47 articles
CLIMATE, RICHARD LINDZEN OF MIT fondly reminds us, always changes. It must. Over centuries, responding to stresses internal and external, the earth is either warming or cooling, just as the temperature from day to day heats or chills. It could stay the same, but not for very long. "Climate change,"…
THE FIRST WORD ANYONE EVER SPOKE to me in London was blimey. Age 18, I came out of the Earl’s Court tube station from Heathrow and asked a woman where the youth hostel was. "Blimey!" she replied, unironically. "Aw daon’t knaow." I would later spend a couple of years living in London, but have…
EUROPEANS LOVE THE DEATH PENALTY WITH GEORGE W. BUSH visiting Europe last week as Timothy McVeigh was being put to death, it was perhaps only natural that newspaper readers would be treated to a sample of European opinion on capital punishment. "Almost as One, Europe Condemns Execution," clucked a…
EUROPEANS LOVE THE DEATH PENALTY WITH GEORGE W. BUSH visiting Europe last week as Timothy McVeigh was being put to death, it was perhaps only natural that newspaper readers would be treated to a sample of European opinion on capital punishment. "Almost as One, Europe Condemns Execution," clucked a…
ALL NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIALS are annoying, but a few manage to annoy in a distinctive way. If I hadn’t just come from Beijing, and weren’t now in Taipei, I probably wouldn’t have given a second thought to last Sunday’s 778 words on "China Viewed Narrowly" (reprinted in Thursday’s Taiwan News,…
THE ELECTION OF GEORGE W. BUSH has brought forth a change in the government’s view of the Second Amendment. More than a few Americans know the amendment by heart: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be…
NOW THAT THE DEMOCRATS CONTROL THE SENATE, price controls are back on the legislative agenda. Western electricity producers are first in line, and pharmaceutical firms are sure to be next. Democrats will likely use the issue of adding a drug benefit to Medicare (the federal health insurance program…
ALAN WOLFE, A DISTINGUISHED SOCIOLOGIST and public intellectual, has been asking ordinary Americans about virtue. For his recent book Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice, Wolfe and his research team interviewed individuals in communities around the country and from all walks…
AS MUCH AS LIBERALS WERE MYSTIFIED by conservative hostility toward Bill Clinton, so conservatives were baffled by liberal love for Clinton. How did this good old boy from Arkansas manage to inspire the affection of the Left from Harvard to Hollywood? One answer is to be found in The Truth of…
LAST FEBRUARY DEMOCRATIC SENATOR EDWARD KENNEDY introduced a "patients’ bill of rights." His proposal instantly became his party’s top priority on health care, attracted the endorsement of Republican senator John McCain, and won the support of a majority of senators. Kennedy introduced the…
Of all the perplexing issues that have been brought to our attention by the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance -- besides the fact that there is such a thing as the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance -- none has been so puzzling as the question JOPERD chewed over in…
OF ALL THE DREARY DEMYSTIFICATIONS of female experience advanced by feminists, surely one of the silliest is the claim that the heroines of girls, classics helped turn generations of admiring readers into milksops. Yet that is the thesis of Deborah O,Keefe,s Good Girl Messages: How Young Women Were…
SINCE THE MOMENT George W. Bush was declared winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes, both state and national black leaders have vowed to exact revenge on brother Jeb. With Jeb Bush’s announcement that he will run for reelection as governor of Florida in 2002, they think they have their chance.…
IT’S CUTE, IT’S HIGH-TECH, it seats four, it gets a world-best 77 miles to the gallon—and Americans can’t have it. The Volkswagen Lupo 3L TDI is already saving fuel on European roads, but it won’t qualify for any of the $4 billion in subsidies for "alternative-fuel vehicles" in the Bush…
TWO WEEKS AGO, following a long round of high-profile diplomacy, the Bush administration finally achieved what it thought an acceptable entente with the People’s Republic of China regarding the disposition of our downed EP-3 surveillance plane. The entire embarrassing incident thus safely consigned…
TOWARDS A MORE PICTURESQUE HATE SPEECH PROOF THAT THE SPEECH POLICE in America are almost all on the left: the amazingly forgiving reaction of the press to California attorney general Bill Lockyer’s attack on Enron chairman Kenneth Lay. Lockyer is running the price-fixing investigation in which…
