Charlotte Allen

Rupert, Idaho

The “hate list” generating Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) already has the media firmly in its pocket. If the SPLC calls, say, Bell Curve and Coming Apart author Charles Murray a “white supremacist,” why, so will the Washington Post. And now corporate America seems to be jumping onto the SPLC’s…

Anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, famous for his surreptitious videotaping of conversations with abortion-giant Planned Parenthood officials about their dealings in fetal remains , just won his second court victory in a row affirming his right to learn about the identities of the Planned…

“Cal State Will No Longer Require Placement Exams and Remedial Classes for Freshmen,” reads a Los Angeles Times headline. Don’t think that the 23-campus California State University system dumped remedial ed because its entering students are so well-prepared academically these days that they don’t…

Not all the news coming out of Evergreen State College is bad. Only most of it.

When I read that Montclair State University in New Jersey had removed shooting-obsessed adjunct professor Kevin Allred from its course roster, my first thought was: Now who’s gonna teach “Policitizing Beyoncé”?

The Trump administration has recommended defunding a $100 million-plus a-year Obama-era grant program designed to reduce teen pregnancy, to the screams of the liberal media. The program, created by Congress in 2010 during that brief and shining moment right after Barack Obama’s election when…

Poor Richard. Richard Dawkins, that is. The British evolutionary biologist and professional atheist devoted years of his life to blasting Christianity, and the intellectual left couldn’t shovel enough praise onto his head. But more recently he has begun blasting Islam, and uh-oh! The Berkeley-based…

One thing that everyone ought to be able to agree on about the Olive Garden and its 844 chain-Italian restaurants is that the food there is pretty cheap (“value-oriented” is the favored way of describing the cuisine). Another thing that almost everyone ought to be able to agree on is that is that…

George Delgado, M.D. is a family-practice physician in San Diego, California. His credentials seem quite respectable: He’s a 1988 graduate of the University of California-Davis’s medical school, and he has admitting privileges at Scripps Mercy Hospital, a well-regarded San Diego facility, and the…

Duke University historian Nancy MacLean has written a book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, asserting the existence of a vast right-wing conspiracy (actually a vast libertarian conspiracy) funded by the villainous Koch brothers to subvert…

Two college geography professors are urging their colleagues not to cite geography research done only by straight white men. Relying on the scholarly efforts of pale males who mate with females perpetuates “white heteromasculinism,” say geographers Carrie Mott of Rutgers University and Daniel…

Swiss photographer Roger Eberhard traveled to 32 different countries in the course of 365 days and stayed in 32 different Hilton hotels, one for each country. He was shocked, shocked to discover that—guess what? Hilton hotel rooms look pretty much the same no matter whether you’re visiting Panama…

“Proverbs is probably the most Republican book of the entire Bible.”

The recent protests over alleged racial injustice at Evergreen State College in Washington looked bad: A professor whose classroom was invaded by student radicals so aggressive that he felt forced to hold his next class at a public park off campus; the president held virtual prisoner in his office…

Even in famously abortion-friendly California there is justice for abortion foes. On June 21, the San Francisco County Superior Court threw out 14 of the 15 felony counts that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra had brought against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the anti-abortion…

At Evergreen State College, the revolution will be televised. And it already has been, thanks to the smartphone.

At Evergreen State College, the revolution will be televised. And it already has been, thanks to the smartphone.

You're in your early 60s, and you hold an endowed-chair professorship at Duke University's prestigious divinity school, where your specialty is Catholic theology, and where the subjects of the courses you teach include a range of religious and secular philosophers from Augustine of Hippo to…

As readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD know, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, got quite a bit of nasty backlash from her peers in university perches over an article titled "In Defense of Transracialism" that appeared the most recent issue of Hypatia, an…

The weirdest thing about Hulu's much-discussed serialization of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale is the Handmaid's Tale cosplay industry.

