Yorker Magazine Research Articles

"And Thou Shalt Bind Them as a Sign upon Thy Hand": Eve's Tattoo and the Holocaust Consumer

"And Thou Shalt Bind Them as a Sign upon Thy Hand":Eve's Tattoo and the Holocaust Consumer Rob Baum (bio) The eponymous Eve of Eve's Tattoo acquires a tattoo based on a photograph of an anonymous woman from Auschwitz. New York writer Eve Flick seeks to memorialize all victims of Nazi genocide by performing their death stories, but instead plays out her own personal and political dramas before a backdrop of contemporary U.S. concerns, urban chic, and German reunification. Emily Prager's contemporary novel interrogates the Judeophobia prevalent in the most artistic and educated of milieux. The novel exemplifies a postmodern malaise I call the "Holocaust reader." The "Holocaust reader" actively pursues an empathic obsession with victims (and sometimes survivors) of the Shoah. The syndrome is ontologically "postmodern" in its pathology, as the "Holocaust reader" reads the Shoah as a secondary or tertiary text, and projects herself into the literature of torture and gratuitous death. Let your absence be the latest shape of your being felt forever.—Rilke When Eve Flick acquires a tattoo at the age of forty, she does not choose a butterfly, rose, or dragon to curl around her shoulder. Eve's tattoo resembles that of an unknown woman murdered at Auschwitz, matched to a photograph found hidden in the recesses of her boyfriend's closet; the tattoo is placed on her left forearm, six small numbers from a dead stranger. Why was this photograph in the closet, and what does Eve mean by transferring a dead woman's Ka-Tzetnik number onto her own limb? Eve intends to memorialize Hitler's female victims, to create archetypal death narratives, postmodern performances of memory. Around the imagined name "Eva," Eve invents myriad fictional selves, fragments of horrible truth. The brave, stupid gesture of emblazoning [End Page 116] Auschwitz on her arm initiates a spiritual journey as Eve hunts for the nameless woman she desires to embody. But she does not glimpse the decadent Gentile European body she has actually conjured from silence—a body that gives voice to racist and homophobic hatred in the name of a "living," loving god. Content in North American privilege and a generation away from war, Eve's painful dramas of private alienation, public betrayal, and self-denial testify to the contemporary allure of Nazism. Nazism exerts a dangerous fascination in these times, not least because of its association with the erotic. Nazi symbolism elides in the simplistic shapes of monster and maiden, discolours Jewish lives, whitens Gentile lives. In the twenty-first century, Nazism inspires the décor of Asian restaurants, fashions on Milanese catwalks, costumes of famous rock stars, national prize-winning novels, tags of Polish gangs.1 The resonance of Nazism with postmodernism governs a brisk market in secret photos, Judenstern crisp with age, Nazi china, shrivels of Torah scrolls reduced to swastikas. Fifteen years ago I handled a silver soupspoon with an incised lightning bolt of the SS, touched the dim dent made in its bowl by SS teeth. Hate memorabilia is very good business. You can buy it on the internet if you can't make it to the conferences, meetings, trade fairs, and club dinners where such goods are brokered, along with concentration camp uniforms, prisoners' tools, Jewish talismans, soap, flesh, and other Nazi family heirlooms. The Jewish Holocaust, the Shoah,2 has become a commodity, something to consume, to want, to want to possess. Emily Prager's novel Eve's Tattoo3 forms the basis of my exploration of Holocaust consumption, the visitation of a neo-trauma on the Jewish body. This insightful novel shapes my discussion of performance and embodiment, the iconography of the Ka-Tzetnik (concentration camp) tattoo, the Nazi erotic and the dangers of Holocaust consumption. [End Page 117] Performing the Jewish Woman The central character of Eve's Tattoo is Eve Flick, a tony New York magazine writer known for her witty, acerbic pen. In Eve's mind, "memorialization" is not the same thing as "immortalization"; the dead live in, rather than apart from, Eve, who incorporates the narrative. Attracted to, yet repelled by, the woman in the photograph who (blonde, blue-eyed, and Germanic) looks so much like...