AFTER A FAILED EFFORT to ban human cloning in 1998, Congress has taken up the issue once again. There have been hearings in both the House and the Senate, testimony from fertility doctors and cult leaders who want to clone human beings, and heavy rhetoric about the coming of a Brave New World. In…
FOR BASEBALL GAMES PLAYED IN DISTANT CITIES in the 1930s and 1940s, local baseball announcers would read the telegraph wire to find out what had happened on each play, add canned applause and the recorded sound of a bat, and broadcast games as if they were really watching the players. Arch…
FAMILIES ARE NOT WHAT THEY ONCE WERE—but this may not be entirely a bad thing. Cinderella, after all, had a family. So too did Hamlet, King Lear, Oedipus, and Antigone. So did Anne Cary Randolph, better known as "Nancy," the prime mover in our first great American scandal and now the heroine of…
THE JUNE ISSUE OF THE NEW CRITERION arrived last week, and I can’t tell you just how really, truly . . . ambivalent I am about that. It looks, once again, like a wonderful issue. It includes a review by Mark Steyn of The Producers, and a long essay on journal-writing by Joseph Epstein. There’s a…
THE LONG-RUNNING ARGUMENT in Washington over Yasser Arafat’s responsibility for the terror campaign against Israeli civilians should have been settled on June 2, the day after a Palestinian suicide bomber murdered 20 Israelis, mostly teenage girls, outside a Tel Aviv disco. That day, the…
THERE THEY GO AGAIN. In releasing their draft report on last year’s presidential election in Florida, the majority members of the United States Commission on Civil Rights have once again put their political biases on display. Earlier this year, the Commission heard three days of testimony regarding…
WHEN JERSEY CITY made a moderate Democrat its first black mayor last week, governor Donald DiFrancesco, a Republican, showed up to congratulate him. "Now Jersey City has a real mayor," he said. DiFrancesco was there because the election was read across the state as a defeat for the outgoing mayor,…
SPECIAL CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS MATTER. In 1981, political strategist Lee Atwater left the White House staff to manage a Republican campaign for a House seat in east Texas. Atwater’s candidate lost, signifying that despite Ronald Reagan’s capture of the presidency the GOP wasn’t on the verge of…
LAST WEEK, HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON joined a growing chorus of lawmakers in calling for a federal ban on racial profiling. "Profiling is not an effective law enforcement tool," said New York’s junior senator. "The vast majority of African Americans and Hispanics who are stopped or searched have…
I SAW HENRY KISSINGER THE OTHER DAY in New York. For a moment I was disoriented. It was as though Bismarck or Metternich had walked out of a history book and straight into my path. Like his nineteenth-century heroes, Kissinger now seems mostly to belong to history: He has earned his place as one of…
THE ANNOUNCEMENT LAST WEEK that the Bush administration would seek a supplemental appropriation of $5.6 billion for defense for this fiscal year confirmed the fears of many on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon: Bush’s commitment to rebuilding and reforming the military is less than anticipated or…
THE RELEASE OF THE BUSH ENERGY PLAN is generating an intense debate concerning the best ways of producing and conserving energy in the United States. Much of the discussion involves complex technical issues such as the ability to produce nuclear power from new engineering designs that would need to…
THE TEMPTATION WAS THERE FOR YEARS: buy a second home somewhere outside the Beltway and nest there on weekends, for long, lazy periods during the summer, at Thanksgiving and Christmas and maybe other holidays. A place beyond earshot of the Washington buzz, a place to read or watch sports on cable…
IT IS 7 A.M. AND I HAVE JUST ARISEN, two hours later than usual. My wife and eleven-year-old granddaughter are still asleep in the second of this two-bedroom condominium we have rented on Sanibel Island, Florida, which also contains two bathrooms and three television sets, all with VCRs. I open a…
DON’T LOOK NOW, but Senator James M. Jeffords, denounced in some circles as a cad and a turncoat, may have secured a second term for George W. Bush. He has saved Bush from his friends; taken key issues away from the Democrats; and given Bush the chance to focus on long-term objectives, instead of…
