107 articles
THERE HAS ALWAYS been a division among Beatles fans between "Paul People" and "John People." Paul People love the Beatles for their music. While mindful of both the extraordinary songwriting symbiosis between Paul McCartney and John Lennon and the lesser contributions of George Harrison and Ringo…
THE STIMULUS PACKAGE now dragging its sorry behind through Congress is a bill that is too stupid to fail. So many politicians have loaded so many bad ideas into it that under no circumstances will they not let it become law. First there are the bad pork barrel spending ideas--the subsidies for…
SHROUDED IN MYSTIQUE, the AK-47 has played a central role in every insurgency and revolution of the past 40 years. It was the weapon of choice for Viet Cong and Somali warlords. During the Cold War it was a symbol of the Red Menace even as the Afghan mujahedeen used it to drive the Soviets out of…
WHEN KARL ROVE, President Bush's senior adviser, met with Hollywood producers on November 11, he delivered mushy talking points about the war on terrorism but no recommendations for movies that should be made on the subject. "Content was off the table," Jack Valenti, Hollywood's chief lobbyist in…
ORANGE COAST COLLEGE, maybe the prettiest community college in California, if not the world, recently gave in to ideological mau-mauing by a group of Muslim students. And now they've been caught red-handed. On September 18, political science professor Kenneth W. Hearlson was teaching his…
YESTERDAY the Drudge Report noted that the Montgomery County, Maryland, town of Kensington has asked Santa Claus to stay away from its annual tree-lighting ceremony on December 2. Two families said they would be uncomfortable if the jolly old fellow were present, so he was kept out of this year's…
THE EDITORIAL in our magazine's current issue suggests that Mazen Al-Najjar, an illegal alien living in Tampa, Florida, is a "free man" pending judicial appeal of his petition for political asylum--notwithstanding a Department of Justice determination that Al-Najjar has held leadership positions in…
LUTON, England--Famous for hat-making and home of the straw boater, Luton, is about an hour north of London by rail. It's just far enough that some glimpses of cows on green slopes interrupt the urban blur seen from the window of the train. The conductor who asks for my ticket is a wiry,…
A RECENT COLUMN on major league baseball's plan to cut two teams before next spring brought an avalanche of letters. Half of them argued that the expansions of the last 32 years haven't had an effect on the quality of pitching. Some of them praised Mark McGwire. These were largely unconvincing.
WITH THE TALIBAN DISLODGED and Osama bin Laden increasingly shorn of allies, the endgame seems to be in sight in Afghanistan. President Bush--along with the men and women of our armed forces--deserve the lion's share of the credit for the encouraging progress of our arms. The president deserves…
LAST MAY IN THE PHILIPPINES, a terrorist group with links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network abducted 20 people from a hotel resort on Palawan island. Three of them were Americans. In June, one of the Americans, Guillermo Sobero of California, was blindfolded and led away with his hands tied.…
GEORGE W. BUSH once ate a hamburger here at the Coffee Station in Crawford, Texas. I know that because on your left as you enter, at eye height, is a framed bill from this past August that Bush himself paid. It's bill #173803, and it lists orders for eight people. Bush paid $35--plus half that…
Letters to a Young Lawyer by Alan Dershowitz Basic Books, 226 pp., $22 CLAIMING TO FOLLOW in the footsteps of Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," Basic Books has begun publishing a series of mentoring books designed to provide advice to young people beginning their careers. One of the first volumes,…
Movie Love in the Fifties by James Harvey Knopf, 464 pp., $35 IF YOU PICKED UP a copy of James Harvey's last book, "Romantic Comedy in Hollywood," you have a notion of what he prizes in movies: wit, skepticism, independence, feistiness, joie de vivre, mystery, and sexiness. In his new "Movie Love…
HERE'S THE CONVENTIONAL interpretation of the most recent media recount of the Bush-Gore election: Bush would have won even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not stopped the statewide recount of undervotes ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. But Gore would have won a statewide recount (that he did…
LAST WEEKEND, the Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan. This weekend, as we go to press, their last remnants are fighting for their lives under heavy American bombardment in two rapidly collapsing redoubts: Kunduz in the north and Kandahar in the south. Terrorist leaders of al Qaeda have been…