On May 8 President Trump announced his nominees to fill 10 of the 120 vacancies on federal district and appellate courts. All 10 have conservative pedigrees. They were on a list supplied by the conservative Heritage Foundation (the same list from which Trump picked Neil Gorsuch). Or they were…

On May 21, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will perform for the very last time, ending a 146-year run. As of this writing, you can still buy tickets on the Internet for some of the final shows at various East Coast venues. The Ringling website also features a photo of a dazzlingly…

OK, someone—and the surveillance video shows exactly one man wearing black clothes—hung bananas by strings that resembled nooses at three locations on the campus of Washington, D.C.'s American University during the wee hours of the morning on May 1. The banana-hangings were plausibly a racial hate…

It's been telling to watch the a-flutter reaction of liberals to President Trump's April 21 appointment of Sylvia Trent-Adams as acting U.S. Surgeon General after forcing the resignation of Barack Obama's appointee of three years, Vivek Murthy. It's as though incoming presidents are expected to…

On April 20 I posted about what I called a "simmering, occasionally boiling cauldron of ethnic self-pity, social-justice terrorism, whines about homework, and calls for the abolition of free speech" at the five ultra-elite Claremont Colleges in Southern California. I focused on news accounts about…

How to persuade liberal, regulation-crazed California to ease up? Market your libertarian pet project as the ultimate in political correctitude. Also, find some Democrats to sponsor the legislation you need to ditch those irksome regulations and get your project off the ground.

Anything to lose weight if you're a Cosmo girl!

The five undergraduate Claremont Colleges, located about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, are famous for their elite U.S. News rankings, their exclusive admissions policies, their sky-high tuition sticker prices, and their gorgeous campuses in the bucolic college town of Claremont adjacent to Southern…

Judge Richard A. Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made legal-outrage history a few days ago with a concurring opinion he wrote in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College. The Chicago-based appellate court ruled in the case that Title VII of the federal 1964 Civil Rights Act, which…

It was the teensy Planned Parenthood cactus plants that grabbed my attention. Washingtonian magazine, catering to an upmarket and overwhelmingly liberal D.C.-area readership, recently ran a fawning article about Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington’s six-month-old $20 million headquarters…

I’m riveted by the case of the Coastal Carolina cheerleaders.

On March 28 California attorney general Xavier Becerra threw the book at anti-abortion activists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt. The penal code book, that is. Becerra's office charged the pair, famous for their undercover Planned Parenthood recordings, with 14 felony violations of California…

On March 28 California attorney general Xavier Becerra threw the book at anti-abortion activists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt. The penal code book, that is. Becerra’s office charged the pair, famous for their undercover Planned Parenthood recordings, with 14 felony violations of California…

Remember how the media vowed, right around President Trump's inauguration, that it was going to be no more Mr. Nice Guy for them? They were going to dive deeply into the innards of his administration with tough-minded shoe-leather investigative reporting that would reveal the Trump White House to…

On the morning of March 16, according to a police report, a 14-year-old girl attending Rockville High School in the Maryland suburb was allegedly pushed into a stall in a boys' bathroom and raped repeatedly by two males, Henry Montano, age 17, and Jose Sanchez Milian, age 18, who were also enrolled…

Last Saturday night my husband I accomplished what few have ever accomplished: We got a table in a little over a half-hour at Bad Saint, the craved-after Washington, D.C., restaurant which doesn't take reservations and where the scenesters start lining up for dinner out on the sidewalk as early as…

"Learning styles"! That's the idea—trumpeted for decades in education schools and school districts across the country—that children have many different individual ways of absorbing classroom material, and it's up to the teacher to present that material in ways that accommodate all of those…

It costs a bundle to attend Pitzer College, an elite liberal-arts institution in Claremont, California, that used to be a women's college and still skews female (57 percent of its 1,000 or so students). Tuition and fees alone are $48,670 a year, and when you throw in room and board, the price jumps…

#ShakespeareSoWhite!

Only in Portlandia: Multnomah County, Oregon, has decided to solve its homelessness problem by . . . housing the homeless in the backyards of Multnomah County homeowners.

Okay, the McDonald's anti-Trump tweet—"You are actually a disgusting excuse of a President and we would love to have @BarackObama back, also you have tiny hands"—seems to have been a hack job. McDonald's, upon taking the insult down from Twitter after 20 minutes and more than 1,000 likes and…

I read The Grapes of Wrath—this year celebrating the 75th anniversary of its publication in 1939—the summer after I graduated from a Southern California girls’ high school less than a quarter-century after its author, John Steinbeck (1902-1968), had banged out his socialist-realist magnum opus…

The Washington Post Magazine's cover story this week is about … the horrors of home-schooling. Specifically, the horrors of "fundamentalist Christian" home-schooling. The cover illustration for the story depicts a sinister windowless log cabin that's supposed to be your typical home school, I guess.

