July 2002

WILL THE FRAGILE U.S. ECONOMY head into a full tailspin if President Bush makes good on his promise to oust Saddam Hussein? The New York Times evidently thinks the answer to that question is "yes."

HAVING NEGOTIATED the plea bargain by which John Walker Lindh managed to avoid life in prison and was instead sentenced to 20 years, lawyer James Brosnahan recently was asked by Newsweek: "How will we look back on this case by the time John Walker Lindh leaves prison?"

BAD CASES make bad law, they say, and so good cases ought to make good law--or in this instance good U.S. policy. Egypt's conviction on trumped up charges of Egyptian-American academic and pro-democracy intellectual Saad Eddin Ibrahim and several associates ought to be an ideal test for President…

INFORMATION that might "jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability, contravene laws and regulations and spread superstition and obscenity" will, effective Aug. 1, no longer be posted by major Internet portals in China, thanks to their participation in the voluntary Public Pledge on…

ON SATURDAY, November 2, Washington, D.C., will be filled with people who don't believe in God. Or in any case, more full of people who don't believe in God than usual.

A WARM MONDAY NIGHT in Chicago, and I'm feeling flush and contented, departing a parking lot with my wife, beginning our walk to the Emperor's Choice, our favorite Chinese restaurant on Wentworth Avenue. A guy in his early thirties, in jeans, a well-worn cambray work shirt, and a white hard hat,…

FIVE YEARS AGO, anyone calling China a strategic problem was dismissed as looking for some new "cold war" enemy to fight. And when President Bush initially characterized the People's Republic as a "strategic competitor," Washington's old foreign policy hands collectively clucked their disapproval…

ONCE THERE WAS A TIME, while America was at war, when our government refused to grant its captured enemies, very much including the oddball U.S. citizens among them, access to the regular criminal courts. And the nation's leading newspapers and other such purveyors of advanced opinion rose up as…

Slander Liberal Lies About the American Right by Ann Coulter Crown, 256 pp., $25.95 WHILE ON A TOUR of Monticello as vice president, Al Gore examined busts of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and asked the curator, "Who are these people?" A single newspaper reported Gore's embarrassing…

Astaire and Rogers by Edward Gallafent Columbia University Press, 256 pp., $24.95 THE PLACE of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as the American dance couple, perhaps even the American romantic couple, seems secure. The very phrase "Fred and Ginger" still evokes a sense of elegance, glamour, and…

PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER was a Republican, Senator Lyndon Johnson a Democrat. But in his memoir "Waging Peace," Eisenhower remembered Johnson, the Senate majority leader during his presidency in the 1950s, as a friend and frequent ally. "We had our differences, especially in domestic and…

OF ALL THE BENIGHTED CUSTOMS of the past, none is viewed with more condescension in these enlightened days than the practice of purging offensive passages from literary classics. We get the word "bowdlerize" from the English physician Thomas Bowdler, whose 1818 edition of Shakespeare omitted "those…

WHO IS SYED ATHAR ABBAS? The Scrapbook's colleague David Tell raised this interesting question last week in an online piece for The Daily Standard, discussing developments in the anthrax investigation. As was reported by Newsday's Rocco Parascandola on July 15, Abbas is a Pakistani national…

"FOR MY MONEY," wrote David Ignatius recently in the Washington Post, Pervez Musharraf "is the most courageous and visionary leader on the world scene today." The Pakistani president's help in the hunt for al Qaeda and his apparent decision to fight extremists engaged in violence against India…

A CURIOUS THING seems to have happened on the way to the war against Saddam Hussein. Despite President Bush's oft-stated commitment to "regime change" in Iraq, media reports have been rife with speculation that military action is unlikely, maybe even off the table. These reports continued to appear…

LAST WEEK, Spain undertook its largest unilateral military operation since 1939. In the wee hours of July 17, 28 Spanish special forces, backed up by four naval vessels and six helicopter gunships, reconquered the 500-yard-long uninhabited island of Perejil, part of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on…

AS AMERICA'S best-educated, best-equipped, and best-known law enforcement agency, the FBI runs the world's most sophisticated law enforcement labs, keeps national crime statistics, and gives police all over the country plenty of advice on everything from child abuse to credit card fraud. The…

REPUBLICANS have been pretty sanguine about their prospects in this fall's midterm elections. They shouldn't be. It's true that President Bush's popularity ratings remain high and that, asked which party they would like to see control Congress next year, the voters are still evenly divided. But…

ITALIAN-AMERICANS are speaking out. They are complaining about a stereotype they just can't stand. One that they find inaccurate and misleading. One that is constantly shown on television, much to their disgust. They are unhappy. They are at their wit's end. They are fed up.