A Note of Gratitude

A Note of Gratitude

Tanning bed hygiene: Microbes found on tanning beds present a potential health risk

Tanning bed hygiene: Microbes found on tanning beds present a potential health risk

Toward a better understanding of “psychocutaneous disorders”

There is a group of cutaneous disorders for which we have an inadequate understanding of their etiology and which frustrates us as therapists. This includes conditions such as the dynias, neurotic excoriations, postherpetic neuralgia, prurigo nodularis, and others. Herein, we review a recent article in the New Yorker magazine which postulates a new way to look at these puzzling entities.

Can We Separate “Interest Groups” from Education Politics? A Book Review 100 Years LaterArthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press [1908], 3rd ed., 1995), 533 pp., $22.45 (paper).

Arthur Fisher Bentley (1870–1957) is a political theorist and the author of The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures. Published 100 years ago, this classic analysis bears revisiting and reapplying to more contemporary studies of the politics of education in the United States. Since Bentley’s book appeared (and since he was revered as the most important political analyst of his generation), education politics has moved toward more postmodern and market views. Recently, however, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, discussed Bentley’s continued importance to our field in the New Yorker magazine (2008). In this fascinating article, Lemann noted, concerning Bentley’s work, that “2008 is the centenary of a curious and mesmerizing book that was long considered the most important study of politics and society ever produced in the United States” (86) As Dowling (1960) explains, Bentley’s work was “modeled on the physicists’ conception of a closed system in which forces within the system are so arranged that the resultant at every point is zero” (947). In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Bentley fell out of favor and practically disappeared from theoretical discussions as pluralism and group politics were either assumed to be too mechanistic, predetermined, and closed as a system or were denied altogether. Bentley is less well known now, in part because his notions are antithetical to the prevailing existential, liberal, and progressive notions

John Updike, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, and I

John Updike, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, and I Sanford Pinsker (bio) When John Updike gave a reading at Franklin and Marshall College (where I was then teaching), I was privileged to introduce him to a large enthusiastic crowd. Updike was a man who needed no introduction, especially to people who had waited up to two hours for him to sign their books and who regarded him as southeastern Pennsylvania’s literary son. I began by pointing out that Updike and I had much in common: both of us had been born in Pennsylvania and both of us had been writing for the pages of the New Yorker magazine since the middle 1950s. I let the last observation sink in, and added that, unlike me, the New Yorker had published him. The audience got the joke but not the wealth of identifications curling inside it. One of Updike’s earliest short stories, “Ace in the Hole,” focuses on a former high-school basketball star who finds himself trapped by a variety of new roles: husband, father, breadwinner. But, if Fred (“Ace”) Anderson has a web of entangling responsibilities, he also has an abundance of raw sexuality, and that is enough to get Updike’s protagonist into—and out of—many tight spots. “Ace in the Hole,” which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1955, contains the rough outline of the character that Updike would expand in Rabbit, Run (1960), his lyrical rumination about manhood, spiritual isolation, and America in the 1950s. As with Ace, Rabbit knows, ah knows, that nothing trumps conventional behavior like being a bad boy, and that other people will always be there to clean up your messes. Rabbit Angstrom is a character whom readers love to hate—and in the four Rabbit novels and novella-like coda (“Remembering Rabbit,” 2002), that take him from the 1950s to his death from a heart attack at the end of the 1980s—we see his life, with all its high-intensity vicissitudes, against the [End Page 492] larger backdrop of America during the latter half of the twentieth century. Each decade has its distinctive metaphor, whether it be the lingo of black militancy during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency (Rabbit Redux, 1972) or the long lines for gasoline that turn Rabbit’s Toyota agency into a gold mine (Rabbit Is Rich, 1981). As the twentieth century winds down, so too does Rabbit. He moves to Florida, grows ever more sluggish, and packs on the pounds. Updike is at once a healthy arm’s-length from his protagonist and close enough to be his cousin, for Rabbit Angstrom is Updike’s lyrical rumination about the life he himself might well have lived—that is, if he had stayed in Shillington, Pennsylvania, rather than leaving to attend Harvard. Updike always felt a bit out of place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just as he later felt a bit out of place in New York City, where as a young man he wrote “casuals” for the New Yorker, or Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for most of his life. In his heart—and, more important, in his imagination—Updike remained a staunchly Pennsylvania boy. I read each of the Rabbit books with rapt attention, not only because I was teaching at a college a twenty-minute drive from his birthplace but also because I too was a product of small-town Pennsylvania, albeit a town at the other end of the state. I am hardly the only English professor who included Rabbit, Run in a course on post–World War ii fiction. Few novels got to the heart of what made fifties America tick more surely than did Updike’s. But I also wanted to teach the other Rabbit novels and, moreover, to put them into the wider context of Updike’s work. After much deliberation I offered a senior seminar in Philip Roth and John Updike, close contemporaries (Updike was born in 1932; Roth, a year later) and authors of wide significance. Rabbit gets his news and music via am radio; by contrast Nathan Zuckerman not only listens to fm radio but is likely to be interviewed on npr. I worked my students hard, but...

