83 articles
SATURDAY. I have been coming to Hong Kong for more than 25 years, sometimes to do business, sometimes to prepare for trips to Taipei or Beijing. Other times, I come just to catch a glimpse of what comes next in the global economy. Hong Kong is not so much a country or a colony as a running…
Bill Clinton is quite plainly going claustrophobic inside the dollhouse presidency he has constructed. As "time runs out of my hourglass," he says with characteristic smarm, "I get more impatient to do everything I think I have to do to prepare this country for a new century." So five years into…
ON JUNE 11, the night before Democratic representative Tony Hall introduced his resolution apologizing for slavery, he called Jesse Jackson. During their 15-minute conversation, Jackson expressed support for Hall's effort, telling him, "I don't have any problem" with the proposed apology. But when…
J. Harvie Wilkinson III
Nicholas Christopher
Good news on the genocidal-monster front: Pol Pot -- as of this writing -- is reportedly surrounded, pinned down near the Cambodian-Thai border by some 1,000 defectors from his Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot may not have Hitler's or Stalin's or Mao's numbers, but his percentage is impressive: He and his…
The other day I came across some diaries from my childhood and browsed in them enough to find them quaint and intriguing. When I actually read them, I realized what gave them their piquancy: They're a window on a child's life before TV.
Environmental and antinuclear activists have found a new enemy: the space program. The Cassini space probe to Saturn, scheduled for an October 6 launch from Cape Canaveral, is the target of an impassioned campaign of protests and grassroots lobbying -- a campaign marked by technological naivete and…
One by one, House Republican leaders signaled I support for Speaker Newt Gingrich last week after the traumatic GOP surrender on the disaster relief bill. Majority leader Dick Armey appeared at Gingrich's side at a press briefing. Whip Tom DeLay declared that, despite threats of rebellion in the…
AT MIDNIGHT, JUNE 16, NEW YORK CITY stepped out from under rent control for the first time in 50 years. Five minutes later, like groundhogs frightened by their own shadows, Gov. George Pataki and state senate majority leader Joe Bruno went scurrying back into their holes. New York's flirtation with…
WASHINGTON JOURNALISTS are generally thought to be more liberal than their colleagues in the hinterland, and the perception is understandable. If 89 percent of journalists in the nation's capital really did vote for Bill Clinton in 1992, as a survey by the Freedom Forum suggested, then they rival…
In the ongoing appropriations battles on Capitol Hill, there was good news last week. House Republicans found the nerve to take substantial steps toward eliminating two government programs.
John Lewis Gaddis
Constructive engagement, as the Clinton administration likes to call its policy toward China, is actually more a theory than a strategy. And it is a theory that demands perpetual optimism. It runs something like this: China has a clear set of interests -- in expanding its economic growth, in…
After Senate majority leader Trent Lott took the occasion of his appearance on ABC's This Week to issue one of the more pointed criticisms ever aimed at a president of the United States -- "He acts like a spoiled brat. He thinks he's got to have it his way or no way" -- Bill Clinton took remarkably…
American business has become an unflattering caricature of itself in the fight over renewed most-favored-nation trade status for the People's Republic of China. "China MFN is not some ideological debate," National Retail Federation president Tracy Mullin announced at a news conference June 16. "It…
Elliott Abrams
Politicians decorate their offices with mementos of the power they have and portraits to remind them of the virtues they wish to possess. And if you go to a politician's office these days and look over his shoulder as he's charming you with his geniality, you're likely to spot the stern and…
Let's say you were somehow involved with a bloodthirsty tyrant who had brought down upon his country a reign of corruption and terror. Suddenly the tyrant is in the world's headlines. Would you (a) try to keep quiet about the whole thing, or (b) issue a press release?