A FEW MONTHS AGO, after his passing, I wrote about the great Milton Berle and mentioned how Milton had set me up for one of the neatest jobs I ever had, which involved Frank Sinatra. Several of you wrote in afterwards asking to hear that Sinatra story itself, sometime. Well, it is now officially…

IN HER OCCASIONAL ARTICLES for the Washington Monthly, the first of them years before she entered public life, Townsend has displayed bold, contrarian impulses, thumping the left for being anti-religious, as well as for secularizing lefty icons like her father when it was precisely his religious…

PERHAPS it is my imagination, but it seems as though we are in the midst of a full-blown summer funk. While trend writers and editorialists will have you believe this is related to the anticlimax of the war on terrorism or the free-falling Dow, astute culture vultures know what is really ailing us:…

SEVERAL MONTHS AGO, I took a long look at the nation's foremost liberal scold, Bill Moyers (here and here). Among the many questions the article raised was this one: Why would a show dedicated to promoting the views of the most extreme elements of the far left in America get a coveted prime-time…

IT'S BEEN SAID that it is important to know one's enemies. By requiring freshmen to read parts of the Koran this year, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, may be trying to do just that. But though this year's selection for the summer reading program may be well intended, some students…

WEDNESDAY'S New York Times carried a front-page article by Neil A. Lewis headlined "Ashcroft's Terrorism Policies Dismay Some Conservatives." Lewis asserts that Attorney General John Ashcroft is becoming unpopular with religious conservatives who fear that their organizations may be investigated…

WE'RE IN THE MIDST of a stock market crash, the sudden shrinkage of everyone's retirement accounts, and a potential second dip of a recession. So what are former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, ex-White House aide David Gergen, and Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal calling for? An end to…

IF TINA BROWN were alive today, we wouldn't be able to escape talk of transgender buzz. The eighties were the gay decade. The nineties belonged to lesbian chic. Now it's a transgendered world. We have seen the rise of the transgender movie--"The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" (1994),…

LAST APRIL I was going to write a story about German defense minister Rudolf Scharping after hearing him speak at the New Atlantic Initiative here in Washington. Scharping, a former chairman of the SPD (the German Socialist party), talked about the war against terrorism, cooperation between the…

Editor's Note, September 5, 2002: After a party-line vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee today, Judge Priscilla Owen's nomination to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was denied. President Bush called the vote "shameful." He's right.

The Path to Victory America's Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs by Donald Vandergriff Presidio, 376 pp., $34.95 LAST MONTH the United States Army brought approximately 3,000 troops of the Tenth Mountain Division back from Kosovo and 3,000 troops of the 101st Airborne Division back from…

WHEN THE SHOOTER who chose July 4 to start a gun battle at Los Angeles airport's El Al ticket counter turned out to be Hesham Mohamed Hadayet--an Egyptian native with a "Read Koran" sticker on his apartment door--many people not unreasonably wondered if he had picked up his hostility to America and…

Collision Course The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America by Hugh Davis Graham Oxford University Press, 246 pp., $30 ON JUNE 6 FLORIDA GOVERNOR Jeb Bush signed into law a sleepy-sounding bill called the Florida Minority Business Loan Mobilization Program. The…

NO SENSIBLE PERSON can quarrel with what the president told the Wall Street biggies he addressed last week. Crooks should be forced to disgorge their ill-gotten gains, and should go to jail for extended periods. Enforcement agencies should be given adequate resources. Corporate executives should be…

IN OCTOBER 2002, a political event is likely to occur that will be a major setback for freedom. If it happens--and it could still be prevented--it may cause as many as 300 million people in several countries to fall under the control of anti-American dictatorships. It could also increase…