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about Osama bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalism; less about the contribution of European Marxist postmodernism to bin Laden's thinking. In fact, the ideology by which al Qaeda justifies its acts of terror owes as much to baleful trends in Western thought as it does to a…
IN THE LAST TWO WEEKS, the Bush administration has publicly signaled that a tougher Iraq policy may be on the horizon. For example, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on November 8: "There is plenty of reason to watch Iraq, there is plenty of reason to make very clear to the Iraqis…
WILL THE People's Republic of China prove to be one more victim of September 11? Today, the Chinese state may look like an inadvertent beneficiary of the terrorists' crime, but on closer inspection, it could turn out that China's economic, social, and political institutions are about to be tested…
STAMP OF APPROVAL After 5,000 Americans were killed by Islamic terrorists, one would assume that image-conscious homefront Islamic organizations like the American Muslim Council would find time in their busy schedules to denounce overseas Islamic governments that have abetted terrorism, while…
EVEN THE CASUAL READER of last week's financial news will know that Enron, the energy and trading company, has been acquired by its smaller rival, Dynegy. This is more than just another multibillion dollar merger, which explains why liberals, who can ordinarily be expected to oppose any marriage of…
LOONY LEFTISTS (CONT'D) We thought perhaps the London Review of Books was getting better. It could hardly get worse after its Oct. 4 parade of writers denouncing America. Columbia historian Eric Foner wrote: "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the…
AMERICANS MAY ENJOY the spectacle of Russian president Vladimir Putin chowing down with President Bush in Crawford, Texas, and take comfort in the knowledge that the old standoff between two continent-sized foes has well and truly ended. But we still have reason for caution in dealing with Russia.…
VICTORY IN AFGHANISTAN is in sight. The few remaining pockets of resistance have been isolated and the Taliban leadership can no longer control events. One-eyed Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden, and their lieutenants are on the run, if they haven't already been captured or killed. More than any attacks…
Memoirs A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics by Edward Teller Perseus, 544 pp., $35 EDWARD TELLER has undertaken, at the age of ninety-three, to tell the story of his life. In conducting an exercise of this sort, most men find much to admire, but little to censure in themselves. An…
Witchcrafting A Spiritual Guide to Making Magic by Phyllis Curott Broadway Books, 304 pp., $25 BROWSE IN ANY bookstore's "spirituality" section and you'll find dozens of books about Wicca and the world of modern-day witchcraft. Pink and purple covers promising "girl power" fill the teenagers'…
THE ANNOUNCEMENT by Advanced Cell Technology of an apparent breakthrough in human cloning should restore a sense of urgency to Congress's attempt to ban human cloning. After the House passed the Human Cloning Prohibition Act at the end of July, attention swung to the issue of embryonic stem cells.…
TWO WEEKS AFTER September 11, while the whole world was still checking in with itself, the New York Times called up a bunch of novelists. The paper of record wanted to see if their jobs still had any meaning. "While many temporarily questioned their work," the reporter wrote, "they ended up…
MAKING HIP-HOP records is a bit like making love: Anyone can do it, but it takes a special knack to do it right. Consequently, history is replete with those who have scribbled rhymes on a napkin, booked studio time, then barreled headlong off the high-dive only to do an artistic belly-flop. Recall…
MONDAY'S STATEMENT in Geneva to the Biological Weapons Convention conference by John R. Bolton, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, made news primarily because he named names. The U.S. government, said Bolton, is "concerned about potential use of biological weapons by terrorist groups,…
THANKSGIVING WAS ALWAYS tense while I was growing up, and I don't know why. Christmas, now--Christmas was fun and presents and carols and laughter, as I remember. But Thanksgiving was arguments and huffs and recriminations and doors slamming and one indistinguishable great-uncle or another rousing…
I THINK IT WAS Garfield who said, "Vacation is a state of mind." Or maybe it was Ziggy. Either way, it's demonstrably true: Vacation is what happens when you abandon the things that dominate your life. When you're a journalist, that means getting away from the news. Last August I took a vacation…
EVEN AS AMERICA enjoys its newfound sense of political and cultural unity, the battles over issues of race and culture roil on, though perhaps in more muted tones. One example is the recent dust-up in California over changes to the University of California system's admissions procedures. Actually,…
CHALK THIS UP as history's best example of "it never hurts to ask."
