110 articles
IN THE LARGER WORLD, despite the expectations of numerous political scientists and pundits, unipolarity still rules. America stands head and shoulders above all other nations, with no real competitor in sight, not Russia or China or Japan or Europe. In the world of professional football, by…
The Conquerors Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945 by Michael Beschloss Simon & Schuster, 377 pp., $26.95 A RECENT Washington Post headline for an excerpt from Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" read, "A Struggle for the President's Heart and Mind." Had such a headline…
WOULD YOU CONSIDER taking two hours to see a Broadway show filled with music by an aging pop star? Some of those who grew up with Billy Joel's songs, featured in this season's hit "Movin' Out" at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, disdain the show, thinking it little more than MTV outfitted for Broadway.…
IS THE UNITED STATES about to become midwife to democracy in the Muslim Middle East? President George W. Bush has certainly given unprecedented speeches on the inalienable right of Muslim men and women to be free, and on December 12, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a new $29 million…
Bestsellers Popular Fiction Since 1900 by Clive Bloom Palgrave Macmillan, 292 pp., $60 I'M NOT SURE who started the rumor--it may have been Sam Goldwyn or, more probably, Marshall McLuhan--but somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, people came to believe that books were doomed. The…
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] A CONSUMER-MATH PROBLEM: How many cell-phone calls would you have to make to be billed $1,759.35?
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] REPUBLICANS APPROACH 2003 with the embarrassing Trent Lott flap over, the most attractive and genial Republican senator, Bill Frist, installed as the new Senate majority leader, and his tough and shrewd conservative colleague Mitch…
I WAS OFTEN BOTHERED about what happened to my gun during the James Meredith riots at Ole Miss. Quite a few people were shot during that crazed Sunday night in the fall of 1962. Two civilians died, and 168 U.S. marshals were wounded when bullets flew into the Lyceum Building. No one ever knew who…
"Senator Trent Lott's lament that Strom Thurmond lost his segregationist campaign for the White House in 1948 . . . is already influencing an internal Bush administration debate on what approach to take on a major affirmative action case.
A CENTURY AGO, the psychologist, philosopher, and agnostic William James delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. His 20 addresses were published in 1902 as "The Varieties of Religious Experience," which soon became one of the most widely read works on religious…
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] DEMOCRATS GOT SMART about the Trent Lott controversy too late. A few days before Lott stepped down as majority leader, prominent Democratic politicians and pundits--Rep. John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, James Carville, Lanny Davis--began…
I
BOOKS IN BRIEF
The Democrats' Flag Fantasy
SOMETIMES IT'S GOOD TO BE SELFISH. That goes for all of us, collectively as well as individually.
Malcolm Bradbury--novelist, teacher, critic, and scriptwriter--died in England on November 27, 2000 at the age of sixty-eight. He was best known for "The History Man," one of the great academic comedies ever written, and "Rates of Exchange," a comic attack on communism set in a fictitious country…
IT'S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE not to know how it opens. "Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that." Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" has been filmed at least forty-two times and dramatized for the stage in dozens of versions--the first almost immediately after the book's…
THE LAST THING my sisters and I would do on Christmas Eve--before retiring to our separate rooms and our private paroxysms of insomniac anticipation--was make sure our parents had put out cookies for Santa Claus. After all, we didn't know the man. Perhaps he was the type who, sensing a niggardly…
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] TRUTH, famously the first casualty of war, is now falling victim to the latest skirmish in the biotech wars. Euphemism and doublespeak are the order of the day, and not because of timid politicians or shameless propagandists, but,…
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] AFTER A WEEK of confusion, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott held a press conference Friday in an attempt to clarify his position on segregation. "Segregation is a stain on our nation's soul," said Lott. "Let me be clear:…
IT WAS A JOYFUL MOMENT. In 1999 and 2000, for the first time in 50 years, New York City surpassed the rest of the nation in job growth. Silicon Alley was humming. Martha Stewart was remodeling a 1930s West Side industrial building that could lift railroad cars to the eighth floor. Mayor Giuliani…