Updike and the Past Recaptured

Updike and the Past Recaptured Bruce Allen (bio) The story lived by the late John Updike (1932–2009) is a peculiarly American one. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the nearby suburban community of Shillington, the only son of a respected junior high-school teacher and a mother who would follow her highly talented boy’s example by publishing fiction (as Linda Grace Hoyer) in the New Yorker magazine. After excelling in high school, John studied English at Harvard, then art (for he had also contributed cartoons to the Harvard Lampoon) at Oxford. He married young, fathered several children, and, after relinquishing dreams of becoming a professional cartoonist or film animator, landed a “dream job” at the New Yorker. Updike was graduated quickly from that magazine’s “Talk of the Town” and filler-piece assignments (news breaks), and he began writing polished, distinctive fiction and poetry. His first novel, volume of stories, and book of poems appeared almost simultaneously as the 1950s were ending. Updike’s mastery of subject, milieu, and style was recognized immediately, as he turned out realistic fiction (often tinged with fantasy) in odd and surprising sequences. His defiantly original first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), eschewed the conventional young writer’s focus on autobiographical experience, to imagine a future welfare state’s effect on an old people’s home. Lyrical considerations of youthful experience and marriage graced the limpid short stories of Pigeon Feathers (1962) and The Music School (1966). And, in the first of several novels that won prestigious literary prizes, The Centaur (1963), he ingeniously used Greek mythology in forging an immensely moving homage to his conscientious overburdened father. Updike persevered, achieving matchless successes, creating a national epic of sorts in his four “Rabbit” novels (1960–90), whose painful chronicle of the high-school basketball hero Harry Angstrom’s brief triumphs and numerous failures offers a replete fictional history of postwar American suburban life. [End Page 490] There was the mixed achievement of his highly sexually inflected best seller Couples (1968), which today seems both more realistic and more prescient than contemporary reviewers acknowledged. And, as if to demonstrate how far afield this adventurous author could cast his net, there was the sly, boisterous erotic comedy of The Witches of Eastwick (1984); the provocative reimaginings of classic literary forerunners (his three novels echoing Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; the tale of Tristan and Isolde in Brazil, 1994; and the personal histories of Hamlet’s mother and stepfather in Gertrude and Claudius, 2000); examinations of political chicanery and strife in a fictional African country (The Coup, 1978); America after a global war (Toward the End of Time, 1997); and the threatened world still paralyzed by the catastrophe of 9/11 (Terrorist, 2006). There were the short stories, immensely assured, poignant, musically seductive, appearing with dependable regularity even as Updike continued to extend his range. Every year brought a new Updike volume from Knopf, and this author stuck with his original publisher throughout his long career. Updike wrote enthusiastically about not only baseball but golf (in the lively Golf Dreams, 1996). He wrote a great farewell tribute to Ted Williams (“Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”). There were also those huge collections of his scrupulously professional book reviews and essays, a partial autobiography, two volumes of art criticism, a play, dozens if not hundreds of unpretentious poems far too human and engaging to be filed under “light verse”—and he found time to edit the authoritative anthology Best American Stories of the Century. Perhaps the most surprising sustained grace note in Updike’s oeuvre is the trilogy depicting the fictional Nobel Prize–winning (!) Jewish-American author Henry Bech, published 1970–98. Bech is a failed womanizer, a mensch, a frequently farcical victim of his own insecurities, who incarnates a possible sidelong glance at Updike’s highly visible contemporaries (Bellow, Malamud, Roth, et al.)—and an amused wink at the annual rumors that Updike himself would soon be receiving a Nobel Prize. His work continued to impress and sometimes astonish. For this reader the best of Updike’s twenty-eight novels may just be his saga In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996). The...

