The New Yorker articles from September 2004

The New Yorker archives from September 2004

SCOOPS.(The Talk of the Town)
September 6, 2004... The news cycle is a tricky matter these days, what with cable TV and the Internet, but in the buildup to the Convention a new complication materialized: clairvoyance. Not content with the traditional sequence of choreographed tips and leaks,...

REPORTING FOR DUTY.(The Talk of the Town)
September 6, 2004... Every election year, Jim Morris hits the trail as a Presidential hopeful--or two, or three. Morris, a rangy forty-seven-year-old from Massachusetts, is arguably the country's leading political impressionist. He came to notice during the 1980...

BITTERNESS.(The Talk of the Town)(Interview)
September 6, 2004... On a gray afternoon of what would, for the time being, at least, prove to be his last weekend with the Mets, Jae Weong Seo, a pitcher once touted as a prospect blessed with vast possibilities, paused to chat about the eternal struggle against...

COME ONE, COME ALL.(The Talk of the Town)
September 6, 2004... Why here? This thought must have occurred to the citizens of Boston, Athens, and New York this summer as they saw their cities converted, at great expense, into heavily garrisoned holiday camps for hordes of strangers. Home-town promoters of...

TAX CODE.
September 6, 2004... A few weeks ago, George W. Bush crossed the Potomac to a community college in Annandale, Virginia, where he hosted an "Ask President Bush" town-hall-style meeting and took up a favorite campaign theme, saying that one of the things that...

A REALLY BIG LUNCH.
September 6, 2004... On our frequent American road trips, my friend Guy de la Valdene has invariably said at lunch, "These French fries are filthy," but he always eats them anyway, and some of mine, too. Another friend, the painter Russell Chatham, likes to remind...

THE LONG WAY HOME.
September 6, 2004... Saturdays, when I was growing up, I would often be woken by the powerful, almost meaty stench of powdered asafetida hitting a pan, or the insistent drone of my mother's blender, pulverizing whole roots of ginger or a dozen heads of garlic. I...

DISSED FISH.
September 6, 2004... Calvin Trillin discusses regional food fetishes From 1972, Trillin reports from a Louisiana crawfish festival From 1977, Trillin hunts barbecued lamb in Kentucky My friend Jeffrey Jowell, who grew up in Cape Town, has lived away...

CHICKEN SMEDLEY.
September 6, 2004... My father once made soup. Barley soup. This was, give or take, forty-five years ago. The soup was red, so tomatoes must have been involved--also, I'm guessing, carrots, celery, onions, a turnip, maybe some soup bones, probably garlic, plus a...

BACK TO THE FUTURE.
September 6, 2004... Lacerba, Monica Trapasso thought when she saw the sign above the pizzeria she had just bought, was a peculiar name for a restaurant. It is not even a word in Italian, although acerbo is an adjective, meaning unripe or sour, applied to fruit....

THE MAN WHO EATS.
September 6, 2004... The God of Lightning does not hit the man who eats, my grandfather often said when we were young. The lesson? Eating was a virtue. Grandpa could go on for hours citing Confucius and his disciples on the merit of eating. Sometimes, to make us...

THE KETCHUP CONUNDRUM.
September 6, 2004... Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French's. It came in a plastic bottle. People used it on hot dogs and bologna. It was a yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and vinegar, which gave it...

SALAD DAYS.
September 6, 2004... Doucette, they called it, the sweet little one, and its lack of cultivation was half its charm. It was a slender, diminutive thing--so lowborn that it came clean only after repeated washings--but it had strong roots and surprising snap, and a...

UNAUTHORIZED.
September 6, 2004... There are few documented examples of the fake or forged autobiography, although the genre probably has a long, secret history. Its most famous practitioner was Clifford Irving, who, in 1971, tried to publish the tell-all memoirs of Howard...

CITY OF GLUTES.
September 6, 2004... All bad things--car alarms, the wait at Starbucks, dental work--go on forever, but good things inevitably come to an end. And so the Olympics are over. Like every Olympic fortnight, this one produced stories and images that will stay in...

POWER PLAYS.(Movie Review)
September 6, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File No film of "Vanity Fair" can be true to Thackeray's novel, nor should it be. Bad faith, with occasional slivers of good, was his most pullulating theme, and woe betide any director who dogs the book with...

IN MODERATION.(The Talk of the Town)
September 13, 2004... When Barack Obama spoke at the Democratic Convention in Boston, a lot of people thought--and hoped--that they were seeing the future. Half Kansan and half Kenyan, half black and half white, yet all-American in a novel and exhilarating way that...

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE.(The Talk of the Town)
September 13, 2004... On a midtown residential block shortly after ten o'clock last Thursday night, as the President appeared onstage at Madison Square Garden, a series of dissonant voices joined the familiar chorus of passing car stereos and sirens....

MONEY HONEYS.(The Talk of the Town)
September 13, 2004... Last week, the big Republican donors who travelled to the Convention seemed determined to be themselves, starting curbside at the entrance to the Ritz-Carlton, where many of the major Party benefactors were holed up. "We're called the...

