John Lahr’s 2005 Profile of the “Angels in America” playwright. “For me, drama without politics is inconceivable,” Kushner said.
Best New Yorker Articles of 2005
Explore 47 featured picks from The New Yorker's 2005 issues.
47 picks · 47 issues · Top author: Jane Mayer (3)
Most featured section: Profiles
Featured Picks
Why have most medications never been properly tested on kids?
A new biography of Christopher Isherwood.
Haruki Murakami’s dreamlike new novel.
Short story in which an older man revisits his boyhood home, checks in on what remains of the family land, and then has dinner with old friends at the …
Jane Mayer on extraordinary rendition, which the Bush Administration used to send terrorism suspects to be tortured in prisons abroad.
Short story about a young Bosnian writer who emigrates to the United States before the Bosnian-Serb war, and his relationship with an older Bosnian poet, …
Orhan Pamuk on growing up among the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is a champion of the new who is bitterly disappointed by most new things. Daniel Zalewski’s Profile of the man who designed the new Seattle Public Library.
A REPORTER AT LARGE about Stephen Williams’s religious-discrimination lawsuit against the Cupertino, CA, school district. Cupertino, California, is …
Margaret Talbot on Justice Antonin Scalia. “Scalia revels in intellectual combat. And his certainty runs so deep that he views detractors with mild amusement.”
Larissa MacFarquhar profiles Edward Albee, the author of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and other plays.
Comment about the death of Pope John Paul II… Tells about Karol Wojtyla becoming Pope in 1978. According to the Pope’s biographer, George Weigel, his …
Nick Paumgarten skis with the mountaineer Andrew McLean, who specializes in chutes—steep, narrow flumes of snow that plunge like elevator shafts.
In the first article of a three-part series, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about global warming, melting permafrost, and how the Arctic regions are losing ice.
In the second article of a three-part series, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the Akkadians, an ancient empire undone by climate shifts—and what its fall portends about the future of the environment.
Stanley Crouch’s 2005 Profile of the legendary jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins. “When he’s on, Rollins seems immense, summoning the entire history of jazz, capable of blowing a hole through the wall.”
Manhattan’s legendary D.A. faces a tough challenger.
Robert Rauschenberg’s new life.
“The Ninth Day” and “Madagascar.”
Talk story about fortune cookie writer Donald Lau… As a vice-president at Wonton Food, Inc., in Long Island City, Donald Lau manages the company’s …
Justin Tussing’s short story about first love, high-school life, and a mysterious local legend in the nineteen-seventies.
A college that trains young Christians to be politicians.
Judith Thurman on Rei Kawakubo, the Japanese avant-gardist who changed women’s fashion with her label, Comme des Garçons.
The military trains people to withstand interrogation. Are those methods being misused at Guantánamo?
How is the N.Y.P.D. defending the city?
Short story about a man who lives with his parents (who are ghosts) and works on a governmental base; he ends up murdered after helping to cover up the …
Short story about a writing teacher who comes to the town of Gomez Palacio and goes on a strange car-ride with the director of the writing program. …
Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, and the transformation of American evangelicalism.
Fiction, from 2005: “He does not know if the men are mocking his father or if his father is playing a trick on them. Or if it is a trick at all.”
The chef who catches your dinner.
Jeffrey Toobin’s 2005 piece on Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy opposes racial preferences and argues for expansive Presidential powers, yet he wrote the two most important pro-gay-rights decisions in the Court’s history. One conservative called him “the most dangerous man in America.”
David Grann reports on a quest to uncover a lost civilization deep in the Amazonian rain forest described as “the last great blank space in the world.”
The strange liaison of Sartre and Beauvoir.
John Adams and Peter Sellars create an atomic opera.
DVD NOTES review of “Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection” (Universal)...
American art and the Cold War.
Dana Goodyear on Sarah Silverman's uncoventional comedy. “Silverman crosses boundaries that it would not occur to most people even to have. The more innocent and oblivious her delivery, the more outrageous her commentary becomes.”
Talk story about the upcoming World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Houston Astros… Baseball has come up with a World Series so free of …
Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2005 Profile of the author of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” and other poems.
Can the C.I.A. legally kill a prisoner?
After the earthquake, some strange new alliances.
DVD NOTES about “Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 3” (Warner Bros.) and “The Lenny Bruce Performance Film” (Koch Vision).
Putting predictions to the test.
Ian Frazier treks through the American South in search of feral swine, and explores the wild hog’s long history.