What Is Pregorexia?

In the summer of 2008, the mainstream media—including The Early Show and Fox News—leapt on a new term: pregorexia ( 1 CBS News“Pregorexia” inspired by thin celebs CBS News Web site. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/11/earlyshow/health/main4337521.shtml Google Scholar , 2 Fiore M. Pregorexic: Are some pregnant woment putting their fetuses at risk. FOX News Web site. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,398021,00.html Google Scholar ). Used by the press to describe pregnant women who will reduce calories and exercise in excess in an effort to control pregnancy weight gain, the buzz surrounding this issue may have started as far back as 2004, when New York ran a feature article entitled “The Perfect Little Bump.” The piece detailed the lives of fashionable New York City women anxious to achieve a “perfect” pregnancy body, going so far as to work out every day with heart monitors in an effort to push their heart rates to the maximum safe limit ( 3 Abraham L. The perfect little bumpNew York Magazine Web site. http://nymag.com/nymetro/health/features/9909/ Google Scholar ).

Psychiatrists Challenged to Shift to Public-Health Focus

Psychiatrists Challenged to Shift to Public-Health Focus

“Genêt” on the Air

For fifty years, journalist Janet Flanner wrote a bi-weekly “Letter from Paris” column for the New Yorker magazine. While her professional legacy included influencing American literary journalism by developing the journalistic essay, she also recorded a little-known series of radio commentaries in 1945–46 from the hotspots of Europe in the critical months surrounding the end of World War II. This article offers a detailed examination of the content and themes of those commentaries. It notes her focus on deprivations caused by the war and its aftermath, the plight of women in the war-ravaged countries, the post-war political landscape in France and Italy, and the obligation of the Allies to help rebuild France and Italy. The study concludes that her foray into radio was an important indicator of the growing significance of this medium.

Sensationalist Literature or Expert Advice?

Helen Gurley Brown, diva of the New York magazine world, is best known for her 32-year editorship of Cosmopolitan magazine. Taking over the ailing Cosmopolitan in 1965, Brown transformed the magazine almost overnight, turning it into Cosmo, which became shorthand for the sexually astute, sexually active, single woman. Putting sex front and center, however, was not a new undertaking for Brown, who initially made her mark in the publishing world with the 1962 publication of Sex and the Single Girl, her upbeat guide for living in what she considered “superlative” style. Published a year before Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Brown's book counseled her readers to avoid the pitfalls of suburban domesticity by embracing a philosophy of long-term single living, sex before and even outside of marriage, and an enjoyable domesticity based on the self rather than the family. This essay explores the publishing context for Sex and the Single Girl, locating the book within the traditions of sensationalist literature and advice literature and claiming that Brown relied on these traditions, as well as her own instincts and her long history of working in advertising, to write convincingly of the plight—and the delights—of the single woman in postwar American life.

Branding New York: how a city in crisis was sold to the world

Introduction: New York, Capital of the 1970s. Prologue: From the Standpoint of the Out-of-Towner 1. Branding and the Neoliberal City Part 1: From Image Crisis to Fiscal Crisis: 1964-1974 2. It's a Small World After All: The Rise of New York Media the End of Boosterism 3. Style & Power: the Common Sense of New York Magazine 4. Selling the City in Crisis: Big Apple and the Invention of the Public Private Partnership Part 2: The Battle to Brand New York: 1975-1985 5. Welcome to Fear City 6. The Limits of Branding: From 'Big Apple' to the 'Summer of Sam' 7. Purging New York through I(c) NY 8. Conclusion: The Legacy of the 1970s 9. New York City as a Symbol of Neoliberalism. Epilogue: Re-Branding New York after the World Trade Center