A POTENTIAL SHOWDOWN is looming in Washington that will affect the fate of a people and could define the politics of human rights for a generation. At issue: Should foreign oil companies doing business in Sudan be denied access to U.S. capital markets? Yes, asserts a coalition of religious and…

LOS ANGELES California, the sixth largest economy in the world, is in economic and fiscal freefall. It has by far the bleakest budget outlook of any of the 50 states. Deficit projections have been revised upwards every six weeks or so. The latest two-year forecast points to $24 billion in red ink,…

The Irish Story Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland by R.F. Foster Oxford University Press, 304 pp., $28 THE AMERICAN UNDERSTANDING of Irish history has often been simplistic. Ireland has rarely been a consideration in American foreign policy--which means that Americans have been able to…

THE ELEPHANT REVISITED IN HER ARTICLE "The Elephant in the Sacristy" (June 17), Mary Eberstadt suggests that I was trying to minimize the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church by stressing that most of the acts involved are "ephebophilia" (acts with older teenagers), and therefore less damaging than…

Hello. My name is John, and I'm a soap-opera addict. At this point, you're supposed to shout, "Hello, John," so that I will feel welcomed and safe while discussing my addiction. But I know that even in this culture of confession, there are some behaviors that go beyond the bounds of acceptable…

CAN SEAN WILENTZ READ? When last the nation heard from Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, in November 2000, he was organizing a full-page New York Times advertorial in which various academic and Hollywood celebrities announced their solemn conclusion that Al Gore had just won a "clear…

JACK GERMOND, the great political writer, tells a story about a horseplayer. It's a tale with a political lesson. The horseplayer wakes up one morning at 5:55 A.M. with the number 5 in his mind. Having played hunches before, he's intrigued. Suddenly he realizes it's his 55th birthday, May 5. He's…

WITH THE RELEASE last week of its report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity (available at www.bioethics.gov), the President's Council on Bioethics has made a large and lasting contribution to our national debate on dealing with the revolutionary advances in biotechnology that are--for better and…

Lone Star Justice The First Century of the Texas Rangers by Robert M. Utley Oxford University Press, 370 pp., $30 THERE'S A MOMENT in Larry McMurtry's novel "Lonesome Dove" when the retired Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Augustus McRae--now in the cattle business--pass a new farm settlement with a…

DEATH IMITATES ART The news stories read like the opening of a mystery novel. In the early morning of July 4, in Morristown, New Jersey, a man named Mark McGarrity was found dead on the hard ground outside his apartment. An accident, the police insisted. The fifty-eight-year-old man--an occasional…

WHEN THE President's Council on Bioethics released its report on cloning last Thursday morning, in a gilded meeting room at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, Sean Tipton made himself available to reporters in a hallway outside. But he wasn't sure whether he should be upset. "Let's be clear…

THE NEWS HEADLINES have been awfully depressing lately: stock market doldrums, terrorism fears, priest-sex scandals, child kidnappings, massive wildfires, and on and on. In times like these, many of us turn to sports for a temporary respite. For instance, take 1998, when, amidst the sleaze of Anno…

A CURIOUS THING seems to have happened on the way to the war against Saddam Hussein. Despite President Bush's oft-stated commitment to "regime change" in Iraq, media reports have been rife with speculation that military action is unlikely, maybe even off the table. These reports continued to appear…

LAST WEEK Al Gore was on the campaign trail again. Before a gathering of supporters in New York City, he slipped back into the role of self-styled defender of the common man and spotted owl, comparing the Bush administration to everything from Enron to a hungry fox in a chicken coop. Enthusiastic…

THE SEPTEMBER 11 terror attacks and the war on terror that followed have the Middle East studies establishment running scared. The recent events put the university scholars who should have been warning us about Islamic terror, and psychoanalyzing Osama bin Laden, on notice that their departments…

AS YOU MAY know from MSNBC's Normandy-style ad campaign, Phil Donahue, the man who practically invented the gutter genre of talk television, who paved the way for Oprah and the rest, he of the bulging eyes, concerned hand gestures, and sensitive male persona has entered the fray of nightly…

