Best New Yorker Articles of 2004

A mezzo with the most potent voice since Callas.

Ian Frazier on the thrill of snagging plastic bags in trees.

Ken Auletta writes about how George W. Bush and his Administration restricted press-corps access, and considered journalists to be increasingly irrelevant.

Short story about an actor who comes across the runaway child of a rich family living on the streets. Set in Houston, TX... What caught Paolo’s attention…

Short story about the ramifications of an affair between two married people, Veronica Horst, who’s health later becomes delicate (she comes down with …

Derek Walcott is writing a poetry of the Caribbean.

For the young hopefuls on “The Apprentice,” Trump towers.

Short story about a couple who are called to the hospital because their daughter has been hit by a car, only to find that it’s not their daughter. …

Why is Washington going easy on Pakistan’s nuclear black marketers?

Fifty years ago, the mall was born. America would never be the same.

Marauding Taliban and drug-dealing warlords on the road to Kandahar.

Louis Menand on the strange career of Eugene McCarthy.

Cynthia Zarin’s 2004 Profile of the author of “A Wrinkle in Time.”

Fiction by Edward P. Jones: “They caught him after he had killed the second man. The law would never connect him to the first murder. . . . It was almost as if, at least on the books the law kept, Caesar had got away with a free killing.”

Seymour M. Hersh’s 2004 report on the torture of Iraqis by American soldiers.

Ben McGrath writes about Tim Wakefield and the effectiveness of the knuckleball, a baseball pitch that moves unpredictably in the air.

David Grann on efforts by the marine biologist Steve O’Shea to capture the animal, which has fascinated sailors and oceanographers and been written about by Jules Verne and Peter Benchley.

Will they destroy Israel?

Ahmad Chalabi pushed a tainted case for war. Can he survive the occupation?

Junot Díaz recalls his tragicomic return to the Dominican Republic.

Following the former President’s death, Edmund Norris looks back at the man himself—detached yet accessible, astute and prophetic, colorful and complex.

Short story in which a man recalls his first real, though unconsummated, sexual encounter in a car on a deserted road in Pennsylvania in the 1950s… …

The not so merry soul of Cole Porter.

Pakistan’s lawless tribal borderland has become a virtual jihadi highway.

Zoe Heller’s 2004 profile of Don Rickles. “Rickles is an equal-opportunity offender; aggression is, in a sense, the subject of his performance.”

Short story about a series of confrontations between a man and his neighbor, Adams… One day, he’s standing in my kitchen in his underwear. Facing in …

Alex Ross profiles the Icelandic pop star.

What Mike and the Mad Dog talk about when they talk about sports.

Malcolm Gladwell on the history of mustard and ketchup, the science and psychology of food testing, and how the best food products have “amplitude.”

Short story about a preacher, towards the end of his life, recording his own history for his young son. Takes place in 1956, but stretches back to 1830… …

The strange case of Kyril Bonfiglioli.

Teresa Heinz Kerry is an uncharted element on the road to the White House.

What Kirkuk’s struggle to reverse Saddam’s ethnic cleansing signals for the future of Iraq.

“To know Dick Avedon was to know the sun.” Adam Gopnik remembers The New Yorker’s staff photographer.

Nicholas Lemann writes about the President’s transformation into a conservative, fundamentalist-Christian businessman from the Southwest.

John Briggs was made aware of the fact that some sort of problem existed for his friend and former schoolmate Erik Faucher by the sheer accident of a request for information from their former class secretary, Everett Hoyt, who in the thirty years since they’d graduated from Yale had hardly set foot out of New

Paul Wolfowitz defends his war.

Amos Oz writes the story of Israel.

SHOUTS & MURMURS about Pavlov using his brother Nikolai for his famous ringing bell experiment. Nikolai insisted on caviar, because that was the only food…

Creative property has always had a tendency to escape the control of its creator, Malcolm Gladwell writes.

Or, The Man Who Came to Broadway.

Atul Gawande writes about the practice of measuring doctors and hospitals against each other, and examines the approaches of different programs that treat cystic fibrosis.

Was the death of Richard Lancelyn Green, the world’s foremost Sherlock Holmes expert, an elaborate suicide or a murder? David Grann reports, from 2004.

Short story about a neurosurgeon who avoids being beaten up by a thug when he notices that the thug has the symptoms of Huntington's Chorea… Henry …