YOUNG AMERICANS.(The Talk of the Town)
September 13, 2004... Like many an overworked, ambitious television producer in this season of around-the-clock political coverage, Andrew Leon puts in long hours at the studio. "Any time they need me to come, I come," he said the other night. "Saturday, I come....

BUSHSPEAK.
September 13, 2004... The roadkill on the highway west of El Paso, our southernmost interstate, is mostly jackrabbits and coyotes. For miles, the blacktop is hemmed by cattle pens, and the smell of sunbaked dung sweetens the air. Beneath the near-hundred-degree heat...

SUMMER AFTERNOON.
September 13, 2004... From 1933 to 1941, when I was between the ages of seven and fifteen, I spent nine summers in a big white house in the Adirondacks. The house had no electricity, no heat, and no gas for cooking, but it had a great many bedrooms, and our...

THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN.
September 13, 2004... "Hey, Dwayne? . . . Dwayne?" "Yes, Mr. Vice-President?" "Could I have some more coffee?" "Yes, Mr. Vice-President. Coming . . ." "Thanks, Dwayne." It was ten in the morning in Nashville, a quiet weekday, with most of the...

GOLDEN BOY.
September 13, 2004... Twenty years after the death of Truman Capote, it comes as a surprise to open his letters and meet with more discipline than dissipation. Biographies of the writer cannot ignore his last, wasted years, but a new epistolary handbasket, "Too...

WILL POWER.
September 13, 2004... Why do we read critical biographies of Shakespeare? The reasons that we shouldn't have been ably given by his best critics. "Reader, looke / not on his Picture, but his Booke" was Ben Jonson's advice right there at the start, on the title page...

HOMES OF THE STARS.
September 13, 2004... In the late nineteen-fifties, J. Irwin Miller, the chairman of the Cummins Engine Company, decided to liven up Columbus, Indiana, where his company was based, by commissioning work from famous architects--I. M. Pei, Kevin Roche, and Robert...

JOURNEYS.
September 13, 2004... Vincent Gallo, a downtown New York artist active since the early eighties as a musician, photographer, painter, model, actor, and filmmaker, has a face like a rusty hatchet (needle nose, scraggly beard), damp inky hair, and an unnerving stare....

PRISONERS OF THE CAUCASUS.(The Talk of the Town)
September 20, 2004... In Russia, the tragic sense is not limited to Chekhovian intellectuals or tyranny's victims. Even the privileged few, insulated by high office and a pride of bodyguards, know the truth when they care to look out a Kremlin window. In the...

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM.(The Talk of the Town)
September 20, 2004... This week, the pennant race enters the homestretch, as the underdog Boston Red Sox, with their long hair and their mud-encrusted helmets, come to New York to try to catch the incumbent (and clean-shaven) Yankees. By now, thanks to the...

NAMES.(The Talk of the Town)
September 20, 2004... Eighteen months ago, several hundred people gathered outside Senator Charles Schumer's apartment building on Prospect Park West, in Brooklyn. They were there to protest, with a candlelight vigil, the approaching invasion of Iraq, which Schumer...

THE BORAT DOCTRINE.(The Talk of the Town)
September 20, 2004... Roman Vassilenko, the press secretary for the Embassy of Kazakhstan, wants to clear up a few misconceptions about his country. Women are not kept in cages. The national sport is not shooting a dog and then having a party. You cannot earn a...

A HANDYMAN'S GIFT.(The Talk of the Town)
September 20, 2004... Joe Temeczko kept his past mostly to himself. In Minneapolis, where he lived, his friends knew little about him other than that he was a handyman who spoke broken English and ate past-date cakes. A gregarious neighborhood fixture with a mouth...

PERSONALITY PLUS.
September 20, 2004... When Alexander (Sandy) Nininger was twenty-three, and newly commissioned as a lieutenant in the United States Army, he was sent to the South Pacific to serve with the 57th Infantry of the Philippine Scouts. It was January, 1942. The Japanese...

POLL POSITION.
September 20, 2004... From 1988, Ronnie Dugger looks at the risks of computerized voting The New Yorker's complete coverage of the 2004 Presidential race On March 7, 1965, John Lewis, the twenty-five-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating...

KERRY'S BRAIN.
September 20, 2004... Robert Shrum, a senior adviser to John Kerry, is probably the Democratic Party's most celebrated speechwriter. But Shrum, who has made speechwriting a specialty, dislikes being described by what he does best. "I don't want to be a...

THE GHOSTLY ONES.
September 20, 2004... David Rawlings told me Gillian Welch's life story. She had grown tired of telling it herself. Welch is a singer and songwriter whose music is not easily classified--it is at once innovative and obliquely reminiscent of past rural forms--and...

COUNTERLIVES.(The Plot Against America)(Book Review)
September 20, 2004... Nathan Zuckerman, the hero of several of Philip Roth's mid-career novels, is dogged by the notoriety of a book he wrote in 1969, "Carnovsky," which told of a Jew reacting against his parents' first-generation respectability by chasing shiksas...

THE GENUINE ARTICLE.(Don't Point That Thing at Me)(Book Review)
September 20, 2004... "This is not an autobiographical novel," an author's note warns at the start of "Don't Point That Thing at Me" (Overlook; $13.95), by the British author Kyril Bonfiglioli. "It is about some other portly, dissolute, immoral and middle-aged art...