TUESDAY NIGHT on the "CBS Evening News," Dan Rather described Fed chief Alan Greenspan's testimony before the Senate Banking Committee in these terms: "President Bush couldn't do it; today the chairman of the Federal Reserve tried to calm nervous investors and stop the slide on Wall Street. Alan…

BACK IN APRIL, having marinated myself in a decade's worth of published microbiology research and whatnot, I wrote a longish story for the Standard expressing near total bewilderment about the FBI's investigation of last fall's anthrax terrorism. Specifically, I couldn't understand why the Bureau…

TWO MORE ITEMS for the Voices of Reason from the Islamic World file:

"I've known Ted since 1936, and everything is a production. I guess that's the way it's going to end up." -Bobby Doerr BOBBY DOERR played with baseball legend Ted Williams for ten seasons and surely knows whereof he speaks. Williams died on July 5, but his death wasn't the end of things but the…

PARIS Very soon, France is going to have to figure out whether people like Kamel Hamza are its salvation or its worst nightmare. Barely 30, born in France of Algerian parents, Hamza recently launched a telecommunications business that works with Bouygues and MCI in one of France's worst…

SAY IT AIN'T SO, ALAN. Say you have no intention of retiring. Sure, you are 76 years old, and your term is due to expire in 2004. So retire now, you are being told, and give the president an opportunity to name a replacement before the 2004 campaign season is upon us. Get out while the getting is…

THE UNITED STATES Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris upholding the constitutionality of the Ohio school voucher program was not really as close as it seems, at least not if the quality of the constitutional arguments of the majority is weighed against the quality of the…

WHO, I FOUND MYSELF WONDERING the other afternoon in the checkout line at Borders, ever actually pays money for one of those bookmarks full of coo-inducing saucer-eyed kittens or saccharine poetry? Someone must, but for my part I'm rarely tempted. In my experience, fancy store-bought bookmarks…

SEPTEMBER 11 has affected American policy far beyond the Middle East. In the Asia-Pacific theater, in particular, the attacks and their aftermath have created a new dynamic that may work to the advantage of the United States in its competition with China for regional leadership. What remains to be…

The Einstein File J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist by Fred Jerome St. Martin's, 358 pp., $27.95 THERE IS NO DOUBT that J. Edgar Hoover was guilty of sustained abuses of power. The FBI chief's anti-communism had (as the historian Richard Gid Powers puts it) such…

SECRETS OF THE SECRET SERVICE Capitol Hill lawmakers considering the president's plan for a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security will want to look awfully hard at one particular flow-chart revision it contemplates--the new outfit's absorption of the Secret Service--in light of an…

FIDEL CASTRO, always full of bluster, says Cuba will never change its socialist ways. He says he might cut off ties with America altogether by shutting down the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. He's threatening to flood America with a new wave of refugees. We've heard all this before. It's Castro…

DELIBERATELY but without fanfare, Saudi Arabia has altered its relationship with the United States. Quite logically, and dangerously, the House of Saud has decided the proper reaction to the events of September 11 is to distance itself from Washington, seeking instead to firm up its support among…

IT SEEMS FITTING that the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' attempted deletion of God from the Pledge of Allegiance was eclipsed the next day by the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 decision upholding Cleveland's voucher plan. The finding of unconstitutionality for the words "under God," by a…

The Making of a Philosopher My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy by Colin McGinn HarperCollins, 256 pp., $25.95 COLIN MCGINN is a clever man--the very clever product of that very clever school of British academic thought known as analytic philosophy. His initial impetus for studying…

Masters of Death The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of The Holocaust by Richard Rhodes Knopf, 335 pp., $27.50 AS RICHARD RHODES notes in "Masters of Death," his riveting history of the Nazi death squads known as the Einsatzgruppen, gas chambers and crematoria have come to typify the Holocaust.…

"The 1980s were not just a decade of greed and self-seeking, they were a decade of denial and blame. George Bush is happy to tell Israel what to do. Why won't he tell Wall Street what to do?"

