The New Yorker articles from September 2003

The New Yorker archives from September 2003

Rated X.(two books about Madame X)(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Belle Epoque Paris may have greeted John Singer Sargent's portrait of Madame X with derision, but the luminously pale model he captured has become an icon. Deborah Davis sets out to revive the woman behind the image in Strapless: John Singer...

POX POPULI.(politics in California)
September 1, 2003... Twenty-five years ago, California voters went to the polls and, by a two-to-one margin, approved the property-tax-cutting measure known as Proposition 13. During the previous decade, local property taxes all across California had soared,...

THE PERSUADER.(Dr. K. A. Paul)
September 1, 2003... Charles Taylor, having laid waste to Liberia, has been trying to set the record straight about who persuaded him to surrender his Presidency and go into exile in Nigeria. "I will say that 99% of [the credit] goes to Dr. K. A. Paul alone," he...

THE MOJITO MAN.(unlicensed drink peddler in Central Park)
September 1, 2003... A hundred and fifty summers ago, New York City annexed a swampy unpromising seven-hundred-and-seventy-eight-acre tract that was home to hog pens, bone-boiling plants, and threadbare settlements. It became Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted and...

THE O'REILLY FACTOR.(Fox News' suit agianst Al Franken)
September 1, 2003... "Where's the Beef? The Mad Cow Disease Conspiracy."?"Positive Discipline: Don't Leave Home Without It."?"The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life." These were among the more than a hundred book...

RECENT LETTERS TO THE ETHICIST.
September 1, 2003... During the blackout on Thursday night, I looted some Red Bull from the corner bodega. Should I go back and pay for it or leave well enough alone? --Remy Toussaint, Greenwich Village Some of the bars in the neighborhood were open all...

THE ANTI-ANTI-AMERICANS.(pro-Americanism in France)
September 1, 2003... Adam Gopnik discusses the current French mind-set All summer long, Paris was intermittently spectacular and spectacularly intermittent. Even the brightest spectacles came and then, abruptly, went. Every hour on the hour after nightfall, the...

THE CONSENT DEFENSE.(rape laws and cases)
September 1, 2003... Kobe Bryant's defense team made its public debut with a show of force. The initial court appearance for Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers star guard who is charged with felony sexual assault, was scheduled for four o'clock on August 6th, in the...

CITY OF WATER.(tunnel construction under New York City)
September 1, 2003... No one knows how many sandhogs are, at any given moment, working beneath the streets of New York City, but one morning this winter half a dozen men could be spotted gathering around a hole on the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Thirtieth...

THE GARDENER.(poet Stanley Kunitz)(Biography)
September 1, 2003... Stanley Kunitz reads his poem "The Layers" In 1946, just after being discharged from the Army, where he underwent infantry training four times and then refused a commission when it was offered, the poet Stanley Kunitz got a letter from...

SHADOWS AND FOG.(Romanian writer Norman Manea)(Biography)
September 1, 2003... The Jewish Romanian writer Norman Manea made his first, abortive attempt at emigration at the age of four, when he ran away from home. He was disgusted, he writes, by "the alluvial, alluring, endless boredom, the comedy played out by the...

DEEP SONG.("Ainadamar")(Opera Review)
September 1, 2003... Osvaldo Golijov's chamber opera "Ainadamar," which had its premiere at Tanglewood earlier this month, lasts about an hour, but it feels like a surreally extended moment, a long blink of an eye. The libretto, by the playwright David Henry Hwang,...

AMERICAN DREAMERS.("Open Range"; "Thirteen")(Movie Review)
September 1, 2003... "Open Range," the new Western directed by Kevin Costner, was shot in the Canadian Rockies in high, green valleys, a darkly beautiful landscape that lies across the wide screen like velvet. The movie, as if becalmed by the soundless open spaces,...

On the Dot.(Book Review)
September 8, 2003... The rise of the information age looked like a revolution partly because it created an elite from the previously unheralded ranks of programmers and gamers. Shawn Fanning, who spent part of his childhood in the welfare system and part in a...

