79 articles
I love books, and I own a ton of them. Not that I've read most of them, but still I love them -- the objects. I don't bend back the covers, so that my twice-read copy of Lucky Jim hasn't a single crease in the spine. I don't fold page corners to mark my place -- the top and sides of my much-thumbed…
Even with all the eulogic rhapsodizing over the Free Speech Movement's Mario Savio, whose heart gave out last month after the passage of Prop. 209 (or after the rearrangement of heavy furniture, depending on whose autopsy you believe), Wendy Lesser wrote such a mushy mash note in the December 15…
The Scrapbook thought the ne plus ultra of Christmasbook marketing madness had been achieved several years ago when the counters of our favorite bookseller were chockablock with handsome volumes that contained . . . absolutely nothing. The idea was to put your valuables inside the box-…
Back in November, we noted on this page that Democrat Mark Warner not only outspent Republican John Warner in Virginia's U.S. Senate race, but that in the process he spent more per voter than Michael Huffington had two years earlier in an unsuccessful bid for the Senate in California. Huffington,…
Tell us quick, President Clinton's defenders demand. Before you begin screaming about the "Asian money" fund-raising scandal dogging the Democratic party and its White House, tell us "what it all means." What sinister conspiracy is involved? What precisely was the quid pro quo? And unless you can…
Further proof of educrat hostility to school choice comes from Albany, New York, where "A Better Choice" (ABC) is offering to rescue 650 kids -- an entire student body -- from the worst school in the city. Giffen Elementary is a miserable failure, and ABC, with more than a million dollars offered…
In the race to succeed him, Haley Barbour has professed neutrality. But the outgoing chairman of the Republican National Committee is quietly using the same formidable political skills that got him the job to influence who gets it next.
In an amazing feat of psycho-archaeology, the Washington Post Style section last week unearthed several perfectly preserved specimens of a creature not seen since the late 1970s: the Carpool Hero. You remember the Heroes -- "good citizens," as the Post put it, who have "left their cars at home,…
Hollywood loves "high-concept movies," films whose plots can be summarized in a single phrase, like "dinosaurs come back to life in an amusement park." So besotted is the motionpicture industry with the high-concept approach that many movies no longer even need plots at all, only titles -- Twister,…
IN NEARLY FOUR HOURS of preparation for his press conference on December 13, President Clinton devoted only a few moments to reviewing his position on partial-birth abortion. So White House aides were surprised when he mounted a vigorous, lengthy defense of himself on the issue after CNN's Wolf…
The first surprise on delving back into Dr. Spock on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Baby and Child Care is that his much-denounced " permissiveness" is scarcely to be found. Peruse the pages of this record bestseller -- still second only to the Bible -- and you discover much practical…
Is there anything left to say about Evelyn Waugh? Since his death in 1966 at the age of 62, a veritable industry has grown up around the great satirist. A somewhat cloying but immensely popular television miniseries of his novel Brideshead Revisited got the ball rolling in the early 1980s.…
"The half hour before midnight is for doin' good," according to Minerva, the voodoo witch in John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. "The half hour after midnight is for doin' evil." And these days in Savannah, Ga., the setting for Berendt's many-layered non-fiction tale of an…
On November 14, 1996, there was an article buried deep inside the Home section of the New York Times that was so crammed with cultural import it made your head spin. The story was about Jane Amsterdam, the onetime media Pooh-Bah who edited both Manhattan, inc. and the New York Post in the 1980s.…
"IT NEVER CEASES TO AMAZE ME," Justice Clarence Thomas has observed, "that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior." Sadly, the Milwaukee National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is now asking yet another court to endorse just…
Ten days before the most charity-soaked of holidays, a story appeared in the Washington Post, front page, above the fold, like the Ghost of Christmas Real Time: "Inside Welfare's New World," subhead: "Watching Reform at Work." In this, the threatened "First in a series of occasional articles,"…
Seldom has a politician left public office with more self-generated fanfare than Sen. William S. Cohen. "Last week, I announced that I would not seek reelection to the Senate," Cohen announced for the second time in a January 1996 Washington Post op-ed. "I have been moved by the reaction of my…
Q: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?
What a confusing week for human rights activists. On Monday, December 9, President Clinton played Tickle-Me Bill when China's defense minister, Gen. Chi Haotian, the Tiananmen trigger-man, dropped by the White House for a romp.