Every two years, new members of Congress arrive on Capitol Hill portraying themselves as modern-day replicas of the famous "Mr. Smith" who went to Washington and cleaned up its crooked ways. Last month, one of these characters, Rep. David Minge, a Minnesota Democrat elected in 1992, was profiled on…
The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote next week on the extension of China's most-favored-nation trading status. How it will turn out is anyone's guess; the House Republican leadership is split on the question, so its nose-counting whip system isn't operating. That in itself is a…
Dana Mack
Among the many unhappy campers in the House GOP last week, two may have been the unhappiest of all: Christopher Cox and David McIntosh. Republican leaders had attached a couple of worthy but wonkish riders to an unrelated flood-relief bill (and had allowed it to get loaded down with specialinterest…
LAST MONTH, A TELEVISION PRODUCER wanted to interview me for a piece on the tenth anniverary of President Reagan's address at the Berlin Wall, a speech I drafted. We met at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., so the crew could film the interview in front of the actual…
Wherever I have worked for the past decade, I have been the office techno- weenie -- the guy to whom co-workers turn for help with their computers (and printers and fax machines and, most recently, voice-mail). I have no training, but I'll pretend to be an expert about anything. And more often than…
If writers can be said to have a leading hobby, that hobby is the collecting of grievances. How nicely they pile up, like a child's collection of Beanie Babies, one atop the other, a writer's grievances against his publisher(s), his editors, his agent, of course his reviewers and critics, his…
IN HIS FOURTH VISIT since leaving Krakow for Rome, John Paul II returned home last week at a crucial moment for his native Poland. Sometimes comically, but more often tragically, the cycles of modern European history either begin or end in Poland. The historian Norman Davies aptly called Poland "…
Greg Norman, the high-flying Australian golf star, blew in to Washington recently for a two-week stay, trailing obnoxiousness and venom behind him. At the Kemper Open, held in suburban Maryland, the starter on the first tee introduced him thus: "Of all the golfers in the world, the following player…
The single greatest legislative achievement of the much-maligned 104th Congress was welfare reform. The new law ends the federal welfare entitlement for single mothers and requires states to get an increasing percentage of their welfare recipients to work.
EXCUSE ME FOR ASKING, but do you feel Bloated? Callous and Vain, perhaps? How about Schizo and Talky, Robotic and Obvious and Cutthroat? No? Not even the teensiest bit Powerless and Shortsighted? Then the patriotic editors of the New York Times Magazine have a simple question for you: You call…
ON JUNE 14, PRESIDENT CLINTON will deliver the commencement address at the University of California at San Diego. His topic will be race relations and the importance of diversity. The speech is being hyped as one of the president's moves to engage us all in a "national discussion about race," along…
IT'S BEEN ANOTHER BAD WEEK for conservatives. In France, the second round of legislative elections on June 1 proved every bit as devastating to conservatives as the first round a week before: The socialists won 268 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, with another 39 going to the Communists.…
It's hard to imagine a high-profile death-penalty case without a New York Times editorial denouncing executions. And sure enough, no sooner had the Oklahoma City bombing jury pronounced Timothy McVeigh guilty than the Sages of Times Square weighed in with their ritual denunciation, a lead editorial…
Saul Bellow
It may be the 50th state, but come on! For those of us who grew up on the East Coast and never joined the Navy, Hawaii is more myth than reality. It's smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, for God's sake. How could Hawaii be a state when you've never seen a license plate with the word "…
Elizabeth Drew
John Kasich, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the primary architect of this spring's federal budget agreement, wants to talk off the record for a while. We're sitting in the living room of his small clapboard bungalow on a leafy street in Westerville, just outside Columbus, Ohio, and…
DURING THE IRAN-CONTRA AFFAIR, Art Buchwald defined an Iranian "moderate" as an Iranian who has run out of ammunition. Despite this cynical view, there most likely are moderates in Iran -- the vast majority in the country who are disgusted with the Islamist theocratic regime, and even some in the…
With government-sponsored affirmative action in retreat everywhere, you might think federal bureaucrats would hesitate before spending tax dollars to promote racially divisive programs. Wrong. Consider the annual "training and development" conference that will be held in Washington this August by…
Most smokers take their first, experimental puff before they reach adulthood -- as children. Children enjoy cartoons. The spokesbeast for the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco company's flagship brand, Camel, is a cartoon camel named Joe. He appears on billboards and in newspapers and magazines where…
Anthony Haden-Guest
Contributing editor David Gelernter writes to THE SCRAPBOOK:
IMAGINE YOU WERE GEORGE SOROS'S chief currency and bond trader. Throughout the late 1980s, you bet that an almighty Japanese juggernaut -- the new capitalist model for the 21st century -- was taking over the world, Rockefeller Center and all. Today, had you followed that line, you would not be…
Leopold Stokowski had been the conductor of the renowned Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly three decades by 1940, but much of the world met him only that year, with the release of the Walt Disney movie Fantasia. In the opening frames, the "Fabulous Philadelphians" filed in, took their seats, and…
DAVID E. KENDALL, the private attorney for President Clinton and Hillary Clinton, got carried away in his June 3 letter attacking independent counsel Kenneth Starr. So helpful have the Clintons been to Starr's investigation, Kendall said, that "their cooperation has been unprecedented." Sure, some…
Four months ago, this page awarded top honors in our 1997 Appease China Sweepstakes to Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California. She had proposed that China and America appoint a commission on human rights that " would point out the successes and failures" of both sides, "both Tiananmen…
A battle is on over the shape of economic activity in the information age. It pits government -- specifically, law enforcement -- against a disorienting jumble of right-wing and left-wing legislators, interest groups, and business leaders to be known herein as the Cyberspace Liberation Front.
