Best New Yorker Articles of 1995

Neil had sucked his thumb since infancy and the summer he turned thirteen, his father, Mike, and his orthodontist, Perry Lyman, tried to get him to quit. …

LIFE AND LETTERS on former President Ronald Reagan's handwritten announcement of his Alzheimer's disease. The author is Reagan's biographer and…

Susan Orlean writes about how the accomplished horticulturist John Laroche became an orchid thief.

A REPORTER AT LARGE about the growing tensions between the Islamic fundamentalists and Hosni Mubarak's government, and how Nobel Laureate Naguib …

Jane Kramer on how a left-wing socialite created an intellectual salon that took over an entire building and ran for forty years.

A REPORTER AT LARGE about Don Paradis, member of the West Coast biker gang called the Gypsy Jokers, who was sentenced to death in Idaho after a double …

LETTER FROM WASHINGTON about Senator Bill Bradley. Tells about his gesture of obeisance to writer, which impressed writer as self-deprecating. It is …

In the face of boring, day-to-day stuff like time and place, Wonder has repeatedly shown himself capable of an indifference bordering on the heroic.

Harriet sat at a solitary table in the dining room of the Pensione Cesarina in Italy. She has come here alone because of a recently ended love affair. …

David Remnick on the religion scholar Elaine Pagels and the problem of evil.

Norman Mailer on Lee Harvey Oswald’s troubled marriage and his time spent under the observation of the K.G.B. before he assassinated John F. Kennedy, in 1963.

A REPORTER AT LARGE about Special Forces troops in Haiti as part of Operation Uphold Democracy. Writer follows the men led by Captain Jonathan Carroll, 29,…

Hilton Als on Dorothy Dean, a black woman who became a galvanizing force for white gay New Yorkers.

A REPORTER AT LARGE about Hitler biographers. Tells about Hugh Trevor-Roper's view that Hitler was "sincere" in his designs, and misguided, rather than…

Comment about the bombing in Oklahoma City and about depictions of violence in the media. "Terror Strikes the Heartland," read one headline, echoing a note…

LETTER FROM THE ANDES about coca, the plant from which cocaine is derived. Andean Indians contend that it is a mistake to demonize coca, a plant they hold …

Comment about the New York Public Library on its 100th anniversary. "In "Democratic Vistas" and "Specimen Days" Walt Whitman continued in prose the rolling…

A REPORTER AT LARGE about Mississippi's racial policies in the '60s, and about the state's Sovereignty Commission. Of the hundreds of white …

Gina Grant was accepted by Harvard College, but the admissions office rescinded her place after learning she had killed her mother, Dorothy Mayfield. Jane Mayer reports.

A short story, written in 1946: “Occasionally a train sets off along the seafront railway, and on that train there’s me, leaving.”

Richard Rhodes writes on Curtis LeMay, the general who almost brought the world to nuclear destruction during the Cuban missile crisis.

COMMENTARIES about Mark Twain, following a previously-unpublished excerpt from "Huckleberry Finn" It's quite likely that if Mark Twain had merely used …

Signed Comment about budgetary rhetoric by the Republican Party. "We're sick and tired of having a 5% increase described as a cut," said John Kasich, …

PROFILE of comedienne and television producer Roseanne Barr. Within three years, Roseanne's Big Food Diner, which she started in Eldon, Iowa, during …

POPULAR CHRONICLES about the painter Julian Schnabel's movie about Jean Michel Basquiat called "Build a Fort, Set It on Fire." Julian's father, …

The Talk of the Town by William Finnegan, from 1995: High above the East River, on a dark maintenance platform under a well-known bridge, eight people take the plunge.

Lawrence Wright on new revelations about identical twins and human development.

LETTER FROM GERMANY about the controversy over the proposed Holocaust memorial in Berlin. It could be said that in the fifty years since the war in Europe …

A REPORTER AT LARGE about DNA typing of the Imperial Romanov family's remains and the political controversies surrounding the tests and the …

The psychologist Kay Jackson worked with many incarcerated sex offenders. Fearing one patient’s impending homecoming, she agonized over whether to warn the police.

REPORTER AT LARGE about Lisa Foster, the widow of former deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. This is Lisa's first interview since her …

David Remnick on Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post.

Tobias Wolff’s 1995 short story about what “passes before” a literary critic’s eyes—“a phrase he would have abhorred”—when he is shot in the head at the bank.

Fiction, from 1995: “ ‘Everyone must dream. To stop dreaming—well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.’ ”

Adam Gopnik on the controversial author of “Alice in Wonderland.”

Modern Life by Nancy Franklin, from 1995: “After sixteen years, it came down to a battle of wills: woman versus apartment.”

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., discusses the Simpson verdict and the Million Man March with Wynton Marsalis, Spike Lee, Jamaica Kincaid, and others.

John Lahr on how the tap dancer Savion Glover moved the rhythms of the street onto the American stage.

Robert S. Boynton’s 1995 Profile of Stanley Crouch, the actor, poet, playwright, jazz drummer, professor, and essayist—and a rare figure in a narrowly specialized intellectual world.

Will Crutchfield on the opera star, who, according to legend, ruined her own voice for the sake of vanity and café society. But what she really sacrificed herself to, he writes, was the music.

LETTER FROM WASHINGTON about the abandoned opportunity for a Republican Presidential candidacy by Gen. Colin Powell and the new politics of racial …

Hilton Als on the photographer who looked when the rest of us turned away.

A REPORTER AT LARGE about convict Willie Turner, 49, who escaped several times from Virginia prisons before his execution May 25, and who, after his death,…

PROFILE of Polish journalist Jerzy Urban. During Poland's martial law in the eighties, Urban was General Wojciech Jaruzelski's press secretary, …

Philip Gourevtich on the aftermath of the Hutu power’s months-long genocide against the Tutsi minority, in Rwanda, in 1994. When a people murders up to a million fellow-countrymen, what does it mean to survive?

Signed Comment about endings. Toward the end of "Northanger Abbey," Jane Austen makes a characteristically sly joke. The book's readers can tell that a…