THERE IS ONLY ONE GOOD REASON to hate Christmas music: treacle--the cloying sentimentality, molasses emotionalism, and gooey, faux-compassion. Easter songs are silly: Peter Cottontail comes hoppin' down the bunny trail, and ladies don Easter bonnets. The New Year's song "Auld Lang Syne" has license…
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=]LAST WEEK I was driving through Paris with a bunch of American journalists. One of them mentioned that the last time he'd been in Paris, there had been a big Ferris wheel in the Tuileries gardens, as there is every summer. Then…
OLD WINE in new bottles. That's what the shakeup of the administration's economic team seems to come to. Since it is the president who will determine just what he wants to put to the Congress when he delivers his State of the Union message, most likely on January 28, the policy implications of the…
"Celebrities" Aren't What They Used To Be
I'VE SPENT A LOT OF TIME on elite college campuses recently--at Yale, where I taught a course, as well as at Princeton, Dartmouth, Kenyon, and a few less rarefied schools--and while I've temporarily given up on the game of trying to diagnose the ills of America's youth, I have found that things…
A Crossworder's Holiday by Nero Blanc Prime Crime, 224 pp., $22.95 A Puzzle in a Pear Tree by Parnell Hall Bantam, 308 pp., $23.95 The Christmas Garden Affair by Ann Ripley Kensington, 293 pp., $22 THE TRADITION of telling ghost stories at Christmas has a venerable lineage, reaching back well into…
Flesh and Machines How Robots Will Change Us by Rodney A. Brooks Parthenon, 260 pp., $26 Prey A Novel by Michael Crichton HarperCollins, 384 pp., $26.95 Dumbstruck A Cultural History of Ventriloquism by Steven Connor Oxford University Press, 448 pp., $35 Building Bots Designing and Building Warrior…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir by John McCain, with Mark Salter Random House, 396 pp., $25.95 AS A RECOVERING McCainiac, I hesitated to pick up the new John McCain-Mark Salter volume. Their previous effort, McCain's war memoir, "Faith of My Fathers," was so good that I expected…
IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA, the trappings of monarchy obscure the police state that keeps the Saud family in power. But beneath the veneer of gracious luxury, internal security has never been more important than it is today to a regime that constrains the press and commerce, struggles to…
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] THINK PRESIDENT BUSH has put off reforming Social Security until 2005? Not necessarily. Republican congressman Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who's eager to enact reform legislation next year, raised the issue with Bush at a White…
THE FIRST THING you need to remember when going into a Martin Scorsese film is that it'll probably be long. Get food and drink. Go to the bathroom. Wear comfortable clothing. In fact, the last movie Scorsese made under 2 hours was released in 1986 ("The Color of Money," at 119 minutes). Ever since…
Editor's Note: We'll be on hiatus for the holidays, so next week, we'll be posting some of our favorite recent pieces from both The Weekly Standard and The Daily Standard--some holiday-related, some not. Enjoy, and have a terrific and safe holiday season!
Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. . .
NO ONE CAN BE SURE of the exact size of China's Internet police force, but estimates hover between 30,000 and 40,000 officers. And their back-up is impressive--China has just spent $200 million on new firewall technology as well. But for those who still try to access forbidden material, China's…
ENOUGH TERRORISTS have been arrested in Europe in recent days--three in Edinburgh, four in London, four in Paris--to make this one of the bigger police weeks since September 11. The French arrests, which took place in the north Paris suburb of La Courneuve, are particularly unsettling for two…
ANY DAY NOW, the Democrats may come to regret deeply the moment the Trent Lott disturbance caught media fire. It is now a great mess for the Republican party, but one that has the potential to turn into a great opportunity, and one the party should eagerly seize. It is a chance for the GOP to clean…
THIS MONTH, the New York Times became a story when another paper reported that its editors had spiked sports columns written by staffers Harvey Araton and Pulitzer Prize-winner David Anderson.
All on Fire William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery St. Martin's, 707 pp., $32.50 IN 1984, in Biloxi, Mississippi, deep in the heart of the old Confederacy, the future Senate majority leader Trent Lott declared that "the spirit of Jefferson Davis" now lives in the Republican party.
SOMEONE PLEASE STOP HIM. The damage from Trent Lott's offensive comments 12 days ago could hardly be clearer. His support among Senate Republicans is crumbling. Even fellow GOP leaders, his strongest backers, have begun to consider ways to oust the majority leader and allow him to save face.