It's hard to say what's worse: the outrageousness of the Southern Poverty Law Center in pinning the label "white nationalist" and "extremist" on anyone who bucks the prevailing politically correct narrative, or the credulity of the mainstream media in treating the SPLC as a neutral source.

It's the weirdest feeding frenzy of the week that doesn't include the words "Sergey Kislyak." It's Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's twice-a-week workout.

Okay, the recount didn't work. The "faithless elector" pleas produced exactly two faithless electors to reduce his Electoral College vote total to 302 from 304. There's always the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. That allows the vice president and the cabinet to remove a sitting president if…

Airlines are cutting back on their once-vaunted plethora of flights to Cuba because … it turns out that hardly anyone wants to go to Cuba. As Bloomberg News reported in late 2016:

Here's an excerpt from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451:

Graduate magna cum laude from Dear Old Alma Mater, donate $50,000 to help keep its ivied halls open because you want to be true to your school—and get slammed in public from here to Sunday by the college president because you don't happen to be in accord with her anti-Trump,…

No, Chelsea Clinton's latest book is not a flop!

On February 7, a giant hole opened up in the main spillway of Northern Calfornia's Oroville Dam, leading to a possible chain of events that could burst the dam's reservoir with billions of gallons of floodwater crashing into the towns below. The next day, the office of California's Democratic…

It’s a website: "Help us elect Elizabeth Warren for president in 2020."

The Standing Rock protest may be over, but here's one thing that won't be over for quite some time: the standing mountain of trash that the ever-so-environmentally concerned protesters of the Dakota Access Pipeline left behind when they abandoned their makeshift camp on the Standing Rock Indian…

The Women's March on Washington has decided to become a permanent fixture on the political scene, not just a pink hat-wearing one-off. But that means it's gotta do something, so it's come up with something to do: a "general strike" with the catchy title "A Day Without a Woman."

Now that a Republican is back in the presidency, the "theocracy" machine is cranking up again.

Anheuser-Busch's beer ad for the 2017 Super Bowl looks more like a protest film against President Trump's immigration policies than an actual pitch for brew. The 1-minute commercial tells the tale of the German-born Adolphus Busch, co-founder of the St. Louis-based suds empire, as he survives…

I don't know whether it's "fake news," but it's almost certainly fake concern: all the solicitude in the mainstream media over First Lady Melania Trump's supposed sham marriage with her extremely famous husband.

The liberal media's coverage of the Women's March on Washington on Jan. 21 was generally one long ecstatic swoon. Even some 10 days later, the Washington Post is slapping the Vaseline over its lenses in a loving soft-edged gaze at march founder Teresa Shook:

It's always fun to watch one segment of socially conscious progressivism light into another segment of socially conscious progressivism. Especially when the socially progressive target is Mark Zuckerberg, the $55 billion net-worth founder and CEO of Facebook who enjoys lecturing his fellow…

The liberal explain-it-all website Vox said the Women’s March on Washington on January 21 was possibly "the largest demonstration in U.S. history."

What I saw of the inauguration: Not much.

Gee, I'm having a tough time deciding which exciting anti-Trump demonstration to attend this weekend. Fortunately the Huffington Post published a helpful list:

You can find out everything you need to know about the Trump-fixated L.L. Bean boycott by … perusing the L.L. Bean catalogue. Let's pick up the one titled Winter 2017, opening pages at random. Here, in the men's section, is "Our Genuinely Tough River Driver Shirt … the perfect cold-weather tee in…

On January 6, a 27-year-old woman, Emilie Inman, was stabbed to death inside her home in Berkeley, California, and another Berkeley woman was stabbed on the street, allegedly by the same assailant, a UC-Berkeley student named Pablo Gomez Jr., who was arrested the next day and remains in custody.

Hmm, maybe liberals can actually rip out the kitchen sink and throw it at Jeff Sessions.

The January 6 stabbing death of 27-year-old Emilie Inman in Berkeley, California, and the arrest of the alleged killer, 22-year-old University of California-Berkeley undergraduate Pablo Gomez, Jr., who is suspected of stabbing another young Berkeley woman although not fatally, remains shrouded in…

"Fake news"! The phrase was such a handy hammer for liberals to pound the heads of conservatives—until conservatives grabbed the hammer and started pounding liberals, pointing out some of the fakery that liberals had fallen for. How dare they? So now the liberal mantra is: We must retire that…

Hillary Clinton, fresh off her defeat by Donald J. Trump, is said to be considering a comeback via a run for mayor of New York City this very year. Or at least some powerful New York Democrats who can't stand current Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio—thanks partly to the dirtier, more disorderly…

When it comes to pushing the Donald J. Trump panic button, hardly anyone has been more industrious than just-retired Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California).