LAST WEEK THE SUPREME COURT assumed its usual stance astride the statute books, took a mighty swing—and shanked a particular federal law so far into the trees that it will likely never be found again. At least, not the way that law was originally written. As you’ve no doubt heard, the Court ruled…
TO MANY CONTEMPORARY INTELLECTUALS, especially academics of postmodern outlook, the radical German writer Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) embodies the restless consciousness of the past century. Jewish and Marxist, a critic and philosopher, he was little known during his lifetime. But after his…
HAS THE NAIVE MOOSE popped up on your mental radar? One of the fashionable items on the green agenda, under the rubric of biodiversity, is the reintroduction of species to territory from which they have disappeared—many of them no doubt emigrating to California and Oregon. The reintroduction of…
ANYONE WHO THINKS THE WRITING OF BIOGRAPHIES a declining art will be buoyed by the appearance of John Aloysius Farrell’s monumental study of legendary Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. In Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, Farrell attempts, as his title suggests, both to tell the…
THE STATE OF RACE POLITICS and current academic fashion apparently requires that there be a book on "multicultural conservatism." But does it have to be jargony, confused, uneven, and done by an effusive anti-conservative? In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now?, Angela Dillard, a young professor of…
LAST YEAR, ABOUT 16,000 AMERICANS died from treating their arthritis with FDA-approved drugs such as Advil and Aleve -- so-called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. That's what happens if millions of people, to treat their chronic pain, take a kind of drug that can increase the risk of bleeding…
The week's political news had reporters in Washington working overtime. The Senate passed a $1.35 trillion tax cut, the biggest in 20 years. The House approved an education bill that would require the states, for the first time, to test students and identify failing schools. The Senate finally (if…
WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS are hopeful that the signing of George W. Bush's tax cut marks the beginning of their tax agenda, not its completion. The next item, they indicate, will be tax reform. While the president has yet to offer any clues about what sort of reform he will propose, his appointments to…
THE BUZZ IN THE MEDIA after senator James Jeffords's switch put Democrats in control of the Senate was that President Bush must change his ways. He has to become more moderate. Why? Because only that will prevent more Republican defections and it's the president's one hope for getting his agenda…
FOR QUITE SOME TIME NOW, METAPHYSICS -- traditionally central philosophical discipline -- has been looked at askance by philosophers themselves. For Marxists, metaphysics seemed merely religion making a masked reappearance. For Heideggerians and deconstructionists, it was a dubious "onto-theology."…
THE DIRECTOR MICHAEL BAY had a dream one night as he considered how to film an epic movie about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In his dream, he followed a bomb, falling from a plane, as it descended ever more rapidly to crash into the deck of a ship. He awakened, gripped with an obsession to…
ONE MARK OF A SON OF A BITCH is the pleasure he takes in pointing out how many people think he's a son of a bitch. By this measure, to judge by his new memoir Staying Tuned, the former CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr is one first-rate, top-of-the-line, gold-plated -- but let him tell it.…
NEW YORK CITY LIBERALISM, OR PALEOLIBERALISM to some, is what New Yorkers are told will return to City Hall when term limits force mayor Rudolph Giuliani to depart in 2002. Four Democrats are vying to succeed him. But the potential return of unreconstructed liberalism is not the most menacing…
ABM, Kyoto, and the new American unilateralism
THE DIMMEST KENNEDY? Ever since the New Republic labeled Joe Kennedy, the now-retired Massachusetts congressman, "the Dumbest Kennedy," family-watchers have fiercely debated: Can this possibly be fair? After all, competition for that distinction is stiff. Indeed, THE SCRAPBOOK has always been…
I WENT TO A HIGH SCHOOL with perhaps fifty different extracurricular clubs that, whatever their other shortcomings, at least let one know one's exact social standing. Status under this arrangement was as finely calibrated as any I have since encountered. Athletes, good guys, ladies' men, genial…