109 articles
WALKING INTO the News Room magazine shop in Farragut Square, I was stopped short by the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. That issue generally stops me short, what with its contrarian insistence that beautiful women wearing hardly anything will be "in" this fashion season. But this one stopped me…
A CONSTANT WORRY about American forces overseas is that we will overstay our welcome, that the host country will tire of us, that eventually, with enough protests and demonstrations and effigies burned, we will be forced out. It's happened plenty of times in countries from Europe to the Middle East…
THE BIGGEST STORY in Washington these days is not campaign finance reform or President Bush's desire to promote marriage. It's Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, now injured. The question is whether he'll return to the Washington Wizards, spur them to a spot in the National…
AROUND THESE PARTS, the complaint heard most often from readers of America's premier journal of conservative political thought is: "Why don't you have more coverage of teen queens and pop princesses?" It's a fair question, one that prompted me recently to head to my local multiplex to catch the…
BERNIE MAC was the one stand-up comic featured in the movie "The Original Kings of Comedy" who at the time didn't have regular television work. Steve Harvey had his own show as did D.L. Hughley, while Cedric the Entertainer was a regular co-star on Harvey's show. During an interlude between the…
IN AN interview with the New York Times, Doris Kearns Goodwin has now revised and extended her explanations for how other people's prose ended up in her book "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys." In the January 28, 2002, issue of The Weekly Standard, I reported on similarities in the language of…
EVERY SO OFTEN the public relations industry plaintively wonders why journalists hold it in contempt. Well, it's because the feeling is mutual. They're in the business of using us. It's often a satisfactory professional transaction, but respect rarely enters into the equation. Plus, we have…
LAST WEDNESDAY, the Supreme Court heard arguments in two of the biggest cases this term. First, the court considered the constitutionality of an Ohio program providing vouchers to low-income parents who enroll their children in church-related schools. Then, the court reviewed the constitutionality…
Roscoe by William Kennedy Viking, 288 pp., $24.95 THE CRITIC William Pritchard probably did not mean to lay down a law of literary excellence when, in his recent study of John Updike, he spoke of "a reader who knows what fairness is and wants fiction to observe something like ideal balance." The…
LAST WEEK, the powers that be at our local elementary school laid down the law for its annual Valentine's Day bash. Any kid who wanted to give out any valentines had to give them to everyone in his class. What's more, any kid who gave out valentines had to give the same valentine to all his…
AIRLINE MECHANICS apparently include among their many skills an ability to drive nails into coffins. Last week the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers rejected the 37 percent pay raise offered by United Airlines--its members want 43 percent--and threatened to strike. Never…
SHEER PANIC. That's the only way to describe the reaction of green activists to a fact-filled 515-page book by a young Danish statistician, published in English late last year by Cambridge University Press. The statistician, a slim, laid-back former Greenpeace member named Bjorn Lomborg, dared to…
THE BORKING OF PICKERING (cont.) As reported in these pages last week, Judiciary Committee Democrats are going hard and heavy after U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering, selected by President Bush for the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. We've seen the law firm of Biden, Kennedy, and Leahy…
WHEN PBS executives asked themselves the question so many Americans asked after the September 11 attacks--what can we do?--their answer was obvious: Bill Moyers. We can give America Bill Moyers. Lots of Bill Moyers. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting promptly set aside some $440,000 in public…
Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt Knopf, 320 pp., $24 ONE OF the most interesting literary genres of the contemporary American West is the ranch memoir. Unlike the pretty volumes that issue from the novelists who move to Montana for the fly fishing, or the delicate work of the poets who come seeking the…
THERE'S BEEN a great lot of hand-wringing these past few weeks over the "axis of evil," President Bush's State of the Union coinage for hostile foreign dictatorships that cultivate weapons of mass destruction and make sponsorship of terrorism a conscious policy. The president's critics wonder: Do…
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND President Bush's "axis of evil" speech has provoked an extraordinary degree of vitriol from our European allies. The yowling from the press and intellectuals is predictable and returns those cosseted elites to their familiar habit, interrupted ever so briefly after September11,…
MICHAEL BELLESILES is a professor of history at Emory University. When his "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" appeared in 2000, it came wrapped in a yellow strip of paper printed with four blurbs--one from the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen, who called the book…
FOR ART'S SAKE The worst effect of the contemporary art scene may be the way it turns even those who love art into howling philistines. There's something irresistible about reporting, as The Weekly Standard did back in November, that a cleaning man had swept up and bagged as trash an expensive…