WITH FLU SEASON UPON US, millions of Americans have rushed to their immunologists, hoping to avoid the cruel bite of the Moscow, New Caledonia, or Hong Kong strains of the influenza virus that are prevalent this year. But no matter the precautions, these doctors can do nothing to stave off the most…
HAVING A FAMILY that rears you for greatness can be a mixed blessing at best. Now and then a George W. Bush or a John Kennedy will exceed expectations, but often the outcome is grim. John Adams and his wife Abigail desperately wanted their three sons to be famous lawyers--and president. One of them…
"IT'S UNFORTUNATELY TRUE," Al Gore told the Washington Post last month, "that the painful experiences in life give you more of a chance for growth than the others." In the former vice president's list of painful experiences, the 1996 Clinton-Gore fundraising scandals must rank pretty high. Although…
THREE YEARS AGO, I wrote in this space about a post-Thanksgiving football game my high school friends and I play every year. I bragged about how we ruthlessly tackled each other to the ground without any padding or protection, and scoffed at the idea of one day switching to two-hand touch or even…
"Chasing the Dime" by Michael Connelly Little, Brown, 400 pp., $25.95 WILLIAM J. BRATTON, having won his crime-fighting laurels in the first Giuliani administration, was recently inducted as the new chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. There was something discordant about the erstwhile top…
Blix's Black Rose
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] SOMETIMES the Washington press corps reports a story, but entirely misses its significance. This was the case with last week's naming of Elliott Abrams to the position of senior director for Near East and North African affairs on…
NEEDLESS TO SAY, everyone in Washington politics and journalism is accomplished and popular and physically attractive. But even here, there are some among us whom Allah has clearly singled out for special blessing. And Adel al-Jubeir is one of them. He's the 40-year-old "foreign policy adviser" to…
JOHN RAWLS, who died on November 24 at age eighty-one, was the towering figure of academic liberalism. A gentle, dignified, self-effacing man, he taught philosophy at Harvard for more than thirty years and exerted a commanding influence on his profession, single-handedly shifting its dominant…
IF A GOVERNMENT set out slowly to strangle the family life of its people, what would be the best tactic? One diabolical approach would be to saddle young adults in their early 20s with massive debt. Surely, this would delay marriages, as potential spouses shied away from this perverse form of…
LONDON
THE CLOSE OF 2002 brings with it the close of the 150th anniversary of the publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." But you would hardly have known it from America's premier journals and magazines, which showed little interest in giving "Uncle Tom's Cabin" its due in the course of the year. No other…
CHRISTIAN MERCHANDISING TODAY has many mansions. Start with faith-on-your-sleeve fashion, such as the T-shirts promoting J.Christ instead of J. Crew, Fruit of the Spirit instead of Fruit of the Loom, Christ Supreme instead of Krispy Kreme. This "witness wear," a manufacturer's rep explains, evokes…
BOOKS IN BRIEF The Last Jihad by Joel C. Rosenberg Forge, 304 pp., $24.95
THE REAL STAR of "Frida," the much-hyped film biography of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, is not Salma Hayek, the beautiful Arab-Mexican actress who handles the lead role, but Mexico--in all its legendry, folklore, and intensity of color and passion. Mexico has remained in large part untouched by…
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] ANKARA
IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN Jerry Seinfeld's movie, "Comedian," you should. If it's not playing near you, or if it's no longer playing anywhere, buy the video when it hits the stores. Watch it often, buy several more, and give them to your friends, especially anyone who's ever said, "Ooh, I love…
THE IMPORTANT THING about Al Gore's decision not to run for president in 2004--other than the decision itself--is the debate it will unleash inside the Democratic party, both during next year's run-up to the primaries, and in the 2004 primaries themselves. That debate will be about war: war against…
WITH THE 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade approaching and Republicans in control in Washington, the 108th Congress will likely take up the partial-birth abortion ban passed by the House last July but buried by the Democratic Senate.
The remarks below were delivered earlier today at the 23rd annual convention of the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations, as part of a panel discussion titled "Reevaluating Democracy and Islam after September 11."--Ed.
I AM APPALLED by my journalistic colleagues' failure to fully exploit the Liesel Pritzker story. Once upon a time, the American media knew how to treat beautiful heiresses--exhaustively. They were our royalty. Now it's Jennifer Lopez. That represents a profound shift in our culture (I would say…
THIS MORNING'S front page article in the Washington Post, "Report Cites Al Qaeda Deal For Iraqi Gas," should not come as a surprise. Over the past months, we have had several detailed reports of links between Iraq and al Qaeda. For example, in "The Great Terror (March 3, 2002)," Jeffrey Goldberg of…
THIS WEEK, after pulling off one of the most remarkable interdictions in naval history and succeeding for the first time in making nonproliferation something more than a feel-good slogan, the Bush administration concluded that it had made a mistake. Announcing December 10 that the Spanish Navy with…
MARVEL COMICS IS ON A ROLL. First there was the blockbuster "X-Men" movie that generated almost $300 million worldwide. Then came "Spider-Man," which grossed more than $800 million. Coming in February, Ben Affleck will star in "Daredevil." In that same month, Marvel will be bringing back to comic…
WHAT FADES IN MEMORY is not the fact but the feeling. I can call up nearly every detail of those Christmases like frozen frames of recollection:
IN A NOBEL LECTURE YESTERDAY that is a familiar mixture of personal self-satisfaction and national self-abasement, Jimmy Carter names the greatest challenge in the world today, and it is us: the tragic failure of the wealthiest nations to cure the poverty of the poorest.