We meet our griefs again when work is through and do with words what little words can do. A stranger weeps beside us through the night. Beneath our pleasant sun, we never knew the dark that hates the sky for being bright. We thought to build a garden without rue, to climb and, all-beloved, to reach…
YESTERDAY MORNING on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines, 200 Muslim separatists laid siege to an army outpost. The attackers, however, were not part of Abu Sayyaf, the terrorist group currently holding two Americans hostage. They were supporters of the much larger Moro National…
JERUSALEM NO ONE INSIDE ISRAEL wonders why Prime Minister Ariel Sharon abruptly cancelled a trip to Washington long scheduled for November 11-13. Everyone here knows that Sharon, at the urging of advisers and allies, cancelled the trip to avoid facing an American president unhappy about Israel's…
NEW YORK Call it the New York Paradox: Politically, it's always 1968. Racial tensions, though far lower than they were thirty, or even ten, years ago, still define city elections. In Gotham, explains Jim Andrews, the campaign manager for Ruth Messinger's failed 1997 mayoral bid, "race isn't just…
SO NOW WE KNOW: The Saudi Arabian regime is no friend of ours. Sure, they sell us oil and tell us that they keep the OPEC cartel from pushing prices through the roof. But their refusal to go along with OPEC price hawks is self-serving. They have huge wealth stashed away in investments here and in…
BILL CLINTON, CHATTERING ASS Last Wednesday, President Clinton returned to the guest speaker's podium at Georgetown University and proceeded to grace us with his thoughts on international terrorism and suchlike contemporary concerns. President Clinton has decided that: 1. Osama bin Laden's mass…
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 568 pp., $26 JONATHAN FRANZEN HAS THE SORT of ambition rare for an American novelist these days. His aim is to write great and enduring books that grapple with large social issues even as he offers minute dissections of the day-to-day…
AMERICAN STRATEGY in the war against Afghanistan has been seriously hampered by the culture of fear that reigns in Washington. We are afraid of "nation-building." We are afraid that the coalition might collapse. We are afraid of Muslim reaction to military operations during Ramadan. We are afraid…
IS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION really getting serious about fighting the war on terrorism? On the one hand, there was still plenty of happy-talk flying fast and furious this past week. President Bush's speech Thursday night was upbeat and spared him media attacks for not addressing the nation on…
"IRAQ TODAY represents a threat to no one." It's hard to imagine that argument coming these days from anyone other than Tariq Aziz, or another of Saddam Hussein's propagandists. But those are in fact the words of Scott Ritter, former chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq. This represents an…
WHEN OREGON VOTERS legalized assisted suicide in 1994, state regulators had a problem. They wanted to authorize doctors to prescribe barbiturates as killing agents. But the federal government regulates the use of these drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, and federal law did not permit their…
THE FRENCH-MOROCCAN terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui made a series of suspicion-provoking blunders that landed him in a Minnesota jail in mid August. Otherwise, the 33-year-old Moussaoui would likely have been a "fifth hijacker" on board United Flight 93, which crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside…
THE CONFLICT to its east has presented Iran with a dilemma: whether and how to get involved in the war on terrorism. The Tehran government does not want to be seen as aiding Washington in its attack against a Muslim state, since anti-Americanism is one of the regime's founding myths, and to…
AS CONGRESS prepares to convene hearings on the intelligence failures exposed by September 11, it is important to recognize that the failures go beyond the dearth of agents on the ground in the Middle East and the shortage of Arabic speakers at the CIA. Our neglect of the terrorist threat is of…
MORE SONTAGS This week's Susan Sontag Certificate--The Standard Reader's way of acknowledging inanity by artists and intellectuals--goes to the Columbia University faculty senate, which voted 46 to 0 to "reaffirm open discourse as a prime value in our community." Almost anywhere else, we'd applaud…
Halloween night was neither dark nor stormy in Washington, but it did get eerie when my doorbell rang at 1 A.M. My wife Barbara was up late, working on party invitations. I was asleep, though not for long. Barbara opened the door, checked out the caller, and immediately yelled, and yelled loudly,…
Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris Random House, 864 pp., $35 IN 1903, in the midst of his struggles to build the Panama Canal, President Theodore Roosevelt was asked by Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, for a list of recommended books. The list, which Roosevelt wrote out…
THE WHITE HOUSE has put together an aggressive public relations campaign to promote the war against terrorism and combat the falsehoods spread by America's enemies. The director is a hyperactive presidential aide, Jim Wilkinson, who runs it like a guerrilla operation. When the Taliban ambassador to…
SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly has grilled representatives of charities, demanding that they account for the millions of dollars they've collected for victims' families. His show, "The O'Reilly Factor," has also featured a number of widows and widowers who haven't yet received…
I REMEMBER a conversation I had with my friend John Podhoretz last March about the movie "Pearl Harbor." I proposed that based on the early evidence, "Pearl Harbor" would have the biggest opening weekend in box office history and might well wind up the fourth or fifth highest-grossing movie ever.…
