Christopher Caldwell

One is hard put to see how a government commissioned to negotiate in good faith for independence could have come up with a deal quite this bad.

“I wasn’t born chancellor,” said German leader Angela Merkel in an ad for her 2009 reelection campaign. She repeated the phrase in late October at a press conference to announce her coming resignation as chairman of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Recent state elections have…

Italy’s coalition government came to power in May partly by winning an economic argument: The tight-budget “austerity” policies promoted by the European Union in the wake of the financial crises that began a decade ago were a sucker’s game, at least for slow-moving economies like Italy’s. Now the…

Years from now, perhaps only days from now, when people are no longer quite so inebriated with partisanship, those who wish Brett Kavanaugh well and those who wish him ill will probably agree on one thing: His defiant September 27 statement denying the charges leveled against him in the course of…

Germany cannot decide whether migrants or xenophobes are a bigger threat.

The anti-immigration nationalists come up short.

A vinyl pressing gone missing—and greatly missed.

Christopher Caldwell on the euro and the damage it wrought.

To judge from Western newspapers, the elections on June 24 in Turkey brought a crisis for democracy. The “crisis” is that Turks will continue to be governed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the perennially popular Islamist former mayor of Istanbul, for whom they voted overwhelmingly, and not by Muharrem…

Last week, France’s youthful and dapper president Emmanuel Macron swaggered into a battle of wits with the inexperienced and much-mocked lugnuts who run Italy’s new populist government. Macron was humiliated. That very same Italian populist government, meanwhile, threw down a gauntlet before half a…

A political establishment of long standing always suffers from a kind of mental illness. No matter how unambiguously it is repudiated or how joyously it is driven from office, its members will continue to remember the episode as accidental, temporary, and unjust. This week in Italy such arrogance…

In March, Italian voters decided they had more to fear from corruption than from incompetence. Despite the warnings of experts, they voted overwhelmingly for two parties that want Italy to reclaim its sovereignty from the overweening European Union. One of those parties, the League, is on the…

The deadly police tactics, insulting oratory, anti-Americanism, and overwhelming popularity of Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte.

Christopher Caldwell sneaks into a movie.

The borders around the 140-square-mile Gaza strip are guarded heavily by both its neighbors, Israel and Egypt, and the sea lanes are blockaded. Israel has lately managed to stop the rockets that the Palestinian radical group Hamas, which runs Gaza, has been firing into its southern cities. Israel…

Maybe not since the proto-Protestant radical Girolamo Savonarola was hanged and set on fire with two of his clerical accomplices in 1498 has Florence seen a weekend so filled with terrifying surprises and reversals of fortune. On Sunday morning, March 4, the city awoke to discover that Davide…

Tomorrow some people from Catholic Charities are coming to tow away the beautiful BMW 740iL that my father bought in Germany at the turn of the century. Like the vast majority of American males he was until then a car enthusiast who had never owned a nice car. He didn’t suffer from that​—​fancy…

Since January, the most important person in the campaign for the Italian elections coming on March 4 has been a missing person. Sad selfies of Pamela Mastropietro, a troubled 18-year-old from Rome, have appeared on the front pages of Italy’s newspapers since her body was found, chopped up, rinsed…

An ex-convict named Abraham Shakespeare thought he had hit the big time in 2006. He won $30 million in the Quick-Pick, one of Florida’s state lottery games. Women flocked to him, including one named Dee Dee Moore, who had a genius for embezzlement. By 2008, Shakespeare was a missing person. Police…

In nine days in early December, eight young people died of overdoses in Fairfax County, Va., the second-richest of the 3,007 counties in the United States. Mass events like these happen frequently and in all sorts of places. A half-dozen people died in the small Rhode Island town of Burrillville in…

When the nationalistic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party swept into the national legislature with 13 percent of the vote in the fall, the American op-ed industry boomed but Germans mostly took it in stride. The country has had populist parties since World War II, even extremist ones. They have…

A notice came last week from a newspaper I subscribe to. Since “offering check payments is becoming increasingly difficult to support,” the paper is “looking to move all our readers to digital payment methods.” The letter was bossy and presumptuous but the upshot was clear. There’s no longer anyone…

The attic where I write is stifling for half of the Washington, D.C., year. But in the autumn, breezes gust through the open windows and so do the sounds of our neighborhood—children chatting on their way to school, a barking dog, the squeak of the mailbox across the street being opened, and the…

The attic where I write is stifling for half of the Washington, D.C., year. But in the autumn, breezes gust through the open windows and so do the sounds of our neighborhood—children chatting on their way to school, a barking dog, the squeak of the mailbox across the street being opened, and the…

The Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos, who in the 1970s won the Panama Canal back for his country, used to tell less successful Latin American leaders that the United States is like a monkey on a chain. You can play with the chain all you like—but if you play with the monkey, you’ll get badly hurt.…

The Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos, who in the 1970s won the Panama Canal back for his country, used to tell less successful Latin American leaders that the United States is like a monkey on a chain. You can play with the chain all you like—but if you play with the monkey, you’ll get badly hurt.…

Berlin

Berlin

Eccentric Culture

 I spent a dreary half-week in Helsinki a few years ago. It was mid-March. Short days, empty streets, damp snow blowing off the harbor. The Finns I met said: “Come back in July. There’s nothing like a Scandinavian summer.”

This past week, at least a dozen French people, most of them journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, were gunned down during an editorial meeting by the brothers Chérif and Said Kouachi, two French Muslims who may have returned recently from waging jihad in Syria. French citizens…

British voters have just shocked Europe—and perhaps themselves—by repudiating their conservative prime minister Theresa May. May called a snap election because it seemed an easy way to bolster her slender parliamentary majority as she began negotiating Britain's exit from the European Union. That…

Not since 2011, when Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi was captured on a wiretap disparaging the size of her backside, has Angela Merkel suffered so grievously from the boorishness of allies. Donald Trump, on his first diplomatic visit to Europe, strong-armed the prime minister of Montenegro. He…

Tokyo

The 19th-century Irish-American vagabond and travel writer Lafcadio Hearn opened the first of his many books on Japan by quoting an English professor whom he met in his first days there. "Do not fail to write down your first impressions as soon as possible," the old scholar said. "They are…

The 19th-century Irish-American vagabond and travel writer Lafcadio Hearn opened the first of his many books on Japan by quoting an English professor whom he met in his first days there. "Do not fail to write down your first impressions as soon as possible," the old scholar said. "They are…

"Everyone said it would be impossible to do what we did," France's new president, 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron, told a crowd of politely applauding supporters in the courtyard of the Louvre shortly after the polls had closed on May 7. "But they didn't know France!"

You could tell the European political establishment had taken a shine to 39-year-old French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron by the number of articles in which he was referred to as both a "centrist" and an "outsider." Angelique Chrisafis, of Britain's Guardian, even called him a "maverick…

If Britain winds up leaving the European Union, it will be the doing of a woman who was not even publicly identified with the cause when voters approved the referendum for “Brexit" 10 months ago. This week Conservative prime minister Theresa May called a general election for June 8. It will…

The pronouncement that “democracies don't go to war with one another" has been a standby of chipper talk-show personalities for most of this century. We might want to reconsider it in light of the way Dutch and Turkish authorities were brought to the brink of an armed confrontation by little more…

A machete, a chainsaw, a potter's wheel, jumper cables, and an actual stack of Bibles: Anyone who saw what was sitting on my writer's desk right now would either diagnose paranoia or predict my imminent flight "off the grid." But the avocado-green Dutch oven, the cobalt-blue stemmed-glass dessert…

No journalist really understood the forces that over the past year made Donald Trump president, with the possible exception of the former newspaper publisher Conrad Black. In early 2016, with the primary season barely underway, Black wrote a column in Canada’s National Post entitled "Don't…

New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick was not going out of his mind when he told his team after its first playoff victory this year: “A big day for Rutgers!" Three of the Patriots' players—Devin McCourty, Logan Ryan, and Duron Harmon—had gone to college there, and all three had intercepted…

Years ago, when I was writing about a wave of immigrant violence in France, a higher-up in the housing authority of a provincial city took me on a tour of some slum projects. Alphonse was his name. He was the directeur de régie de gestion, which, as best I could translate, meant "director of the…

They are keening in the Bay Area. "Oh, America, what have we done?" wrote a San Bruno reader to the San Francisco Chronicle the week after November's election. "Many of us feel for President Obama, especially as we watch him gracefully support Donald Trump's transition, knowing Trump's priorities…

They are keening in the Bay Area. “Oh, America, what have we done?" wrote a San Bruno reader to the San Francisco Chronicle the week after November's election. "Many of us feel for President Obama, especially as we watch him gracefully support Donald Trump's transition, knowing Trump's priorities…

How could they? It's the question being asked by all the world's press and much of our own. How could the American people, after all they have learned about Donald Trump's private vulgarity, his boasting and confabulation, his wild and tacky business career—how could they vote to place him in the…

How could they? It’s the question being asked by all the world's press and much of our own. How could the American people, after all they have learned about Donald Trump's private vulgarity, his boasting and confabulation, his wild and tacky business career—how could they vote to place him in the…

Whenever an American presidential election threatens to produce a controversial or conservative victor, some of our intellectuals and celebrities swear that, should the dread event come, they're going to "move to Paris."