It's sort of like "the California goldfields in 1849," reports the trade publication Restaurant Business: China has 1.2 billion hungry people, but only one fast-food joint for every 5 million of them. Better get a move on, the magazine advises; "the time to break into China is now." PepsiCo made…
For good reason, the biggest turnover in the Clinton White House occurs in the post of chief counsel. The latest to leave is Jack Quinn, who quit abruptly on December 11. The reason: Quinn chafed because he wasn't in control of the most important legal work being done at the White House, namely…
When USA Today broke the news earlier this month that Thurgood Marshall, while lawyering for the NAACP, had cooperated with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, elite opinion first gulped, then sputtered, then . . . sputtered some more.
Under pressure from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the highly annoying group of busybodies that pursues its mission under the banner of " animal rights," the National Park Service has removed nine deer from the Pageant of Peace on the Washington Mall's Ellipse, behind the White House.…
The story so far: On Election Day, California voters approved Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, by 54 to 46 percent. CCRI mandates that in state employment, contracting, and education, California treat all people alike -- no matter their color and no matter whether they are…
I have a new grandson with the admirable name of Nicholas Charles Epstein. Nick Charles, moviegoers will happily recall, is the name of the suave detective played by William Powell in the Thin Man movies. A friend, when told of my new grandson's name, said she hopes it won't be long before he's…
WHEN CHINA'S DEFENSE MINISTER, Chi Haotian, was granted an extraordinary meeting with President Clinton in the Oval Office on December 9, Chi's role as the military leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre barely made a ripple in official Washington. Oh, a few get-tough-on-China Republicans,…
YOU WOULD THINK that the nomination of U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright to be secretary of state would have been feted with hosannas by Bill Clinton's Washington constituency. A woman, and this after 63 men in the job! One might be forgiven for thinking that the sound of cheers would be drowned…
Harry Mulisch
So now we all know what many of us have suspected all along: The Consumer Price Index is wrong, and has been wrong for two decades or more. The report recently released by the so-called Boskin commission -- a panel of experts led by Stanford economist Michael Boskin -- lays out a host of reasons…
Suzannah Lessard
Hillary Clinton recently lashed out at those who have detected a " feminization" of American society. "What an unfortunate term," she said. " After all, don't fathers worry about how long their wives and babies can stay in the hospital when they need care? Don't men want to be able to take time off…
Whether or not one believes that America is suffering a crisis of runaway judicial activism, there is at least a broad consensus on this point: The Supreme Court led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist has significantly weakened the protections enjoyed by criminal suspects and convicted prisoners.…
In January 1903, a girl named Henya Woliner was born in the town of Nemirov in the Eastern European territory of Galicia. In December 1996, a woman named Helen Podhoretz died in a hospice in Manhattan. Henya Woliner traveled a long way to become Helen Podhoretz; she was an American for 76 of the 93…
ERSKINE BOWLES, THE NEW White House chief of staff, made only one mistake when he trekked to Capitol Hill on December 5 to woo two dozen moderate House Republicans, and it was a small one. He and John Hilley, the White House congressional lobbyist, referred to the "Kennedy-Kassebaum" health-care…
"David Gergen doesn't like this? David thinks it's inappropriate? Gee, that'll put me cold in my tracks. I think I'm going to stop." James Carville seems angry and amused at the same time. Yelling into the phone, his already garbled Louisiana speech rendered nearly unintelligible by sarcasm,…
First as federal traffic-safety czarina for Jimmy Carter, and today as president of the Naderite outfit Public Citizen, Joan Claybrook has spent an entire career accusing automakers of scrimping on safety because it costs money -- in other words, of profiting from death and injury. And she is…
Like most people in America, I'm of two minds about gun control. To wit: Several years ago, my parents retired to a remote part of a southern state famous for its military traditions. For a long time, I was consumed with lurid fears about their isolation ("If someone were just to come in and cut…
An unintended consequence of Bill Clinton's decision to pass up George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, as secretary of state: Mitchell is likely to be the new baseball commissioner. It's the job he wanted anyway. It pays more. He can travel with his wife. Mitchell has been ready to…
Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman Leon Lett has been suspended for a year without pay, after testing positive for cocaine in the last week of November. Lett is best remembered for fumbling his own fumble recovery while strutting into the end zone in the fourth quarter of Dallas's blowout of Buffalo…
In a private conversation with his toe-sucking consultant Dick Morris, you may recall, President Clinton once played an earnest game of "rank the presidents." The presidency's historical "first tier" was probably out of reach, Clinton decided. But with a strong showing n his second term, he guessed…
I recently wrote a book on the biological search for the origins of homosexuality. In its final chapter, I described some rather amazing work being done at two biotech companies: The first is trying to manufacture a computer chip out of human DNA to tell you exactly what genes you have, while the…
Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post's State Department correspondent, don't know much about history -- even recent history. In an editorial masquerading as a news story about the Clinton administration's human rights policy toward China last week, Dobbs badly mangled the Reagan administration's…
There's a whiff of 1974 in the air -- July 1974, to be precise. That's when the National Citizens' Committee for Fairness to the Presidency held a star- studded fund-raiser in defense of the beleaguered Richard Nixon.