BEIJING It's not easy being the father of the Chinese Internet. Children are running by, boats are paddling, the smell of roast lamb fills the air, and Michael Robinson, a young American computer engineer, sits rigidly, facing an empty cafe on the shore of Qinghai Lake, speaking in a low voice of…
WE JUST threw our oldest boy a birthday party at the local bowling-pizza-video-drome. He and his twenty-three friends are six, and perhaps you heard the sounds of the balls as they were flung up (surprisingly high and far, I thought) and came down on the polished wood floors. I don't know who makes…
"DISGUSTING." "Obscene." "Gross." Those are just a few words people have used to describe "Glutton Bowl #1: The World's Greatest Eating Competition," which aired on Fox last Thursday. Contestants were challenged to eat bowls of mayonnaise, sticks of butter, and "Rocky Mountain Oysters," and the…
NEW YORK It's Valentine's Day, and though I'm a married man, I'm standing on the sixth-floor landing of a Greenwich Village apartment building with a box of Russell Stover candy that's intended for a woman I've never met. I'm on a journalistic suck-up safari, and my quarry has warned me that I'd…
THE FULL SWEEP of the new Bush Doctrine was on display this past week, as President Bush traveled through North Asia delivering a consistent and powerful message: American security and global security require a determined assault not just on terrorists but on the three-headed hydra of tyranny,…
NATIONAL POLITICS will survive the Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform bill, which passed the House last week and is likely to become law soon. If it curbs money in politics at all, the effect will probably be slight. And Republicans shouldn't be alarmed despite House Speaker Dennis Hastert's…
BILL MOYERS responds to Stephen F. Hayes's piece "PBS's Televangelist":
BY NOW, you're surely aware of the controversy that erupted at UC Berkeley last week over the school's student-taught courses on "Male Sexuality" and "Female Sexuality," sponsored by (of course) the Women's Studies department. Last semester's "Male Sexuality" course featured an orgy; a party game…
PITY poor Vanessa Gusmeroli. On Tuesday night, the French figure skater gave an outstanding performance in the women's short program and got good marks--from everyone except the Canadian judge. The judge from the Great White North scored Gusmeroli 0.3 points behind the average of the other eight…
WITH THE Senate out this week, Judge Charles Pickering's embattled nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is getting help from seemingly unexpected sources.
[img caption="A detail from the Woodburn 100 mural." float="right" width="289" height="349" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8798[/img]AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY, students are lobbying to have a decades-old work of art removed from a classroom on campus. The work is part of a multi-panel depiction of the…
COLIN POWELL and Condoleezza Rice reaffirmed the Bush administration's position on Iraq over the weekend. In short: We'd like to have some international backing to oust the world's greatest terrorist, but if we don't get it, that's okay, too. Powell said essentially the same thing last week in…
LAST MAY, even as Vermont senator James Jeffords prepared to leave the Republican Party, President Bush decided to nominate federal district judge Charles Pickering to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which encompasses Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Judge Pickering has endured not one but…
THE FEBRUARY 10 suicide of 58-year-old Jack Henry Abbott in his jail cell in Alden, New York, passed almost unremarked. National Public Radio devoted five minutes to Abbott and Philip Terzian of the Providence Journal-Bulletin used his column to write an excellent essay on his larger significance.…
WHEN JIM JEFFORDS left the Republican party last May and became an independent, Democrats gained control of the Senate. By a single vote, yes, but what a difference that margin makes, especially when it comes to appointing judges. Consider the case of Charles Pickering, for twelve years a U.S.…
OVER THE last three weeks, the Bush administration has taken important steps that, together, should advance the president's volunteer service agenda, increase public and private support for community-serving religious organizations, and make federal social welfare programs work better and cost…
PRESIDENT BUSH, in his State of the Union address, gave a stirring summation of the values dear to America and its allies in the struggle against global terrorism. Among the "non-negotiable demands of human dignity," Bush included religious tolerance. He did so at a time when American policymakers…
The Case Against Assisted Suicide For the Right to End-Of-Life Care edited by Kathleen M. Foley and Herbert Hendin Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 392 pp., $49.95 Supporters of legalizing assisted suicide often claim religious belief is the only reason to oppose killing as an acceptable answer to human…
The God Hypothesis Discovering Design in our "Just Right" Goldilocks Universe by Michael A. Corey Rowman & Littlefield, 256 pp., $27 GOD'S EXISTENCE is not required by the premises of quantum mechanics or general relativity, the great theories of twentieth-century physics --but then again, it is…
The Death of the West How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization by Patrick J. Buchanan Dunne, 320 pp., $25.95 Pat Buchanan's thesis in "The Death of the West" is simple enough: The "cultural revolution" that swept across the West in the 1960s led to…
THE REV. JESSE JACKSON says that an eagle can only soar with two wings. But what if one wing refuses to fly? From September 12 onwards, the left-leaning press--magazines like the Nation and the Progressive and alternative newspapers like the Village Voice and the Bay Guardian--have fed their…