Sex, Sadism, Encrypted Loss and Encrypted History in Last Tango in Paris

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This is a shortened, somewhat altered version of a much longer chapter, entitled ‘Tortured History: Crypts, Collaboration, and Colonialism in Last Tango in Paris’, from my recently published book, Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008). 1. Pauline Kael, ‘Tango’, New Yorker 47 (28 October 1972), pp.130–38. 2. Judith Christ, ‘“Last Tango”, But Not the Last Word’, New York Magazine (5 February 1973), pp.64–65. 3. Ultimo tango a Parigi [Last Tango in Paris], Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci (United Artists, 1972). DVD: MGM Home Entertainment Inc., 1998. 4. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, in The Shell and the Kernel [1978], trans. N. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp.125–56. 5. Maria Torok, ‘The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse’ [1968] in The Shell and the Kernel, pp.107–24. 6. Torok does not use the term ‘crypt’ in her essay but ‘tomb’. The term ‘crypt’ and its complex functioning with regard to trauma and mourning were not articulated until her work with Abraham in ‘Mourning or Melancholia’ and ‘“The Lost Object – Me”: Notes on Endocryptic Identification’ (in The Shell and the Kernel, pp.139–56) and also in their The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy [1976], trans. N. Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). We can nonetheless read Torok's essay on ‘Illness of Mourning’ as a proleptic account of one kind of psychopathology that results in the formation of a crypt. 7. For more on fantasies of incorporation, the anasemic etiology of the illness of mourning, Jeanne's role in this sadomasochistic dyad, and the way the film stages and comments on psychoanalytic process, regression, and transference, see chapter 2 in my Unspeakable Secrets, pp.47–89. 8. Both statements in Le Monde (14–15 November 1954), p.3; my translation. 9. Le Grand Robert de la langue française, 2nd edn (Paris: Le Robert, 1985), gives 1955 for the first usage of ratonnade and cites, in support, a reference to the Algerian War. It also indicates that raton was already in use in 1937. 10. Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog]. Dir. Alain Resnais (Argos‐Como‐Cocinor, 1955). DVD: The Criterion Collection, 2003. 11. In several notable speeches at the end of World War II, Charles de Gaulle rhetorically rewrote French history by speaking of ‘Paris liberated by itself’, of ‘Eternal France’, and of a nation of resisters. He also refused to declare the rebirth of the Republic, which the National Assembly had dissolved in 1940, claiming that it had never ceased to exist. On postwar France's mythologized denial of the horrors of the Collaboration and of the Vichy regime, see Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, [1987], trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp.15–59.

Covers-Elect

Covers-Elect* Thomas Sayers Ellis (bio) I A red, ringing stimulus. Well, it could be Michelle calling but I bet it’s Bill. Handle-yo-business like you bump your fists, their fear of a Black-Islamic religious alliance. Jeremiah Bin-Laden. No Drama Obama ain’t no bama, no veterinarian vetting dogs, no donkey vetoing elephants. His master’s voice, his own. All election night the marble giant sat beneath a lunar vowel, full moon over Union. Halo, eclipse, hope. A portrait to lay the old way of doing things in Washington to rest, Presidential Blackness. II They both want the nomination that’s why they both want the phone. The lobbyist in the lobby is calling. A profile so Jihad the flag in the fireplace won’t burn unless you pour some Haliburton on it. [End Page 1054] Cabinet in need of training, secret files of flea powder, Cabinet on a leash. Barack’s best friends. Just like the Great Emancipator’s mood, the economy is a financial crisis of stars in a recession-blue sky above a credit crunch of columns. “I, Barack Hussein Obama, a continental Colored, do solemnly swear to stay black and die.” III Probably just the front desk calling, again, to complain about campaign headboard noise. “You can do this, Boo,” the Soldierette instructs her tall, hip and athletic, ivy-league educated Taliban hubby. Camouflage a la Von Furstenberg. Revolving door loyalists want a partisan, lipstick pit in their ear. Down on all fours. Consider the marchers sitting Lincoln has seated with his back to service, the ghost of battlefields. Facing freedom freed him. “The white wig fits because I have a good wave cap.” George Washington’s slaves put his on. [End Page 1055] Thomas Sayers Ellis Thomas Sayers Ellis, a native of Washington, DC, is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. This co-founder of the discontinued Dark Room Collective also teaches at The Lesley University low-residency MFA program in Cambridge, MA. He is author of The Maverick Room, winner of the 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award, Song On, The Genuine Negro Hero, a chapbook, and The Good Junk (Take Three #1). The University of Michigan Press will soon publish his Breakfast and Blackfist: Notes for Black Poets. He has also published poems and interviews in Agni, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and other periodicals. He lives in New York City. Footnotes * For New Yorker Magazine cover artists Barry Blitt, Bob Staake, and Drew Friedman. Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

