Best New Yorker Articles of 2009
Explore 47 featured picks from The New Yorker's 2009 issues.
47 picks · 47 issues · Top author: Jill Lepore (3)
Most featured section: A Reporter at Large
Featured Picks
Jill Lepore writes about the history of American Presidents’ Inaugural Addresses, from George Washington to Barack Obama.
Inside a movie marketer’s playbook.
How should Obama reform health care?
When central bankers rescued, then ruined, the world.
George Packer on the dire situation in Florida resulting from the housing-market collapse and the Great Recession.
Daniel Zalewski talks to the novelist, whose empirical temperament distinguishes him from his friends Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.
She is on the phone. He can see her reflection in the bathroom mirror, the headset wrapped around her ear as if she were an air-traffic controller or a Secret Service agent. “Are you sure?” she whispers. “I can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. If it’s true, it’s horrible. . . .
The sadness over the author’s death, D. T. Max writes, was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete.
Alber Elbaz and the refinement of Lanvin.
Republican economics and a payroll-tax holiday
Atul Gawande asks, If prolonged isolation is so objectively horrifying, how did we end up with a prison system that subjects so many people to it?
An old band whose new songs always get the most applause.
James Wood writes that George Orwell, a Puritan radical who deplored poverty but detested privilege even more, yearned for an uncorrupted, pre-modern England.
Short story about the faerie king and queen, Oberon and Titania, and their mortal son, who suffers from leukemia.
Smyrna, Tennessee, vs. Detroit.
Can Peter Orszag keep the President’s political goals economically viable?
The Marco Polo of neuroscience.
The rise of really cheap wine.
Elizabeth Kolbert on the possible mass extinction of frogs: These amphibians have been around since before there were dinosaurs. But that could soon change.
What a Texas town can teach us about health care.
Should creative writing be taught?
Short story about an older man who inherits a mansion from his great-grandfather and decides to renovate it with the help of a handyman.
Connie Bruck writes about Angelo Mozilo, the Countrywide C.E.O. who became the face of the subprime-mortgage scandal and the ensuing financial crisis.
Can one commander set the conditions for a massacre? Raffi Khatchadorian on Colonel Michael Steele’s murderous leadership in Operation Iron Triangle.
Selling Hollywood on an updated convent comedy.
Short story about a man who plays Jesus in a passion play and his relationship with his pregnant teen-age daughter .
Retiree and prostitute
The path of poets and prisoners.
“Where the Wild Things Are”
Burkhard Bilger on the Bryan twins, Bob and Mike, who are as close as tennis may get to a genetically engineered doubles team.
David Grann on Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted, on scant scientific evidence, of a deadly case of arson, but who may have been innocent.
Short story about Altman, an elderly man from Medford, Massachusetts, who returns to the Lower River region of Malawi, where he had worked as a volunteer …
Ta-Nehisi Coates drives around Los Angeles with the rapper and m.c. Metal Face Doom—formerly Daniel Dumile—of “Operation: Doomsday” fame.
Where will synthetic biology lead us?
Jon Lee Anderson’s 2009 story on the gangs of Rio de Janeiro, where favela residents often live under the de-facto authority of a gangster and his private army.
Scientific management started as a way to work. How did it become a way of life?
Alloy, the teen-entertainment factory.
The return of James Cameron.
A battle against famine in North Korea.
Husband and wife fight
Can we learn to rewrite our bad dreams?
The secret world of the flavor factory.
Since the Karen Ann Quinlan case, in 1975, the right to life and the right to die have become central to policy debates from abortion to health care. Jill Lepore examines the consequences.
In 1976, Richard Avedon went to Washington to photograph Henry Kissinger. As Avedon was leading him to his mark, Kissinger said, “Be kind to me.”Artists have been making portraits of the mighty for centuries—from Velázquez’s Philip IV to Lucian Freud’s Elizabeth II—and the act of portrait-making can leave the royal or the
Sex, fame, and the case of Roman Polanski.
The quest for a stove that can save the world.