IN FEBRUARY 1998, after an American team won the first Olympic gold medal ever awarded for women's hockey, there was a brief rainshower of patronizing media coverage, as is customary in such matters. Weren't they a great bunch of gals? And didn't they really deserve it? And--forget about…
WHERE THERE WAS economic stagnation, now there's prosperity. Where there was weakness in confronting rivals, there's strength and cunning. Where there was a moral swamp, there's a return to family values. And my quality of life is a lot better, too. Who has produced all this? You probably expect me…
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH'S stunningly forceful State of the Union address has probably forever altered U.S.-Iranian relations. It may provoke a redrawing of the intellectual map of the Middle East, giving liberal democracy its best chance in the region since the end of World War II. In following…
The Best of Pif Magazine Off-Line Short Stories, Poetry, and Essays Selected from PifMagazine.com edited by Camille Renshaw, et al. Fusion, 152 pp., $14.95 The Salon.Com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors An Opinionated, Irreverent Look at the Most Fascinating Writers of Our Time edited by…
IN THE DAYS after September 11, mainstream Arab- and Muslim-American community groups condemned the terrorist attacks in the most emphatic terms. Salam Al Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), recalls, "As citizens we all felt the obligation to seek the culprits…
ANOTHER RIDE WITH SHEILA JACKSON LEE In last week's Weekly Standard, Sam Dealey reported on Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee's using a government car and driver to chauffeur her one block to work on a regular basis, in seeming violation of Congressional Handbook rules. The Scrapbook hears that several…
BOOK OF THE WEEK Losing His Stuff The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract by Bill James Free Press, 998 pp., $45 There was a time I was sure the greatest pieces of American prose were the letters of Adams and Jefferson, "Bartleby the Scrivener," "Death Comes for the Archbishop," and "The…
Berlin GERMANY'S Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard Schroder, the first leader to enter office since the country was reunited in 1990, faces reelection in September, and he's in deep trouble. He's in deep trouble because his country isn't as reunited as it looks. There are, in fact, two Germanies…
ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER Ariel Sharon last week paid his fourth call on the Bush White House. The primary subject of Sharon's visit was the fate and future of Palestinian Authority boss Yasser Arafat. Arafat has been under virtual house arrest in the West Bank since December, a calculated act of…
WHEN I was a kid, which wasn't that long ago, my buddies and I would play Marine Corps sniper with a scope-mounted Daisy 880 pump-action pellet-gun. Some of our favorite targets were G.I. Joes, in particular the ridiculous bargain-bin figures such as Destro, the evil metal-headed sidekick, and Snow…
WHEN PBS executives asked themselves the question so many Americans asked after the September 11 attacks--what can we do?--their answer was obvious: Bill Moyers. We can give America Bill Moyers. Lots of Bill Moyers. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting promptly set aside some $440,000 in public…
MICHAEL BELLESILES is a professor of history at Emory University. When his "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" appeared in 2000, it came wrapped in a yellow strip of paper printed with four blurbs--one from the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen, who called the book…
THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE threw its big annual dinner Wednesday night. The speaker, Norman Podhoretz, delivered an eloquent tribute to America and the Bush administration. He described what the war on terror is really about. But he also delivered a startling warning: He predicted that we…
TRAUDL JUNGE had a solid resume. She was a journalist at Quick magazine, a freelance writer and editor, and even a technical adviser for a movie. But most of all, she was a secretary with almost superhuman skills at typing and dictation. And she was very good at following orders--a boss's dream…
BEIJING It's not easy being the father of the Chinese Internet. Children are running by, boats are paddling, the smell of roast lamb fills the air, and Michael Robinson, a young American computer engineer, sits rigidly, facing an empty cafe on the shore of Qinghai Lake, speaking in a low voice of…
NOT EVEN a war president and his fellow ideologues always get along. For example, House majority leader Dick Armey and President George W. Bush have their differences. Along with many conservatives, Armey doesn't much like AmeriCorps, while Bush does. In fact, judging from the president's…
TODAY is V-Day. Though most of us will celebrate--or hope to celebrate--February 14 as Valentine's Day with a candlelight dinner in an overcrowded Italian restaurant, in very recent history the date has become the subject of an alternative interpretation. February 14 is the focal date of playwright…
WASHINGTON is full of guys (and yes, the type is more male than female) who are an important part of the media food chain, yet who themselves are rarely written about. These are the obsessive single-issue experts, usually allying encyclopedic knowledge of a narrow issue with some kind of advocacy.…
JOE BARTON doesn't really wear Texas on his sleeve. Actually, he wears it on his tie--or at least he does on the day I arrive at his office in the Rayburn House Office Building. Cut from what can only be called Texas-flag cloth, his tie is red, white, and blue and has, rightly placed, a lone star.…