A FORD, NOT A SHAKESPEARE You remember the headlines back at the end of 1995? "New Work by Shakespeare," "Literary Sleuth Uncovers Lost Poem by the Bard," "Did the Swan of Avon Write It?" It all started when a Vassar professor named Donald Foster claimed to have demonstrated that Shakespeare was…

THE CAREER DIPLOMAT studied the two newspaper headlines with an intensity usually found only in safecrackers. Where average people have laugh lines, his 57-year-old patrician face had lines of earnestness--no, over-earnestness--crop circles that are mowed into human skin by a lifetime of nodding…

SEE IF YOU CAN follow this logic: There's a scandal involving some egregious wrongdoing in the business community. President Bush is favorably disposed toward the business community. Therefore, President Bush is part of the scandal and in big trouble. Or check out this logic implicating…

NO SENSIBLE PERSON can quarrel with what the president told the Wall Street biggies he addressed last week. Crooks should be forced to disgorge their ill-gotten gains, and should go to jail for extended periods. Enforcement agencies should be given adequate resources. Corporate executives should be…

BASEBALL now faces a perfect storm. On top of The Tie, on top of cryo-frozen Ted Williams's battling offspring, on top of steroid use, on top of Alex Rodriguez's $252 million contract, major league baseball faces another strike. What makes this storm so perfect, is the timing.

LAST SUNDAY, the New York Times Magazine published a remarkably chilling essay entitled "Family Planning." Penned by an anonymous father--let's call him Mr. X--it described his family's efforts to convince his pregnant 15-year-old daughter, against her own better instincts, to have an abortion.

OF COURSE everyone is disappointed with the way baseball commissioner Bud Selig ordered this year's All-Star game stopped at the end of 11 innings, in order to prevent players from getting overtaxed and risking injury. Yeah, the five 9-year-olds who now make up the audience for this absurd show are…

THERE'VE BEEN SOME developments over the past few days in the case of Professor Mona Baker, director of the Center for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in England. Turns out she's a native Egyptian, for one thing.

BACK IN THE '70s and '80s, the only thing that could stop me from eating those delicious McDonald's french fries was the Hamburglar (while his accomplice Grimace was out stealing shakes). But in the early '90s, health concerns led to a switch from frying with hearty beef tallow to vegetable oil,…

WHAT AN EMBARRASSMENT.

IT WAS PROBABLY just a coincidence, but did you notice that just as White House communications guru Karen Hughes was wrapping up her last day at the office before leaving town on Monday, President Bush was delivering a remarkably undisciplined--and for that reason quite amusing--press conference?…

LAST WEEK, President Bush flew to Cleveland, where he dared to speak the v-word, which is to say "vouchers."

MARK BROWN deserves a raise.

AROUND MY HOUSE, we have always counted ourselves happy little capitalists. Sure, we pay plenty of lip service to the eternal verities of God and freedom and high, democratic ideals. But in our dark consumerist hearts, we believe that if we are to truly shine our light upon the Second and Third…

THE BRITS, so valuable for so many reasons, understand a great many truths, one of which is this: Everyone has their place in the world. Alas, the place of conservatives is standing athwart history and yelling stop until, Wile E. Coyote-style, history runs them down, hurtles onward towards the…

IN ITS DEALINGS with its Muslim population, the French government, whether out of nobility or naivete, has not reciprocated radical Islam's distrust. Each of the last four interior ministers has sought to bring Islam into agreement with the country's 1905 laws, which mandate a separation of church…

MOMENTS INTO the drooling stage of my late-afternoon snooze last Sunday, I woke abruptly. I had fallen asleep watching the BellSouth Classic or the U.S. Senior Open or, well, some golf tournament anyway.

MY FIRST APARTMENT in Washington had an excellent view of the Capitol dome. Except that you had to climb a fire ladder from the hallway outside my apartment door to get to the roof to enjoy it. And even then, after you safely set down your drink in order to pull yourself up by the hands onto the…

ONE OF THE QUIET WONDERS of the last year has been the swift reconstruction of the Pentagon. While New York City has gone through a long, public grieving process for the World Trade Center, Washingtonians seem almost oblivious to the impressive work of the Phoenix Project. But no longer. On July 4…

GEORGE WASHINGTON, for all his fame, is one of the least known and even less understood American presidents or Revolutionary War figures. Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor of National Review, sought to remedy that a few years ago in a short but riveting book, "Founding Father: Rediscovering…

