52 articles
IN DECEMBER 1999, the Clinton administration issued a worldwide terrorist alert to Americans overseas advising them to avoid crowded millennial celebrations. Bomb-toting Islamic militants under the banner of the Saudi terrorist Usama bin Laden had declared war, so Americans were to stay discreetly…
LAST OCTOBER IN ST. LOUIS, during the closing minutes of their third and final televised debate, Al Gore and George W. Bush had a little exchange on the proper role of affirmative action in federal decision-making. A woman in the audience asked Governor Bush what his intentions were with respect to…
TAKE AN ELECTION—a tie in the Senate, a near tie in the House, a near tie in the popular vote, a near tie in the Electoral College. Three states too close to call days after the polls closed, other states decided with minuscule margins. Then, when it all comes down to the vote of one state, give…
PHILIP CALLOW’S NEW BIOGRAPHY, Louis: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, comes exactly one hundred years after the publication of Graham Balfour’s The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, the writer’s first biography, authorized by his widow and penned by his young cousin. In the intervening years, the…
MEXICAN PRESIDENT VICENTE FOX barnstormed the United States last week, urging American businessmen to support some sort of amnesty for the three million Mexicans illegally working and living in this country. And to put pressure on his American counterpart, Fox addressed rallies of his countrymen…
BETWEEN COLUMBINE, EMINEM, AND MTV, today’s teenagers often come across to their elders as indecent, self-destructive, and dangerous. But Baby Boomers shouldn’t be too quick to judge. In one respect, modern adolescents behave far more responsibly than their parents did at the same age. High school…
THERE HAVE BEEN TWO PROMINENT RESPONSES to the news that the Jones Institute in Virginia is creating human embryos simply to harvest their stem cells: concern and outrage. Mark Warner, the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia, is concerned. Asked in the governor’s debate last week if he…
THOUGH I GRUDGINGLY ADMIT to doing many things that cause me some degree of embarrassment—cow-tipping, white slaving, parking in my church’s first-time-visitor’s space for 73 consecutive Sundays—I fly my freak flag high when disclosing that I watch lots of bad television. To some snobs, the…
Albion, New York
THE 30 FAT YEARS AFTER THREE DECADES overseeing the premier daily outpost of conservative opinion, legendary Wall Street Journal editorial-page editor Robert Bartley turned over his command last week to that same page’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington columnist, Paul Gigot. In a March 10, 1997,…
LAST WEEK’S HOUSE PASSAGE of President Bush’s faith-based initiative is a significant victory for the administration in its embattled effort to broaden religious organizations’ involvement in providing social services. Two crucial pieces of the bill—protecting religious charities’ freedom to hire…
THE 30 FAT YEARS AFTER THREE DECADES overseeing the premier daily outpost of conservative opinion, legendary Wall Street Journal editorial-page editor Robert Bartley turned over his command last week to that same page’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington columnist, Paul Gigot. In a March 10, 1997,…
HALF A CENTURY AGO it was plain which way democracies were heading: left. In the United States, the Democrats held the White House for the nineteenth straight year. In Britain, the Labour party had just created the National Health Service and nationalized the commanding heights of the economy.…
GEORGETOWN DOYENNE SALLY QUINN is Washington. Which is why when Mrs. Benjamin Bradlee deigned to advise a beleaguered congressman a week ago Sunday in the Washington Post, everyone listened. "Gary, Gary, Gary," she admonished Rep. Condit. "Most people don’t care whether you or any other congressman…
ANDREW CUOMO HAS BEEN RUNNING for office for years. The official announcement of his candidacy for governor of New York finally came on January 29, 2001, just nine days after his tenure as secretary of housing and urban development ended with the close of the Clinton administration. Cuomo’s friends…
THOUGH I GRUDGINGLY ADMIT to doing many things that cause me some degree of embarrassment—cow-tipping, white slaving, parking in my church’s first-time-visitor’s space for 73 consecutive Sundays—I fly my freak flag high when disclosing that I watch lots of bad television. To some snobs, the…
WHEN JOHN CAMPBELL’S TEENAGE SON CHRISTOPHER became comatose after a car accident in 1994, the last problem Campbell expected was obtaining proper medical treatment for his son. Campbell, a corporate executive, had excellent health insurance and was convinced Christopher would receive the best of…
THE FIRST CRISIS TO THREATEN ISRAEL’S four-month-old national unity government was caused by a handshake: Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were photographed shaking hands at the Socialist International Conference in Lisbon on July 1. How could Israel expect…
