The New Yorker articles from September 2002

The New Yorker archives from September 2002

The Deep.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... In the forthcoming photographic anthology OCEANS (Rizzoli), edited by Sue Hostetler, actor and environmentalist Robert Redford writes about the sea as "a complex natural wilderness" and Jean-Michel Cousteau (son of Jacques) describes the...

Where the Sidewalk Ends.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... Breezy Point is a place where you can pull off a neat, necessary trick of urban living: escaping the city while remaining within the city limits. A slender peninsula of dune grass and stunted trees that separates Jamaica Bay from the Atlantic...

GAY OLD TIMES.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... When the Times announced, this month, that its Sunday Weddings pages are to shed their staid, heterosexual identity and come out, transformed, as the Weddings/Celebrations pages, sparkling with accounts of the quasi-nuptials of gay and lesbian...

DRIVE SMALL.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... In an unusual spurt of semi-seriousness, Tom and Ray Magliozzi (a.k.a. Click and Clack), the wisecracking brothers and M.I.T.-educated auto mechanics who are the hosts of the radio show "Car Talk," decided recently to launch a political crusade...

A NO. 1 FAN.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... One afternoon last week, on Court 8 at the National Tennis Center, in Flushing Meadows, two young players named Bob Bryan, from California, and Tuomas Ketola, from Finland, met in a first-round qualifying match for the U.S. Open. Among those...

SONIC TRUTH.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... Another good thing about New York is that an ancient-music musician looking for an ancient room in which to play his or her original ancient instrument might not have to leave town. An ancient-music musician can find a fairly ancient room--and,...

BUSH'S BUDDY ECONOMY.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... When George W. Bush took office, his Administration loudly touted its corporate credentials. In place of Clinton's policy wonks, the Bush economic team featured real businessmen, who knew how the world worked, and who appreciated, in a visceral...

THE REFORMER.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... In 1993, when the head of the Boston Archdiocese, Cardinal Bernard Law, appointed Father Walter Cuenin the pastor of Our Lady Help of Christians, a Catholic parish in Newton, Massachusetts, the church's spire was corroded, the Celtic cross that...

CAN YOU FORGIVE HIM?(Vincent A. Cianci, Jr.)(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... In the fall of 1978, I stood on the shoulder of I-95 North in southern Connecticut, facing the traffic and holding out a sheet of cardboard on which I'd written the word "Providence." The sign worked; it took me three rides to get there--all of...

THE SLOW LANE.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... From 1950, John Brooks on solving the mid-century jam A Q. & A. with John Seabrook Shannon Sohn, the blue-eyed, freckled young helicopter reporter for New York's Channel 7 "Eyewitness News," was sitting in the office at the back of the...

BEEHIVES OVER BROADWAY.(Hairspray)(Review)(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... When Harvey Fierstein has something seriously funny to say, he sets it up by tuning his voice low. Then, opening a reserve tank of testosterone, he drops another half octave for the kicker. Fierstein's famous vocal instrument is no black-sable...

THE HERETIC.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... One morning early in February, 1917, Gerhard Scholem, a tall, jug-eared, acutely bookish young man of nineteen, sat at breakfast with his parents in their comfortable Berlin apartment. It was an hour of family crisis. Gerhard, the youngest of...

CHEZ JANE.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... The poet John Ashbery once remarked, "From the moment that life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible and pleasant surprise is promoted to the front rank of the emotions." He might have been talking about the art of Jane...

OUT OF THE PAST.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... From 1961, Roger Angell reviews Godard's "Breathless" The new film from Jean-Luc Godard, "In Praise of Love," is to be released on September 6th. That plan alone strikes me as bold, not to say reckless. Will audiences, caught in a gust of...

Branch Library.(books about trees)(Brief Article)(Bibliography)
September 9, 2002... While walking in South Africa in 1829, the British missionary Robert Moffat came upon a giant fig tree so large that, according to his report, it housed seventeen huts in its branches. The historian Thomas Pakenham, in REMARKABLE TREES OF THE...

BLOOMBERG BUTTS IN.(New York City's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, proposes to completely ban smoking in restaurants and bars)
September 9, 2002... You might suppose, at first thought, that the opposition to Mayor Bloomberg's recent proposal for a complete ban on smoking in bars and restaurants would be both passionate and powerful. Like the owners of guns, the consumers of cigarettes are...