Whenever an American presidential election threatens to produce a controversial or conservative victor, some of our intellectuals and celebrities swear that, should the dread event come, they’re going to "move to Paris."

French authorities spent this week razing the notorious Jungle migrant camp, which THE WEEKLY STANDARD visited last winter. The Jungle was a shocking place. What made it unusual in the recent history of European migration is that it resulted from an actual obstacle being placed in migrants' way.…

A friend is in town for medical tests. We had a pasta lunch in the complex where he's being probed and scanned. He said he hadn't seen so many doctors since he was quarantined for tuberculosis as a child in the 1950s.

A friend is in town for medical tests. We had a pasta lunch in the complex where he’s being probed and scanned. He said he hadn't seen so many doctors since he was quarantined for tuberculosis as a child in the 1950s.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan is not only merited. It is inspiring, thrilling, reassuring. It restores a bit of faith in the prize itself. In recent decades the Nobel committee had taken to honoring fashionable charlatans or, at best, writers of limited scope and only…

"Excessive" is the word that Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch president of the Eurozone countries, used for the Obama Justice Department's decision in mid-September to seek mammoth fines from Deutsche Bank. The German bank's various mortgage-underwriting violations were committed in the days before…

A country is heading for trouble when its most popular writers worry that their words will land them in jail. France is that way now. Two years ago, TV commentator and journalist Éric Zemmour published Le Suicide français, an erudite, embittered, and nostalgic essay about the unraveling, starting…

A country is heading for trouble when its most popular writers worry that their words will land them in jail. France is that way now. Two years ago, TV commentator and journalist Éric Zemmour published Le Suicide français, an erudite, embittered, and nostalgic essay about the unraveling, starting…

There were seventy reporters credentialed to the New York Mets instructional league in Port St Lucie, Florida, this week. The 29-year-old college-football broadcaster, Christian evangelist and former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow was taking his first swings and shagging his first flies as a…

Germany is blowing up again over migration. The Saxon town of Bautzen has, like dozens of similar places across Germany, a barracks for some of the million or two Middle Eastern migrants who have been streaming across the Mediterranean for the past year-and-a-half. People in Bautzen aren't used to…

Modern societies have problems with social cohesion. Austria's problem is with adhesion. The envelopes for the postal ballots in the presidential revote scheduled for October don't stick, the interior ministry announced this week. He hinted that he might have to postpone the election. Some allege…

A surprising German poll showed Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) tied for second place with the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) just before this weekend's regional elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The incumbent Social Democrats are at 28 percent, the CDU and the…

Phew! "Turkey sends tanks into Syria ...," CNN headlined on Thursday. "The goal is to crush ISIS." It's about time Turkey joined the war against Islamist terror. Some had suspected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of having a soft spot for ISIS, even of letting his country be used as a supply…

How on earth does Angela Merkel think she is going to get re-elected?

Seventeen-year-old ISIS volunteer Kadiza Sultana was killed by a Russian bombing strike in Syria, according to the BBC. One extraordinary thing about her is that she was already, at her age, a widow: The ISIS fighter she had married (or been married off to) had lately been killed in action. What…

In the last days of July, German chancellor Angela Merkel rushed back to Berlin from her summer vacation to tell her countrymen how strong they were. She had done the same thing a year earlier, when Europe faced a wave of refugees from the war in Syria, joined by migrants from Iraq, Iran, and…

For a minute or two last week, over coffee in a working-class bakery in Massachusetts, I recovered my optimism about the human race. To say working-class might be a stretch. It was in a gentrifying neighborhood once inhabited by factory workers. It had an Italian name. Everyone was welcoming,…

London

Last month, I had to stay a night in Oxford. Having not set foot there since my 20s, I was looking forward to it. If memory served, there were good B&Bs near the Thames and the Cherwell. There were rooms at the colleges where one could stay for cheap. Any place would serve, as long as it was close…

London

Early in the Internet’s life, and relatively late in his own, the great journalist Christopher Hitchens embarrassed me away from the Web. This embarrassment, luckily, did not involve his writing anything. He had invited me to work on a project and deadlines were approaching. I emailed him without…

Her politics are leftish, and her hottest tirades are reserved for Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and both George Bushes. But the novelist Joan Didion voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964—"ardently," by her own account—and swears that "had Goldwater remained the same age and continued running, I would…

Not many people had heard of Frauke Petry, a pretty and very sassy 40-year-old chemist, until she started talking about how a country without borders is not a country at all and railing against the political establishment. It is natural for Americans to think of Petry as a kind of German version of…

Calais

"Suddenly there was a hand on my bottom .  .  ." was the rather atypical headline that ran in Germany's ordinarily conservative daily newspaper Die Welt on January 4. It described a riot-like series of sexual assaults and robberies carried out on New Year's Eve in the center of Cologne on the…

It is sad to walk down a poor street lined with $60,000 houses and to see, as one often does, a $45,000 car in one of the driveways. It is often some kind of macho Mustang, freshly washed, gaudy of hue, souped up, and glittery with detailing. What are these people thinking? Why not get a perfectly…

The other day, sitting around naked in a Bavarian hotel with a woman I'd just met, I thought of the best-mannered person I ever knew. Andrzej came from an elegant Warsaw family. I met him at the very end of his long and difficult life, when he was singing "Sto Lat" at his American grandsons'…

If Europe doesn’t get serious about protecting its borders, it’s going to head back to the days of barbed wire and concrete walls. That’s what President François Hollande warned when he went before a rare joint sitting of France’s National Assembly and Senate to argue for an extended three-month…

Vienna

Until mid-September, the half-million migrants who had been marching northwards into central Europe seemed like the Old World equivalent of Hurricane Sandy survivors. Families uprooted by the war in Syria were seeking safety, according to this view of things. It was sad to see little girls sleeping…

You could tell that the plan European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker announced on September 9 for distributing 160,000 refugees around the European Union was slapdash. You could tell by the number of times Juncker felt he had to browbeat his listeners about their Nazi past. “We Europeans…

In the early 1990s, amid public outrage over Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexually explicit photographs, including several of private parts, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) would settle arguments on the matter by pulling out his own. That the most avowedly conservative politician in America felt the need to…

Maybe “Culture Belongs to Everyone,” as they say at New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park shows, but the works of Atlantic essayist and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates appear to exist in another realm altogether. In the weeks since the publication of Between the World and Me, Coates’s letter to his…

Lately my home life has felt like a camping trip. I have been waking at 3 a.m. or so and staring. Stirring at night is one thing—rolling over, drifting into semi-consciousness, having a stray thought or two either to be remembered or not remembered in the morning—but staring is quite another. In…

A mass outbreak of syphilis, the radical economist and member of parliament Costas Lapavitsas told an interviewer, is about the only thing the European political establishment did not threaten Greece’s voters with before the country’s early-July referendum. 

I had coffee at Peet’s with a childhood friend who is plotting a major change in his life. Victor will pull it off. He has done it before. He does not subscribe to the lazy American view that there is something special about having big “dreams.” Every loser has them. But Victor works. In him,…

On a bright, zero-degree morning last month, as I was happily making my bed in the attic of friends in Brooklyn, I thought with a shudder of Ignác Hrubý. Being a houseguest is one of my joys. It combines security and adventure, familiarity and independence. Having houseguests used to be a joy, too.…

In the mid-1960s the most celebrated folk musician of his era bought a house for his growing family at the southern edge of the Catskills, in the nineteenth-century painters’ retreat of Woodstock. He was a “protest singer,” to use a term that was then new. His lyrics—profound, tender,…

In Athens in mid-January, two weeks before the election that would make 40-year-old engineer Alexis Tsipras Greece’s new prime minister, a bunch of cleaning ladies explained to me why they planned to vote for his party, the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza, for its Greek acronym). We met where…

Towards midnight one night last week I walked miles down the pitch-black European shore of the Bosphorus, the 15-mile channel that splits Istanbul and Turkey in half. To any watcher of TV news, that will sound nuts. Fifteen million people have converged on Istanbul in recent decades, cramming into…

French readers follow the herd. They believe in prizes. When a French author wins the Goncourt or the Nobel, people rush to bookstores and send his books rocketing to the top of the bestseller lists. But today the French have other things on their minds. President François Hollande is France’s…

A lot of people worry about Ebola these days. Not me. I’m calm, relatively speaking. That is, I’m calm, relative to the shuddering, sobbing basket case that the mere thought of infectious disease once reduced me to.