Comedian Rob Schneider decided to make paella, and got himself into a paella pan of hot water thanks to the culinary-correctness police.

Nothing rings my Schadenfreude chimes louder than a tale of a trendy-liberal professor teaching at a fancy college getting...royally hosed by another trendy-liberal professor teaching at a fancy college. Especially when the scene of the liberal-on-liberal hosing is California, home of likely the…

It's Christmastime at the Washington Post—and Christmastime at the Washington Post means it's time for another article bashing Christianity, the religion that invented Christmas.

No story illustrates so succinctly the mainstream media's dive deep into the tank for Hillary Clinton than the year-long Easter Egg hunt for supposed outtakes from The Apprentice that would sink the presidential candidacy of its 11-year host, Donald Trump.

Most parent-offspring biographies consist of either the offspring's fond but warts-and-all reminiscences of his or her famous parent. Or are Mommie Dearest exposés of the famous sire or dam's parental barbarity. Ruthless is the other way around: Ron Miscavige is the 80-year-old father of a famous…

Most parent-offspring biographies consist of either the offspring’s fond but warts-and-all reminiscences of his or her famous parent. Or are Mommie Dearest exposés of the famous sire or dam's parental barbarity. Ruthless is the other way around: Ron Miscavige is the 80-year-old father of a famous…

Madera, Calif.

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is remembered by most people only as a name—the name of the woman who shot Andy Warhol. On the day of the shooting, June 3, 1968, Warhol was at the pinnacle of his fame, first as a pop artist, and then, as the 1960s progressed, a cinematic auteur. Warhol’s innumerable…

Jesus’ wife has finally taken the sad step that culminates many a marriage: the gruesome divorce. Harvard Divinity School professor and historian of early Christianity Karen L. King, who has spent the past four years championing a one- by three-inch papyrus scrap bearing the Coptic words "Jesus…

In late April, the sixth season of Game of Thrones, the ardently watched HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's elephantine, quasi-medieval fantasy-novel series, A Song of Ice and Fire, launched its 10-episode run. This has been the first season of the six in which Thrones' writer-producers D. B.…

In 1995 the city of Roswell, New Mexico, population just trailing 50,000 then as now, discovered that it had the potential to become a major tourist site, courtesy of The X-Files. That immensely popular television series ran from 1993 to 2002 and was briefly revived in early 2016. It combined…

The Welsh-born Philip Jenkins holds the title of distinguished professor of history at Baylor, and he is also an emeritus professor of humanities at Penn State, where he holds an endowed chair. His specialty over more than 35 years of scholarship has been the study of Christianity in both its…

At first she was the “Aunt From Hell,” with an #AuntFrom-Hell hashtag to match. Jennifer Connell, age 54, had sued her young nephew, Sean Tarala, for $127,000 over an incident at the boy’s eighth birthday party in 2011. Sean had impetuously jumped into Connell’s arms to greet her when she arrived…

Every few years in the Northeast, biologist John Cooley gets famous—because he’s the man who discovered the mating secrets of one of the insect world’s weirdest and most-publicized species: Magicicada septendecim, the 17-year cicada. True to their name, and unlike the bottle-green “annual” cicadas…

I’m a kind of poster child for bottle-feeding instead of breastfeeding. I’m a first-born, and my mother, bless her heart, decided to nurse me from her own nipples instead of the more “scientific” formula that was the middle-class aspirational standard of the 1940s. (Breastfeeding was strictly for…

Charlottesville, Va.