Bill Clinton is famously concerned about his place in history. He should rest easy; his place is secure. He has it all to himself: No president has ever before been credibly accused of exposing himself to a strange woman and demanding oral sex. No president has even been incredibly accused of it,…
In politics, as in life, little things are often the most revealing. Senate majority leader Trent Lott does lots of big things -- chemical-weapons treaties, budget deals, and the like. But it is a little thing -- his brief comments responding to reporters' questions about Air Force Lieutenant Kelly…
In Leo Tolstoy's telling of the story, Napoleon began the battle of Borodino -- the battle that doomed his hopes of conquering Russia -- exactly as he began every battle. He reviewed his men, gave them an inspiring speech, and sent them out to attack the enemy. In the past, the result had never…
THE LATEST INSTALLMENT IN THE LONG, colorful history of counterproductive do-goodism is the quixotic campaign by the Humane Society of the United States to stamp out the sport hunting of elephants in Zimbabwe. This misguided effort -- though spurned by a string of environmental champions (including…
SOMETHING REFRESHING IS AFOOT in Minnesota. Republican governor Arne Carlson is in a knockdown-drag-out fight with the Democratic legislature over his plan to devote $ 150 million to tax deductions and credits for parents seeking alternatives to public education.
Robert Hughes of Time magazine, most celebrated art critic of the age, has made an irritating, interesting TV series called American Visions that is now showing on PBS. Eight hour-long segments cover the history of American art from colonial times to the present. The close of the last episode finds…
Conservative leader Paul Weyrich has walked with a cane since breaking his back in an accident over a year ago. As a courtesy to Weyrich, the Senate sergeant-at-arms granted him the same privilege that is routinely accorded to members of Congress, dignitaries, and the disabled. Rather than having…
It would be too little to say that Rosie O'Donnell, star of the Rosie O'Donnell Show, is a comedienne-turned-talk-show host. She is our Everywoman, gal-pal to the glitterati, the "human manifestation" of the " Celestine Prophecy" (actress Rita Wilson's words), "everybody's sister" (John Travolta's…
Apologies to Lisa Schiffren, whose review last week of playwright Wendy Wasserstein's An American Daughter had its concluding line amputated by a technical glitch at the printer (yes, it really does happen that way sometimes). Here is the last paragraph, as it should have appeared:
Valerie Grosvenor Myer
Robert Reich learned at least one thing from Bill Clinton: a total disregard for the truth. His newly published account of his time in the Clinton administration, Locked in the Cabinet, is now being picked apart for its dishonesty and inaccuracy.