McAllen, Texas, Evidence-Based Medicine, and President Obama

INTRODUCTION In April we traveled to McAllen, Texas, to present an evidence-based medicine (EBM) seminar to the faculty of the University of Texas Pan American (UTPA) PA Program in nearby Edinburg. On our route to the UTPA campus, we drove by what seemed to be a plethora of medical facilities ranging from family medical clinics and those focusing on pediatrics and women’s health to subspecialty clinics. There were numerous ambulatory surgical facilities and at least four home health businesses. The hospitals we stumbled across seemed, from the road, to be modern and attractively designed. We agreed that the number of health care facilities seemed out of proportion to what we perceived to be average for a community of McAllen’s size. To our knowledge, McAllen and its suburbs were not known as a research or tertiary care center that would create the need for health care organizations in greater-than-expected numbers. We did not think much more about this as we were focused on effectively delivering our presentation and not getting lost on the way to UTPA. The 21⁄2-day EBM seminar went well and we were impressed with a dynamic UTPA faculty, supported by visionary leadership. As is often the case, we returned home with a number of ideas from our attendees that will likely improve our own curriculum. Shortly after our return I (DK) received an email from a health policy and access listserve that I belong to about the June 1, 2009, New Yorker magazine article1 by staff writer Atul Gawande, MD. Dr. Gawande is on the medical staff at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and has been a writer for the New Yorker since 1998. What drew me to the article was not only my interest in health policy, but also the fact that it focused on McAllen, Texas. Dr. Gawande’s article compared McAllen to El Paso, Texas, and found what he termed “overutilization” of health care services. This was consistent with our decidedly nonsystematic observation that there was an overrepresentation of health facilities in McAllen. Intrigued, I read the article and have since followed the ensuing debate about the factual foundation of his reporting. Dr. Gawande’s finding that McAllen’s 2006 Medicare costs per enrollee of $14,946 were double those of its northern neighbor, El Paso ($7,504), was central to his thesis that current incentives in our health insurance system can lead to overutilization of services when profits rather than outcomes are a prime motive. Of particular interest to Dr. Gawande was the proliferation of physician-owned diagnostic facilities that, in his mind, explained much of the asymmetry of Medicare costs in this south Texas city. The fact that health outcomes were no better — and in some cases worse — in McAllen compared to El Paso suggests that his concern might have merit. The article caught my eye because it underlines the fact that under our current system of health care, incentives are centered on maxThe intent of this feature is to present a forum for PA educators to share their approaches to teaching EBM. Areas of interest might include reviews of EBM resources; mini-tutorials in areas such as statistics, epidemiology, and study design; ethical, historical, or philosophical perspectives of EBM; and discussion of practice or technological tools that enhance application of EBM. Prospective authors are encouraged to contact the feature editors to receive approval of topics in advance. Authors desiring to contribute to EvidenceBased Medicine should forward submissions to:

Hamlet Between the Lines

Hamlet Presented by The Public Theater at Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York, New York. May 27-June 29, 2008. Directed by Oskar Eustis. Scenic design by David Korins. Costume design by Ann Hould-Ward. Puppetry by Basil Twist. With Michael Stuhlbarg (Hamlet), Sam Waterson (Polonius), Andre Braugher (Claudius), Margaret Colin (Gertrude), Lauren Ambrose (Ophelia), David Harbour (Laertes), Kevin Carroll (Horatio), Hoon Lee (Rosencrantz), Greg McFadden (Guildenstern),Jay O. Sanders (Player King), Miriam Silverman (Player Queen), and others. The most, and almost only, moving scene in The Public Theatre's Hamlet in Central Park this year was the play-within-the-play. Performed by highly skilled puppeteers, it featured three life-sized marionettes designed by Basil Twist with what one might call rough magic; each puppet was made to look as though it were only colorful sheet (of satiny burgundy, white, or blue and green) wrapped over simple marionette frame with stuffed headpiece and coiled fabric for arms. The movements were equally simple, but also remarkably subtle and expressive, and brought the puppets alive in hauntingly poignant way that made the mic'd voice-overs resonate with genuine emotion. For the first time I can remember, the Player King and Queen did indeed come across as couple that shared thirty years of love in the sacred bands of marriage. Thus it felt real that the Player Queen would protest so much; and the Player King's blunt predictions about how her vows will fare after his death felt as though he spoke, not out of cynical distrust, but selfless care for his wife's happiness in the future. Unfortunately, this moment stood virtually alone, and did not become an emblem for the magic of theatre when make-believe takes on living quality and actors become personages we care about. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I should note that I was not alone in feeling that the production, directed by the Public's Artistic Director, Oskar Eustis, was uninspired. First, I happened to see the show with my mother, who had last read Hamlet well over sixty years ago in Korean translation of Japanese translation (as was the practice in colonial times). Her knowledge of the play came more from bits and pieces picked up over the years (melancholy brooding, To be or not to be) and assembled around the image of Hamlet holding skull. On top of this, because her English is still far from perfect, her impressions were necessarily broad. Nonetheless, her reactions to the production generally matched the most common complaints of the reviewers. She found Gertrude to be characterless and bland (NY Post, June 18, 2008), if not so lifeless as a well-maintained mannequin (Daily News, June 22, 2008). Nothing illuminated my mother's most pressing question about Gertrude: is it frailty or guts, or something else, that drives woman to marry her brother-in-law so soon after her husband's death? My mother also couldn't see how Andre Braugher's Claudius could murder, seduce and engineer coup, since there was little in the way of specific characterization (NY Times, June 18, 2008); had she been familiar with Braugher's other work, she would no doubt have added that he uncharacteristically left little impression (New York Magazine, June 19, 2008) at all. Ophelia was at least pitiable as the pained, dutiful daughter in an elegant pink frock, but her transformation into disheveled punk-chick (New York Sun, June 18, 2008), or Courtney Love look-alike (NY Post) in the mad scene left my mother thinking that Ophelia had suddenly walked in from another play. But most of all, Michael Stuhlbarg's Hamlet left her feeling emotionally disengaged, and as the show teetered into its fourth hour, numbness [became] the overriding response (Variety, June 17, 2008). By that time, the character that both the New York Times reviewer and my mother found most interesting--Sam Waterston's eager and bluster-filled but vulnerable and gently comic Polonius--was long dead and offstage. …

The good listeners: Joseph Mitchell (U.S.), José Hamilton Ribeiro (Brazil) and Literary Journalism

The article discusses the experience of Joseph Mitchell, an American literary journalist who humanized the art of profiles, writing in a personal and emotional style for The New Yorker magazine from 1938 until 1996, and Jose Hamilton Ribeiro, a Brazilian journalist who used to work for Realidade magazine from 1966 through 1975 and now is a Globo TV special reporter. It also suggests the usability in Journalism of a more profound interview approach as a method to better analyze and comprehend complex realities. The present study aims at a reflection on the role of journalists as readers, writers and producers of meaning in the contemporary world, as well as on the effect of this profound interaction between environment and interviewers on the journalist’s personal and professional life.