HERE’S SOME UNSOLICITED ADVICE for two old friends, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz: Resign. Right now that may be the best service they could perform for their country, for it may be the only way to focus the attention of the American people—and the Bush administration—on the impending…
ON JULY 11, THE HOUSE Ways and Means Committee approved one part of President Bush’s faith-based initiative when it passed a measure permitting those who don’t itemize their taxes to deduct charitable contributions. In a statement, the president praised the committee for its vote and predicted the…
AMERICANS TAKE GOOD CIVIL-MILITARY relations for granted. The Constitution, military officers’ strongly ingrained acceptance of the principle of civilian control, and the fact that the services get their personnel from a broad range of the population have combined to give the United States a…
ON JUNE 28, MORTIMER J. ADLER, propagandist for the reading of great books, indexer extraordinaire, and the world’s highest-salaried philosopher, died at the age of ninety-eight. I worked for Mortimer, as we all called him, in the late 1960s. After a year-long stint as the director of an…
TAKE AN ELECTION—a tie in the Senate, a near tie in the House, a near tie in the popular vote, a near tie in the Electoral College. Three states too close to call days after the polls closed, other states decided with minuscule margins. Then, when it all comes down to the vote of one state, give…
MONICA LEWINSKY IS ALIVE AND WELL, and Chandra Levy, one must now fear, is most likely neither, but these two young women seem to have a lot in common. What most stands out is that neither seems to have benefited from any controlling moral authority, or to have been well served by the adults in her…
A NATIONAL BUSINESS REPORTER GETS A SCOOP: The Treasury Department, in consultation with the Federal Reserve, is planning to sell dollars for yen on the foreign-exchange market in order to strengthen Japan’s currency and stabilize exchange rates. The treasury secretary, outraged at the publication…
THE POLITICAL DISTRESS and moral agony now burdening President Bush on the issue of stem cell research could have been avoided. All Bush had to do was take the advice of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the first days of his administration. The bishops urged him to implement…
DR. STEPHEN BEZRUCHKA, a physician with the University of Washington School of Public Health, has made the startling claim that income inequality is the major cause of our nation's health problems. Writing in Newsweek's My Turn column, he dismisses the role individuals can play in safeguarding…
WHEN CIPRIANO MARTINEZ walked through the doors of Teen Challenge of South Texas 11 years ago, victory over drugs seemed unlikely: For Martinez, a balanced diet meant heroin, cocaine, downers, and booze. In and out of prison, he,d already flunked half a dozen drug treatment programs. Teen Challenge…
IF EPISCOPALIANS DREAM OF PRETTY CHURCHES-and believe me, they do-then one of the pretty churches they dream about is Christ Church, in Accokeek, Maryland, 20 miles south of Washington, D.C. Built during the Revolution and renovated before the Civil War, it stands today in a grove of towering…
FROM RECENT SCHOLARSHIP has emerged a remarkably complete picture of modern American legal politics at the moment of creation. We now know that in the 1980s, occupying the farthest-right outposts of human imagination, was a barbarian tribe of conservative "Republicans" led by a mythic figure called…
MORTON KONDRACKE IS A REPORTER in Washington, D.C., and a name to conjure with: a writer for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, a star on the political television program The Beltway Boys, an original member of The McLaughlin Group, a man who has followed the ins and outs of American politics…
THE 20 MEMBERS OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION voted unanimously to block General Electric's $45 billion takeover of Honeywell, and what's the result? For one thing, the biggest gap between front-page and business-page reporting in two decades. The financial boom of the 1990s always had a strong…
AMONG THE ISSUES in American politics that inspire the most ideological fervor these days, stem cells and missile defense are at the top of the list. Missile defense has a long history: To conservative Republicans, it is a fixture of the Reagan legacy, of American strength, independence, and…
THE POST-COLD WAR ERA has produced something new in world history: an abundance of poor democracies. There are now some 70 nations with a gross domestic product below $10,000 per capita and with the basic attributes of democratic government. These regimes have been greeted in the West mostly with…
THE GOOD PART OF THE PATIENTS’ BILL OF RIGHTS CONSERVATIVES DISMAYED BY THE SENATE GOP’S rollover on the patients’ bill of rights can perhaps find a silver lining, thanks to Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum. For the bill includes as a rider—introduced by Santorum and passed 98-0 on June 29—a modest…