UPON LEARNING that the Supreme Court had accepted the big affirmative action cases involving her campus, University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman said about the only thing that she could, which was that "we are looking forward to presenting our cases." Ms. Coleman's--and…
A GROUP OF STUDENTS at the University of Michigan have devised a tool that might have saved me several hours of nail-biting, and perhaps hundreds of dollars in application fees, had it existed for my school of choice when I applied to college. The staff of the Michigan Review, a conservative campus…
IN THE MONTHS after the 1986 election, President Reagan was in serious political trouble. Republicans had unexpectedly lost control of the Senate and the Iran-Contra scandal was threatening to engulf Washington. A senior Reagan adviser came up with a plan for reviving the sagging presidency. Reagan…
"IT IS NOT A SMALL THING for one of the half-dozen most prominent political leaders in America to say that our problems are caused by integration and that we should have had a segregationist candidate," said former Vice President Al Gore on CNN's "Inside Politics" yesterday. "That is divisive and…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
Press Release of the Week
Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 208 pp., $23 IT'S THE NIGHTMARE DILEMMA for every critic: There's an artist whose work the critic has recommended to friends with urgent passion. He feels pride as the artist's fame grows, because he can congratulate himself on having…
THE TRANSFORMING FLOW of money through New York has accelerated over time. Thirty years ago the SoHo area, which had been the cast-iron district and a no-man's-land of warehouses and small manufacturing, was transformed almost overnight into a casbah of lofts and galleries that formed an immense…
Jon L. Breen explains why Patricia Cornwall doesn’t catch Jack the Ripper.
The Dawn of Universal History Selected Essays from a Witness of the Twentieth Century by Raymond Aron Basic, 495 pp., $35 RAYMOND ARON was at once journalist, sociologist, man of letters, and political thinker. Born in 1905, he never entered French politics directly, but before his death in 1983 he…
WHEN TAMERLANE retook Baghdad in 1401, delivering mail and feeding babies weren't post-conflict priorities. Ticked that the Baghdadis had the cheek to revolt, the warlord put the city to the sword. There was no Fox or CNN to report the massacre. Tamerlane's signal--a message all too often sent by…
PRESIDENT BUSH so bestrides the American political landscape that his power exceeds his agenda. Already the bills for a Department of Homeland Security and terrorism insurance have been whisked through by a lame-duck Congress, which also, for good measure, approved the appeals-court nomination of…
NEW ORLEANS
IF THE LAST 180 YEARS of American politics are any guide, the 2004 election will see one of the two major parties become dominant in presidential politics for 36 years.
OF THE MANY silly reasons propounded for leaving Saddam Hussein on his blood-stained throne, the silliest has to be the suggestion that to remove him would promote "instability." As a guiding philosophy for policy-making, the mantra of "instability bad, stability good"--endlessly repeated by…
When President Bush enunciated his radical new doctrine of preemption, the forcible disarmament of rogue possessors of weapons of mass destruction, it was met with a mixture of disdain and consternation by a foreign policy establishment instinctively allergic to new doctrines. Most objected that…
EARLY ONE EVENING in September 1986, a 17-year-old local girl was walking along West North Street in Wooster, Ohio, a rural town about 50 miles southwest of Cleveland, when Joel Douglas Walton Yockey, 30, also of Wooster, rolled up next to her in a pickup truck and asked if she'd like a ride.…
WHILE COVERING the Democratic presidential race back in 1984, I happened to stop one day in Monroe, Louisiana. I had a problem with my portable word processor, so I visited a local Radio Shack in hope of getting it fixed quickly. And indeed the fellow running the store instantly knew what to do to…
THERE IS NO MYSTERY, and there is no need for complicated theorizing, about the scandal that has struck the family of Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abd al-Aziz, the ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Washington. U.S. authorities are investigating a financial link between Prince Bandar's…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Sex, Drugs & Economics An Unconventional Introduction to Economics by Diane Coyle Texere, 263 pp., $24.95 In her vastly amusing economics primer Diane Coyle explores topics from prostitutes' wages to Japanese teenagers' fashion choices. Coyle, a former economics editor of the…
WHEN FORMER PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON addressed the Democratic Leadership Council the other day, he declared it "unconscionable" what Republicans had done in attacking now ex-Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. And, yes, Clinton was serious. He was repeating what has become a Democratic talking point.…
RECENT EVENTS--September 11, the war in Afghanistan, and the coming war in Iraq--have rigorously tested one of the perennial cliches of politics: that the Left is for idealists. Dreamers. People longing to change the world--and make it better. It's no longer true. Idealism has become a property of…
pork (n) 2. Government funds, appointments, or benefits dispensed or legislated by politicians to gain favor with their constituents.
