July/August 2002
In This Issue
William Langewiesche, “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center” (part one, excerpts); David J. Garrow, “The FBI and Martin Luther King”; Michael Benson, “A Space in Time”; Jon Cohen, “Designer Bugs”; Ian Frazier, “The Mall of America”; Kenneth Brower, “Ansel Adams at 100”; fiction by Brad Vice; and much more.
Articles
77 North Washington Street
A Space in Time
Click for the universe … Your home computer, thanks to the windows that NASA has poked in space, is the site of the greatest show on earth. A deskbound cosmic pilgrim beckons us to an available sublimity
Chinoiserie
A Brief History of Yasir Arafat
The PLO leader is a terrible administrator but a brilliant image crafter
Ansel Adams at 100
The photographer would not have been pleased by this new retrospective
A Notorious Trifler
For Ogden Nash, humor was "a shield, a weapon, a survival kit." Herewith a small selection, previously unpublished
Unironic
Bill Frisell draws from a wide spectrum of music identified with the American experience&mdashand country music is a persistent echo.
The Mall of America
The warm oblivion and eternal present tense of the country's largest mall
The FBI and Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King was never himself a Communist—far from it. But the FBI's wiretapping of King was precipitated by his association with Stanley Levison, a man with reported ties to the Communist Party. Newly available documents reveal what the FBI actually knew—the vast extent of Levison's Party activities
The Hula Movement
The ancient Hawaiian art is catching on nationwide—even worldwide.
As English as God
Ferdinand Mount brilliantly delineates social class
The Taste Business
What foreigners love to hate about America is also what they love to buy
Il Trappeto & la Peschiera
Restaurants worth building a trip around
American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
After nine months of unrivaled access to the disaster site, our correspondent tells the inside story of the recovery effort. This is the first installment in a three-part series
Letters to the editor
From Soup to Nuts
The categorical imperative
Firebombs Over Tokyo
America’s 1945 attack on Japan’s capital remains undeservedly obscure alongside Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Men of Letters
The decline of "amateur journalism"
Fatal Attraction
Robert Caro does a lot of heavy breathing and grasping at the reader's lapels in his books on LBJ.
True Confessions
Two simple measures could go a long way toward ensuring that findings of criminal guilt are genuine
A Grand Contrivance
Together, the Easy Rawlins mysteries constitute a sprawling novel of manners about black Los Angeles in the mid twentieth century
Report From Junction
A short story
Word Fugitives
The Jewel of Poland
Once again, many-faceted Kraków sparkles
Postmodern Protest in the Age of the Neo-Demo
"I'll keep the mohawk until we stop killing people abroad."— the musician Eddie Vedder, quoted about his hair in Rolling Stone, April 11, 2002
The Internationals
A growing new—but familiar—social order thrives in the world's trouble spots
Designer Bugs
Four years ago a team of Australian scientists, attempting to create a genetically engineered virus to combat common pests, stumbled across a mechanism that could potentially increase the killing power of a host of human diseases. Their findings, published last year amid great controversy, bring to the fore a question of increasing urgency: Might technologies intended to improve the world provide terrorists and rogue nations with the means to build the ultimate bio-weapon?
A Capitalist Primer
Upton Sinclair's realism got the better of his socialism
New & Noteworthy
The making of the modern Middle East; grimly absurd humor in two reissued novels; the last word on Napoleon
A Week Later