IDENTITY CRISIS.(Wicker Park)(Infernal Affairs)(Movie Review)
September 20, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File This has been the season of remake hell, and it isn't over yet. There is nothing disreputable in the notion of producers rooting through used material, and one could, indeed, find cogent reasons for...

THE POLITICAL WAR.(The Talk of the Town)
September 27, 2004... Earlier this year, the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., hired a team of independent experts to go to Iraq and evaluate the agency's programs there. The experts came back with a mixed review that included plenty...

BLACKED OUT.(The Talk of the Town)
September 27, 2004... A government censor rarely displays a highly refined sense of irony. Consider the reaction to a lawsuit filed earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union to have part of the U.S.A. Patriot Act declared unconstitutional. In...

SWING VOTER.(The Talk of the Town)
September 27, 2004... Harry Kourounis, who has been shuttling business tycoons and celebrities around New York City in limousines and town cars since 1982, has a saying: "First-rate people get first-class service, and second-rate people get first-class service."...

BIG CHEESE.(The Talk of the Town)
September 27, 2004... While touring Wisconsin last month, George W. Bush made an unscheduled stop at the Cady Cheese Factory, in Wilson, which turns out torpedoes of Colby and pepper Jack for machine-slicing at the deli counter. The candidate's swing-state snack...

PENNY-WISE.(The Talk of the Town)
September 27, 2004... The notion that we live in a global economy is now a commonplace. Supply chains extend halfway around the planet, and no respectable corporation would dare show its face without at least pretending to have a well-defined global strategy. The...

THE SHOOT.(Profile of fashion photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott)(Interview)
September 27, 2004... Off the southwestern shore of the Spanish island of Ibiza, a hump of limestone rises more than twelve hundred feet out of the sea. It is called Es Vedra and is said to possess extraordinary powers. Sailors and scuba divers have described...

FASHION CAFETERIA.
September 27, 2004... One evening not long ago, I wandered down the Rue de Richelieu on my way to a Chinese restaurant called Dave, which is recommended regularly by people in the fashion business. Like many popular restaurants in Paris, reservations are hard to get...

FIT FOR THE WHITE HOUSE.(Profile of Georges de Paris, tailor to the Presidents)(Biography)
September 27, 2004... Georges de Paris, tailor to every American President since Lyndon Johnson, dresses beautifully at all times. He nearly always wears a suit, regardless of errand or weather. He has never owned a pair of jeans or khakis; his most casual look is a...

THE CANDIDATE'S WIFE.(Teresa Heinz Kerry)(Biography)
September 27, 2004... The child of nature was a creature invented by the Romantics, whose cult of authenticity informed the literature of the next two hundred years. His direct descendant is the protagonist of countless modern films and novels: the prisoner of a...

PENN A LA CARTE.(Irving Penn)(Biography)
September 27, 2004... Happy pictures are all alike. Every perfectionist is unhappy in his own way, and his art reminds us that life is a losing battle. Fashion, on the other hand, is the domain of promise, where youth and beauty are perpetually solvent. The...

A LIFE IN GOOD TASTE.(Profile of Elsie de Wolfe)(Biography)
September 27, 2004... From 1938, Janet Flanner profiles Elsie de Wolfe In 1921, at the pinnacle of her decorating career, Elsie de Wolfe sued one of her clients for neglecting to pay her for seventeen thousand dollars' worth of furniture. De Wolfe had never...

TWO'S A CROWD.(The Double)(Book Review)
September 27, 2004... The Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, born in 1922, has not let the Nobel Prize, which he received in 1998, slow him down. He was a late starter in the lists of fiction, having been a civil servant and sometime journalist to the age of fifty....

COLLATERAL DAMAGE.(Stuff Happens)(Theater Review)
September 27, 2004... "I don't do nuance," President Bush has reportedly said. Fortunately, David Hare does. Although he is sometimes sniffy about journalism--he titled his own volume of feuilletons "Writing Left-Handed"--Hare functions best as a dramatist when he...

WARHORSES.(The Marriage of Figaro)(Sempre Libera)(The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I)(Sound Recording Review)
September 27, 2004... The breathtaking profanity of Mozart's letters--"Whoever doesn't believe me may lick me, world without end," and so on--has led one British researcher to conclude recently that the composer had Tourette's syndrome. What's interesting about...

GHOSTS.(The Motorcycle Diaries)(Shaun of the Dead)(Movie Review)
September 27, 2004... Movie Listings The Film File Once you have decided to make a film about Che Guevara, you face a forbidding choice. His life was a feast, so on which particular course should you concentrate? The taking of Cuba? The fiasco in the Congo?...

OCTOBER SURPRISES BY ARNOLD ROTH AND ANDY BOROWITZ.
September 27, 2004... Tom Ridge raises threat level to "John Kerry threw away his medals." White House announces capture of trick-or-treater wearing bin Laden mask. Teresa Heinz Kerry airdrops crisp ten-dollar-bills over key battleground states. ...