THE SAUDIS CONTINUE to generate what for them is unwanted news. The urgency for Americans is to place the news in context, and toward that end there is no better guide than Stephen Schwartz, author of the new book "The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Saud from Tradition to Terror."
THERE ARE MANY REASONS to be mad at fast food giant McDonald's. For starters, there was the decision, in the early 90s, to switch from deep frying its french fries in tasty beef tallow to 100 percent vegetable oil (something I've lamented before). Then there was the more recent switch from its…
LONDON, DECEMBER 2--It was quite a sight: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of State Marc Grossman, and several others, burrowed away in a pod-like enclosure in the middle of an Air Force C-17, speeding across the Atlantic, preparing for a busy three days. Hours later,…
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber Harcourt, 838 pp., $26 DURING THE SECOND HALF of the twentieth century, readers complained that the "postmodern" novel--that dark, deconstructing offspring of the novel as perfected by Henry James and James Joyce--was becoming so stylized, formal, and…
THE COUNTRY IS ON THE BRINK OF WAR, it faces the likelihood of another terrorist attack, and the New York Times is worried that Americans are not paying enough attention to race and gender. Two front-page articles on November 12--one on college diversity programs, the other on a golf club's…
PHOENIX
Blood of Victory by Alan Furst Random House, 237 pp., $24.95 IT CAN BE A PLEASING HAPPENSTANCE how one becomes acquainted with an author--a book review, an appealing title perhaps, but more often word-of-mouth recommendation. Until a few months ago, I had not heard of Alan Furst. Then within a…
NOT SURPRISINGLY, top Bush administration officials have no confidence that Saddam Hussein will cooperate with the latest U.N. resolution requiring him to disarm. Any foolish optimism in that regard was dispelled when Iraq continued its longstanding practice of firing on allied aircraft patrolling…
JERUSALEM
Harvard's Disappearing Backbone
General Patton A Soldier's Life by Stanley P. Hirshson HarperCollins, 826 pp., $34.95 IS THERE ANY JUSTIFICATION for yet another biography of the much-chronicled General George S. Patton Jr., particularly after the superb "Patton: A Genius for War" by Carlo D'Este (1995)? Certainly not the one…
MANY YEARS AGO, when I was a sub-editor at the New Leader magazine, I tried to get the literary journalist Dwight Macdonald, whom at the time I much admired, to write something for the magazine. I don't remember what it was I wanted him to write--a book review, I think--but I do recall his writing…
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt Knopf, 480 pp., $26 NO ONE seems able to talk about Donna Tartt's new novel, "The Little Friend," without talking about Donna Tartt. Take a look at the magazines with her picture on their covers and the adoring photo portraits run by Vanity Fair. Or watch the…
AFTER AN ELECTORAL LOSS, sour grapes is a normal response. Few politicians are big enough to manage a nobler one. A political candidacy puts forward a set of ideas about how a decent society ought to be run; a political defeat hands power to people who don't share the losing candidate's goals, and…
ANKARA
GOP LOVES NEA?
Bush at War by Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster, 349 pp., $28 Fighting Back The War on Terrorism from Inside the Bush White House by Bill Sammon Regnery, 400 pp., $27.95 LET'S GET RIGHT to the scoreboard. The winners in Bob Woodward's account of President Bush's response to the September 11, 2001,…
LIKE THE POOR, those who hate the military will always be with us. They believe that America is bad, and that a soldier's only value is as an object of ridicule and scorn. The Vietnam era belonged to them and, even after the war ended, their rants went unanswered. Those of us who wore the uniform…
Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews Allison Pearson’s novel of a woman who wants to have it all.
I'M WRITING THIS the day after Thanksgiving. I knew I was going to write something today, but I didn't plan for it to be about the holiday itself. In fact, nothing could've been further from my mind. I had several other terrific ideas, I didn't feel like it anyway, and, just incidentally, the…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.