MOSES IN ALABAMA.(removal of Ten Commandmants sculpture from an Alabama courtroom )(reading the law of church and state)(Column)
September 8, 2003... In 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to the Danbury Baptists--the letter in which he introduced the metaphor of "a wall of separation between Church and State"--that he was convinced that man "has no natural right in opposition to his...

FIT TO PRINT?(news coverage at World Tribune.com)
September 8, 2003... Aficionados of the Drudge Report may have noticed several striking headlines recently linking to stories from the World Tribune, an enterprise with a title as grand and ambitious as it is unfamiliar. One such story last week began, "U.S....

DOTING.(parents of tennis player Andy Roddick meet up with representatives from their son's marketing agency SFX)(Blanche Roddick gives brief bio of herself and her husband)(Interview)
September 8, 2003... For twenty-one-year-old Andy Roddick's first scheduled tennis match last week at the U.S. Open, his parents, Blanche and Jerry Roddick, turned up at Arthur Ashe Stadium and were taken in hand by SFX, Andy's marketing group. They were escorted...

LET'S GO CRAWFORD.(finding George W. Bush's home in Crawford, Texas)
September 8, 2003... There are guides leading tours of the Washington, D.C., White House, but if you want to see the Western White House, in Crawford, Texas, where President Bush has been based for the past month, you have to take a self-guided tour, which goes...

EZ DOES IT.(using radio frequency identification for inventory control)
September 8, 2003... Among the three million or so items in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History is a ten-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum, which was sold for sixty-seven cents at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in 1974. The gum was ordinary...

THE LAST MEOW.(pet medical care, pet owners, and the ethics of animal welfare)
September 8, 2003... She arrived in Manhattan looking ravaged and ravishing, like a queen of silent film with one last swoon left in her. Her sleek ermine coat was matted and worn, her long neck so weak that it drooped to her chest. For months she had managed to...

ALONE IN THE DARK.(North Korean history, relations with South Korea, United States)
September 8, 2003... In 1866, the S.S. General Sherman, an ironclad schooner recommissioned for use in the China trade after service for the Union as a blockade runner in the Civil War, came sailing across the Yellow Sea and entered the mouth of the Taedong River...

THE YEARS WITH THURBER.(the life and work of James Thurber)(Critical Essay)
September 8, 2003... From 1933, "Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife," by James Thurber From 1933, "The Night the Bed Fell," by James Thurber Is the name of James Thurber, once a byword for humor, slowly slipping from the national consciousness? Only half a...

THE ECSTASIST.(the life and work of Pablo Naruda)(Critical Essay)(Biography)
September 8, 2003... Pablo Neruda was easily the most prolific and popular of all twentieth-century poets. His collected poems run in excess of thirty-five hundred pages, and his books, which have been translated into dozens of languages, have sold in the millions....

SELF-MADE MAN.(biography of the artist Arshile Gorky)(Book Review)
September 8, 2003... A headline in the Times of July 22, 1948, read "gorky's cousin ends life." According to the brief obituary that followed, a Russian-born American painter, forty-five years old, had hanged himself in a barn on his property in Sherman,...

BACKGROUND MUSIC.(Taking Sides)(Movie Review)
September 8, 2003... Did anybody look like Wilhelm Furtwangler, apart from Wilhelm Furtwangler? Many photographs exist of the conductor on his podium, and they offer more than an inkling of the attention that he compelled. What a combination: the knobbly leanness...

Smells Like Teen Spirit.(ODD GIRL OUT; QUEEN BEES AND WANNABES; NOT MUCH JUST CHILLIN')(Book Review)
September 15, 2003... Catherine Hardwicke's new film, "Thirteen," has once again raised the issue of adolescent girls' social rituals, especially the more brutal aspects. The same topic propels two recent books, Rachel Simmons's ODD GIRL OUT (Harcourt) and QUEEN...

MAKING THE GRADE.(comparison between federal educational reforms and industrial-efficiency movement)
September 15, 2003... The most striking thing about the sweeping federal educational reforms debuting this fall is how much they resemble, in language and philosophy, the industrial-efficiency movement of the early twentieth century. In those years, engineers argued...