Boston

Ferguson, Mo.

A few weeks ago the Times Literary Supplement ran a photograph of the grisliest act of violence in Italy since World War II—Italy’s equivalent of our own September 11 attacks. In 1980 a shadowy group of homegrown terrorists planted a time bomb in the waiting room of the Bologna Central station.…

Kiev

The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has written that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty’s new book on inequality and wealth, “will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics.” Clive Crook describes the raptures with which intellectuals have greeted…

Amsterdam 

Paris

Back in the 1980s I spent one afternoon working for Ralph Nader and wound up with bite marks all over my bum. The memory returned a couple nights ago when a college kid came to the door, shaking the cup for some charity. He’d memorized a spiel about dioxins and microfluids and picoliters. He must…

Late last August, along the coast of New Hampshire, Kevin Walsh, police chief in the town of Rye, got a lecture on law enforcement from a bunch of grown-up bicyclists. Local law requires bikers to ride single-file when there is traffic. But this day, a pack of a dozen or so bikers were racing down…

Berlin

There is something futile about breakfast meetings. Breakfast ought to be where you dissipate the irrationality of dream-life and find your way back to a clear view of the things you care about in the waking world. Alcoholic memoirs are full of where-the-hell-am-I stories, some funny (“I seem to…

Just out of college I ran into my acquaintance Mona at a party in Boston. She was leaving the next day for the house on Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, where she had spent her summers growing up. Mahone Bay was remote and beautiful, she explained, and no one had ever heard of it. I told her I had heard of…

On Sunday, Nevada’s Democratic senator Harry Reid said that taking away the Senate minority’s right to filibuster would be outrageous, and even criminal. “That contempt for the rule of law and the law of rules,” Reid said, “will set a new precedent—an illegal precedent—that will always remain on…

An older Ukrainian guy walks his dogs in the woods near my house. We talk a lot. The other day I was complaining about tendonitis in my ankle, which was causing me pain. 

Rome

If it is true that people’s political assumptions reflect the battles that were being waged when they were 18, then my assumptions are probably unreasonable. The first political leader to whom I paid serious attention wound up the most successful Western leader since the Second World War. I spent…

Dublin

In the 1930s, a group of psychologists and physical anthropologists at Harvard chose 268 students whose medical, amatory, and career experiences they wished to document over the remaining decades of their lives. Department-store mogul W. T. Grant, who bankrolled the study, was curious about what…

Had this presidential campaign been a chess match, one move would have merited a row of exclamation points. A chess master will violate the rules of strategy as neophytes understand them (“You’re gonna lose your Queen!”) but only because he sees possibilities on the board that are invisible to…

Tbilisi

The Sunday before last, my plane was half an hour away from Budapest and a stewardess was bustling clumsily down the aisle. I was reading John Lukacs’s Budapest 1900. Something in his description of the Austro-Hungarian Empire led me to be glad I was wearing a neat shirt and blazer. In some…

It would be a good parlor game to draw up a list illustrating the variety of great men New England has produced—starting with the archetypal New England poet Robert Frost, continuing through, say, Benjamin Franklin, the gunsmith Samuel Colt, the black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, the Watergate…

In a beautiful poem called “The Capital,” W. H. Auden talks about rich people “waiting expensively for miracles to happen.” That is what is happening in all the capitals of Europe now, nowhere more so than in Madrid. Spain’s economy carries two impossible burdens. It has the most overregulated…

The French prefer “tenacity” to “cooperation” by a measure of 51-44 percent, according to a poll about political attitudes published this election season. By 57-41 percent they like “hard work and courage” better than “social justice and solidarity.” Such attitudes have not been widespread in…

Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner cannot claim to be the only world leader to lash out against oil speculators this week. Last Tuesday President Obama used an appearance in the White House Rose Garden to do the same. But Kirchner put her money where her mouth is. She announced she…

A

If you understood how French president Nicolas Sarkozy found himself holed up in a barroom in Bayonne last Thursday afternoon, it would take you a long way towards figuring out what is going to happen in France’s two-round presidential election, coming up in April and May. Sarkozy, who heads…

Last week Germany reclaimed its status as the leading power in Europe. In the two years since it became apparent that Greece was, essentially, bankrupt, there have been dozens of emergency meetings of the countries that use the common European currency, the euro. Most of the euro-using states…

I

A friend told me at dinner over New Year’s break that people had started walking at night in New York’s Central Park again. In the year just ended, the New York Times reports, there was about one robbery in the park every three weeks. Back in the 1980s, when I started visiting, there were two a…

Was it Western strength that triumphed over communism or Western freedom? It was both, of course, but Václav Havel, who died last week at the age of 75 in the Czech Republic, has always had a special place in the hearts of those who stress the latter. Lech Walesa, with his shipyard electrician’s…

A lot of intelligent money people think this is make-or-break week for the euro. They say that by Friday, December 9, either there will be a path toward resolution of Europe’s debt crisis, or events will accelerate toward a breakup of the single currency. One such is Morgan Stanley analyst Arnaud…

Just as incoming American presidents are given the atomic “briefcase” by their predecessors, along with the codes for launching a nuclear attack, perhaps Spanish prime ministers will henceforth receive a begging cup and a German phrasebook. It was al Qaeda that made José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of…

Chug-a-lugging malt liquor and smashing things may be the Oakland way of expressing support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. But there are other ways. The movement’s English sympathizers seemed to be asking what Jesus would do. In London last week I decided to visit them. 

London

London

Three or four years ago, during the Neronian decadence that preceded the financial crash of 2008, we got a glossy brochure in the mail from one of our doctors. It announced that for a modest fee—about a hundred dollars per person—our family could enjoy a whole range of special perquisites known as…

President Obama’s nomination of former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may finish off the brief political career of the most eccentric and poorly understood figure of the finance crisis. It was Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren who…

To have served as the intellectual architect of the stalest presidential campaign of the modern-media era, to have lost a record number of states, to have gained a reputation for ruthlessness and secrecy in the process—only in Washington is that a recipe for success. Running the 1984 effort of his…

W ith the afternoon off from a conference near Lisbon, I hired a guide to take me to Sintra—stronghold of the Moorish invader 1,200 years ago, center of monastic learning in the Middle Ages, pleasure garden of Portugal’s monarchy in the 19th century, and all of it spread across an upland pine…

There was supposed to be some good news amidst the dismal report card the U.S. real estate market got last week. On average, houses have lost a third of their value since their peak in 2006. Blighted Detroit has seen home prices fall to half their old level, and overbuilt Las Vegas is off by 60…

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was not just rich and powerful. He was also, until last Saturday, the likely next president of France. So commanding was his lead that rumors had been flying since April that Martine Aubry, his chief rival for the…

A mystery lies at the heart of America’s budget politics. In the weeks since debate began on raising the debt limit, President Obama has faulted Republican budget plans as a way of giving favors to “millionaires and billionaires” at the expense of the poor and aged, just as he did during last…

Helsinki If you believe the members of the fastest growing political party in Finland, their country is the sucker, the sap, the patsy among the Nordic nations. Norway never joined the European Union. Sweden and Denmark opted out of using its currency, the euro. Finland, however, is a full member…

The squat old lady standing in the entrance to the café in Saint Petersburg was blowing cigarette smoke out of her nose. She had thick glasses and gave off an air of running the place. In fact, she gave off an air of having run it since the Brezhnev era. I had missed lunch and was starving. I asked…

Paris

In the grand old days before the Irish real estate boom collapsed, the ruling Fianna Fáil party used to campaign the fun way. Infamously, the party held blowout fundraisers every year in a tent at the Galway races. Bankers and property magnates would show up, caked in bling, surrounded by…

There is a sweet spot in France’s cultural life, and maybe in the cultural life of all countries, where a thinker finds himself able to “raise profound questions” in a way that requires neither profundity nor questioning on the part of his readers. Never has a French book hit that sweet spot quite…

Just as he was due to take power over New Year’s weekend, Vincent Gray, the new mayor of Washington, D.C., declared surrender in what voters had anticipated would be a knock-down, drag-out fight. Last November Walmart announced plans to open its first stores in the District. The low-cost retailer…

It has been easy to snicker in recent weeks at the politicians who designed the euro, which appears on the verge of collapse after a decade as the common currency of a dozen countries in the European Union. Last May, the continent’s finance ministers put together a $145-billion package to bail out…

Not knowing how to say “Buzz off” in German, I consented when the taxi driver insisted I put my briefcase in the trunk. I was in a rush—I had a meeting at a government ministry. Almost from the moment the taxi began to move it was clear I had made a mistake. 