I NEED A LITTLE HELP. I haven't figured out how I am going to respond to the rout of the Taliban. There are so many postures to adopt, and I just can't figure out which would be the most emotionally satisfying. Here are the candidates:
MANY AMERICANS are wearing or waving the flag now. Patriotism is in, and those who have long focused on educating Americans about the values behind the flag see an opportunity to make that lapel pin prick not just the heart, but also the mind. "Post 9/11 patriotism is surface and cosmetic,…
LAST WEEK, sportswriter Stephanie Myles described major league baseball owners' proposal for the elimination of two big-league teams as "a contraction plan few want." Myles writes for the Montreal Gazette, so you'd expect her to say that. Her Expos are, along with the Minnesota Twins, one of the…
AGING HOLLYWOOD boy-stars, the rise of men's vanity mags, the mania for a hair-free bod going mainstream: These are the usual suspects in a hairless man investigation. But now this trademark mix of literary hijinks and old-fashioned social criticism has broken new ground. Last week, the pursuit of…
ON MONDAY the Northern Alliance took the small town of Taliqan from the Taliban. The people of this valley town in northeast Aghanistan deserve more than cursory notice, for they are compelling witnesses to what the war on terrorism is about. According to Dexter Filkins's account in the New York…
THE NORTHERN ALLIANCE'S stunning recent victories in Afghanistan have created an opportunity to destroy the Taliban much more rapidly than seemed possible just a few days ago. If additional American military force can be brought to bear in a timely fashion--including the introduction of mobile…
AS STAGE ONE of the war on terrorism picks up momentum, Americans continue our crash course in radical Islam. We're getting used to the notion that Osama bin Laden represents an extremist movement with manifestations worldwide. Today's lesson spotlights a group called the Laskar Jihad, now waging a…
OF ALL THE PUZZLING THINGS that have been said since the United States started bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age -- or, as pedants would have it, up to the Bronze Age -- none outranks the idea offered during the October 16 press conference with Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf and…
"OSAMA BIN LADEN is very unhappy that we Republicans are gathering here today," Rep. David Dreier told some 800 delegates attending the California Republican party convention on October 27, six weeks later than scheduled. Dreier attacked House Democrats, who again are showing that "the old…
THE DOMESTIC-FRONT PRESS COVERAGE of our war on terrorism has featured at least a half dozen stories of knuckle-dragging American provincial lugnuts who have bolted from commercial flights upon finding a couple of kaffiyeh-wearing gentlemen aboard. These stories generally end the same way. The…
A couple of weeks after the September 11 attacks -- before the military campaign in Afghanistan had begun, and when Secretary of State Colin Powell's coalitionism seemed to be driving American policy -- a concerned observer privately asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld what in the world was…
REPUBLICANS ARE REVELING in the sky-high poll numbers of President Bush, but there's a downside. As a popular war president, Bush is mostly unable to help his party. Worse for Republicans, Bush is subject to constraints that may actually harm his party. A top priority for Bush is to keep the…
ON SEPTEMBER 27, a group of Islamic scholars in the Middle East issued a fatwa on the duties of Muslims serving in the U.S. armed forces. The story of this fatwa -- a religious pronouncement with legal force among Muslims -- illustrates both the confused state of relations between American society…
IT IS SAID THAT GENERALS are always fighting the last war, and this is no less true of politicians and policymakers. As the first war of the new century begins, America's leaders have been reaching back to the two great struggles of the 20th century, against communism and fascism, to understand…
THE ISSUE OF GLOBALIZATION is very much on our minds at the moment--and the experience of the ancient world proves an aid to understanding what we think of as a uniquely modern problem. It was Jean-Marie Guehenno who argued in his brilliant 1995 book "The End of the Nation-State" that during the…
ABDUL HAQ, the legendary Afghan resistance commander, was captured and hanged on October 25 by the Taliban while on a mission inside Afghanistan to contact local Taliban leaders who wished to defect. In the war against the Soviets, Abdul Haq had led large-scale operations in and around Kabul. In…
By Order of the President FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans by Greg Robinson Harvard University Press, 336 pp., $27.95 Free to Die for Their Country The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II by Eric L. Muller University of Chicago Press, 256 pp., $27.50 AMONG…
THE SURPRISINGLY GOOD GUYS LIST (cont.) Our winner this week of membership on THE SCRAPBOOK's Surprisingly Good Guys List is the German Navy. Obviously, as they are NATO members in good standing, we expect a lot of the Deutsche Marine. But in their actions described in the e-mail below and depicted…
DURING DESERT SHIELD, the run-up to the Gulf War of 1991, President George Bush told a visitor that Israel would join in the fight "over my dead body." His reason was that the coalition of Arab states he was building to eject Iraq from Kuwait would break up if Israel were involved. Everyone knows…
Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Harvard University Press, 478 pp., $18.95 paper SINCE LAST SPRING, the publishing sensation on the American academic left has been Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's "Empire." Its many critics--in magazines from the New Republic to the New Criterion--have…
The American empire and the Islamic challenge.
