At the track, near the tents

THE VILLAGE VOICE - 14 FEBRUARY 2006

Giuliani be damned, the window washers are back, only a few streets from all the Fashion Week models and their witnesses. On 37th Street, still reeling from the twice-yearly shows at Bryant Park, I stop in a phone booth and find a few empty bottles of rum. How much? The closest liquor store, one of Hell's Kitchen's grim closets, sells tiny Bacardis for $1.50. Grey Goose, for the tony Port Authority guzzler, runs $4. A slip of Jack Daniels is $2.50.

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I smell dead people

THE VILLAGE VOICE - 13 DECEMBER 2005

Outside an exhibit of the dead, a ticket for which is $24.50, you will encounter the following: The Gap, a Baby Gap, a Guess store, Brookstones, The Body Shop, J. Crew, and a boldly-lettered sandwich board for the Buskers Hall of Fame. There is one entry on that board.

The attraction, "Bodies: The Exhibition," takes up the corner of a downtown shopping plaza, a museum in a mall across from the South Street Seaport. Posters promise real human bodies.
In the distance, old ships bob in the moonlight. The Fulton Fish Market is abandoned. I notice the Heartland Brewery. On a grim, bitter Sunday night, the lights look inviting. There's beer in there.

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I survived the Staten Island Mall

THE VILLAGE VOICE - 29 NOVEMBER 2005

On the upper deck of the ferry, a pigeon taps at an old Newsday. A Korean family—parents, teenage son, tweens daughter—sit in a row, each listening to a private set of white headphones. Many riders seem like European merry-makers, with bright, jaunty knapsacks, maps, and cans of beer. Most will step briefly off this boat and immediately reboard another back to Manhattan. I mistake the women's for the men's restroom, inching briefly into its anteroom, where five hard chairs are bolted in front of a mirror. On a Saturday like today, the brilliant November sun blinds me for a second, and I step back to take a seat by the waves.

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Shrink raps: Three books refract Sigmund Freud

THE VILLAGE VOICE - 2 AUGUST 2005

-Freud's Free Clinics, Elizabeth Ann Danto (Columbia, 2005)
-Recollecting Freud, Isidor Sadger (Wisconsin)
-Freud's Requiem, Matthew von Unwerth (Riverhead)

Sigmund Freud's analytic couch implies a lush affair, an indulgence for the wealthy matron or nervous son of great inheritance. Over the past century, that handsome image has fueled more than a few dismissals of Freud, critical and informal. But thanks to a thorough new study, the charge that psychoanalysis was a luxury for the upper class deserves reappraisal.

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Un-American activities

THE VILLAGE VOICE  - 27 JUNE 2005 TO 9 JULY 2005

Screw the Hamptons. I summer in Russia.

Stretching through JFK's forgotten terminal three is a line of travelers willing to wait for accident prone-Aeroflot's overnight flight to Moscow. We're crossing a cultural barrier, entering this two-hour line ruled by Russian stewards, and I take it all as a gentle preview of the former Soviet Union. My fellow travelers: One is an lumpy middle-aged woman in leopard-print pants fanning herself, slightly disturbing a bright orange helmet of hair. Her shoes curl up like an elf's—the epitome of women's footwear on the other side of the Pacific. Her husband rubs his ribs under a Brezhnev-era suit, then spits on the floor and mutters in Russian.

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The American way of beef

THEATLANTIC.COM - MAY 2003

These days, the thought of ingesting hamburger gives many people pause. Massive beef recalls and books like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation have impressed upon readers' minds the image of the modern beef cow, packed tightly in an enormous feedlot, standing in a cesspool of its brethren's manure as it gorges itself on an excessively medicated mix of corn and rendered animal protein. Although livestock diseases have devastated farms in Europe, American factory farming has earned an especially bad name for its carelessness and inhumanity. As B. R. Myers wrote in his May 2005 Atlantic piece "If Pigs Could Swim," "Livestock are treated better in Europe because Europeans want them treated better. They are treated worse here because we hardly think of them at all. It's as simple as that."

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The cruel wit of Evelyn Waugh

THE ATLANTIC.COM - 11 APRIL 2003

Charity requires that one forgive Waugh," argues Christopher Hitchens in "The Permanent Adolescent," his essay on the author in the May Atlantic, "precisely because it was his innate—as well as his adopted—vices that made him a king of comedy and of tragedy for almost three decades."

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Like father, unlike son

THE ATLANTIC - 26 MARCH 2003

In 1991, President George Bush directed the U.S. military into battle against Saddam Hussein. A little over a decade later, a second President George Bush is doing the same. Though in some ways it seems that history is repeating itself, George the younger is a very different man from George the elder. Whereas George W. Bush has been characterized—and criticized—as a leader who makes decisive split-second judgments and singlemindedly follows through on issues he cares about, his father, by contrast, was seen as a leader who preferred to avoid taking decisive or dramatic action. As an assortment of Atlantic articles from the 1980s and 1990s demonstrates, Bush the elder seems to have endured as much criticism for his perceived hesitancy and cautiousness as his son now endures for his perceived reckless determination.

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The Korean quagmire

THE ATLANTIC - 13 FEBRUARY 2003

With international focus pointed almost exclusively toward Iraq, many feel that recent alarming developments in the Koreas should be getting equal attention. In the last month North Korea has resumed the production of nuclear-weapons material, and the international community is scrambling to respond. Meanwhile, countries in North Asia have expressed fear of North Korean missile attacks, and—as has been the case for decades—South Korea has mixed feelings of appreciation and resentment toward the 40,000 American troops who are stationed there. After half a century, conditions may again be ripe for trouble on the Korean peninsula. A sampling of Atlantic articles from the 1950s to the present offers perspective on the long history of tension between North and South Korea, and on the United States's sometimes inflammatory presence in the region.

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