"You won’t find a lot of Keynesians here,” explained one German economic policymaker in Berlin in September. That will not be news to anyone who has spoken to his counterparts in Washington. In their view, Germany is a skulker, a rotten citizen of the global economy, the macroeconomic equivalent of…

There are certainly bigots in the world. By no reasonable definition is Juan Williams, whose journalistic career has been capped with several books on civil rights, one of them. But last week, Williams spoke honestly about having had a thought that has occurred to many people. He confessed on…

"Decaying industrial cities" are no longer a blot on the American landscape. What we have now is decayed industrial cities. From a certain vantage point—the consumerist one—the empty shells of these places are more pleasant than the actual, living cities were. Factories, tanneries, and high schools…

In 2005, University of Chicago finance professor Raghuram Rajan published a paper in the proceedings of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City called “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” Rajan, then the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, warned bluntly that…

"You must be busy packing,” an editor once said to me, five days before I flew to Europe to do an article for him. Yeah, I felt like saying, about as busy as you are preparing your retirement party. I pride myself on packing simply and quickly: a few shirts, underclothes, a baggie full of adapters…

I never watch a snowstorm without a feeling of gratitude that I got to live, as a teenager north of Boston, through the Blizzard of 1978. Since Washington is having its snowiest winter in a century, I have been having these feelings a lot. It is not the storm itself that sticks in the memory three…

My wife, back from walking the dog in a rainstorm, was drying her wet sox by the electric space heater in my attic office. I told her to be careful.

Ever since it was carved by treaty out of the Dutch, French, and German borderlands after the Napoleonic wars, Belgium has been an odd kind of country--short on space, sunlight, and national identity. It was a shotgun marriage of two peoples, the Dutch-speaking Flemings in Flanders and the…

Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the Swiss justice minister, took to the airwaves as soon as her fellow citizens voted by a landslide majority to write a ban on minarets into their constitution. She wanted to make clear to the world that this was "not a vote against Islam." Her government issued a press…

Jytte Klausen's book on the Danish cartoon crisis of 2005-06 opens in an unusual way--with a hand-wringing preemptive apology from Yale University Press for not reprinting (despite its profession to be "an institution deeply committed to free expression") the 12 caricatures of the prophet Muhammad…

When I was around the age of 20, the National Football League started to annoy me, and it hasn't stopped annoying me since. There are few institutions--none outside of academia--that mix pomposity and anti-intellectualism with quite the gusto the NFL does. You have the Roman-numbered Super Bowls…

During the "cartoon crisis" of early 2006--when mobs in Nigeria, Pakistan, Libya, the Palestinian territories, and elsewhere attacked embassies, looted buildings, and murdered bystanders to protest the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten--Jytte…

Since late 2007, when Michael Vick, the former star quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons, was incarcerated for running a dog-fighting club out of his Smithfield, Virginia, home, a lot of things have broken his way. Vick, now 29, was able to spend the last two months of his sentence under house…

Tegucigalpa

During the Kosovo war in 1999, a lot of Americans got a chuckle out of the story--probably apocryphal--about Yugoslav soldiers storming into a Belgrade news agency and demanding that the journalists hand over the Internet. What was funny was the way the soldiers sort of got it. They understood that…

Researching an article on Ireland that ran in the STANDARD last week, I came across a pessimistic series of employment projections by PwC. They sounded important. But I had a problem before I could cite them. Who or what was PwC? Was it the acronym of some trustworthy national statistics office? Of…

More than any other country over the past two decades--more even than China--Ireland has given up its traditional culture for the global economy. In a quarter century, it went from being a little, poverty-stricken, priest-ridden agricultural backwater to a swingin', low-tax, wide-open, unregulated…

For a while, I thought I was on the long slide into sad, sagging middle age, but it turns out I was wrong. My neighbors seemed to be losing interest in me, looking past me, drifting away. You know how it is. One morning you'll bump into a neighbor you've seen taking afternoon walks in the park.…

Britain's politicians care so much about constitutional protections for human rights that they have two sets of them--the centuries-old traditions laid out by parliament and precedent and the newfangled European Convention on Human Rights, written into British law in 1998. Neither of these stopped…

Part of the achievement of John Updike, who died on January 27, was that he became the preeminent all-around man of letters in our cutthroat literary culture without ever losing his reputation as a generous and gentle person. He did so while being derided by half the country as an unadventurous…

Time has killed off a lot of modernist art. College courses that teach Gertrude Stein must be awfully undersubscribed today, assuming they are offered. Modernist sculpture and painting still receive respectful attention, but this is largely because people have so much money invested in them. It…

Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain had much of value to say about the financial crisis as it raged through the headlines this fall. Rather than shred their campaign strategies, they played it safe, as most politicians would have. But in the name of justice we ought to recall that there was one…

Holes are opening in the populated landscape. Outside the attic window where I write this is an abandoned house. A "For Sale" sign, hanging from a yardarm by the front walk, creaks eerily in the wind. It has a permanent look to it, like the soggy "War Is Not the Answer" placards that have lined our…

It must be hard for people under 35 to imagine how large dog mess (as I am constrained to call it) once loomed in the day-to-day life of the nation. Not the metaphorical kind, which retains its privileged position in the fine arts and political oratory, but the actual stuff, as dropped by real…

Paris

Dakar/Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Georgetown, Delaware

Rome

Paris

ON APRIL 29, 1951, Kingsley Amis complained in a note to Philip Larkin about a slew of mediocre new novels he had been reading. He singled out Anthony Powell's A Question of Upbringing for especial contempt. "The most inconclusive book I have ever read," Amis called it. "The sort of book where you…

Berlin

PEOPLE OFTEN USE THE WORD "culture" as a synonym for "cuisine." When they claim to adore the "diverse and vibrant culture" of the city they live in, what they're actually trying to say, nine times out of ten, is that they like kung pao chicken. Those of us who grew up in Massachusetts often hear…

WHEN THE RUSSIAN ARMY CHASED Napoleon's troops all the way back to Paris in 1814, the occupiers were not just tolerated but welcomed. They were chic. The empress Josephine herself went riding with the young czar. The locals seemed to delight in subjugation, the more undignified, the better. "We…

London

"THIS CONSTITUTION," SAID French president Jacques Chirac in mid-April, "is in its way, a daughter of French thought." He was talking about the 448-article constitutional treaty (the U.S. Constitution has 7 articles) that is meant to bind the 25 countries of the European Union into something like a…

Malmö, Sweden

Amsterdam

PROBABLY NO ARTICLE has traveled more miles on the Internet this season than the cri de coeur that the novelist Jane Smiley wrote for Slate 24 hours after the election. Using her supposedly Bush-supporting relatives in Missouri as evidence, Smiley chalked the election results up to the "ignorance…

THE AFTERNOON of Election Day in Washington, one of the Dutch journalists in town to cover the vote mentioned to me that there had been a spectacular killing in Amsterdam that morning, which would be international news as soon as the dust cleared from the Bush-Kerry contest. True enough. Most of…

Strasbourg

SELDOM HAS THE COURSE of European history been changed by a non-politician's throwaway remark in a German-language newspaper on a Wednesday in the dead of the summer doldrums. But on July 28, Princeton historian Bernard Lewis told the conservative Hamburg-based daily Die Welt that Europe would be…

New York

New York

THE TALK OF THE GARDEN last night was Arnold Schwarzenegger's exuberant tribute to the American freedom that first drew him to fame and fortune in California. Every other pundit compared his oratory to Ronald Reagan's. Many Republicans criticized the organizers for failing to end the evening on…

What a role reversal. After a Boston convention in which Democrats delivered a simple message ("We Like the Army") with the discipline of a Prussian military drill, Republicans--if Night One in New York is any indication--are following up with improv night at the coffee house. The GOP on display is…

Boston

THE RED SOX were playing the Angels in Anaheim last Sunday. I tuned in on the Internet with Boston one run down in the sixth, just moments before future Massachusetts governor David Ortiz drilled a three-run homer to right. A hollow silence usually descends over the ballpark at such a reversal,…

Istanbul

LAST WEEK, at the cash register of a sporting-goods store, I saw what looked like a display of baseball cards. It annoys me that in corner stores, where baseball cards ought to be sold, they are less and less present. Why? Because children no longer get allowances to mete out, nickel by nickel, for…

Madrid

THE ELECTION VICTORY of Spain's antiwar Socialists in the wake of al Qaeda bombings has left American commentators worried. The war on terrorism, it seems, is endangered by what Italy's Corriere della Sera calls "the spirit of Munich . . . blowing across Europe." And that spirit appeared to be…

