PROFILE of contemporary classical Californian composer John Adams, 53. . . Writer compares the juxtapositions in Adams's music to the landscape of …
Best New Yorker Articles of 2001
Explore 45 featured picks from The New Yorker's 2001 issues.
45 picks · 45 issues · Top author: Hendrik Hertzberg (3)
Most featured section: Profiles
Featured Picks
A REPORTER AT LARGE about South Africa’s Dr. Wouter Basson, and the various apartheid-era clandestine weapons programs he oversaw as leader of Project …
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON about the shape of foreign policy to come under George W. Bush. . . Mentions his predilection for settling scores scores with …
Hilton Als writes about Flannery O’Connor’s portrayal of race and religion in the unreconstructed South.
Signed comment about Gov. George W. Bush's Inaugural Address. . . . It was by far the best Inaugural Address in forty years; indeed, it was better than…
How a bag of supermarket ice cubes launched a plan to dominate an industry.
Adam Gopnik on the Austin H. MacCormick Island Academy, a school for teen-agers who are incarcerated on Rikers Island.
Fast food is killing us. Can it be fixed?
Fiction, from 2001: “How dare these men call? she’d say. How dare they hunt her down?”
Short story about a Japanese man whose wife suddenly leaves him, and who attempts to piece together his reaction to their divorce by taking a trip north to…
Anthony Lane breaks down the actress’s appeal—she is more lovable than desirable, and, even when love is off the menu, she cannot not be liked.
Short story about the narrator’s memories of a late teacher he had as he waits in a Madrid hotel lounge for his friend Juan, a sculptor... A television …
Through the lens of a young mother struggling to get by in Washington, D.C., Katherine Boo explores welfare reform, poverty, drugs, crime, and teen pregnancy.
John Lahr on the playwright who wrote “Fences,” “The Piano Lesson,” and more.
John Gregory Dunne on how Pearl Harbor—and Hawaii, the frontier of American empire—has been an available metaphor for the Navy.
Short story set in Dublin about a middle-aged woman who works in the bed department of a large store... Kitty Daly, a Dublin divorcee with two grown sons,…
Rafael Perez’s testimony on police misconduct ignited the biggest scandal in the history of the L.A.P.D. Is it the real story?
The mellowing of Nick Cave.
Short story about Alice, who does voicework for movies, and her father, a former Hollywood stuntman who is now holed up in his foreclosed cabin, stalling …
Larissa MacFarquhar profiles the “loudmouth” literary scholar Stanley Fish, who is famous for his attacks on liberalism and his work on John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
Fiction by Jonathan Safran Foer: “He escaped the Nazi raid on Trachimbrod. Everyone else was killed.”
Signed comment about traffic jams, overcrowding, and summer vacations... Writer comments that "Congestion is the expected condition of everything." …
The newest Grove Dictionary tries to bring it all together.
Elizabeth Kolbert profiles the incarcerated revolutionary as she approaches parole after twenty years behind bars.
Signed comment about coverage of the Rep. Gary Condit scandal & CBS News’s reluctance to join the media circus it has become... A curious feature of the …
PROFILE of entrepreneur Bill Bartmann... He appeared on Forbes’s 1997 annual ranking of the richest Americans, tied with his wife... Their combined …
Short story about a boy investigating his father's Nazi past by way of an inherited painting... As a boy, he takes his afternoon naps under the painting …
Jack Valenti has fought Hollywood’s battles in Washington for thirty-five years. Can he still get his way?
David Samuels on a twenty-nine-year-old drifter, petty thief, and con artist who transformed himself into a Princeton track star.
The President of Venezuela has a vision, and Washington has a headache.
The curious coupling of science and religion.
John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Roger Angell, Aharon Appelfeld, Rebecca Mead, Susan Sontag, Amitav Ghosh, and Donald Antrim respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Louis Menand on J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” and on the persistent power of Holden Caulfield, fifty years after the book’s publication.
Signed comment about Mayor Giuliani’s recent attempt to capture a third term, or, failing that, extend his reign by three months...
PROFILE of Hollywood movie producer Brian Grazer... Grazer was born in 1951… His lifetime gross has passed four billion dollars and he ranks with Jerry …
A REPORTER AT LARGE about Rev. Jesse Jackson… Tells how Jackson had spent previous months dodging questions about the revelation that he had fathered a …
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON about the possible goals of Osama bin Laden… Writer talks with Bruce Hoffman, the director of the Washington office of the RAND …
Who has the right to rule Afghanistan?
Short story about Nachman, a scrupulously honest mathematician still bothered about an incident in graduate school, twenty years earlier. Nachman's …
Why did the World Trade Center buildings fall down when they did?
A liberal town’s school system meets the new patriotism.
Hilton Als on the writer Carson McCullers: her tumultuous personal life, her professional ambition, and her penetrating novels.
Prince believes in God; the King of Pop doesn't even believe in himself.
A new show at the Costume Institute features outré outfits.