OPENOVA.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... As the Williams sisters shot relentlessly toward titledom at the U.S. Open last week, the Russian competition spent their time, when not playing or practicing, in the players' lounge, eating yogurt and pizza. They were fast out of the gate in...

THE SWIMMERS.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... "When you swim in the Hudson, everyone thinks you're nuts, but native New Yorkers really think you're nuts," Teddy Jefferson said on a recent hot afternoon, while floating on his back in the river, off the Surfside Marina, at Chelsea Piers. It...

CLUB TRIP TO N.Y., 2002.
September 9, 2002... Rachel Trachtenburg moved to Manhattan in July, after spending her entire life in Seattle. Like most eight-year-old girls, Rachel didn't move for a job or a boyfriend or because she needed a change of scenery. She moved because her parents...

BLOCKING AND CHOWING.(eating habits of Randy Thomas, and other New York Jets players)(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... If you are an offensive lineman, the Netherlands cafeteria, at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, where the New York Jets hold their training camp, has a couple of things going for it: the portions are unlimited, and the food doesn't cost...

THE MAN CHASING ENRON.
September 9, 2002... On the morning of January 22nd, a lawyer named Bill Lerach got out of his van in front of the Houston federal courthouse and presented a cardboard box full of shredded documents to the cameras of a waiting press corps. At the time, the...

PERFORMANCE.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... From 1975, Hendrik Hertzberg on the Rolling Stones at the Garden One afternoon last month, Mick Jagger was standing in front of a full-length mirror in a windowless room in downtown Toronto, plucking at the cloth of a pair of narrow black...

BEYOND TOLERANCE.(Holland: reactions to the life, and death, of Pim Fortuyn)
September 9, 2002... On July 19th, ten weeks after he had been buried in the little town of Driehuis, just outside Amsterdam, Pim Fortuyn was dug up again. The disinterment was scheduled for 7 P.M., and, exactly on time, a machine resembling a giant spider...

I AM FASHION.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... The Air France hostess was pleasant but unwilling to compromise. "This flight closes in three minutes,'' she said. "We don't make exceptions." Chuck Bone, who was sitting in the Concorde's first-class waiting lounge at J.F.K., reached casually...

NOBLESSE DE ROBE.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... I never bought a piece of clothing by Bill Blass, although I inherited one of his down coats from my mother. It was a shapeless bed sack of reversible two-tone gray cotton, ash on one side, slate on the other, and there is nothing better for...

THE DREAM MASTER.(Arthur Schnitzler)(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... One September evening in 1887, Arthur Schnitzler, a young doctor with literary aspirations, was out walking with a friend on the Ringstrasse, the grand new boulevard encircling the old city of Vienna. A pretty young woman caught his eye, and...

UNREAL LIFE.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Robert De Niro speaks in quiet, even tones throughout much of the dolorous family melodrama "City by the Sea." De Niro is Vincent LaMarca, a respected Manhattan homicide detective who has cut himself off from an earlier time of trouble out in...

Change Will Do You Good.(METAMORPHOSES; YOU'RE AN ANIMAL, VISKOVITZ!)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Ovid's Metamorphoses, says Madeleine Foray, "changes in the hands of each new translator and adapter." Her introduction to a new edition of Arthur Golding's 1567 English translation of the METAMORPHOSES (Johns Hopkins) shows how he...

A YEAR AFTER.(anniversary of 9/11 attacks)
September 16, 2002... On September 17, 1862, in the Maryland village of Sharpsburg, in the fields between Antietam Creek and the Potomac River, forces of the Union Army defeated Confederate troops under General Robert E. Lee. By nightfall, some five thousand men...

THE WAR ON WHAT?(War on Terrorism)
September 16, 2002... Just a few hours after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, President Bush made a brief appearance at Barksdale Air Force Base, in Louisiana. "Make no mistake," he said, "the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for...

THE "HOLY GROUND".(tracing the history of the land occupied by the World Trade Center twin towers)
September 16, 2002... At the northeast corner of Vesey and Church Streets, across from the graveyard of St. Paul's Chapel, there is a tiny, crowded deli called the Stage Door. I went there recently to meet Joyce Gold, a guide who used to lead a World Trade Center...

THE MAN BEHIND BIN LADEN.(Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who apparently controls the Qaeda al-Jihad organization)
September 16, 2002... Last March, a band of horsemen journeyed through the province of Paktika, in Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. Predator drones were circling the skies and American troops were sweeping through the mountains. The war had begun six months...