FOR THE FIRST TIME since September 11, 2001, terrorists have struck the West in a spectacular way, murdering (at last count) 199 innocents and injuring a thousand others with a dozen bombs planted in Madrid's commuter-rail system at rush hour, three days before national elections. The first…

AS A GROWING BAND of ragtag rebels converged on Port-au-Prince last week, threatening to topple Haitian dictator Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Bush administration's policy at first appeared hesitant. The situation was admittedly confusing. But happily, by the end of the week, the administration…

LUTECE, for four decades New York's premier French restaurant, is closing for good this month. The news has hit me hard. I remember Lutèce from the go-go 1980s. Giants walked on Broadway in those days--Leona Helmsley and Ivan Boesky, Keith Hernandez and Vernon Mason. My perch in the Manhattan…

EXECUTIVES at MTV decided that 100 million Americans would want to watch onetime teen heartthrob Justin Timberlake violently expose the mutilated breast of the 40-ish rock singer Janet Jackson during the halftime show of last week's CBS's Super Bowl broadcast. We have no interest in disputing that…

IN LATE DECEMBER, Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual leader of the Lebanese radical organization Hezbollah, released to the Western media a letter in which he complained of a "stripping of liberties from Muslims, even when they have not disobeyed the law," and warned of an emerging climate…

I WENT to a rock club the other night. When we arrived, a 5-foot-3 college-age guy with an acoustic guitar was onstage. He didn't look like a rock star. He looked like the kids I once sat next to in AP Calculus, earnest and self-effacing--ingratiating, even. This was a look he gave every evidence…

Paris

IN 1983, around the time NATO was placing medium-range missiles in Europe, ABC aired the made-for-TV movie "The Day After," which concerned what would happen to Lawrence, Kansas, in a nuclear war. The film had been trumpeted for weeks in advance as "unquestionably-the-most-shocking" this and…

"IF THERE IS ONE THING non-Californians need to know about this campaign," said veteran GOP strategist Allan Hoffenblum towards the end of the mid-September state Republican convention in Los Angeles, "it's that it's not a 'circus.' It's not a 'spectacle.' It's not a joke." There has been a lot of…

ON OCTOBER 7, Californians will be offered more than a chance to pick a new governor. They will be asked whether they want to amend the state's constitution to outlaw most public classifications by race. Under Proposition 54--known as the Racial Privacy Initiative to its backers, and as CRECNO (the…

LAST NIGHT, strolling at dusk in the small town where I'm vacationing, I passed a half-dozen 14- and 15-year-old boys. Some were walking, some were balancing jerkily on their bikes, struggling to coast at walking speed. They all had that weird adolescent gift for remaining unintelligible while…

BY EARLY SPRING, journalists and political activists had begun to notice that former Vermont governor Howard Dean had a knack for firing up crowds. He was little known and badly financed, but his issues were unfudged and easy to understand: budget-balancing, civil unions for gays, a…

THE OTHER DAY, my e-mail in-box saw an extraordinary convergence of two clear and present dangers: weapons of mass destruction and spam. Specifically, Saddam's secret deal with Niger to build weapons-grade uranium has wound up embedded in the Internet's oldest confidence game. You've probably seen…

WE ARE GOING TO NEED a new way to think about spam, those importunate unsolicited e-mails advertising products, pandering to vices and insecurities, and bearing headers like GET LOLITA OUT OF DEBT BY ADDING THREE INCHES TO YOUR MORTGAGE! The problem is changing before our very eyes. Shortly after…

New York

FOR CERTAIN self-important novelists and CEOs, the blue-collar biography has been a staple affectation for decades. Before writing his unreadable novel or founding his unscrupulous corporation, Joe Blow, the dust jacket or business-magazine profile tells us, "worked as a private detective, a…

FOR THE BOSTON RED SOX, the Clubhouse Blowup has over the last quarter-century been as reliable a summer fixture as the August Collapse. Generally the debates have been over whether Yaz is a fathead or Lynn's a malingerer or Roger deserves his pay. But this season the whole team--along with the…

Paris

IN ALL LIKELIHOOD, the pictures Americans saw on every news network Wednesday morning will be the ones we see on the covers of newsweeklies when they run their year-end wrap-ups next December: jubilant Iraqis dancing around the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, citizens of all…

Paris

Paris

Editor's note: Now that war has begun, The Daily Standard will be deviating from its normal schedule. For the next several days we'll have morning and afternoon editions posted regularly and other reports posted throughout the day, so you'll want to check back with us often.

ON THE FIRST semi-drivable day of the mid-February snowstorm here in Washington, I got a reminder of how membrane-thin can be the line that divides private property from public. My neighbor, Otto Snowden, called to complain that our babysitter was parked in his space. By "his space," Mr. Snowden…

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, every adult in my family smoked: both parents, all four grandparents, and every single uncle and aunt. It was Camels (and Dutch Masters "President" cigars) for the men, Viceroys for the women. There was an ashtray on every surface flat enough to accommodate one--coffee table,…

Cincinnati

EUROPE'S GREATEST NEWSWEEKLY, Hamburg-based Der Spiegel, is also one of its biggest-selling. Since the European appetite for in-depth news analysis is unlikely to be much larger than ours, you have to assume the magazine has a secret formula for attracting such a wide readership. And it does: The…

THE EVIDENCE IS EVERYWHERE that nepotism is becoming a major issue in American life. If no one in Washington is calling it a major problem, that's only because to describe it as such would insult virtually the entire leadership of both major parties. We are in the absurd situation where our current…

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=]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…

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…

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…

FLORENCE

IT IS NO GRAVESIDE cliché to say that the death of Paul Wellstone leaves a gaping void in American politics. Let's be clear about exactly where that gaping void lies. Iowa senator Tom Harkin's tribute to Wellstone as a man who "made a miner up on the Iron Range know that he was as important as the…

THE BOARD of the Schumann Foundation (president, Bill Moyers) met on Thursday to settle on a strategy that would allow one of its most expensive projects--the leftish American Prospect magazine--to survive in the current political climate. Perhaps the Schumann Foundation wants to cut costs so that…

BERLIN German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has been getting help from the heavens lately. On the last Saturday of the tightest election campaign in the history of democratic Germany, Schroeder chose the Baltic port of Rostock as the backdrop for his closing speech. The idea was to advertise his…

AS THE DISGRACED Andrew Fastow makes his way into court this week to explain his wheeling and dealings as chief financial officer of the Republican-connected Enron corporation, there will be plenty of Republicans urging Americans not to lose their focus on the Democrat-connected telecom group…

A FEW WEEKS AGO, as I left the house I grew up in, my stepmother remembered, as she always does, that she had "some of my things." These "things" are the treasures of my youth--my first baseball glove, letters from friends now dead, my college diploma--which are fighting a losing battle for attic…

IN HIS ADDRESS to the United Nations General Assembly last Thursday, President Bush, perhaps without meaning to, used a word that always jolts Europeans like a burst of electroshock. The word--which came up towards the end of his case against Saddam Hussein's weapons buildup--is "irrelevance." That…

FINALLY we have President Bush's rationale for waging war on Saddam Hussein. It is, the president told several House and Senate leaders on Wednesday, that Saddam "has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he had made not to harbor, not to develop weapons of mass destruction." This…

THE WASHINGTON POST'S sense of priorities has me scratching my head. Yesterday morning it ran one of the great scoops of our soon-to-be-a-year-old War on Islamism, under the headline Al Qaeda Deputies Harbored by Iran.