WHILE CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS are tripping over one another to see who can most vociferously pledge allegiance "under God," two straws in the popular-cultural wind further confirm the return of traditional values: No less a Hollywood vehicle than the new Spiderman movie depicts a pious family in a…

Duncan Hines The Man Behind the Cake Mix by Louis Hatchett Mercer University Press, 297 pp., $29.95 WITH 150 MILLION BOXES of cake mix sold each year, the name of Duncan Hines is as well known as ever. Aurora Foods, which owns the product line, boasts Duncan Hines has "92 percent unaided name…

BOYCOTTS don't always work, but they usually annoy. Maybe it's time to annoy Vermont and its two senators, Patrick Leahy and James Jeffords, to get across how little the obstruction of judicial confirmations is appreciated. Senator Leahy holds the chairmanship of the Senate's Judiciary Committee, a…

WHAT'S LESS BAD: enacting a ban on so-called "reproductive" human cloning that explicitly authorizes cloning for research purposes, or passing no law at all prohibiting cloning in 2002? That is the seeming conundrum facing cloning opponents, since neither side in the great cloning debate apparently…

DURING THIS JULY FOURTH SEASON, the two hundred twenty-seventh year of American democracy now dawning, just how secure--under the temporary stewardship of President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft--are the basic constitutional rights that democracy was founded to assert? One or another version…

PALESTINIAN TERROR, COURTESY OF THE E.U. This message is brought to you by the European Union: "If the Jew hides behind the rock and the tree, the rock and the tree will say, 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, a Jew hides behind me, come and kill him.'" Did the E.U. fund such wretched anti-Jewish…

WINNING THE PEACE in Afghanistan is not optional. It is a national necessity. Early American military victories, the current low level of fighting, and the recent completion of the loya jirga, or council of elders, all have contributed to a false sense of progress evident both in official U.S.…

"As governor, I will veto any new taxes and any increase in existing taxes. And I keep my word." --Candidate Jesse Ventura, 1998 WHEN IT CAME DOWN to keeping his word or running for a second term, Minnesota's flamboyant governor apparently decided on trying to restore his credibility by not seeking…

IT'S THE BIG ISSUES that matter in President Bush's brand of conservatism. So he's strong and principled on taxes, cloning, the Kyoto treaty, the war on terrorism, Iraq, missile defense, and federal judges. It's a different story with the smaller issues. Bush strays on them--education, trade, farm…

KHAKIS, you may not have noticed, are in crisis. Sales of casual pants for men, among which khakis predominate, have fallen off. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reports that they are down 11.5 percent, grossing $3.86 billion last year, while jeans have held steady, with sales of $4.94…

Sacred Secrets How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History by Jerrold and Leona Schecter Brassey's, 320 pp., $18.95 SINCE THE END of the Cold War a flood of revelations about Soviet espionage in America has discomfited old leftists and startled many Americans. Easy assumptions about…

Victor Serge The Course Is Set on Hope by Susan Weissman Verso, 320 pp., $35 WHO NOW READS Victor Serge? The novelist is nearly unknown these days, even among the most literate readers. Few of his titles--"Men in Prison," "Birth of Our Power," "Conquered City," "Midnight in the Century," "The Case…

THE ISRAEL-LEBANON BORDER Yellow Hezbollah FLAGS fly over the rubble of the Tourmus agricultural station on the Israel-Lebanon border. Following Israel's May 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah guerrillas dynamited the cattle pens and vaccination clinics where Lebanese farmers once…

BOOKS IN BRIEF American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr. by Richard Blow (Henry Holt, 288 pp., $25). Take the celebrity heir to a political fortune, trying both to embrace and to evade the family legacy, and you have George, the first political magazine produced wholly by and for people who…

JERUSALEM The latest mission impossible embraced by those who would resolve the Middle East conflict is the effort to "democratize" the Palestinian Authority, an organization that has thrived on repression, violence, and aggressive irredentism. Meanwhile, a far more promising route to peace--the…

I'M SICK of my telephones; I miss my telephones.

TEN YEARS AGO in a case called Lee v. Weisman, the Supreme Court decided that a state may not sponsor the sort of prayers long customary in America at middle or high school graduation ceremonies--invocations and benedictions--not even when the saying of those prayers is rotated among…