FAITH, HOPE, AND CLARITY.(9-11-01 terrorist attacks: eight books)
September 16, 2002... The initial response of most cultural and political critics to the attacks of September 11th--a completely unanticipated atrocity carried out by an organization that few people in the West had ever heard of and whose intentions are still not...

FEMMES FATALES.("8 Women")
September 16, 2002... If you find yourself in need of a tonic in the coming weeks, and discover that a close friend has stolen your copy of "Singin' in the Rain," you could do worse than plan a trip to "8 Women." Francois Ozon's new picture is a tonic of sorts, but...

Alternate Americas.(The Partly Cloudy Patriot)(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... Sarah Vowell, a contributing editor to "This American Life," on National Public Radio, knows that she's not a fair-weather patriot--at least not the kind Thomas Paine disparaged in the first installment of the "American Crisis" papers, which...

US AND THEM.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... Last Wednesday morning, one year to the hour after American Airlines Flight 11 rammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, Rudolph Giuliani hunched over a lectern at Ground Zero and began reading the names of the dead in the tolling...

A DESERT TRIBUTE.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... When the New York-New York Hotel and Casino opened in Las Vegas, five years ago, the absence of the World Trade Center towers from the resort's ersatz skyline seemed like a reasonable omission, the kind of messing around with reality that is to...

FAITHFULL.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... Marianne Faithfull--singer, songwriter, memoirist, occasional film actress, occasional stage actress, and all-around legend--was in town the other day to do a little shopping and catch up with friends before heading off on a short tour (which...

REAL FOLK.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... It's been a summer of windfalls at the American Folk Art Museum. First, in July, at the World Architecture Awards, the museum was named the best new building in the world. And then, in August, something else rather extraordinary happened,...

THE BUFFETT OF BASEBALL.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... Even if you set aside the accounting scams and the free palaces for C.E.O.s, these last few years would rate as some of the most dismal in the annals of corporate leadership. Intoxicated by cheap money, executives squandered hundreds of...

THIS IS GOING TO BE BIG.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... The view from the upper reaches of the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles is magnificent: all Beverly Hills glitters below. But on a clear day last year the three people in Room 1429--the public-relations consultant Bumble Ward, her associate...

GUTTER MOUTH.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... A look at bowling Web sites If you met Pete Weber, you'd never guess that he is "the loudest, most controversial and successful athlete you don't know," as ESPN's "SportsCenter" has called him. He is five feet seven and a hundred and forty...

WHERE'S WILLY?(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... It was a hell of a time to be in Iceland, although by most accounts it is always a hell of a time to be in Iceland, where the wind never huffs or puffs but simply blows your house down. This was early in August, and it was stormy, as usual, but...

THE GREED CYCLE.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... There are many ways to take the measure of what has happened to corporate America in recent years. As good a way as any is to flip through some back copies of the Financial Times, which recently published a remarkable series of articles on what...

HEAD ON.(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... The first image in the new show of Richard Avedon photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the picture that visitors will come upon as they enter, is not just the earliest, dating from 1947; it is also the happiest. A small Sicilian boy...

THE DOUBLE MAN.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... When W. H. Auden died, in 1973, no one would have imagined that thirty years later he would come back as the poet of another age, our own. He seemed miserable and seedy then, having made a failed return to Oxford after two decades on St. Marks...

TALKING TERROR.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... From 1968, an interview with Tom Stoppard. "When in doubt, speculate. Enter the picture," Tom Stoppard has said. In his ambitious trilogy about prerevolutionary intellectual life in Russia, "The Coast of Utopia" (at London's Royal National...

SANCTUM ON THE COAST.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... It is hard to make a landmark in Los Angeles. The city is relentlessly horizontal, and while you might think that a skyscraper would be memorable, it doesn't work that way in L.A. Big, boxy buildings stay in your line of vision longer, which is...

GOOD-TIME GIRLS.(The Banger Sisters)(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... If groupies followed film critics around from screening room to screening room, I suppose I might take a different view of their social value, but they don't, so right now I'll stand on my conscience and say that the premise of "The Banger...

Pot Luck.(Pot Planet; Loaded)(Brief Article)
September 30, 2002... "I'm the tour guide for a global gourmet-ganja holiday." So writes Brian Preston, a Canadian journalist, with just a hint of gloating, in POT PLANET (Grove), a gimlet-eyed and often hilarious account of the author's round-the-world reefer...