The tale of Air Force First Lieutenant Kelly Flinn is absorbing for so many different reasons that, oddly enough, people will be tempted to underestimate its importance. After all, the melodrama of a high-flying career laid low by illicit sex is as undeniable as it is distracting. Flinn and her…
Like millions of Americans, I've succumbed to the allure of a wild bull market and plunged into mutual funds over the past 18 months. It wasn't so long ago that I had no idea what a "mutual fund" was and found myself confounded by their promises to make me money. Now, I am familiar with arcana like…
Larry King's USA Today column is, as the many aficionados who read it know, always a treat. But on Tuesday, May 27, he outdid himself. He devoted his entire "News and Views" to his visit with fiancee Shawn to Ted Turner's ranch in northern New Mexico. Larry flew there in Ted's private plane, rode a…
Probably the weirdest stop on Kelly Flinn's quick journey from disgraced adulteress to feminist hero came on May 11, during her first appearance on 60 Minutes. Correspondent Morley Safer opened the segment by explaining how sexism had destroyed Flinn's brilliant career in the military. In the old…
Leroy Hendricks is now 62 years old. Sitting in his car one day when he was 20, in 1955, he exposed himself to two small girls. In 1957, he was convicted for playing strip poker with a 14-year-old girl. In 1960, Hendricks was sentenced to a three-year prison term for molesting two boys, ages 7 and…
LET'S BE STRAIGHT about the whack the Supreme Court took at President Clinton in the Paula Jones case. It was a big one. Normally the court has a bias in favor of executive power. At least some justices are willing to side with the White House in almost every circumstance. President Truman got…
If you've bought a new home since 1993, you know all about the modern toilets mandated by the last Democratic Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 1992. They don't work very well, do they? You're only allowed to have a 1.6- gallon tank, down from the old 3.5-gallon standard. Most of the new ones…
In strictly legislative terms, it looks as if the congressional effort to abolish the unconscionable practice of partial-birth abortion has fallen short. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed such a ban on March 20. The Senate approved a nearly identical bill on May 20. The two…
The state of the State of the World Forum s good, we are delighted to report; it thrives; it flourishes. You may recall that the Forum is the project of New Age gadfly James Garrison and the otherwise unemployed Mikhail Gorbachev, who hope to create a "global brain trust." The first Forum,…
Amos Elon
Last week, after four years of repeated Chinese sales of chemical-weapons components to Iran, the White House finally acted. It imposed sanctions on five Chinese citizens and three minor Chinese companies for the next 12 months -- depriving them of about $ 2 million in business with the United…
Irascible gumshoe Gary Aldrich was in the news again this week, when New Yorker writer Jane Mayer quoted the former FBI agent and bestselling author as saying that some of the allegations he made about President Clinton in Unlimited Access were "hypothetical" and "not quite solid."
IN 1994 SEN. PHIL GRAMM OF TEXAS vociferously opposed the Clinton health- care plan. "Anything I can do within the rules of the Senate to prevent the government from taking over or controlling the health-care market," he declared, "I'm going to do, and I'm going to do it proudly." Gramm was key in…
LEADERS IN AMERICA AND EUROPE will spend the next two weeks celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan, the American effort to lift the economies and the spirits of our allies at the dawn of the Cold War. But should they? As a standard critique of U.S. foreign aid has it, the…
I'd been sick for a couple of weeks: sniffle, tickle in my throat, blocked- up ears. I figured I'd been taking the wrong antihistamine. So the other day I walked into a yuppie drugstore and rang for the pharmacist. A chubby little guy with a flat-top haircut appeared behind a window.
Despite negative reviews in all I the New York papers, the night I saw An American Daughter, the latest Broadway offering by the Pulitzer-prize- winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein, the audience was packed with visibly high-powered, sophisticated Manhattanites. They bore little resemblance to the…
THE DAIS WAS LINED WITH American exports (various types of grain) and Chinese imports (toys, baseballs, sneakers) when the Business Coalition for U. S.-China Trade convened a meeting in early May in the Rayburn House Building. The issue: extending most-favored-nation trade status to China for…
We all know what Clintonism is: the unacknowledged appropriation and successful electoral exploitation of our ideas. Well, now it's spreading. Into the culture at large. The days of conservative exclusion from the culture are over. These days, the conservative sensibility is more likely to be…
Philip Roth
Not so long ago, it was TV talk shows that were being excoriated for their wanton exhibitionism as they competed for the honor of producing the most brazen or degrading revelation of the month. The award surely goes to the show (never aired but highly publicized) where one man confessed to being a…
CULTURAL CRITICS PRONOUNCE, almost daily, that America is going to hell in a handbasket. But no one has done so as memorably, or as successfully, as Allan Bloom did in 1987 with The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom told America that her professors and parents had been so corrupted that the young…
One Saturday night in early May, Annette Sorensen, a 30-year-old Danish tourist, went to the Dallas BBQ restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with her boyfriend. As the couple drank margaritas inside, their 14- month-old daughter Liv sat outside -- unattended in a stroller on the sidewalk.…
Springfield, Massachusetts, home of the MerriamWebster's Dictionary, has long been proud of its annual spelling bee. But in the first week of May, Springfield superintendent of schools Peter Negroni canceled the event forever, on the grounds that "the bee provided too much stress and too few…
Two weeks ago, our reporter Pia Catton gave a number of reasons for disliking the new memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt, starting with its misrepresentation of the man's character and his politics. Here's another reason: Besides memorializing ineptly, it panders ineptly.