The New Yorker articles from October 2004

The New Yorker archives from October 2004

INDEFENSIBLE.(The Talk of the Town)
October 4, 2004... In July, the first interceptor for a national missile-defense system was installed at Fort Greely, Alaska. A few weeks later, President Bush announced that the first components of that system would soon "become operational." Speaking at a...

HOT TICKET.(The Talk of the Town)
October 4, 2004... Third week in September: back to school at the United Nations. No sooner had the Fashion Week tents come down in Bryant Park than gravitas (of a sort) returned to the city, ushered in by motorcades ferrying visiting dignitaries between the U.N....

BOFFO BEATITUDE.(The Talk of the Town)
October 4, 2004... Last Tuesday, a double-decker sightseeing bus was inching its way along Via della Conciliazione, the wide thoroughfare that leads to St. Peter's Basilica, in Rome. The bus, which was plastered all over with an advertisement for the DVD of Mel...

POINT OF VIEW.(The Talk of the Town)(The View restaurant at the Marriott Marquis reopens)
October 4, 2004... Last spring, the owners of The View, Manhattan's only revolving restaurant, which is at the top of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, shut the place down to repair what had come to seem a serious problem. "People were just sitting at their...

GOOD GROOMING.(The Talk of the Town)
October 4, 2004... In July, 1994, Michael Eisner, the C.E.O. of the Walt Disney Company, underwent emergency quadruple-bypass surgery. Just before taking him to the operating room, the doctors gave him a little time to talk to his wife and his sons. Among other...

GOING PLACES.(Profile of Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco)(Interview)(Biography)
October 4, 2004... Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, began fighting City Hall almost as soon as he moved into it. He disliked ceremonial ribbon-cuttings and the way that Room 200, his imposing oak-panelled office, seemed to turn visitors into sycophants....

THE X PRIZE.
October 4, 2004... About six years ago, not long after Burt Rutan, an aircraft designer, had begun to think seriously of building a plane that could leave the Earth's atmosphere, he woke up at his desert home, a few miles outside the town of Mojave, California,...

THE NEXT IRAQI WAR.
October 4, 2004... Luna Dawood was twenty-four years old when Saddam Hussein paid a surprise visit to her house in Kirkuk, the ethnically mixed city in northern Iraq. She admits that she reacted like a teen-ager. It was an October afternoon in 1983, and two...

THE PRANKSTER.(Profile of artist Maurizio Cattelan)(Interview)(Biography)
October 4, 2004... Ten o'clock on a May morning in Paris, by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Maurizio Cattelan, the world's only punctual artist, is slightly late, but the sun is warm, the breeze is cool, and vividly dressed art students crowd through a narrow gate in...

GOD IN THE DETAILS.
October 4, 2004... Borges, in one of his enigmatic parables, imagined an empire in which the art of cartography had "attained such perfection" that a map was exactly the same size as the area it covered. At well over two thousand pages, Norman Sherry's authorized...

FOUR SINGLES.
October 4, 2004... Beyonce Knowles is a poet of hugeness. It is the subject of her work and the signal feature of her life. She is the lead singer of one of the world's hugest pop groups, Destiny's Child, and she has a multimillion-dollar contract with L'Oreal,...

RATHER KNOT.
October 4, 2004... A discussion about the value, relevance, and long-term viability of network news shows has been going on for a while, and naturally it accelerated in the past couple of weeks, after CBS's unsinkable "60 Minutes" plowed into an iceberg. The...

BATTLE STATES.(aims of the movies)
October 4, 2004... Movie disasters (not to be confused with disaster movies) come in many styles. There are the leaden, twelve-footed monsters ("Pearl Harbor," "King Arthur"), the relentless whirligigs ("Men in Black II," the remake of "Planet of the Apes"), the...

WINNING.(The Talk of the Town)
October 11, 2004... About a third of the way into last Thursday's Presidential debate, the moderator, Jim Lehrer, asked President George W. Bush to clarify a comment that he had made the previous month. Bush had used the term "miscalculation" in connection with...