Manhattan Monologues

YEARS AGO, in the wake of Zoe Baird's confirmation hearings--in which our would-be attorney general was disqualified for failing to report her nanny's income--Gary Trudeau did a series of "Doonesbury" strips that pointed up the absurdity of such scandal-hunting. In the most outre of them, his…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

FROM EARLY ADOLESCENCE, I never doubted that my writerly life would lead me into a romantic European exile. I was right. Here I am! Just like Goethe, just like Henry James: standing on the edge of Lake Como, staring a mile across the water at the wall of pine-speckled, auburn-colored Alps that…

THE TEN-DAY, four-country tour of Africa that Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and U2 lead singer Bono Vox completed last week was taken for a publicity stunt, even if the controversy it was meant to address is an important one. Bono's theory is that the billions of dollars in aid that sub-Saharan…

UH-OH! R. Kelly is in big trouble. He's been arrested for having made a dirty video with a 14-year-old girl. From the time I first heard the news on a drive-time talk show until yesterday morning, when I read about it in detail on page 1 of the New York Post, I've been unable to shake the same…

LAST WEEK'S IRISH ELECTIONS were supposed to provide a measuring stick for the wave of right-wing xenophobia that commentators warn is sweeping Europe. Spurred by a decade of dynamic growth, the country now has immigrants--tens of thousands of Balkan refugees and African laborers--for the first…

GEORGE W. BUSH waited until he was safely in Europe to declare that he wanted no independent investigation into the "Phoenix memo," written in the summer of 2001, which detailed links between al Qaeda and young Arabs enrolled in American flight schools. The congressional intelligence committees are…

STRASBOURG, FRANCE The atmosphere of the first round of France's presidential election was captured by candidate Francois Bayrou's visit to Strasbourg on April 9. Bayrou, who represents Valery Giscard d'Estaing's center-right Union of French Democracy (UDF), was scheduled to visit a new mayoral…

BONIFACISME Last August, Pascal Boniface, a top foreign policy adviser to Lionel Jospin, wrote an open "Letter to an Israeli Friend" that appeared in Le Monde. The echo of the "Letters to a German Friend" that Albert Camus had written in 1943 and 1944 was not lost on Jewish readers. The lawyer…

PARIS--The Monday morning newspapers were already on the streets at midnight Sunday, and so was the French left. Both were describing National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen's runner-up finish in the first round of the presidential elections as "A shock!" and "A political earthquake!" Le Pen, who…

THE WOMAN at the hotel front desk, who bore a name tag reading Jessica Doodle, must have got high marks in Service with a Smile class at hotel management school. She beamed at me as if I were every present under the Christmas tree, and said, "Welcome, sir, to Colonial Williamsburg!" She didn't say…

REPORTER ALFONSO CHARDY wrote an important but little-noticed article for last Wednesday's Miami Herald. It adds to the proofs that we never got the whole story behind the Clinton administration's case for deporting 6-year-old boat person Elian Gonzalez back to Fidel Castro's Cuba. Young Elian had…

LONDON'S Financial Times, read by more and more American businessmen, does not have a reputation for remoteness from the facts. But it is in the process of acquiring one. On March 28, the FT published a piece of terrorist propaganda under the guise of news. In an article entitled "US Muslims see…

A LONG-AWAITED exhibition of Francisco Goya's paintings, drawings, etchings, and cartoons of women arrived in Washington this week. Long-awaited because of one woman in particular: the one shown in "The Naked Maja" and (in exactly the same pose) in "The Clothed Maja," which until June will hang…

SHORTLY AFTER she was sent to Harris County Jail to await trial for drowning her five children in a bathtub, Houston housewife Andrea Yates asked a psychiatrist to shave her head so she could see if the number 666 was still printed on her skull. That wasn't her only problem. A full month into her…

A PROBLEM with carrying fountain pens is that strangers use them as a pretext for conversation. Fa-miliar icebreakers include: "Say, is that some kind of fountain pen?" (meaning: Say, are you some kind of nancy boy?) and "Wow! Can I try writing something with that?" (Answer: "No.") And at the end…

WITH THE upset victory of businessman Bill Simon over former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, the Republican primary in the California governor's race marks the end of an era. Not just the end of the Riordan era, but the end of an era when Republican politics seemed to follow identifiable…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

CELEBRATING Martin Luther King Day gets done in different ways. If there are delightful afternoon games all over the NBA and solemn ceremonies at the White House, there is also, in certain quarters, an angry score-settling and wound-picking that can't be confused with "celebration" in any way. That…

Christopher Caldwell reviews Bernard Lewis's 'What Went Wrong?'

ON CHRISTMAS DAY, Wallid Shatter, an Arab-American member of President Bush's Secret Service detail, was ordered off American Airlines Flight 363 from Baltimore to Dallas. He was on his way to join the president at his Crawford, Texas, ranch.

The Assassin's Cloak An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists edited by Irene and Alan Taylor Canongate, 684 pp., $35 AN ANTHOLOGY of diary entries may seem a silly idea, rather like an anthology of everything. But, in fact, diaries are not infinitely varied. Some are to-do lists in living…

ON WEDNESDAY, I was invited to a panel discussion hosted by Harper's magazine to discuss issues relating to press coverage of the war on terrorism. This is being written before that panel--but I've been reading up on the matter all afternoon, and I can't for the life of me figure out what we're…

THERE HAS ALWAYS been a division among Beatles fans between "Paul People" and "John People." Paul People love the Beatles for their music. While mindful of both the extraordinary songwriting symbiosis between Paul McCartney and John Lennon and the lesser contributions of George Harrison and Ringo…

A RECENT COLUMN on major league baseball's plan to cut two teams before next spring brought an avalanche of letters. Half of them argued that the expansions of the last 32 years haven't had an effect on the quality of pitching. Some of them praised Mark McGwire. These were largely unconvincing.

LAST WEEKEND, the Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan. This weekend, as we go to press, their last remnants are fighting for their lives under heavy American bombardment in two rapidly collapsing redoubts: Kunduz in the north and Kandahar in the south. Terrorist leaders of al Qaeda have been…

LAST WEEK, sportswriter Stephanie Myles described major league baseball owners' proposal for the elimination of two big-league teams as "a contraction plan few want." Myles writes for the Montreal Gazette, so you'd expect her to say that. Her Expos are, along with the Minnesota Twins, one of the…

THE DOMESTIC-FRONT PRESS COVERAGE of our war on terrorism has featured at least a half dozen stories of knuckle-dragging American provincial lugnuts who have bolted from commercial flights upon finding a couple of kaffiyeh-wearing gentlemen aboard. These stories generally end the same way. The…

AFTER ATTENDING a briefing held by CIA director George Tenet and FBI director Robert Mueller last Thursday, Florida Democrat Bob Graham emerged from the Capitol to let the American people know where we stand in the search for those who mailed the treated anthrax that has thus far resulted in three…

TO FOLLOW UP on last week's article on the state of French public opinion:

IT WAS CLEAR EVEN FROM THE POLLS that something changed during Anthrax Week. When Gallup asked Americans about the most important issues facing the nation, that perennial favorite response from prosperous times--"education!"--registered only 3 percent. AIDS, drugs, civility, and various other…

MOST AMERICANS HAVE FACED the war on terrorism knowing that we may have to "go it alone" at some point. According to this unilateralist school, the anti-Taliban, anti-al Qaeda, anti-terrorism coalition we've assembled will--as the bombing toll in Afghanistan rises--gradually erode until there's no…

THE RESPONSE OF AMERICANS TO THE hijack-threatening videotaped rant of Osama bin Laden's spokesman Sulaiman abu Ghaith on Tuesday was probably: "I don't remember ordering this crap in my cable package." Of course they didn't--the footage came from Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based independent news…

WHEN I MOVED TO WASHINGTON in the late 1980s, I was without a job; I saved face by calling myself a "freelancer." And I had few friends; I found the next-best thing in bars. At 10 or so most weeknights, I’d walk down to the Blockhouse. I chose the place because it happened to be on the corner. But…

HALF A DECADE AGO, I wrote an essay for The Weekly Standard on "Five Ways America Keeps Getting Better." It concerned, for the most part, various revolutions in retail the 1990s had wrought: Borders, where you could sit eating cheesecake at 10 o'clock at night, listening to Joni Mitchell and…

"JEEZ, IT’S FOUR O’CLOCK ALREADY," I said to my colleague Andrew Ferguson recently. (At four o’clock yesterday, in fact.) "What am I going to write my Casual on?" "Why don’t you write about that stupid video game you’ve wasted your whole day playing?" said Andy. "Sploodge." He is referring to…

ON SEPTEMBER 12, BRITAIN’S CONSERVATIVE PARTY will tally 330,000 mail-in votes for party leader. At that point it will bestow upon either (a) the centrist former chancellor of the exchequer Kenneth Clarke or (b) the hard-line Thatcherite shadow defense minister Iain Duncan Smith what increasingly…

THE 20 MEMBERS OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION voted unanimously to block General Electric's $45 billion takeover of Honeywell, and what's the result? For one thing, the biggest gap between front-page and business-page reporting in two decades. The financial boom of the 1990s always had a strong…

THE FIRST WORD ANYONE EVER SPOKE to me in London was blimey. Age 18, I came out of the Earl’s Court tube station from Heathrow and asked a woman where the youth hostel was. "Blimey!" she replied, unironically. "Aw daon’t knaow." I would later spend a couple of years living in London, but have…

WHEN JERSEY CITY made a moderate Democrat its first black mayor last week, governor Donald DiFrancesco, a Republican, showed up to congratulate him. "Now Jersey City has a real mayor," he said. DiFrancesco was there because the election was read across the state as a defeat for the outgoing mayor,…

THE DEATH OF 10-YEAR-OLD CANDACE NEWMAKER -- who was asphyxiated last year during a bizarre New Age therapy for a dubious disorder -- had all the ingredients of an O.J. Simpson-esque cause c l bre. It's not just that Candace was a particularly charming girl, although she appears to have been. It's…

