Best New Yorker Articles of 1999
Explore 45 featured picks from The New Yorker's 1999 issues.
45 picks · 45 issues · Top author: John Cassidy (3)
Most featured section: A Reporter at Large
Featured Picks
A REPORTER AT LARGE about the Icelandic Health Care Database, and biotechnology... Writer tells about Icelandic scientist Kari Stefansson and his genetic …
A REPORTER AT LARGE about the civil war in Sudan.
Rebecca Mead on the booming popularity of cashmere clothing in America, and how the Mongolian cashmere industry is actually in trouble.
A REPORTER AT LARGE about two young boys--Ricky and Isaac--who were charged with the murder of an 11-year-old girl named Ryan Harris. The writer describes…
PROFILE of anthropologist Giancarlo Scoditti and the island of Kitawa. Kitawa is an island located at the outer edge of the Trobriand Islands. Italian …
Signed comment about life in New York City. The writer claims that New York City raises more questions than it answers for those that choose to live here.…
ANNALS OF FINANCE about Goldman, Sachs & Company. Goldman, Sachs & Company is the last big investment-banking partnership on Wall Street; that partnership…
LETTER FROM NANTAHALA about fugitive Eric Rudolph. Rudolph is wanted by the F.B.I. for bombings at a Birmingham abortion clinic, an Atlanta abortion …
Malcolm Gladwell on feminism, women’s hair dye, and the hidden history of postwar America.
A REPORTER AT LARGE about financier J.P. Morgan... When Morgan died in 1913, he was the most powerful banker in the world... When I began working on the …
Calvin Tomkins spends time with Philippe Petit, the high-wire artist who walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, in New York.
An edited chapter from Ellison’s second novel, the posthumously published follow-up to “The Invisible Man.”
The late chef’s 1999 essay about working in Manhattan restaurants. “Gastronomy is the science of pain,” he writes. “It was the unsavory side of professional cooking that attracted me to it in the first place.”
PROFILE of Alan C. (Ace) Greenberg, chairman of Bear Sterns... Writer attends a morning walk in Central Park. Greenberg lives off Fifth Avenue in the …
Alex Ross on following Bob Dylan on tour and the timelessness of his infamous album “Blood on the Tracks,” which features the song “Tangled Up in Blue.”
A REPORTER AT LARGE about “cause” lawyer Dennis Henigan, and about civil suits being planned against American gun manufacturers... Once in the bar, he…
Adam Gopnik on critiques about the portrayal of violence in American popular culture, in the wake of the Columbine massacre.
PROFILE of Swedish film and stage director Ingmar Bergman, 80... Describes his single-story gray-brown house on Faro, in the Baltic Sea... It sits …
Edna O’Brien on the labors of “Ulysses.”
A REPORTER AT LARGE about Binjamin Wilkomirski’s book, “Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood”, which purported to be a factual account of the …
Short story in interview form with Johnny One-Arm, of Benton Ridge, OH... Narrator describes how he twists the sympathies of women using his birth …
ANNALS OF FINANCE about last summer’s near-collapse of the investment firm Long-Term Capital Management... According to some observers the hedge-fund …
From 1999: Richard Preston on how smallpox, an eradicated disease that now exists only in laboratories, became a bioterrorist threat.
Michael Chabon’s short story about a young boy who yearns to be an escape artist like Houdini and join the Hofzinser Club, an association for magicians.
Malcolm Gladwell investigates what makes Wayne Gretzky, Yo-Yo Ma, and the brain surgeon Charlie Wilson so good at what they do.
Signed comment about celebrity and memory... As with sex before its revolution, celebrity has many to exploit it but few to defend it. Tells about the …
ANNALS OF COMMUNICATIONS about Bill Gates and the Microsoft anti-trust trial brought by the federal government... Ten-part story describes the trialbefore…
Wendy Wasserstein’s short story with autobiographical elements about a New York Jew’s sudden realization that she may be Episcopalian.
PROFILE of Australian ethicist Peter Singer, 53, recently appointed to the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics chair at Princeton... Tells about the case…
A Profile of the comedian and actor by Hilton Als.
PROFILE of English artist Damien Hirst, 34... He is an open, friendly, humorous, quick-witted, dirty-minded, hard-drinking, immensely likable Yorkshireman…
Susan Orlean on the legacy of the Shaggs, an eclectic female band from the sixties and seventies.
Cruelty and compassion mingle in the short stories of a master.
Peter Schjeldahl on the controversy surrounding the Brooklyn Museum’s “Sensation” exhibit, whose irreverent art works enraged Mayor Giuliani.
A REPORTER AT LARGE about rap music star Lady Luck (Shanell Jones), 17... Describes how she was signed by Kevin Liles of Def Jam records, after he heard …
It looked bleak in court for a Mississippi family man facing a corporate behemoth, Jonathan Harr writes. Then he hired Willie Gary, a star lawyer who raised the stakes to billion-dollar proportions.
ANNALS OF PARENTHOOD about parents and infants co-sleeping in the same bed... My wife and I sleep with our ten-month-old son...This puts us on the wrong …
A REPORTER AT LARGE about the initial behind-the-scenes negotiations between Kenneth Starr’s prosecutors and Monica Lewinsky’s attorneys on her …
Julia Hecht on the revolutionary genius of Andy Kaufman. “I realized that all my life I’d been laughed at, and I used to not like it, and that’s why I was so unhappy. So I started using it.”
John Updike on the future of faith.
LETTER FROM LONDON about P.M. Tony Blair... Writer describes a protest against Blair's proposed ban of fox-hunting... A couple of days later, when I …
A REPORTER AT LARGE about Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion... Writer tells about empty houses in Southhampton County, Virginia, where the rebellion …
Oliver Sacks’s 1999 memoir of his early years. “Many of my childhood memories are of metals: these seemed to exert a power on me from the start.”