There are obvious dark ironies. Bill Clinton took office in 1993 vowing to deal more firmly with "the butchers of Beijing" than had his Republican predecessor. He hasn't. In 1994, the president began an awkward reversal on the issue, abandoning the human rights conditions he had initially attached…
The Dallas Cowboys are touted as America's Team, but have you ever encountered a fan of the Cowboys in the Northeast or the Rust Belt or on the West Coast? Not often, I'll bet. There's a good reason for this, but not one you'd automatically think of. The fact that the Cowboys are a very good…
THE DALLAS COWBOYS are touted as America's Team, but have you ever encountered a fan of the Cowboys in the Northeast or the Rust Belt or on the West Coast? Not often, I'll bet. There's a good reason for this, but not one you'd automatically think of. The fact that the Cowboys are a very good…
Gen. Alexander Lebed, the man who negotiated peace in Chechnya, fancies himself not only the next president of Russia but also something of a political philosopher. After meeting Colin Powell on his visit to Washington just before Thanksgiving, Lebed declared: "Good generals make good politicians."…
When the dust settles from the remaining runoff elections, Republicans are likely to wind up with 228 House seats, only two fewer than they had after the 1994 election (six more were added later by Democratic defections). The latest addition: the much-maligned Steve Stockman of Texas, whose…
Joining us as a contributing editor is John J. DiIulio, Jr., director of the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Management and a Princeton professor. Besides his many sterling articles that have already appeared in these pages -- "The Coming of the Super-predators" was among the most-…
Samuel Beckett has long occupied a central place in the often ferocious disputes that have raged over the ethical and political significance of art in this century. Not long after international celebrity status was thrust upon him following the premiere of his revolutionary play Waiting for Godot…
STIRRED BY THE DISCOVERY of soccer moms, feminists are now on the lookout for minivan madonnas. "Family feminism," a new twist in America's most malleable social movement, seeks to enlist women who want to listen to their maternal urges rather than ignore them. Yes, with a PTA card in one hand and…
Twenty years after he last held public office and seventeen years after his death, the name of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller is mentioned in Republican circles mainly as a pejorative.
At the turn of the last century, when the United States was emerging as the world's most dynamic and successful power, many of America's premier intellectuals were profoundly pessimistic. Although their young, vibrant, industrializing country was growing up all around them, they were convinced that…
IT MAY SEEM OBVIOUS NOW, but as we review the events of the past year -- from January 1, 2002, to December 31, 2002 -- it's worth remembering that just a few years ago nobody could imagine how success would force the feminist movement into a shotgun marriage with the pro-life movement.
The curious island of Japan has long fascinated the West: in peace and war; in novels, paintings, plays, and movies. Ian Littlewood, in The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths, sets out to expose our time-honored myths about that country, not because they are untrue, but because they…
AS IF COPS DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH PROBLEMS, the Drug Enforcement Administration is up against a new obstacle. A DEA press release paints this scene:
Roughly four-fifths through Patrimony, a memoir of his father and one of his best books, Philip Roth recounts his aged father, then in the grip of a tumor pressing against his brain and the victim of several small strokes, having, in his own word, "beshat" himself at Roth's country house in…
In a passage that neatly captures both the nature and the problem of what is called "postmodern" fiction, a character in a John Barth story muses:
STEVE MERRILL IS THE WILDLY POPULAR Republican governor of New Hampshire who will soon be out of a job. He s retiring voluntarily -- he won reelection two years ago with 70 percent of the vote -- but he'd like to stay involved in GOP politics. That explains why in the course of a short conversation…
John Patrick Diggins, a provocative academic who writes primarily on American politics, has the happy faculty of raising your interest without entirely satisfying it. His latest book seems at first glance a departure from his previous work, but it isn't at all. For in Max Weber: Politics and the…
I quit smoking almost exactly ten years ago, and let me tell you, I don't recommend it. Quitting, I mean. Smoking I do recommend, for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to (a) look cool, (b) kill myself slowly, or (c) cause others around me to contract lung cancer secondhand. These are…
Gary Franks, one of two black Republicans in the House of Representatives, will be leaving Congress soon; he was defeated a few weeks ago. And that defeat was celebrated in the ranks of the Congressional Black Caucus, the clique Franks joined upon entering the House and would not quit no matter…