The Measure of a King

King Lear Presented by Royal Shakespeare Company at Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, England, March 24-June 21, 2007; and at UCLA's Royce Hall, Beverly Hills, California, October 19-28, 2007. Directed by Trevor Nunn. Set by Christopher Oram. Lighting by Nell Austin. Sound by Fergus O'Hare. Music by Steve Edis. Fights by Malcolm Ransom With Ian McKellen (King Lear), Frances Barber (Goneril), Monica Dolan (Regan), Romola Garai (Cordelia), Sebastian McCoy (the Fool), William Gaunt (Gloucester), Philip Winchester (Edmund), Ben Meyjes (Edgar), Jonathan Hyde (Kent), Guy Williams (Cornwall), Julian Harries (Albany), and others. In November, 2007 Trevor Nunn's of King Lear for Royal Shakespeare Company made its final stop at New London Theatre in London's West End after an international tour that took it from Stratford-upon-Avon, where it ran for twelve weeks in spring of 2007, to Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and United States. The RSC clearly counted upon recent Hollywood celebrity of actor cast in title role, Sir Ian McKellen, to ensure tour's financial success, and box-office returns were certainly helped by McKellen's decision (reached spontaneously, it appeared, at one of pre-press night performances at Stratford) to let Lear's trousers fall to ground when he is out in storm-blasted heath in act three. There was some cynicism amongst bloggers in UK about stripping, as it was viewed as an attempt on part of RSC to compete with theatrical spectacles in West End, where, only two weeks before McKellen first stripped, Daniel Radcliffe, famous as lead in Harry Potter films, had made his stage debut in a revival of Peter Shaffer's Equus starkers. Other bloggers, however, were ecstatic. Gandalfis HUNG, wrote one (www.bodyjewelleryshop.com, 4 May 2007). The nudity became, as Jeremy McCarter put it in New York Magazine, the talk of three continents (17 September 2007), and by time reached final stop on international tour, UCLA's Royce Hall, patrons were paying upwards of $2,000 on eBay for seats on stage that placed them within feet of McKellen. The decision to strip was, by all evidence, McKellen's. McKellen dropped his trousers for first time, in performance, on Saturday, 24 March 2007, some ten days before scheduled press night of 3 April. The nudity, unscheduled and unadvertised, resulted in a spate of complaints for which McKellen's agent (unnamed in press accounts) was appointed to respond. She claimed that nudity had not been advertised to audience members by RSC because the director [was] still making artistic decisions about production (www.starpulse.com, 26 March 2007). But with his choice to strip on 24 March, McKellen had forced his director's hand. The choice earned additional press coverage on first stop of international tour, Singapore, where McKellen was not allowed to remove his clothes on stage. In conversations with international media there and media at next stop, in Wellington, New Zealand, McKellen complained about Singaporean prudery and its laws on homosexuality. The stripping, it seemed, had its uses over and beyond what it signified in terms of theatrical performance. Bloggers were at liberty to create story about for greater part of initial run at Stratford-upon-Avon, for, week after McKellen first went nude, Nunn called a halt on official opening of production, delaying press night on basis that Frances Barber, cast in role of Goneril, had been in a bicycle accident. UK theatre critics were bemused. They could not understand why they could not review with Barber's understudy, Melanie Jessop, in role. Five weeks into delay, with no official opening of yet in sight, Adrian Hamilton noted in Independent (10 May 2007) that resentment was building among critical corps. …

Select Issues with New Media Theories of Citizen Journalism

New Media theorists such as Dan Gillmor, Henry Jenkins, Jay Rosen and Jeff Howe have recently touted Citizen Journalism (CJ) as the latest innovation in 21st century journalism. 'Participatory journalism' and 'user-driven journalism' are other terms to describe CJ, which its proponents argue is a disruptive innovation (Christensen) to the agenda-setting media institutions, news values and 'objective' reportage. In this essay I offer a 'contrarian' view, informed by two perspectives: (1) a three-stage model of theory-building (Carlile & Christensen) to evaluate the claims made about CJ; and (2) self-reflexive research insights (Etherington) from editing the US-based news site Disinformation between November 1999 and February 2008. New media theories can potentially create 'cognitive dissonance' (Festinger) when their explanations of CJ practices are compared with what actually happens (Feyerabend). First I summarise Carlile & Christensen's model and the dangers of 'bad theory' (Ghoshal). Next I consider several problems in new media theories about CJ: the notion of 'citizen', new media populism, parallels in event-driven and civic journalism, and mergers and acquisitions. Two 'self-reflexive' issues are considered: 'pro-ams' or 'professional amateurs' as a challenge to professional journalists, and CJ's deployment in new media operations and production environments. Finally, some exploratory questions are offered for future researchers.

Limber:

ABSTRACT This article considers the publication of two excerpts from J.M. Coetzee's 2005 novel, Slow man. The first, appearing as “The blow” in The New Yorker magazine, is a silently edited version of the first fourteen chapters of the novel, which makes considerable stylistic changes, as well as transforming the text to perform as an autonomous piece of short fiction. The article considers both the context of its publication — Coetzee's first appearance in the magazine — as well as the symbolic and suggestive absences left by the magazine's editorial interventions. The second excerpt, in Bloomsbury's New beginnings charitable anthology (benefiting the Indian Ocean Tsunami Earthquake Charities), suggests the continued workings of Coetzee's acute awareness of the importance of place, as well as his investment in Australia (his home since 2002) and the larger Australasian region. Both cases offer suggestive instances of the placement of Coetzee's work as (arguably no-longer) “South African” cultural texts, at large in, and subject to the demands of, constructions of high art in global mediascapes.