LITERARY CRITICS WHO MAKE YOU ROLL on the floor laughing are a dime a dozen; what makes Christopher Hitchens rare is that he can do so intentionally. Readers who know Hitchens through his political polemics in the Nation and elsewhere will be grateful that he brings the same stylistic toolbox to…

After spending the 1980s wallowing in unremunerative pomposity, English filmmakers changed their ways, building a successful if schizophrenic commercial industry out of two kinds of formulaic blockbuster. On the upmarket end were literary adaptations, of which the BBC's Pride and Prejudice (1995)…

After spending the 1980s wallowing in unremunerative pomposity, English filmmakers changed their ways, building a successful if schizophrenic commercial industry out of two kinds of formulaic blockbuster. On the upmarket end were literary adaptations, of which the BBC's Pride and Prejudice (1995)…

Democracy in Europe

BILL CLINTON SPENT MUCH of his presidency claiming he was being persecuted with a new political attack strategy: Partisan character assassins would use the Drudge Report or the National Enquirer or the American Spectator to air charges -- on Whitewater, on the Lewinsky affair -- that didn't meet…

At underground parking garages, I like watching the "valets" gas vehicles up the spiral ramp, weaving around columns and going airborne over grates and speed bumps. But not yesterday, when I saw my own car ascending with a softball-sized patch of pistachio-colored paint next to the headlight, and…

TWO WEEKS AGO, the largest coalition of activist groups ever assembled declared holy war on George W. Bush's attorney-general nominee, former Missouri senator John Ashcroft -- arch-conservative, abortion foe, and Assemblies of God congregant. The campaign flouted American constitutional practice.…

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…

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…

WHAT'LL BECOME OF Katherine Harris? During the stormy two and a half weeks between Election Day and her final certification of George Bush as winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes on November 26, the Florida secretary of state was accused of being opportunistic, partisan, corrupt, and stupid.

THE MATHEMATICS of this presidential election is as confusing as any since 1968. If one truth was held to be self-evident at the start of this campaign, it was that George W. Bush could not lose Florida and win the presidency. Yet some polls in the final days had him losing Florida and winning the…

Republican Senate candidate Bob Franks has been described by one New Jersey Democratic Senate aide -- very privately -- as "the perfect senatorial candidate for New Jersey." He was a state assemblyman at age 27, chairman of the state Republican party while still in his thirties, architect of New…

GONE WAS THE AL GORE whose high-energy, big-necked huffing and puffing about policy led one to the sure conclusion that if presidential debating were an Olympic event, the veep would have been disqualified for steroid use. Gone, too, was the George W. Bush who looked like a diffident, 5-foot-2…

Long Island

On April 15, 1953, in a note attached to the typescript of his first novel, Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis told his editor, "Serio-comedy is the formula really, though if it gets by at all I imagine it'll get by chiefly on the score of the comic angle."

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

AL GORE'S choice of Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate was so widely hailed for breaking an ethnic barrier that the seeming strategic illogic of it escaped notice. But as last week began, Gore faced problems beyond the power of logic to solve. On one hand, his left-wing base…

-- Philadelphia

-- Philadelphia

GEORGIA'S EIGHT Republican congressmen huddled for two solid days last week to determine whether any of them was crazy enough to risk his seat to challenge Zell Miller, newly named to the Senate seat of Paul Coverdell, who died of a brain hemorrhage on July 18. What two weeks ago looked like…

America's Forgotten Majority

EDITOR'S NOTE: Owing to a production error in last week's issue, an article by Tucker Carlson was mistakenly printed in place of this piece by Christopher Caldwell. Our abject apologies.

Two Cuban baseball players -- the star Andy Morales, the record-holding slugger who helped Cuba defeat the Baltimore Orioles with a dramatic three-run homer in an exhibition game last year; and Carlos Borrego, whose only record consists in his having been caught nine times by the Cuban Coast Guard…

Buffalo, N.Y.

Last week's 11th Circuit opinion, which effectively resolves the Elian Gonzalez case and clears the way for young Elian to be sent back to Cuba, leaves us feeling a sickening sort of vindication.

"I THINK it's his school uniform," said Justice Department spokesperson Carole Florman of the white sailor shirt and blue scarf Elian Gonzalez appeared in at Wye Plantation last week. The editors of Cuba's government newspaper Granma recognized Elian's outfit, and that's why they ran five pictures…

When INS agents broke into Lazaro Gonzalez's house at 5 A.M. on April 22 to arrest his 6-year-old nephew Elian Gonzalez, civil libertarians -- and those skeptical about giving a refugee child the bum's rush back to Fidel Castro's Cuba -- had a lot of questions. Tom DeLay promised Republicans would…

Last week, Juan Miguel Gonzalez filed a motion with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asking to be given the sole right to speak for his son Elian. The motion characterized Lazaro Gonzalez, Juan Miguel's uncle, as an "intruder and uninvited meddler in Elian's life." His Miami relatives, Juan…

When I was first married and looking for a place to live, my father said, "Get as much house as you can, because you're going to be in it for a lot longer than you think."

Last week, attorney general Janet Reno demanded that Lazaro Gonzalez deliver his great-nephew Elian to Elian's father Juan Miguel, now holed up in the diplomatic residence of the Cuban mission outside Washington. Lazaro did not knuckle under. Had he done so, the boy would now be in Cuba, the…

One of the first news photos of Juan Miguel Gonzalez arriving at Dulles International Airport to reclaim his son Elian showed him in mid-stride, so you could see the soles of his shoes. They were unmarred by any contact with pavement; they'd obviously been in a box when the plane took off from…

We'll say it again: The rush to send Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba is wrong. The 6-year-old rafter, rescued in the Straits of Florida last November, deserves at least a full hearing in an appropriate court before anyone considers allowing his father to take him back to the dictatorship his mother…

SEEMS TIME FOR A BREATHER. By sewing up their respective nominations in the first days of March, vice president Al Gore and Texas governor George W. Bush have booked themselves the longest general election campaign in American history. It's eight months until November, and the candidates have…

It's now three months since little Elian Gonzalez was discovered lashed to an inner tube three miles off the Florida coast, after a crossing in which his mother and 10 other Cuban rafters died while attempting to reach the United States. In recent days, the case has begun to take on the bizarre…

Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort

Senior year in college, I lived on a run-down street in Somerville, Massachusetts. One Sunday night, my roommate called me to the front window and said, Look! There was some kind of riot going on in front of Studley's bar. We drank there a lot, since it was really cheap: 75 cents for a bottle of…

Last week, lawyers for 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez filed a motion in federal court to prevent the boy from being sent back to Cuba. It's an uphill battle.

My grandfather, who never had a son, made himself responsible for my education. He did it by following his enthusiasms. He taught me the alphabet with Red Sox box scores, told terrifying bedtime stories about explorers in the Dark Continent (as Africa was once invariably called), and set math…

TWO MONTHS AGO IN BRUSSELS, I interviewed European Commission president Romano Prodi with a dozen other American journalists. "Sorry for the confusion," he said, as he hurried into his office five minutes late, "but we're getting ready for Seattle." And a puzzled, sidelong look went around the room…

Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest

Hamburg, Germany

At a book party for Erica Jong's What Do Women Want? at the Town Hall Theater in New York last January, Naomi Wolf tried to answer the question herself. "More!" she declaimed. "Better orgasms. More touching. More love. . . . We really are demon goddesses of lust."

Any time I e-mail a friend that I'm working on an article in Paris, he'll send me back a short note reading: "Tough assignment!" or "Life is hard, huh?"

WHEN DAN QUAYLE announced last week that he was abandoning his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, comedians reacted like depositors during a bank run -- banging at the gates to withdraw all the jokes they'd saved up for dead winter nights. Craig Kilborn noted, ruefully, "Quayle…

ALL THE BLACKS who got Ph.D.s in physics last year and all the American Indians who got Ph.D.s in math could ride comfortably on one tandem bicycle. Blacks make up 13 percent of the population, but only 1 percent of engineers and 7.2 percent of computer techies. Lump them together with American…

"A good poet," wrote Randall Jarrell in 1951, "is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great."

DURING THE JANUARY 1998 INTERVIEW in which Hillary Clinton became the first American politician since Joe McCarthy to link the words "vast" and "conspiracy" in a single sentence, there occurred a little-remembered exchange on the Monica Lewinsky affair. NBC's Matt Lauer asked, "If an American…

Cooperstown, N.Y.