In December 1995, over the knee-jerk objections of many Republicans -- " exit strategy," sitting ducks, body bags" -- President Clinton began deploying nearly 20,000 American ground troops to Bosnia. If he hadn't, a fragile cease-fire would have broken, ethnic carnage in Bosnia would have resumed,…
The rowdy House Republican freshmen, most of whom survived the onslaught of the $ 35 million labor-union campaign against them, are now regrouping with their second-term agenda. In hopes of promoting unity, 15 of the most conservative members in their ranks did something unheard of: They passed up…
Our contributing editor, Joseph Epstein, writes: "I should like to apologize for an error in simple arithmetic in my Casual, 'The Running of the Bulls,' in last week's issue. I mentioned four season tickets to the Chicago Bulls costing $ 325 each per game, and went on to write that the expense of…
Pat Schroeder, longtime congresswoman and scourge of the military, has retired and needs a little cushy, well-paying work. Seems she may go to the board of embattled Texaco. "I would be honored to serve," she said. "There are some similarities to some of the problems in the Army, so I look on this…
Call the Wall Street Journal editorial page! Clinton admits all! While golfing in Australia with Greg Norman, the president came upon some reporters at the seventh tee. Norman shouted over toward the press: "He's beating me." Clinton smiled and then responded, "If you believe that, I've got some…
An update on Richard Petty, the most successful driver in the history of NASCAR racing and GOP candidate for secretary of state in North Carolina this year: Basically, he got beat like the family mule. And his fans don't know what's worse -- that he lost by 9 points or that he lost to a woman,…
MANY MYSTERIES REMAIN in the wake of the life and death of Alger Hiss. One is his relationship to Dean Acheson. On January 25, 1950, the day Hiss was sentenced to prison for lying about passing secrets to the Soviet Union, Harry Truman's secretary of state declared during a press conference: "I do…
Testifying before Congress in the spring of 1990, Arkansas state health director Joycelyn Elders took an unusual tack in her defense of legal abortion. "Abortion," she said, "has had an important, and positive, public- health effect," in that it has reduced "the number of children afflicted with…
John Corigliano has almost become world-famous, and for a composer of classical music who is living and breathing among us, that is rare indeed. Every day, his name grows more familiar; every day, his election by the musical gods (or at least the publicity men) is made clearer. Other composers vie…
REPORTING ON NATIONAL SECURITY and intelligence maters has traditionally been the province of Ivy League-educated reporters working for elite papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Bill Gertz hardly fits this profile. He never graduated from college, and he writes for the…
HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH believes ideas have consequences. During the 104th Congress he sought to use the bully pulpit of the speakership to "set the intellectual framework" of political discourse in America. Now this former history professor has made history. To Gingrich goes much of the credit…
YOU REALLY DON'T WANT TO HEAR about this, and I don't blame you, but Lamar Alexander was in Washington last week, less than two weeks after Election Day. The former governor and presidential candidate was making the rounds, giving speeches, granting interviews, meeting with former and future…
Like the deadly virus in the movie Outbreak that hatches in a tiny village then almost eats the world, Quentin Tarantino has gone from minor curiosity to malevolent force of nature in a very short time. Pulp Fiction, the young director's 1994 breakthrough film, has become a cinematic benchmark. Its…
SOMETIMES, LATE AT NIGHT, when Bob Dole was plunging off podiums, labor was blacklisting Republican candidates, and his onetime loyal allies were talking about impaling him, Haley Barbour reached into the bottom of his office closet and pulled out a bottle of Maker's Mark whiskey. There, surrounded…
During my first week as a reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago, a teenager committed suicide on the northwest side. It was my job to call his neighbors and try to get them to tell me why he did it. A few days later, a semi-notable died in a car crash. I had to call the woman who had been…
For years now, economically conservative but socially liberal Republicans -- you know, the Wilson, Whitman & Weld brigades -- have been touted as politically perfect for the 1990s and beyond. The idea was these Republicans had unique appeal to women and independents and young people and yuppies and…
Is the fight against discrimination being lost? Defenders of America's vast anti-discrimination apparatus would like you to think so. The celebrities, activists, lawyers, diversity consultants, university administrators, and corporate bureaucrats who campaigned against the California Civil Rights…