KENNETH LYNN ENJOYED a long and productive career as a scholar of American literary and intellectual life, first at Harvard, then in a quixotic attempt to turn Washington's Federal City College into a serious university, then at Johns Hopkins, and then in a very active retirement. He produced…
IT,S PERFECTLY OBVIOUS that by the time I am 70, I,ll be a museum piece. In the first place, I am going to be the last balding man in America. Scientists are clearly on the verge of stopping hair loss. Pretty soon, there will be anti-baldness shampoos, pills, and toothpaste. You,ll be able to…
In all his books of nature and travel observation, Edward Hoagland subjects wild creatures and faraway places to his writerly mannerisms. Whether the topic is trivial or profound, Hoagland's polished prose can coat it with slickness. And now, in Compass Points, he focuses again on exotic creatures…
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR-the conflict from 1936 to 1939 between the mainly socialist and anarchist militias defending the Spanish Republic, and the right-wing forces headed by General Francisco Franco-is often described as the last purely idealistic cause of the twentieth century. Certainly this is…
DAVID LODGE’S LATEST NOVEL, Thinks..., explores the long-deplored and still-continuing divide between the "two cultures" of Britain, science and the humanities. Scientific investigation is represented by Ralph Messenger, womanizing professor and director of the prestigious "Holt Belling Center for…
THE POST-CLINTON ERA For six months THE SCRAPBOOK has tried to pretend that this is the Bush Era. But let’s face facts: We’re really just in the early stages of the Post-Clinton years. Looking back on Bill Clinton’s presidency, THE SCRAPBOOK admits that it was as guilty as anyone of portraying our…
ABOUT THE HORROR OF CREATING HUMAN BEINGS by cloning, there is wide agreement among the American people—and in Congress as well. But about the extent of the necessary ban on cloning—whether it must outlaw all human cloning or only cloning that aims explicitly at bringing a cloned child to…
IN HIS LATER LANDSCAPES, Paul Cézanne often elaborated the center of his pictures while leaving the corners unpainted, so the sky was only implicit in the blank patches of canvas. In his Henry Bech stories, recently collected in The Complete Henry Bech, John Updike turns Cézanne inside out: he…
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS will soon come under increasingly severe attacks from Internet pirates. These digital assaults should concern all those who believe that secure property rights provide the foundation for a prosperous society. Unfortunately, the best methods for protecting intellectual…
THIS FATHER’S DAY, THE STORIES in the national press had a curious twist. They featured almost exclusively one relatively small group of dads: single fathers. A perusal of newspapers ranging from the New York Times and the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the…
PLATO, AS EVERYONE KNOWS, once defined man as a "featherless biped." His student Aristotle insisted instead that man is by nature a political animal, a being whose capacity for speech compels him to live with others. So who’s right, ironic Plato or solid Aristotle? I can think of only one living…
FOR THE PAST HALF CENTURY, most people thought the Arab-Israeli conflict was a fight over land. Leaders would propose slogans like "Land for Peace." Diplomats would draw lines on maps, hoping to find some territorial arrangement that would be acceptable to both sides. But the events of the last…
THIS WILL NEVER DO. You can measure the failure of Philip Roth’s latest novel, The Dying Animal, by the comments on the back cover. There’s the blurb from the Times Literary Supplement that acclaims Roth’s three prior novels for the "radical individualism" of which they were, in fact, the greatest…
MAKE NO BONES ABOUT IT, there will be another war. We have entered what should be thought of not as the "post-Cold War" era or the "New World Order" or least of all the "End of History," but an interwar period, the tenth the United States has faced as a nation. In all the others save the Cold War,…
RICHARD RUSSO is a writer who dares to repeat himself. His fifth novel, Empire Falls, is about a small town in the Northeastern United States that has seen better days. The only notable difference between the town of Empire Falls and the town of Mohawk (the setting of his first two novels, Mohawk…
REPUBLICAN RANDY FORBES won a Democratic House seat in Virginia in a special election on June 19, even though he failed to gain a mandate on the issue that mattered most nationally in the race, Social Security reform. Instead, Democrats came away from Forbes’s 52-48 victory over Louise Lucas…
SOME PERSONAL HISTORY: In 1973, the year before I was born, the Philadelphia 76ers went 9-73. It remains the worst single-season record in professional basketball. In 1983, I sat hypnotized in front of the television as the Sixers won the world championship; everyone I knew had a God-mad obsession…