Articles (add here)

The Notes of Patrick Modiano

We’ve had a bit of a crisis,” Hughes de Courson told me on a raw Parisian morning last February. I’d found him slumped at a table overlooking the cobblestones of the Place Émile-Goudeau, trying to mollify his much younger girlfriend, Naomie Assana. Courson explained that they had spent the previous night drinking a fair amount of wine in Versailles, and this morning their hostess had asked them to leave, claiming they’d kept her up all night. Exhausted, they had returned to the city and checked into this modest hotel in Montmartre.

Read More
Matthew de JongeHarpers
Waiting for Novak Djokovic With Tennis Great (Turned Coach) Boris Becker

On a Monday in mid-August, 47-year-old Boris Becker is hobbling across the lobby of the Marriott in Mason, Ohio, where the pro-tennis caravan has pitched its tent for the last hard-court tune-up before the U.S. Open. If his shockingly reduced gait (owing to two hip replacements and a steel plate in his right ankle) is the cost of hurling his 215 pounds at passing shots like a goaltender, then it seems too high. But how do you set a fair price on seizing tennis immortality by winning Wimbledon at 17? 

Read More
The Leap of His Life: A Rookie and His Burdens

Midway through the second quarter of an early-season game against the Memphis Grizzlies, the rookie power forward for the Phoenix Suns, Amare Stoudemire, flying diagonally across the paint, made an unlikely but life-affirming attempt to convert a low-altitude rebound into a reverse put-back dunk. Only that he's 20 and what the N.B.A. auditors of flesh and bone call ''a freak'' enabled him to even imagine that he could make this play. 

Read More
The Middle of America

On a perfect Sunday afternoon in Steelville, Missouri, a hundred of its more prominent residents are holed up in the long corrugated metal warehouse of the private country club on Highway 8. A couple are at the bar. The rest crowd tables in the dim cavernous room beyond it, their cans of Stag within easy reach.

Read More
Aaron Sorkin Works His Way Through the Crisis

Exactly two weeks after terrorists ambushed New York and Washington, killed more than 5,000 of us and changed everything, and nothing, Aaron Sorkin, creator of ''The West Wing,'' leans anxiously against a long table filled with actors and production assistants. This is the high-tech briefing area where the show's main character, President Josiah Bartlet, huddles with the military brass when make-believe blips on the radar grow alarming.

Read More
Television's Final Frontier

Overlooking Thimphu, Bhutan's capital and the closest thing it has to a city, is a 9,000-foot hill called Sangyegang. At the top of it, where the long, thin, spear-tipped prayer flags never stop rippling -- and you can serenely take in the full valley, if not the whole epic impermanent cosmicness of it all -- a red carpet adorned with loose elaborate patterns of dyed rice has been rolled to the door of a modest one-story structure.

Read More
States of Grace

Although the women on these pages are undeniably beautiful, they have never asked the world to think of them that way. Standing in front of a sweeping gray canvas, they occupy their bodies with an ease and intimacy seen only in people who spend a great deal of their time going flat-out.

Read More
A Zone of His Own: Tiger Woods

On a mild morning in late fall, Tiger Woods, a tall, thin, impossibly elegant Stanford freshman, is standing at the edge of the seventeenth green of the notorious Shoal Creek golf club near Birmingham, Alabama, awaiting his turn to putt. For Woods, who is almost invariably the longest off the tee, and very often the closest to the flag

Read More
Talking Trash: The Art of Conversation in the N.B.A.

As the third game in the first round of the Eastern Division playoffs wore on, Starks's teammate on the New York Knicks, Charles Oakley, began referring to Miller as "Cheryl," the name of his older and, until recently, more celebrated Olympic-basketball-playing sister. For his part, Miller, a guard with the Indiana Pacers, was punctuating his long-range jumpers with obscene references to a report that the Knicks, confident of ending the series that night, had checked out of their hotel before the game.

Read More
The Slugger Nobody Wanted

Cecil Fielder leans over his kitchen sink and squirts out a light brown sluice of saliva and tobacco juice, then washes it down the drain with a pull on a thin white tap. It's about 8 in the evening, but the darkness inside his huge new home, in an enclave of huge new homes just outside Dallas, feels more like 3 in the morning.

Read More