THE WASHINGTON HILTON staff had to bring out extra tables to accommodate the overflow crowd at commentator Cal Thomas's dinner for the media last Wednesday night. The dinner is an annual event on the eve of the National Prayer Breakfast and it has grown in popularity to the point where the turnout…
YESTERDAY'S resignation of the head of the Kuwait Information Office in Washington is the latest twist in what has become an open battle between Islamists and democrats in Kuwait. It all began when the smiling face of Islamic fascism appeared on "60 Minutes" back in November. A segment entitled…
PRESIDENT BUSH isn't flummoxed anymore. He talks with self-assurance, in private and public, about foreign leaders, whether they should be taken seriously, precisely how their countries fit into his plans for making the world safe for America. He chuckles about transparent efforts by Prince…
TO DATE, THE BUSH administration's handling of the war has been superb. Its handling of the law of war has not. From the president's November 13 Military Order--calling for trial by military commission of certain non-citizens accused of terrorist activities--to the current dispute over the legal…
IN CONTEMPORARY political debate, there is no surer way to discredit and delegitimize a policy than to establish that it injures women and children. Over the past year, a chorus of critics have lodged just this accusation at the Bush administration's foreign aid policy. According to their charges,…
LAST AUGUST, after a few days of white-knuckle bidding on eBay, I became the proud owner of a 1950s vibraphone. That's the instrument the old jazz master Lionel Hampton plays; it's similar to a xylophone, but its metal keys give it a much more sustained and mellow sound than the xylophone's wood.…
GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA It's 5 A.M. at the Roosevelt Roads Naval station in Puerto Rico, and 20 journalists straggle to the gate in sleep-deprived silence to catch a plane to Guantanamo Bay. Many of us haven't been up this early in years. But after flying thousands of miles, then pub-crawling through…
What the Koran Really Says A Textual Commentary by Ibn Warraq Prometheus, 600 pp., $36 LIVING as an expatriate in Rome in the early 1970s, I came to know a young Arabist studying at the Vatican Library, who amazed me during the course of a long holiday banquet by explaining that the received wisdom…
COULD BE, back a year and a half ago, when Judy Genshaft was being recruited for the presidency of the University of South Florida, they simply forgot to mention it. You know: that Palestinian computer scientist fellow over in the College of Engineering. The one who had certain, oh, issues, let's…
IN A YEAR OF RECESSION, unprecedented terror attacks, and the largest bankruptcy in history, there was good news from a surprising front. During 2001, the number of American homes and offices that hooked up to the Internet using fast broadband technologies like cable and digital phone lines roughly…
RETURN OF THE SADDAM APOLOGIST When former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter first surfaced after the September 11 attacks, he sought to persuade America that Saddam Hussein's Iraq "presents a threat to no one." America laughed, made a mental note that Ritter had recently taken $400,000 from a…
WHEN SHEILA JACKSON LEE first came to Washington in January 1995, the Texas Democrat railed against the Capitol's silk-stockinged elite. "The American people want reform, not phony but real reform," she said in her debut House speech. "They want to know that the days of free meals and free trips…
A GREAT DEFICIENCY in the media's reporting of debates about public policy is their tendency to reduce messy democratic discourse to a sterile, never-ending face-off between "The Left" and "The Right." One year, The Right launches an offensive and advances a half-mile. The next year, The Left…
"AT STATE, Powell and others were alarmed by the Wolfowitz drumbeat," the Washington Post's Bob Woodward reports in his series on the early days of the war on terrorism. "At the end of one early meeting of Bush's war cabinet, during which Rumsfeld had raised Iraq as a potential target, Powell…
Death at the Priory Sex, Love and Murder in Victorian England by James Ruddick Atlantic Monthly, 224 pp., $24 In Emily Eden's popular 1859 novel "The Semi-Detached House," old Mrs. Hopkinson observes, "I like a good murder that can't be found out; that is, of course, it is very shocking, but I like…
GEORGE BUSH has probably spent less time thinking about electoral politics over the past four months than any president has over a comparable period since the end of World War II. And what is the result of this benign neglect? The Republican party is, for the moment, in fantastic political shape.…
BOOK OF THE WEEK ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON The Clash of Orthodoxies Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis by Robert P. George (ISI, 387 pp., $24.95) Here's the problem for religious believers, as most of America's intellectuals see it: In a democracy, the only way we can do politics is by rational…
A NEW George W. Bush last Tuesday addressed a transformed country, wholly unlike the one he campaigned in, and as not quite the man who campaigned. Gone is the political dynamic of the past dozen years, gone the small presidency, gone the politics of minor entitlements, gone the burden of the…
"IT'S THE WORST PLACE on earth," a horrified young British woman says in the course of a new off-Broadway play set in Afghanistan. "Homebody/Kabul" is the work of the American playwright Tony Kushner, who staked a claim in the early 1990s to the mantle of Bertolt Brecht and George Bernard Shaw as a…
REMEMBER Lemrick Nelson? He killed a man and got away with it. Now he's back in the news because he may get away with it again.