DRY RUN.(The Talk of the Town)
October 11, 2004... Kwesi Addae, a fifty-three-year-old former political-science professor from Ghana and the founder of Pollwatch Africa, has monitored elections in half a dozen shenanigan-prone countries, including Togo, Nigeria, and Guinea-Bissau. So it's not...

HARD GUY.(The Talk of the Town)
October 11, 2004... New York may be a bastion of liberalism and, in its own gruff way, a sanctuary for leniency, if no longer for licentiousness, but it has always had a soft spot for the autocrat, the unyielding hard-ass--Rudy Giuliani, Martha Stewart, Don...

GARDNER BOTSFORD.(The Talk of the Town)
October 11, 2004... Every meeting with Gardner Botsford--down the hall; on a street corner, unexpectedly; at your doorway before dinner--began the same way, with your own "How are you, Gardner?" and his firm, upbeat "Never better!" You came to count on this and to...

PUMP DREAMS.
October 11, 2004... In the predawn hours of October 6, 1973, on Yom Kippur, Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israeli positions in the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Two weeks later, after the Pentagon had started airlifting materiel to...

PRAY AND GROW RICH.
October 11, 2004... If you had wandered into the World Changers Church International World Dome on a Sunday morning not long ago, you might have thought you'd stumbled into a shareholders' meeting, and in some ways you had. The dome, in southwest Atlanta, seats...

THE DEVASTATION.
October 11, 2004... Michael Specter discusses the worldwide AIDS crisis From 2001, Michael Specter on AIDS in India From 2003, Michael Specter on AIDS in Africa The first days of spring are electrifying in St. Petersburg. The winters are hard and dark...

THE SIMPLE LIFE, INC.
October 11, 2004... MaryJane Butters lives at the end of a long dirt road in the black-soil region of northern Idaho. The road, which she named Wild Iris Lane, passes through wheat fields that are spread like a green duvet and buzzed by crop dusters, and the...

NORTHERN LIGHTS.
October 11, 2004... On January 8, 1697, at some time between two and four in the afternoon, an eighteen-year-old student named Thomas Aikenhead was hanged in Edinburgh. Aikenhead had been found guilty of a serious charge: the previous year he had several times...

TANNER REVISITED.(Movie Review)
October 11, 2004... In her new documentary, "Diary of a Political Tourist," Alexandra Pelosi, who spent nearly two years chasing after the Democrats who were themselves chasing after the 2004 Presidential nomination, asks Howard Dean, as he's hurrying down a New...

PLAYING PARTS.(Movie Review)
October 11, 2004... The title character in Mike Leigh's "Vera Drake" is a radiant middle-aged cleaning lady (Imelda Staunton) who races through her London working-class neighborhood singing to herself. The time is 1950, and the city still suffers from wartime...

PRETENDING HE JUST DOESN'T SEE.
October 11, 2004... "The world was absurd. . . . I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation I was supposed to be the voice of.", --Bob Dylan, in his memoir "Chronicles, Volume 1." "Blowin' in the Wind" "They call Chicago the...

STUBBORN THINGS.(The Talk of the Town)
October 18, 2004... Nicholas Lemann on the Bush Presidency Nicholas Lemann talks about the real George W. Bush Philip Gourevitch on following John Kerry into the homestretch Anthony Lane on the films of Ronald Reagan Folder: The 2004 Campaign ...

TO THE EDITOR.(The Talk of the Town)
October 18, 2004... Katie, a sixteen-year-old from Lexington, Kentucky, has advice for anyone hoping to get a letter published in the Times: "In such a small space, your letter has to convey a lot of passion. You really have to care about what you're saying."...

POST-PUNK.(The Talk of the Town)
October 18, 2004... It is customary for politicians to be called rock stars and for rock stars to be active in politics, but there haven't really been any rock stars who are politicians, in the Mr. Smith sense of the word. "Sonny Bono doesn't count," Danny...