We live in the world that the Middle Ages made. It is hard to think of any modern institution—bank, business corporation, university, the legal system, parliamentary government—that doesn’t have medieval roots. Even the typeface of this review had its origins in monks’ scriptoria not long after the…

King v. Burwell, on which the Supreme Court heard oral arguments March 4, is the most politically important case on the High Court’s docket this term. If the King petitioners win a decision in their favor, it could explode the massive 2010 federal health care overhaul known as Obamacare, by…

Chicago -- It was the skin​—​smooth and hairless as a newborn’s forearm​—​that I fastened on when I saw Sara Andrews, the first “transwoman” I had ever met, at the Kit Kat Lounge & Supper Club in Boystown, on Chicago’s North Side. The ambiance at the club was glitter balls, silver-leather…

It’s surely the most hilarious academic story so far this year: Slavoj Zizek, the most Marxist-chic of all Marxist-chic philosophers, has been caught plagiarizing an article from American Renaissance, a paleoconservative magazine-turned-website with an obsessive focus on what it calls “racial…

Amy Alkon, Los Angeles-based syndicated advice columnist (“Advice Goddess”) and author of Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (St. Martin’s Griffin), is a friend of mine, so this is a plug, not a review. But even if this were a review because I didn’t know Amy, it would read like a…

This is a story about campus sexual harassment, involving a female graduate student in philosophy and a prominent male philosophy professor at an Ivy League university. Except that the alleged events didn’t take place on a campus or anywhere near one. Nor did the alleged events meet any legal…

The University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus has decided it won’t be involved in the White Privilege Conference anymore. Since 2007 the campus’s Matrix Center for Social Equity and Inclusion, directed by UCCS sociology professor Abby Ferber, had lent the controversial conference some…

Cambridge, Mass. 

Mountain View, Calif.

After an 18-month trial separation, “Jesus’ wife” is back with her man. Only this time with a postnup, a distinctly limited right to the marital property she has previously claimed, and a continuing unresolved debate over whether that big diamond on her ring finger is real or fake.

Guess what—Jesus not only has a wife; he’s got a sister-in-law as well.

I’m a Los Angeles girl, born and bred. My hometown is Pasadena, about 12 miles northeast of L.A.’s downtown, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. My husband is another Angeleno, raised in Hawthorne, in far southwest Los Angeles County, on the South Bay flatlands abutting the Pacific…

New London, Conn. 

Atherton, Calif. 

In the late summer of 2011, a 29-year-old woman named Crystal Kelley of Vernon, Connecticut, agreed to become a surrogate mother for a Connecticut couple who already had three children, all of whom had been born prematurely and two of whom had subsequent medical problems. The couple hoped for a…

The word “chivalry,” associated with the Middle Ages and its knightly ethos of courtesy and dragon-slaying, has a bad rap nowadays. “Chivalrous” refers to the patsy in shining armor who opens doors for women, picks up the tab on dates, and is willing to be there with sensitive sympathy (along with…

Devious Maids is the Sunday-night soap on Lifetime about five Latina domestic servants who routinely outwit their wealthy, decadent, self-centered, materialistic, and generally evil Anglo employers in the Beverly Hills monster-mansions where the maids have been hired to do the cooking and dusting. 

The trial of George Zimmerman over the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was actually two trials in one.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), godfather of the “stimulus” and the “multiplier,” and Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), who argued that government intervention in the economy breeds prosperity-killing economic distortions, weren’t just polar opposites in economic theory. They were real-life sparring…

It's a well-known fact that on most college campuses, supposedly havens of academic freedom, you really have to watch what you say.

SeaTac, Wash.

My handwriting is execrable. I routinely desecrate the elegant, engraved stationery that my husband gave me as a birthday present with cramped, misshapen, and only partly legible scrawls. This despite the years I spent in parochial school being drilled by the nuns in the Palmer method, the loopy…

Last August a 28-year-old gay-rights volunteer named Floyd Corkins entered the office lobby of the Family Research Council (FRC), a Christian traditional-values group headquartered in Washington that condemns homosexual conduct and opposes same-sex marriage. Corkins took a gun from his backpack and…

On the morning of January 21, just before President Obama’s second inauguration, Rep. Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman and House budget chairman who had run unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate for vice president, was roundly booed by the gathered crowd as he left the Capitol to attend…

On November 6 voters in California did something nearly unheard of during the past 30 years: They approved, by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent, a ballot measure raising state income taxes on the most prosperous Californians and sales taxes on everyone, even though the state’s sales tax is…

Jesus had a wife! It’s the Gospel of Judas all over again. An exotic Gnostic document claimed to date from the fourth century,* written in Coptic, containing something startling about Jesus, and shrouded in secrecy until its sudden and dramatic unveiling. Next comes the derecho of media publicity,…

I hardly ever watch televised politics. I skipped both conventions. Last night's was the first presidential debate that I have ever watched in my life (OK, I think I caught a little Reagan-Mondale back in 1984). I get my news, including political news, from the Internet. So I mostly get…