DRAFT DODGING.(Wesley Clark at Oxonian Society meeting)
September 15, 2003... Wesley Clark, the former nato commander and current noncommittal Presidential candidate, may not be able to cry on demand, as John Kerry seemed to do the other day during a campaign stop in New Hampshire, but he does a mean dictator impression....

A RARE AND DIFFERENT TUNE.(katydid sounds)
September 15, 2003... Some people go through life never knowing what a katydid is, or what kind of bug makes which sound, when, and for what reason. These people would probably think it frivolous to identify the species of tree that they might be sitting under as...

DOING YOGI.(actor Ben Gazzara)(Interview)
September 15, 2003... "My baseball was stickball--that's a broom handle and a rubber spaldeen--and where I lived, you go to the park, only the park's concrete," the actor Ben Gazzara said one evening earlier this summer, over a drink at his apartment, in the East...

ROCKETS' RED GLARE.(fireworks artist Cai Guo-Qiang,)(Interview)
September 15, 2003... The Chinese may well have invented everything except the forward pass, but some of their most important inventions were accidental. Did you know, for example, that the Chinese characters for "gunpowder" translate literally as "fire medicine,"...

DIRTY WORDS.(Russia's street argot known as mat)
September 15, 2003... In the Russian State Duma building, at the center of Moscow, I showed my visitor's pass to a set of sullen guards, shot up to the fourteenth floor on an express elevator, and opened the door to a waiting room, where I discovered an Asian woman...

JAKE LEG.(outbreak of paralysis in 1930s)
September 15, 2003... Dr. John Morgan, a professor at the City University of New York Medical School, likes to call himself a pharmaco-ethnomusicologist. His first love is early-American vernacular music, and his apartment, on the Upper West Side, is stacked with...

THE JESUS WAR.(Mel Gibson's 'The Passion')
September 15, 2003... One rainy Wednesday afternoon this summer, I made my way to the Sony Building, on Fifty-fifth Street and Madison Avenue, where, through the accommodation of a friend in the entertainment business, I attended a private screening of "The...

URBAN WARRIORS.(architect Daniel Libeskind)(Biography)
September 15, 2003... From 2002, Louis Menand profiles the architect Maya Lin Daniel Libeskind likes to work with crystalline shapes. Before he was selected as the master planner of Ground Zero in Manhattan, he designed an addition to the Victoria and Albert...

BRAINWASHED.("The Manchurian Candidate")
September 15, 2003... Most people know John Frankenheimer's movie "The Manchurian Candidate," which stars Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury in the story of an American soldier who is captured in Korea and programmed by Chinese...

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT.(The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century)(Book Review)
September 15, 2003... Government actuaries, like observant Jews, celebrate the New Year in the fall. In September, 2000, when the books closed on the fiscal year, the federal government had the biggest budget surplus in history, and it was predicted that the...

THE HOLLYWOOD ONE.("Trumbo")(Theater Review)
September 15, 2003... From the sound of it, Dalton Trumbo--the screenwriter for such movies as "Kitty Foyle," "Spartacus," "Roman Holiday," and "Papillon"--must have been one of the most divine dinner companions ever to grace God's green earth. He smoked. He was,...

HEARTBREAK HOTELS.(Lost in Translation)(Dirty Pretty Things)(Movie Review)
September 15, 2003... Back in the sixties, when the movie-porn revels were just getting under way in San Francisco, I knew a young man who occasionally took part in the industry as an actor. My friend would receive puzzling instructions from his director: "I want...

Readers Digest.(Food, Inc.)(Eating in the Dark)(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... In 1998, just as the battle over genetically modified food was heating up, the Monsanto C.E.O. Robert Shapiro--one of the men who represented O. J. Simpson--was struck in the face by a tofu cream pie hurled by enraged eco-protesters in San...

REAL REASONS.(reasons behind Iraq War)
September 22, 2003... The war in Iraq was a long time coming--so long that it was obvious in Washington that war was certain even before the diplomatic drama that preceded it began to unfold. President Bush and Secretary of State Powell went to the United Nations,...