YARD SALE.(The Talk of the Town)(New York yard sale will benefit public schools)
October 18, 2004... This weekend, Central Park will play host to what is being billed as "the biggest tag sale ever in new york city!" Fifty truckloads of rejected possessions will be spread out under an acre of tents, the casualties of a fundamental New York...

FREE AIR.(The Talk of the Town)
October 18, 2004... In the late nineties, Washington policymakers took up a noble cause. There was a new technology, digital television, that almost everyone agreed would eventually revolutionize TV, but--quelle horreur--almost no one was adopting it. Among other...

HOLLYWOOD SCIENCE.(Proposition 71 and the debate on embryonic stem cell research)
October 18, 2004... Addressing a state legislative committee hearing held in San Diego on September 15th, a young research scientist named Hans Keirstead declared, "Maybe every hundred years we have one major milestone in medical research." This was such a moment,...

THE POLLSTER.(John Zogby)(Biography)
October 18, 2004... Shortly after his fifty-sixth birthday, several weeks ago, John Zogby, the pollster, could be found at seven-thirty in the evening walking rapidly back and forth among the brightly lit shops in the Copley Place Mall, in Boston, trying vainly to...

REALITY CHECK.(Bush vs. Kerry)
October 18, 2004... Nicholas Lemann on the Bush Presidency Nicholas Lemann talks about the real George W. Bush Hendrik Hertzberg reviews the Vice-Presidential debate Anthony Lane on the films of Ronald Reagan Folder: The 2004 Campaign Despite...

GREEN MANHATTAN.
October 18, 2004... My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naive and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite...

REMEMBER THE ALAMO.(George W. Bush)(Biography)
October 18, 2004... Nicholas Lemann talks about the real George W. Bush Hendrik Hertzberg reviews the Vice-Presidential debate Philip Gourevitch on following John Kerry into the homestretch Anthony Lane on the films of Ronald Reagan Folder: The...

THE FACTORY.(Bostons' Pacific Rim charter public school)(Biography)
October 18, 2004... A year ago in September, strangeness was afoot in Boston. A gorilla roamed the streets of Dorchester, and the Red Sox made the playoffs. Water droplets on the window of an ophthalmology clinic coalesced into the shape of the Madonna and Child,...

THE MONEY MAN.(Biography)
October 18, 2004... On August 6th, a week after the Democratic Convention, a clandestine summit meeting took place at the Aspen Institute, in Colorado's Rocky Mountains. The participants, all Democrats, were sworn to secrecy, and few of them will discuss the...

THE METHOD PRESIDENT.(Obituary)(Biography)
October 18, 2004... Nicholas Lemann on the Bush Presidency Nicholas Lemann talks about the real George W. Bush Hendrik Hertzberg reviews the Vice-Presidential debate Philip Gourevitch on following John Kerry into the homestretch Folder: The 2004...

BRINGING UP BOBBY.(Jack and Bobby)(Television Program Review)
October 18, 2004... The advance publicity for "Jack & Bobby," a Sunday-night WB drama that debuted a month ago, took pains to note that the show has nothing to do with the Kennedys, even though it is about two brothers, one of whom grows up to become the President...

TRUE VIEWS.(Rackstraw Downes)
October 18, 2004... Rackstraw Downes, the veteran painter of landscapes and urban places, is a realist esteemed by people, including me, who normally have scant use for realism in art. His current show, of work from 1999 to 2004, at the new Betty Cuningham...

THE LAUGHING CURE.(Last Easter)(White Chocolate)(Theater Review)
October 18, 2004... In "The Four Quartets," T. S. Eliot, who was not renowned for spontaneous displays of humor, explained a lot about comedy. "Human kind cannot bear very much reality," he wrote. Jokes are the soul's analgesic: they defy gravity--which is to say,...

YOUNG MEN.(P.S.)(Movie Review)
October 18, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File This is how you get into Columbia University. You get a call from the director of admissions, whom you greet with the words "Yyyyyyo, what's crackin'?" The director's name is Louise, so you call her first...

