI VICE.
October 7, 2002... Guests at the new Westin hotel, which stretches between Forty-second Street and Forty-third Street on Eighth Avenue, will have a pretty good view of one of the most revered modern skyscrapers in New York, the bluish-green McGraw-Hill Building,...

OVERTURES.(Brief Article)
October 7, 2002... The Berlin Philharmonie, Hans Scharoun's gold-yellow masterpiece of late-modern design, was once a temple in a wilderness. Even in 1995, when I last visited Berlin, the wreckage of history was all around: the gray crevasses where the Wall had...

HAM, INTERRUPTED.(Brief Article)
October 7, 2002... In 1966, near the end of his life, Langston Hughes sent an anthology of short stories he had edited to Marianne Moore, that most psychologically astute of modernist poets. Moore wrote back to congratulate him on having managed to get a group of...

SECRETS.(The Trials of Henry Kissinger)
October 7, 2002... At the beginning of the documentary "The Trials of Henry Kissinger," the then national-security adviser to Richard Nixon grins broadly, his eyes shining behind the dark-framed glasses that became his signature. In his late forties, the...

Howard Street Irregulars.(retail stores on New York City's Howard Street)(Brief Article)
October 14, 2002... "My lease was up, and my walk to work was becoming less and less interesting. Greene Street was just getting too spiffy," the jewelry designer Ted Muehling says of his decision to pull up stakes and migrate east to the new location of TED...

On Instruments.(ANALOG DAYS; THE CLAVICHORD; MANUFACTURING THE MUSE)(Brief Article)
October 14, 2002... Robert Moog's moment of revelation came in 1964 when he and a colleague realized the acoustic possibilities of a pair of voltage-controlled oscillators. "It was my turn for my head to blow," he recalls in ANALOG DAYS, by Trevor Pinch and Frank...

MANIFESTO.(George W. Bush's national security strategy)
October 14, 2002... The world is not a place that George W. Bush was terribly familiar with until recently. Any college student who has done a semester abroad has logged a lot more time under foreign skies than he has; and, as he himself told Jim Lehrer, of PBS,...

GOODBYE, PARAMUS.(New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka)(Brief Article)
October 14, 2002... Last week was a nutty one in New Jersey. Bob Torricelli stepped down, and Amiri Baraka did not. Baraka, the poet, dramatist, and activist formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is the state's poet laureate. Why he is the poet laureate is a good...

INSATIABLE.(TV movie "Porn 'n Chicken")(Brief Article)
October 14, 2002... Achievements stud the college record of James Ponsoldt, Yale '01: varsity wide receiver; managing editor of the Yale Daily News Magazine; student-council president. But as he prepared his resume after graduation he omitted his boldest...

A DOCTRINE PASSES.(George F. Kennan on containment and Bush's doctrine of preemptive strikes)(Brief Article)(Interview)
October 14, 2002... For more than fifty years, the security of the world has been kept in fragile balance by an elegant idea, shaped in large part by a man who is a skeptic about big ideas. George F. Kennan, who is now ninety-eight years old, coined the phrase...

OUR WAY.(American dominance of world politics)
October 14, 2002... Years from now, when historians try to explain the world of the early twenty-first century, they might mention the Parsley crisis. It took place in July, when the government of Morocco sent twelve soldiers to a tiny island called Leila, a few...

GETTING TO KNOW YOU.(Children's International Summer Villages camp for children)
October 14, 2002... The future President of Turkey pulled off his T-shirt, hiked up his swimming trunks, and waded into the lake, progressing relentlessly if flinchingly to shorts-soaking depths. This was Gokberk Kutku's first overseas assignment, to a four-week...

CASTRO'S SHADOW.(Otto Juan Reich, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.)(Interview)
October 14, 2002... At the State Department, swearing-in ceremonies for top officials take place in the Benjamin Franklin Room, an ornate hall on the eighth floor. There, in March, Otto Juan Reich was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere...

THE CONGO SOUND.(soukous music from Congo)
October 14, 2002... Herve Halfon, a French person who hates French people, owns a record store on the Rue des Plantes, in Montparnasse, just a few Metro stops from the Eiffel Tower but spiritually closer to Avenue Gambela, in Congo, or to the Mokolo district, in...

THE MIDDLEMAN.(Uighur traders in China)
October 14, 2002... You can buy anything in Yabaolu. The neighborhood borders the embassy district in downtown Beijing, and over the years it has become a Russian ghetto. Small-time traders come from all over Russia and Central Asia to cut deals, often for...

WITHOUT A DOUBT.(national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice)
October 14, 2002... Just outside the entrance to Condoleezza Rice's office in the West Wing of the White House hangs a large color photograph of Rice, the national-security adviser, standing onstage with Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist, their hands clasped, their arms...

IN THE PARTY OF GOD.(Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah)
October 14, 2002... 1--THE MEETING The village of Ras al-Ein, which is situated in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, falls under the overlapping control of the Syrian Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, or Party...

THE LOST MARINER.(Christopher Columbus)
October 14, 2002... In August, 1498, three months into his Third Voyage, Christopher Columbus found himself sailing toward the nipple of the world. He had just spent several weeks navigating off what he believed to be an island in the Far East but was actually...

MEasure for mEasure.(metric system)
October 14, 2002... Early on the morning of September 23, 1999, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory lost contact with a Dumpster-size probe called the Mars Climate Orbiter. According to a news-service report, the mission's increasingly anxious...

PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE.(The Forsyte Saga)
October 14, 2002... As Irene Forsyte, in the new, eight-part Masterpiece Theatre version of "The Forsyte Saga" (based on the first two books of the trilogy by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Galsworthy), Gina McKee calls the term "Galsworthian pale" to mind....