PRIZING ANTI-AMERICANISM If you ran an American foundation with a whole lot of money--so much money that you give out each year what are, after the Nobel prize, the biggest monetary awards for literature in the world--on whom would you bestow your largesse for 2001? Well, as it turns out, the…
WHEN FLIGHT 11 CRASHED INTO THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, President George W. Bush was sitting in on a second-grade class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. Later that day, he found himself preparing the nation for war. In a matter of hours, Bush had traversed a divide, from the…
ON SEPTEMBER 7 in the central Nigerian city of Jos, riots broke out between Muslims and Christians. The violence lasted for a week, and according to the New York Times at least 500 people were killed. As the local government struggled to return the city to normalcy it blamed an unusual suspect for…
WITH TWO MONTHS GONE since September 11, my life, like that of so many others, has fallen into a strange new rhythm: Go to work. Surf the Internet for news updates until the point of catatonia. Go home. Kiss the dog, let out the wife, then flop into the Barcalounger for six more hours of the most…
THIS PAST WEEK during a massive nighttime aerial bombardment near Kabul, the Al Jazeera network caught on video an enormous, fiery-red mushroom cloud with flames reaching 1,000 feet into the air.
SOME HALLOWEEN SPECIALS are funnier than others. Take, for instance, the New Black Panther Party's "Emergency Town Hall Meeting," at the National Press Club which was broadcast on C-SPAN as a "Forum on U.S. Anti-Terrorism Efforts & Muslims" on October 31. A surreal cross between a costume party, a…
SADDAM HUSSEIN HAS BEEN ACCUSED of many things over the years, but a recent report suggests he's clearly been misunderstood. If the Iraqi dictator is guilty of anything, it's hopeless romanticism. Yes, underneath a seemingly tyrannical nature, there lives a passionate soul yearning to share his…
I.
TERRY MCAULIFFE, the chronically silly Democratic national chairman, says Tuesday's elections were a big victory for Democrats. They weren't. Losing the Big Enchilada, the New York City mayor's race, took the edge off winning the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, which had been held by…
FOR THE FIRST WEEK or so after September 11, the American media's coverage of the story was uniformly superb. It was, of course, inevitable that certain portions of the media would return to their usual obtuse navel-gazing. But the speed with which it happened is something to behold. The latest…
UNDER THE IRONIC HEADING "Saudi Solzhenitsyn?" the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto noted in his "Best of the Web" column yesterday that CNN.com is identifying Osama bin Laden as a "Saudi-born dissident." This is what happens when news organizations bend over backwards not to be "judgmental."…
I RECEIVED A PRESS RELEASE this week that says the Duchess of York is coming to Macy's on December 4. Joining her at the famous New York City department store--a beloved American landmark, right in the heart of Manhattan--will be a parade of celebrities, including baseball's legendary "Mr.…
IN TODAY'S ELECTION EDGAR GONZALEZ is attempting to go where no Latino has gone before--to the Virginia House of Delegates. If he wins, the Republican Gonzalez will be not only the first Latino to sit in the House of Delegates, he'll be the first ever to have run in a general election. From afar,…
PRESIDENT BUSH is doing his duty to keep spirits up. "The terrorists wanted our economy to stop," he said at a printing company in Glen Burnie, Maryland. "It hasn't. They wanted to diminish the spirit of America. It didn't." At a White House photo op, he assured reporters that the effort to spread…
Robert Creeley A Biography by Ekbert Faas University Press of New England, 513 pp., $35 POOR ROBERT CREELEY. Few poets can have led a drabber or more justly disgruntled life, winning a position at the very top of the B-list of his generation--only to be rewarded by a biography riddled with…
Misconceptions Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood by Naomi Wolf Doubleday, 326 pp., $24.95 NOW THAT A REAL WAR has been engaged and an ideological truce declared on the home front, it is generally agreed that our criticism should be reserved for certain groups…