TRADING PLACES.(Trading Up)(Trading Up: The New American Luxury)(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Among the many night tables upon which sits a copy of "Trading Up," the new novel by Candace Bushnell that chronicles the aspirational manners and consumer preferences of contemporary New Yorkers, is that of Michael J. Silverstein, a retail...

TALKING OUT LOUD.(Bill Murray)(Interview)
September 22, 2003... In the new movie "Lost in Translation," Bill Murray plays a dispirited movie star who goes to Tokyo to make a couple of million dollars by appearing in a TV commercial for Japanese whiskey. Shooting the movie last year took twenty-seven days,...

EXPLAIN THIS ONE.(Barr McClellan's "Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K.")
September 22, 2003... When Scott McClellan, an unassuming thirty-five-year-old Texan, took over from Ari Fleischer as White House spokesman in July, it was clear that there would be no honeymoon with the press. American soldiers were being killed almost daily in...

AIM HIGH.(Air Force deal with Boeing to lease refuelling tankers)
September 22, 2003... Once upon a time, Americans believed that they should buy only what they could pay for. Debt was seen as dangerous, even immoral. This changed in the nineteen-twenties. Amid a boom in mass-produced consumer goods--washing machines, radios,...

UNDER ONE ROOF.(decline of department stores)
September 22, 2003... The great department stores of New York lie on the avenues now like luxury liners becalmed in a lagoon, big ships in shallow water. All around them, the dhows and junks and speedboats of the new national retailing, Staples and Victoria's Secret...

OUT OF SIBERIA.(baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky)(Interview)(Biography)
September 22, 2003... On a typical winter day in central Siberia in the mid-nineteen-eighties, with below-zero temperatures, a young opera star, the twenty-two-year-old baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, gave a recital at a bread factory several hours by train from his...

THE STONE GARDENER.(sculptor Andy Goldsworthy)(Biography)
September 22, 2003... On a sultry morning in early August, the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy stood in a quarry in Stony Creek, Connecticut, watching the heart being burned out of a ten-ton granite boulder. Eighteen of these tawny-gray brutes, varying between three and...

THE FANTASIST.(fashion designer John Galliano)(Interview)(Biography)
September 22, 2003... Last July, three hours before the first model--wearing a flamenco skirt flecked with purple polka dots and cut from more than a hundred and fifty metres of crinoline, organza, and georgette crepe--stepped onto the runway at the Christian Dior...

THE DIVINE MARQUISE.(Luisa Casati)(Biography)
September 22, 2003... Few priestesses of fashion have been better endowed for their vocation than Luisa Casati, a Milanese aristocrat who was born in 1881 to immense wealth, and who, having probably spent more money on clothes and jewels than any queen in history,...

EXPOSURES.(Autobiography)(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... What do we learn from the autobiography of Helmut Newton? I would be thrilled to report that Mr. Newton has lived a life of blameless quietude. How pleasant it would be to discover that, after a hard day spent taking photographs of strapping...

A NATURAL WRITER.(The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara)(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... What has moved Geoffrey Wolff, the author of six novels and two previous biographies, to write "The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara" (Knopf; $30)? Though O'Hara while he was alive felt, for all the fame and wealth his writings...

TEEN-AGERS IN PERIL.(Matchstick Men)(In This World)(Movie Review)
September 22, 2003... The first sound that we hear in "Matchstick Men" is the soft lapping of water. The credits slide onto the screen against waves of blue. All of which makes it most peculiar that, in the course of almost two hours, nobody gets wet. The water is...

Gender Blenders.(SHE'S NOT THERE: A LIFE IN TWO GENDERS)(DRESS CODES: OF THREE GIRLHOODS--MY MOTHER'S, MY FATHER'S, AND MINE)(Book Review)
September 29, 2003... James Boylan grew up feeling that he was a woman trapped inside a man's body; in his early forties, he chose to risk everything, including his marriage, to pursue another identity. This journey is the subject of Jennifer Finney Boylan's memoir...

CLOUDING THE AIR.(Bush Administration's assault on Clean Air Act)
September 29, 2003... Each year, the Detroit Edison plant in Monroe, Michigan, burns roughly eight million tons of coal. That is enough to generate electricity for three million homes and also to make the plant one of the nation's most extravagant polluters. In...