JUNK-YARD ANGEL.("Sea Change")
October 14, 2002... In 1996, you could walk into almost any bar in downtown New York and, within a few minutes, hear a song from Beck's latest album, "Odelay." Chances were you'd like it. It didn't matter if you were into hip-hop, modern rock, or traditional...

STEAK AND CAKE.("The Butter and Egg Man"; "Our Lady of 121st Street")
October 14, 2002... In an illustrious dramatic career that spanned four decades, George S. Kaufman wrote with Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Morrie Ryskind, Ring Lardner, and Moss Hart. Of his forty-five plays, forty-four were collaborations. (Kaufman explained his...

DYING ART.("Red Dragon"; "White Oleander")
October 14, 2002... From 1991, Terrence Rafferty on "The Silence of the Lambs" From 2001, Anthony Lane on "Hannibal" Going to the movies this week sounds like a trip to your local Ford dealership. "O.K., I'll take the used Thunderbird in Red Dragon with...

Poet's Mind.(two books)(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, has lived in Krakow since 1931. In the late sixties, she began to write about books that had caught her eye, books like "The Enigmatic Lemming," "Accidents in the...

HE'S NO. 19.(Jimmy Carter's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize honors the prize process, as it honors him)
October 28, 2002... In the hundred and one years since the Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has given it to citizens of the United States eighteen times. When Jimmy Carter travels to Oslo in December to collect his medal and his...

SADDAM ON THE COUCH.
October 28, 2002... For decades, Dr. Jerrold Post has been treating patients in the usual way, providing fifty-minute doses of psychotherapy in his home office in Bethesda, Maryland, surrounded by the requisite framed diplomas, primitive artifacts, and Kleenex...

The next don.(looking for an author to write 'The Godfather Returns')(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... Like Mark Twain or Jimi Hendrix, Mario Puzo, who died in 1999, has been posthumously prolific. "Omerta," the last installment in his Mafia saga, was published a year after his death, and "The Family," a novel he'd started about mobsters, of a...

SNOW--BLIND.(a John Ashcroft snow globe, meant as satire, has become popular with the attorney general himself)(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... David Israelite, the deputy chief of staff at the United States Department of Justice, has a snow globe on the coffee table in his office, in Washington, D.C. It is six inches in circumference, and contains a polyurethane-resin bust of Attorney...

DEALING WITH DEADBEATS.(the need for national bankruptcy protection, similar to corporate protection)(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... The 7-Eleven Corporation and the sovereign state of Argentina have a couple of things in common. Both appreciate the benefits of late-night dining. And both are well acquainted with the adverse effects of suffocating debt. 7-Eleven gained that...

DAY STRIPPERS.(controversy over nudity at a popular recreation area in Vermont)
October 28, 2002... From 1933, a Talk of the Town piece on the emerging nudism movement WILMINGTON, VERMONT It's not Phil Markham's or Joanne Ruppel's fault, nor is it mine, that I've never seen them naked. On a global scale, I'm still in the majority,...

DYING WORDS.(increasingly, oncologists must deal with discussions of death with patients)(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... Not long ago, I had an appointment with a patient who was likely to die within a year and a half. Maxine Barlow was a twenty-eight-year-old teacher in Boston. The only child of a middle-class family, she had recently become engaged to a...

IN THE PARTY OF GOD.(analysis of sources of funding for Hezbollah; training of Middle East terrorists in Paraguay)
October 28, 2002... The patrol boat, a Boston Whaler, was worn at its edges, and it was pocked with bullet holes along its starboard side. It had a four-man crew, officers of the Brazilian Federal Police. They carried AK-47s and side arms, and they wore jeans,...

ANOTHER DIMENSION.(Dutch artist Michael Sweerts)
October 28, 2002... In Calvinist Amsterdam in the summer of 1661, the Catholic painter Michael Sweerts began to exhibit signs of indiscreet fervor. He fasted, took Communion in hidden chapels, slept on hard floors, and gave away his portraiture fees to the poor....

PHOTO FINISH.
October 28, 2002... The structure of DNA, the molecule of life, was discovered in the early months of 1953. Nine years later, three men were jointly awarded a Nobel Prize for this achievement, which has proved to be one of the most consequential in the history of...

MURDER AND MANNERS.('The Little Friend')
October 28, 2002... Donna Tartt's languidly atmospheric new novel, "The Little Friend" (Knopf; $26), looks as if it's going to be a mystery: it follows the search for the killer of nine-year-old Robin Cleve Dufresnes, who was found hanging from a tree in his back...

SACRED MONSTER.
October 28, 2002... The artist who strives to create a work of everlasting genius faces many obstacles these days, not least a lack of popular demand. In the end, however, nothing stands in the way of immortality but a lack of mad ambition. Olivier Messiaen's "St....

COMEDY CLUB.(Jerry Seinfeld: a film 'Comedian,' and his influene on the 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' TV show)
October 28, 2002... In 1989, Jerry Seinfeld, then a standup comedian, signed on with NBC to star in a sitcom about Jerry Seinfeld, a standup comedian, and his small group of captious fictional friends. "Seinfeld" was famously said to be about nothing, and, indeed,...

DAMES AT SEA.(three plays)
October 28, 2002... On London's West End this summer, David Hare reprised "Via Dolorosa," his 1998 after-dinner speech in the shape of a one-man show about the Arab-Israeli crisis; he followed it this month with another show about a stalemate, "The Breath of Life"...

CLOSEUPS.(two movies)
October 28, 2002... In Paul Schrader's "Auto Focus," a tawdry real-life story, the former radio personality Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) first meets his nemesis, John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), in Los Angeles, in 1965, just after Crane has begun a six-year run as the...