I BECAME a flag-waver, literally and figuratively, about 20 years ago. This is also about the same time I started losing my hair, but I refuse to see a connection. Although, why is it more guys on the left have full heads of hair? Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore, even Ramsey Clark. Most conservatives…
AND IRAN'S ruling clergy has probably been reading the Middle East more or less the same way as the Sunni fundamentalists who made bin Laden and al Qaeda paladins in their battle against the West. The perception of the United States as weak and on the run--the jet-fuel behind Osama bin Laden's…
WHEN I LIVED in Europe, I used to watch the Olympics on European TV. I loved watching the BBC because their announcers were so good, but the problem was that if, say, a British runner came in eleventh in a particular race, you never found out who came in the top ten. Their cameras would only focus…
ON SUNDAY evening, NBC is going to pull itself away from first round coverage of men's singles' luge and broadcast a real sport: the NBA All-Star game. Starting at shooting guard for the East will be a 6' 6" journeyman from North Carolina, Michael Jordan.
THE FAMOUSLY FLUSH Office of National Drug Control Policy bought $3 million worth of advertising during the Super Bowl. We can leave aside the general question of whether government agencies ought to be spending the public's money to--in effect--lobby that very same public to keep shelling out…
THANK YOU, Chairman Biden, Senator Helms, and members of the committee, for inviting me to testify before you today. You have asked me to address the question, "What's next in the war on terrorism?" The short answer is that Iraq is next. I am not simply saying that Iraq should be next--although I…
WHEN MIKE TYSON recently mounted a stage at the Hudson Theater for his pre-fight press conference, started a melee with Lennox Lewis's entourage, then munched a hunk out of Lewis's thigh, the media called Tyson everything from a cretin to a cannibal. But they failed to label Tyson a cliche. For in…
THERE WAS a time once when I wouldn't miss an Arnold Schwarzenegger film for all the world. I loved his narrow escapes from the jaws of death: diving into a pool as flames chased after him, or jumping out of a plane and pulling the ripcord at the very last second. I loved his self-deprecation. But…
A YEAR OLD, the Bush presidency seems to have undergone a dramatic shift. It began as a presidency concentrated on domestic issues, such as education. It now is, as the president's State of the Union address last week affirmed with even more definition, a war and foreign policy presidency. It would…
A FEW weeks ago I wrote a column about sportswriter Allan Barra and his devotion to statistics. He has just sent in a response:
"I'M ONE of the hawks . . . when it comes to defense," says Senator Robert C. Byrd with a straight face. "But I'm becoming a little nervous as I hear that we're going to spend more and more and more on the military." That was Byrd's reaction to the gratifying news that President Bush has decided to…
WITH PRESIDENT BUSH due to travel to Beijing on February 21, Chinese leaders have embarked on a pre-summit charm offensive. Much of this warming of relations has a ritual quality; the release of a Chinese political prisoner with ties to the United States is becoming the traditional prelude to a…
Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues The Worlds of Charley Patton Revenant, 7 CDs, $169.98 EVERY BLACK living in the Mississippi Delta during the 1920s knew of Charley Patton, and many of the whites did too. A slight man of mixed ancestry, he traveled with his guitar from plantation to plantation,…
HUMAN NATURE--the very idea of a human nature--has been under assault for centuries. That philosophical, historical, and anthropological attack is now fading, and end-of-history theorists, followed by sociobiologists, have come riding to human nature's defense. But they are curious defenders.…
IT'S TIME TO PLAY "Grade the Democrats." Four prominent Democrats--who are coincidentally all thinking of running for president--have delivered ambitious policy speeches in the past three weeks. Responsible citizens will want to know what is on their minds (without having to actually sit through…