Faux-folksy columnist Molly Ivins (1944-2007) and Ann Richards (1933-2006), the single-term Democratic governor who lost her 1994 bid for reelection to George W. Bush, rank as progressives’ favorite dead Texans. It was perhaps inevitable, given the political leanings of most theater audiences, that…

Adrienne Pine, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University (AU) in Washington, decided to bring her cold-stricken baby daughter, too sick for the daycare center, along with her to teach her opening class for the fall semester in "Sex, Gender, and Culture." Some 40 undergraduates…

The death of Helen Gurley Brown two days ago has given every obituary writer a shot at disproving the adage de mortuis nil nisi bonum. The New York Times cracked, "She was 90, but parts of her were considerably younger"—alluding to Brown's pathological addiction to plastic surgery during her…

Like many members of America’s “cognitive elite” (I’ve got a string of fancy degrees to prove it), I’ve taken the “How Thick Is Your Bubble?” quiz in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, which explores the brainy upper crust’s alienation from the dimmer and poorer lumpenproletariat that lives in trailers…

Merced, California

This book is yet another riposte to the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s incendiary and much-discussed The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). Huntington’s book had been itself a response to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man…

America’s colleges and universities, like most of the rest of the country, will soon be commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11, that preternaturally sunny day in early September a decade ago when 19 al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists commandeered four U.S. commercial air-liners and crashed them…

In November 2005, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, published by Harvard University and regarded by academics as one of the four top scholarly journals on economics in America, published the results of a study conducted by Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science and economics at UCLA,…

Cambridge, Mass.

I was briefly a political prisoner of the regime of Tunisia’s now-deposed President Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali—which I hope will convince my readers that I’m not carrying water for him, or for his similarly deposed Egyptian fellow dictator, Hosni Mubarak, when I say that the nearly eight weeks I spent…

Eleanor of Aquitaine

On July 30 of this year, a regional office of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) notified Belmont Abbey College, a small Catholic institution not far from Charlotte, N.C., that its policy of not covering contraception in its employee health insurance plan violated Title VII…

FDR v. The Constitution

San Diego

The in-your-face Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is currently being investigated for voter-registration fraud in 13 states. ACORN is often referred to as the spawn of Saul Alinsky (1909-72), the godfather of radical community organizers, whose most famous aphorism was…

Big Lake, Alaska

The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement

Kalamazoo

Learning Like a Girl

Jena, Louisiana

The Stillborn God

Yellow Springs, Ohio

In mid-July the top three Democratic presidential contenders paid their respects at an important shrine on the pilgrimage circuit of party fundraising: the Washington-based political arm of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. With its unceasing and aggressive advocacy of what it calls…

Until Proven Innocent

Richmond, Virginia

A World Apart

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria

Arizona senator John McCain, currently a bit behind Rudy Giuliani as Republicans' favorite presidential choice for 2008, is far and away the most consistently anti-abortion of all the top contenders. During his 20 years in the Senate (plus four in the House), he has never failed to cast his vote in…

Last September and October it was the 1960s all over again at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. All the elements were present from that bygone era of militant campus radicalism: the student protesters with their linked arms and picket signs, the hunger strike, the sprawling, slovenly tent…

I Feel Bad About My Neck

The Duke University "lacrosse rape case" is all but over. On Friday, January 12, the prosecutor, Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, petitioned the North Carolina attorney general's office to be recused from the case, and the office complied, appointing a pair of special prosecutors to…

Elia Kazan

My Fundamentalist Education

Are Men Necessary?

The Battle of Salamis

I OPENED MY MAIL A couple of weeks ago and was surprised to discover that I'm a plaintiff in a lawsuit. The name of the case is In re Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation, and it's been pending since 2000 in the federal district court in Manhattan. According to the legal…

THE "O.C." of The O.C. doesn't stand for "Orange County," the supposed setting of this Newport Beach-based prime-time soap that's a cross between Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210, although many of the fan websites that have sprung up to track the doings of its many characters seem to think so.

Vindication

The Salvation Army, with its brass bands, blue uniforms, and Christmas kettles, seems to be everyone's favorite charity. The $ 1.2 billion that the 121-year-old Army receives yearly in private contributions makes it the nation's top-grossing philanthropy, dwarfing such rivals as the YMCA, the…