DECLARATIONS.(congressional approval of war declarations)
September 30, 2002... Last Tuesday was Constitution Day, the anniversary of the wrap party of the original Constitutional Convention, when the thirty-nine delegates still in Philadelphia, before saddling up to disperse to their homes up and down the Eastern...

SILENCE IS BEHOLDEN.(alleged copyright infringement of composer John Cage's work in impresario Mike Batt's production of music recording Classical Graffiti)(Brief Article)
September 30, 2002... Mike Batt is Britain's premier impresario of crossover classical music, having orchestrated the careers of such stars as Vanessa-Mae (a sexy Thai-Chinese violinist), Bond (a sexy four-piece multiethnic classical group), and the Planets (a sexy...

CRITTER FLICKS.(filmmaker Mark Lewis's documentaries on animals)(Interview)
September 30, 2002... There are two species of Emmy winners that can be sighted at this time of year: the prime-time Emmy winners, who were all dressed up for the live award broadcast from L.A. last weekend, and the news and documentary Emmy winners, who, a couple...

SATCHMO WAS HERE.(scheduled opening of Louis Armstrong House and Archives museum in Queens, New York)(Brief Article)
September 30, 2002... For nearly half his life, Louis Armstrong lived at 34-56 107th Street, in Corona, Queens. When Armstrong and his fourth wife, Lucille, bought the place, in 1943, it was a boxy two-story wooden house in a mostly white neighborhood; today, it is...

THE TWENTIETH MAN.(trial of alleged terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui)
September 30, 2002... About six years ago, Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now facing trial on capital charges as the alleged twentieth man in the September 11th aircraft hijackings, travelled to Chechnya with a childhood friend to join separatists in their fight against...

BUMPING INTO MR. RAVIOLI.(busyness of life in New York City; effects on a child's imagination)
September 30, 2002... My daughter Olivia, who just turned three, has an imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is growing up in Manhattan, and so Charlie Ravioli has a lot of local traits: he lives in an apartment "on Madison and Lexington," he dines...

THE PROPHET OF DECLINE.(literary critic Harold Bloom)
September 30, 2002... It is tempting to say that Harold Bloom is a man marooned in the wrong place and time, and that living out his late years in twenty-first-century America is what's making him miserable. It is so easy, after all, to imagine him gleefully...

MR. DIFFICULT.(readers' attitudes toward writing styles; author William Gaddis's novel The Recognitions)
September 30, 2002... For a while last winter, after my third novel came out, I was getting a lot of angry mail from strangers. What upset them was not the novel--a comedy about a family in crisis--but some impolitic remarks I'd made in the press, and I knew that it...

THE WOMEN COME AND GO.(author T.S. Eliot's sexual relationships; book Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T.S. Eliot, and the Long-Suppressed Truth about Her Influence on His Genius)
September 30, 2002... T. S. Eliot's sex life. Do we really want to go there? It is a sad and desolate place. Eliot was twenty-six and, almost certainly, a frustrated virgin when, in 1915, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an Englishwoman he had known for three months....

THE DESCENT OF GOULD.(scientist Stephen Jan Gould; books I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History; The Structure of Evolutionary Theory)
September 30, 2002... From 1994, Stephen Jay Gould on "The Bell Curve" In the mid-forties, on the fourth floor of the American Museum of Natural History, there stood the remains of a tyrannosaurus. Towering above hordes of awestruck kids, this pile of bones...

HOME CARE.(Family Matters)
September 30, 2002... Whereas Salman Rushdie's celebrated "Midnight's Children" gave us Bombay with a headlong, fantastic, word-twirling magic realism, Rohinton Mistry, a Bombay-born Canadian, presents the same diverse, congested metropolis with a realism that, if...

NOTHING ON.(Brooklyn Museum's exhibit Exposed: The Victorian Nude)
September 30, 2002... The Victorians were obsessed with sex. That's our new conventional wisdom about an age of proverbial prudery. It informs a strong, mildly racy historical show, "Exposed: The Victorian Nude," that opened at Tate Britain, in London, last year and...

FOREIGN PARTS.(Sweet Home Alabama; The Four Feathers)
September 30, 2002... Among the many talents of Reese Witherspoon is the ability to hang around in movies that are unworthy of her, and thus to shine all the brighter. Only twice, as far as I can see, has she broken this rule: once in "Twilight," which doesn't...