Campaign 2004.(Quiz)
October 18, 2004... Which candidate did what? 1. Howard Dean. 2. John Edwards. 3. John Kerry. 4. Wesley Clark. 5. Joseph Lieberman. (a) Issued a press release announcing his endorsement by Hootie and the Blowfish. (b) Called out to...

QUESTIONS OF GREATNESS.(The Talk of the Town)
October 25, 2004... Folder: The Campaign Trail In 1997, William Kristol and David Brooks, writing in the Wall Street Journal, offered a critique of the Republican Party of Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole. "What's missing from today's American conservatism is...

PRIZE FIGHT.(The Talk of the Town)
October 25, 2004... The host of a dinner party on Fifth Avenue, not long ago, greeted guests with a question: "Can you tell me how cliches subjugate people?" The occasion for this puzzler was that afternoon's announcement of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature,...

WEIRD LOVE.(The Talk of the Town)(Critical Essay)
October 25, 2004... The filmmaker Ed Wood, Jr., who died in 1978, didn't make many movies during the last decade of his life, owing to problems with money and booze, not to mention the problem of never having made movies that were any good in the previous decades....

MURPHY AT THE BAT.(The Talk of the Town)
October 25, 2004... It is one thing to be locked out of one's apartment, and to be forced to perform that cumbersome Manhattan ritual of window entry via fire escape. It is quite another to discover that there isn't any fire escape, and consequently, while...

FAMILY PORTRAIT.(The Talk of the Town)
October 25, 2004... In the past several years, Maria Altmann, an amiable eighty-eight-year-old resident of Los Angeles with a lilting Austrian accent, has become something of an art-world personage. The other day, serving a picnic of Lipton tea and homemade...

NOT POOR ENOUGH.
October 25, 2004... Cassie Stromer, a petite seventy-six-year-old woman with bottle-blond hair and off-blue eyes, lives in Mount Vernon House, a pleasant four-story red brick apartment complex in Alexandria, Virginia. She has good memories of a colorful...

ACROSS THE RIVER STYX.
October 25, 2004... Padded ear protectors had transformed the thunking of the helicopter's blades to a bland white noise, enhancing the sense of dreamlike remoteness with which we drifted over fields of shining paddy. Standing starkly in one green field, a woman...

INSIDE DOPE.
October 25, 2004... Folder: The Campaign Trail "There is always some new tidbit," Mark Halperin said. "You just have to ferret it out." It was the first day of the Republican Convention, in New York, and although the sun had not yet risen, he had already laid...

A DRY SOUL IS BEST.(Critical Essay)
October 25, 2004... Michael Frayn is a decent man. He is nice to everybody, easily pleased, self-effacing, and well liked. He is optimistic, cheerful, tidy, hardworking, discreet, modest, logically scrupulous, and parsimonious in matters of sentiment. He is...

RUNNING WILD.(Theater Review)
October 25, 2004... Call me old-fashioned, but on the opening page of my copy of Shakespeare's "Richard III" I don't see any stage direction that reads "Enter King and Court to portentous swelling music and vulgar pantomime." The director Peter DuBois's first...

HIGH PRICES.
October 25, 2004... An interview with Malcolm Gladwell Ten years ago, the multinational pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca launched what was known inside the company as the Shark Fin Project. The team for the project was composed of lawyers, marketers, and...

TAYMOR'S MYTHOLOGY.
October 25, 2004... In the fall of 1791, Mozart was a sick man who felt his life slipping away. Still, he was intensely happy. The motive for his joy was "The Magic Flute," which had opened at the end of September, in Vienna. Representatives of the musical elite...

PUSHING PAPER.(Television Program Review)
October 25, 2004... Nobody who has seen the BBC series "The Office" has anything bad to say about it, and there's a reason for that: it's perfect. It's a comedy that doesn't make you laugh, and at times it is close to unbearable; some people like it so much that...

DRINKING AND DRIVING.(Movie Review)
October 25, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File Early on in the wonderful new movie "Sideways," the hero, Miles (Paul Giamatti), does the Times crossword puzzle while driving his Saab on the San Diego Freeway. Sharp details are not enough in themselves...