This is a selection of articles I’ve written. Thinking in the Rain<\/a><\/strong> The Steve Hollinger experience can be described most simply as multimedia. For one thing, it includes olfactory surprises. My apartment was right above Steve’s for several years, and on a regular basis he would call to warn me about odors that might waft their way from the second floor, where he lived, to my apartment on the third. Once in a while, the warning was about something he’d be cooking, but often it was more unexpected\u00a0…<\/p>\n The Origami Lab<\/a><\/strong> One of the few Americans to see action during the Bug Wars of the nineteen-nineties was Robert J. Lang, a lanky Californian who was on the front lines throughout, from the battle of the Kabutomushi Beetle to the battle of the Menacing Mantis and the battle of the Long-Legged Wasp. Most combatants in the Bug Wars — which were, in fact, origami contests — were members of the Origami Detectives, a group of artists in Japan who liked to try outdoing one another with extreme designs of assigned subjects\u00a0…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Outsiders<\/a><\/strong> The Church of Saints Peter and Paul in South Boston has had its share of both bedevilment and blessings. A grand gray building, a pile of granite chunks pierced by Gothic arches and topped with a copper-clad bell tower, was erected in 1844 and dedicated with extravagant ceremony; four years later, it burned to the ground. After it was rebuilt, it was so popular that another parish had to be established nearby to handle the overflow\u00a0…<\/p>\n Out of the Woods<\/a><\/strong> It was an awful house. A broker would have called it a charming Swiss chalet; what it should have been called, really, was a dingy A-frame, mud-brown, damp, afflicted with an air of unrelieved gloom. An ad might have claimed that it was nestled in the Oregon mountains — in fact, an ad did claim that it was nestled in the Oregon mountains — but would fail to mention that it was nestled in what was possibly the only cramped, cluttered, suburban subdivision in the Oregon mountains\u00a0…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Nice Doggy<\/a><\/strong> The other day, my Welsh springer spaniel, Cooper, gave me a manicure. He doesn’t give the world’s best manicure — for that you’d have to go to that Korean joint, Nuclear Nails, or whatever it’s called, on Broadway — but he really tries. He can tell whether I’m in the mood to have my cuticles cut or just pushed back\u00a0…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tainted Love<\/a><\/strong> I want to make a confession: I am passionately and uncontrollably in love with Dick Cheney. Lynne, I’m sorry; if I could help it I would. It’s just something about him — the strength, the silence, the frank and unabashed baldness, the mystery, the unknowability, the man, the myth, the Vice-Presidentialness of him.\u00a0…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Shadow Memory<\/a><\/strong> When my grandmother died a few years ago, I was given her formal china, her silverware, a fur-lined lap robe, and her Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition — an old brick of a book, leather-bound, with skin-thin pages and black half-moon thumb tabs\u00a0…<\/p>\n Art for Everybody<\/a><\/strong> One recent sultry afternoon, inside the Bridgewater Commons mall, in central New Jersey, across from The Limited, down the hall from a Starbucks, next door to the Colorado Pen Company, and just below Everything Yogurt, a woman named Glenda Parker was making a priceless family heirloom for a young couple and their kid\u00a0…<\/p>\n A Place Called Midland<\/a><\/strong> In Midland, Texas, it’s not the heat; it’s the lack of humidity. Almost total lack of it, or so it seems, especially when you first arrive and step out of the chilled Midland International Airport and into the dry-roasted air. Midland has the kind of air that hits you like a brick\u00a0…<\/p>\n Springtime Fashion<\/a><\/strong> Nothing says springtime quite so much as a romp around Paris in your underpants. Pitchers and catchers may have reported to spring training; tax day might have come and gone; but nothing celebrates the vernal equinox like whipping off your fleece-lined Uggs and wool-blend trousers, getting a Brazilian bikini wax\u00a0…<\/p>\n The Place to Disappear<\/a><\/strong> All languages are welcome on Bangkok’s Khao San Road, including Drunkard. “Hold my hand,” a man fluent in Singapore Slings commanded a Scottish hairdresser one night at Lucky Beer and Guest House — only in his dialect it came out soggy and rounded, more like Hole mah han. “Not right now,” the Scottish hairdresser said\u00a0…<\/p>\n Shooting Party<\/a><\/strong> When I went to Scotland for a friend’s wedding last summer, I didn’t plan on firing a gun. Getting into a fistfight, maybe; hurling insults about badly dressed bridesmaids, of course; but I didn’t expect to shoot or get shot at\u00a0…<\/p>\n Meet The Shaggs<\/a><\/strong> Depending on whom you ask, the Shaggs were either the best band of all time or the worst. Frank Zappa is said to have proclaimed that the Shaggs were “better than the Beatles.” More recently, though, a music fan who claimed to be in “the fetal position, writhing in pain,” declared on the Internet that the Shaggs were “hauntingly bad,”\u00a0…<\/p>\n I Want This Apartment<\/a><\/strong> Jill Meilus is a New York City real-estate broker. Like Superman, she can see through walls. Walking down a Manhattan street with her is a paranormal experience. “Nice building,” you might remark as you pass a handsome but unrevealing prewar facade, to which she might respond that the J-line apartment on the third floor has a new kitchen, that the guy in 8-A is being transferred to Florida and will entertain any offers of more than two hundred thousand dollars\u00a0…<\/p>\n Pool Buddy<\/a><\/strong> When I was in junior high school, we spent the whole summer at the pool. The coolest kids had tans in May; I don’t know how they did it. In 1971, when I was fourteen, there was a kind of bikini that was the absolute butter — a little something held together at the hips and thorax by brass rings — and early that summer the most popular of the popular girls had circles of untanned skin underneath those rings\u00a0…<\/p>\n Girl Power<\/a><\/strong> I grew up in the sixties and seventies, under the spell of the old television show “Bewitched.” I saw every episode, and I loved them all. But lately I have been watching the television show “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,” and I have come to regret that I was fifteen in the “Bewitched” years rather than now\u00a0…<\/p>\n Shiftless Little Loafers<\/a><\/strong> Question: Why don’t more babies work? Excuse me, did I say more? I meant, why don’t any babies work? After all, there are millions of babies around, and most of them appear to be extremely underemployed. There are so many jobs — being commissioner of major-league baseball, say, or running the snack concession at the Olympic synchronized-swimming venue — and yet it seems that babies never fill them\u00a0…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Orchid Fever<\/a><\/strong> John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games\u00a0…<\/p>\n Figures in a Mall<\/a><\/strong> One of the last happy meetings of the Tonya Harding Fan Club took place at Nancy Welfelt’s house, around her dining-room table. The meeting had actually begun at Clackamas Town Center — the mall, in Clackamas County, Oregon, where Tonya skates — on the morning of the day before Tonya’s on-again, off-again ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, began his sixteen hours of interviews with the F.B.I.\u00a0…<\/p>\n
\nFor more recent articles, visit\u00a0my New Yorker contributor profile<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2008<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, February 19, 2007<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, July 26, 2004<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, June 14, 2004<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, February 18, 2003<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, July 14, 2002<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nFlowers in Shadow (Rizzoli), January 1, 2002<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, on October 15, 2001<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, on October 16 & 23, 2000<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, on March 30, 2000<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, January 7, 2000<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, on September 29, 1999<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, September 27, 1999<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, February 22, 1999<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, June 22, 1998<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, May 18, 1998<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, July 22, 1996<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, January 23, 1995<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe New Yorker, February 21, 1994<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n