WHEN "Black Hawk Down" went into release a few weeks ago in New York and Los Angeles, the New York Times's Elvis Mitchell went on the attack. He claimed that it was riddled with "jingoism," had "a simplistic gung-ho spirit," and reeked of "glumly staged racism." He mocked the American soldiers in…
THE PRESIDENT'S COUNCIL ON Bioethics began its first public session on January 17, in a dreary ballroom of the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel, a pre-postmodern pile of orange stucco set astride an expressway off-ramp in southwest Washington, D.C. Leon Kass, the University of Chicago bioethicist selected by…
KHARTOUM When CIA agents landed here in June 2000 to begin what Washington assumed would be secret counterterrorism cooperation with Sudan, the Sudanese foreign minister held a press conference announcing their arrival. Mustafa Osman Ismail says American officials asked him to conceal the CIA's…
OF PRESIDENTS AND PRINCES During his father's presidency, Neil Bush--you remember--was the object of considerable partisan innuendo concerning his service on the board of a savings and loan bank that went belly up in spectacular fashion. Now, ten years later during his brother's administration, an…
I READ John Podhoretz's "Multiplex Blues," his amusing account of the difference between the broken-down theaters of his early moviegoing days in the 1970s and the plush multiplexes and cineplexes in which the inferior flicks of today are shown, with the smug smile of the man with history on his…
ON TUESDAY, February 5, PBS will air "Secrets, Lies and Atomic Spies," a documentary by the award-winning NOVA science unit. The program is a breakthrough for both PBS and NOVA, for it moves beyond its avowed subject of code-breaking to the impact that code-breaking had on our understanding of…
BOOKS IN BRIEF The Coming Collapse of China by Gordon G. Chang (Random House, 320 pp., $26.95) When, in the early 1970s, Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?", he was wrong about the date, but right about the collapse. Now Gordon Chang, an American lawyer…
ONE OF the reasons Bush v. Gore won't go away is that its scholarly critics--who are numerous, influential, and vehement--won't let it. Many of the biggest guns in the business--Yale's Bruce Ackerman, Harvard's Alan Dershowitz, New York University's Ronald Dworkin--weighed in early and denounced…
His Invention So Fertile A Life of Christopher Wren by Adrian Tinniswood Oxford University Press, 463 pp., $35 SI monumentum requiris, circumspice. So runs the famous inscription on Christopher Wren's tomb: "If you seek his monument, look around." And what you see is the whole of St. Paul's, the…
WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be Enronned? Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle coined the neologism for the narrow purpose of attacking President Bush for supposedly jeopardizing the Social Security system. For Washington it means being engulfed by the financial scandal. Congress has scheduled 11 full-dress…
SHORTLY AFTER the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, Texas senator Phil Gramm called Georgia senator Zell Miller. "I think we should call off today's press conference," Gramm, a Republican, told his Democratic counterpart. Gramm told Miller to turn on a TV. Together on the…
GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA It's 5 A.M. at the Roosevelt Roads Naval station in Puerto Rico, and 20 journalists straggle to the gate in sleep-deprived silence to catch a plane to Guantanamo Bay. Many of us haven't been up this early in years. But after flying thousands of miles, then pub-crawling through…
"AT STATE, Powell and others were alarmed by the Wolfowitz drumbeat," the Washington Post's Bob Woodward reports in his series on the early days of the war on terrorism. "At the end of one early meeting of Bush's war cabinet, during which Rumsfeld had raised Iraq as a potential target, Powell…
THE STRANGE THING about people from Massachusetts is that they never stop rooting for teams from Boston. (Another strange thing is that, whenever someone from Massachusetts begins a column, "The strange thing about people from Massachusetts . . ." you can be sure he's bragging. Forgive me.) I've…
A CALIFORNIA effort to enact a civil union law is on hold, but it's far from dead. In what his spokesman calls a "strategic" maneuver, state assemblyman Paul Koretz withdrew his bill--which would have established Vermont-style civil unions in the state--from consideration just days before the…