REPLY TO ALL, WITH HISTORY.(e-mail exchange between Jim Rogers and Dmitry Alimov)
September 29, 2003... Jim Rogers, the so-called Indiana Jones of finance, is among those businessmen who, though not exactly hard-knocks graduates (Rogers attended Yale and Oxford), feel that the important lessons for achieving success are more apt to be gleaned...

TONY AGAIN.(re-release of 'Scarface')
September 29, 2003... Guests at last week's special screening of the re-released movie "Scarface"--about a Cuban immigrant named Tony Montana who becomes a powerful, wealthy, and very profane drug lord--seemed noticeably liberated after watching the film at City...

THE ROOF IS NOT ON FIRE.(hydronics uses water as construction material)
September 29, 2003... In the spring of 1947, William Katavolos is the solitary occupant of the Ram's Head Inn, on Ram Island, off eastern Long Island. Katavolos is twenty-three. His father has leased the inn. Katavolos has returned from the war and wants a place...

PLEASANTVILLE.(actor Peter Dinklage)(Interview)
September 29, 2003... Usually, Peter Dinklage plays ghoulish or zany character roles, in dream sequences or crime capers; he's four feet five inches tall--a dwarf. But in "The Station Agent," which opens next week, he gets to be the leading man, a downhearted train...

STRONGMAN.(Arnold Schwarzenegger gubernatorial candicacy)(Biography)
September 29, 2003... A political campaign, like an act of love or a basketball game or a night at the opera, has an arc that is shaped by the participants' knowledge of how long it is going to last. As far as the California recall is concerned, last Monday's...

THE BIONIC EYE.(artificial retina for retinitis pigmentosa patients)
September 29, 2003... When Connie Schoeman was growing up, her family had a country house on a lake in New Hampshire, and she loved to sit outside at night and gaze at the stars. As an undergraduate at Pembroke College in the nineteen-forties, she studied medical...

NEWSHOUND.(journalist R. W. Apple, Jr.)(Biography)
September 29, 2003... There is a consensus in the trade, I am pleased to report, that Johnny Apple--R. W. Apple, Jr., of the New York Times--is a lot easier to take now than he once was. Even Apple believes that. When I asked him not long ago about the paragraph in...

A HUNDRED WOMEN.(serial murder of young women, Chihuahua, Mexico)(case of Ulisis Parzabal, Cynthia Kiecker de Parzabal)
September 29, 2003... Long before her current troubles began, Cynthia Kiecker de Perzabal knew that Mexico had changed her life. When she was growing up, in Minnesota, she vacationed with her family here year after year. When she was a freshman at the University of...

GOOD VIBRATIONS.(Walt Disney Concert Hall)
September 29, 2003... Frank Gehry is one of the most famous architects in the world, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall is the most important thing he has built in his home city of Los Angeles--or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter--so of course...

ME AND MY SHADOW.(Democracy)(Theater Review)
September 29, 2003... To be human is not to know one's self. The "I" that we confidently broadcast to the world is a fiction--a jerry-built container for the volatile unconscious elements that divide and confound us. In this sense, personal history and public...

TAKE THE N TRAIN.(opening of Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall)
September 29, 2003... Zankel Hall, the new midsized venue at Carnegie Hall, is billed as a "new space underground." The phrase describes not only Zankel's location--about forty feet below Seventh Avenue, and three yards to the east of the Fifty-seventh Street...

BLUES CLUES.(PBS series "The Blues")(Television Program Review)
September 29, 2003... There is probably no American filmmaker whose movies are more colored by--even, sometimes, propelled by--music than Martin Scorsese's, so music fans have been eagerly looking forward to the seven-part PBS series "The Blues," for which he served...

HEART OF THE COUNTRY.(Under the Tuscan Sun)(To Be and to Have)(Anything Else)(Movie Review)
September 29, 2003... "Under the Tuscan Sun" might be called a soft-core renovation fantasy for educated women. Frances (Diane Lane), a San Francisco writer and professor who has been dumped by her adulterous husband, goes on a bus tour of Tuscany and buys a...