THE IMAMS AND THE JEWS For an extremely disturbing portrait of the political climate in one of the premier mosques in America, see the interview by the Forward's Rachel Donadio with Imam Abu-Namous, which is available on the web at www.forward.com/issues/2001/01.10.26/news5.html. As Donadio…
CONSIDER two foreign ministers. The first wants "to destroy" the Taliban; the second to work with "moderate Taliban leaders." The first warns repeatedly that a key terrorist aim is "the destruction of Israel." The second seeks, even now after the assassination of a government minister, to increase…
AFTER THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACK, a sharp anti-Pakistani sentiment rippled through the U.S. government. Even in the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency, where Pakistan's staunchest supporters have usually been found, foreign service officers, operatives, and analysts voiced a…
The Popes Against the Jews The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism by David I. Kertzer Knopf, 355 pp., $27.95 OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, Catholic-Jewish relations and the role of the popes in European anti-Semitism have been the subject of what seems like innumerable books. Most of…
"A SINGULAR FACT OF MODERN WAR," the historian Bruce Catton once wrote, "is that it takes charge. Once begun it has to be carried to its conclusion, and carrying it there sets in motion events that may be beyond men's control. Doing what has to be done to win, men perform acts that alter the very…
LIFE GOES ON Over a dozen readers sent in to The Standard Reader articles about Emmanuel Asare, cleaning man and unwitting art critic, who, tidying a London gallery on Oct. 16, bagged as trash an expensive installation by Damien Hirst. Of course, Asare was helped by the fact that it was…
NINE MONTHS HAVE NOW GONE BY, and we, like most Americans, find much to praise in the conduct of George W. Bush's presidency--especially his recent assumption of wartime leadership. But we are a bit concerned by one aspect of the administration's performance these past couple of weeks: In the…
LAST WEEKEND I DECIDED to follow the advice of our president and get back to normal life: I agreed to go to my sister's annual pumpkin-carving party. The fact that I was the reigning champion no doubt helped sway me, but so did the feeling in the air since September 11. Usually, before one of these…
SECRETARY OF STATE Colin Powell thinks "it's a little odd" for the United States to be telling our Saudi allies that they should "muzzle dissent, . . . muzzle those [in Saudi Arabia] who are speaking out against us" and our campaign in Afghanistan. But the main public critics of the United States…
AFTER ATTENDING a briefing held by CIA director George Tenet and FBI director Robert Mueller last Thursday, Florida Democrat Bob Graham emerged from the Capitol to let the American people know where we stand in the search for those who mailed the treated anthrax that has thus far resulted in three…
WITH ANTI-TALIBAN FORCES still unable to rally behind one leader, the death of Ahmed Shah Massoud becomes all the more lamentable. Massoud, known as the Lion of the Panjshir, headed the Northern Alliance until his murder nearly two months ago. By now, the Alliance and its struggle against the…
TWO WEEKS AGO I wrote a column criticizing guidelines published by the Society of Professional Journalists. The guidelines purported to tell journalists how to avoid "racial profiling" in coverage of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath.
I'M READING THE MORNING PAPERS and my mood is shifting faster than Bob Brenly's. The front page of the Washington Post tells me that American bombers are the military equivalent of Curt Schilling. The bombings have been "very effective," destroying at least 15 Taliban tanks, according to a Northern…
BACK WHEN I WAS a pie-eyed college sprout--juggling a nerve-shattering regimen of 1 p.m. alarm clocks and game-show watching marathons--I elected to ignore the counsel of my pastor, the advice of my parents, and the ridicule of my peers. I decided to do something for me, and became a journalism…
TO FOLLOW UP on last week's article on the state of French public opinion:
THE IMAGE OF AMERICAN MUSLIMS has been badly bruised since September 11--this, despite vigorous efforts by President Bush and others to defend their loyalty and protect them from threats and violence. Muslim leaders (but not grass-roots Muslims across the country) are at least partly to blame. Why?…