When my friend Ivan came to visit from Moscow last week, we sat on the back porch, drinking coffee in the 85-degree heat until 1:30 in the morning. Much of our conversation concerned coffee. Ivan has the theory that Russia's opening to the West since Gorbachev has given it a real intoxicant problem…

WHEN THE PRESS CAME KNOCKING to ask William Eisner how his Milwaukee-based ad company planned to get Steve Forbes elected president, Eisner gave them a lecture on Mrs. Paul's Fish Sticks. Eisner specializes in rebranding products that have drifted off to the penumbra of public attention. And after…

PASCAL FORGIONE WITNESSED A HIJACKING and it cost him his job. Last February 10, Forgione, who heads the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), was due at an Education Department press conference to announce the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a periodic…

Stephen Cox, a literature professor at the University of California-San Diego and a Titanic buff, makes no apology for this little bout of intellectual slumming.

HOTELS LIST PORNOGRAPHIC VIDEOS on their guests' bills as "room charges." College liquor stores itemize keg purchases as "provisions" or "supplies." And for the last year and a half, the Federal Communications Commission has levied a phone tax and called it a "universal service charge." It comes to…

SOMEWHERE IN THE BARELY NOTICED and long-forgotten middle of his last State of the Union address, President Clinton said, "Parents should never face discrimination in the workplace. I will ask Congress to prohibit companies from refusing to hire or promote workers simply because they have children."

For fifty years it has been a big project of the American academy to rescue the poet Robert Frost from his admirers -- to show that his traditional rhyming sonnets and odes were not merely beautiful ditties, that his blank-verse narratives of ordinary New Englanders were more than just nice stories.

LAST WEEK IN NEW YORK, Democratic State Committee chairwoman Judith Hope dropped a broad hint. She told a Manhattan television station she expected Hillary Rodham Clinton to make a decision within months on whether to run for Pat Moynihan's open Senate seat in 2000. That means Hillary's decision…

The first time Ezra Pound ever flew on a plane was in November 1945, when he was brought from Italy to the United States to stand trial for treason. He was guarded for the forty-eight-hour trip by Lieutenant Colonel P. V. Holder, who described him as:

"My boyfriend and I used to have a lot of phone sex," said a girl sitting next to me at a dinner party in Boston in 1989.

Reading all the accounts of Joe DiMaggio's brave battle with illness has led me to recall the time when he and I corresponded, hitter to hitter. It was through my Uncle Irvin that we hooked up.

There's an old Russian joke about how the second-worst thing that ever happened to the country was the rise of Lenin -- the worst thing, naturally, being the death of Lenin. Americans interested in tobacco legislation may be living a version of that joke. If the second-worst turn of events in the…

I was at dinner with a tableful of Washington journalists -- eight right-wingers and a leftist. The drunkest of the conservatives, at a cruising altitude of five or six cocktails, asked his colleague how he'd wound up on the left.

Last Sunday, I took about the longest cab ride one can possibly take in Paris: from the Porte d'Auteuil (practically Brittany) to Roissy (practically Belgium). As soon as the cabbie picked up on my American accent (halfway through the word "Bonjour"), he decided to devote our 45 minutes together to…

Merrimack, N. H.

Thirty years ago this month, Bobby Kennedy died. What might have been? Did hope exit with him? Or was he over rated?

I know a guy who grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Providence where he played stickball daily with kids he'd known his whole life, went out for homemade ices with them at the end of the day, knew all the shopkeepers -- the pickle man, the candy man, the hardware man -- and grew roly-poly on his…

THE FISH IS, along with the superimposed chi and rho, one of the very oldest symbols of Christianity. As handed down in Christian iconography, it looks like a football drawn with two arcs -- but sloppily, so that the two lines meet at one end and cross at the other. Most early Christians having…

I just finished reading a new essay collection on the future of the labor movement. Half the articles were about how horrible "temporary employment agencies" are; the other half were about the importance of learning skills on the job. Where do these experts think people are going to get this…

This spring, apologizing became the hottest fad among heads of state since televised town meetings. President Clinton didn't quite apologize for slavery while in Uganda last month, but he did say that "we were wrong" to hold slaves. Britain's Tony Blair has begged pardon not only for the Bloody…

On a blistering cold Boston afternoon twenty-five years ago this week, I was a witness to history for the first time in my 10-year-old life. I sat in a first-base box at Fenway Park and watched Ron Blomberg of the New York Yankees come to bat as the first designated hitter in major-league history.…

By last week, my friend Sandy Hume had become, at age 28, the hottest new reporter in Washington. He had single-handedly turned the Hill newspaper into must reading. Sandy broke the major congressional story of 1997 -- that of the House Republicans' botched coup against Newt Gingrich. This was only…

For days after the nation made her acquaintance, it looked as if something terrible had happened to Monica Lewinsky, something even worse than serving as the amatory equivalent of a spittoon and then getting the "Never heard of her" treatment. Networks kept showing a black-and-white picture of…

THE DOGGONE, LOWDOWN, country-western-style string o' bad luck that is Gennifer Flowers's love life finally broke two weeks ago. Bill Clinton's January 17 deposition in the Paula Jones case, the Washington Post reported, acknowledged at last the love affair that Flowers had claimed on the eve of…

Olivier Todd

A colleague and I were in my offme a few days ago when we decided to say hi to an old mutual friend who last year moved to London. I put the call on speakerphone. We were disappointed when we got his answering machine.

ATOMS, reads the sign on a smokestack rising out of the 'fifties glass-and- brick main building of Annandale High School in Fairfax County, Virginia. It commemorates the mighty football squad that has taken six state titles since the mid-sixties. But aside from its gridiron glories, Annandale High…

Jenny Uglow

President Clinton's yearlong initiative on race, launched with much fanfare in his San Diego commencement address last June, hits its midpoint this week. The president and his "race advisory board" are marking it with a trip to Akron, Ohio, for a "town hall" on racial issues. Akron for a few…

Some people make fun of my old Honda. Not much longer, baby. My wife was in a car dealership the other day when she was invited to enter a contest to win a four-wheel-drive Mercedes. As I see it, the thing is practically in the driveway.

Wallace Stevens

LAST WEEK, AS HILLARY CLINTON turned 50, a film crew from the Arts & Entertainment channel tailed her, gathering footage for a special to air this month. And, boy, were they kept busy. Hillary's birthday wound up being the most pageant-filled week of personalized adulation in living memory. Time…

Those who love fiction, especially literary fiction, are ever inclined to lament its death. But the very same people sometimes ask: How can fiction be dying if I've read a half-dozen new novels in the past five years that I hope my children will read someday? Those who like Irish writers will find…

TED TURNER'S OFFER TO GIVE A BILLION dollars to the "cash-strapped" (as it's invariably described) United Nations has not been out of the papers since he sprang it on an audience at the United Nations Association award ceremonies in mid-September. It is, by any standard, one hell of an offer. But…

Supporters of Louisiana's new "covenant-marriage" law compare it to Ulysses' command that he be lashed to the mast of his ship to avoid being lured into the shoals by the singing of Sirens. Think of Ulysses as a husband or wife, and divorce as the shoals. Acting on the belief that America's rate of…

Nathanael West

Jonathan Yardley

Southerners have a reputation for loudly proclaiming who their friends and enemies are. Richard Scruggs, the greatest trial lawyer Mississippi has ever seen, is no exception. As Scruggs waits in a corridor of the Dirksen Senate office building after a hearing on the tobacco deal he largely crafted,…

There are no un-air-conditioned social classes anymore. Last Wednesday, on a night of 98-degree heat, I picked up a six-pack of beer -- Old Gumption Limited Edition Woodchuck Valley Pale Ale, or something. The guy at the counter said dimly, "Mmm-mm, that's nice and cold."

It has been a time of doomsaying for supporters of affirmative action. In May, the University of California's Boalt Hall Law School revealed that its black enrollment had fallen 81 percent last year, following a 1995 decision of the state university system's board of regents not to take race into…

I'd been sick for a couple of weeks: sniffle, tickle in my throat, blocked- up ears. I figured I'd been taking the wrong antihistamine. So the other day I walked into a yuppie drugstore and rang for the pharmacist. A chubby little guy with a flat-top haircut appeared behind a window.

Springfield, Massachusetts, home of the MerriamWebster's Dictionary, has long been proud of its annual spelling bee. But in the first week of May, Springfield superintendent of schools Peter Negroni canceled the event forever, on the grounds that "the bee provided too much stress and too few…

R. F. Foster

A boozy housing agent once told me that the golden rule of urban real- estate speculation was "follow the homosexuals." Gays, he said, sought to maximize pretty architecture and proximity to museums and restaurants, even as they minimized grime and drab vistas. A neighborhood in which flower shops…

I love books, and I own a ton of them. Not that I've read most of them, but still I love them -- the objects. I don't bend back the covers, so that my twice-read copy of Lucky Jim hasn't a single crease in the spine. I don't fold page corners to mark my place -- the top and sides of my much-thumbed…

Hillary Clinton recently lashed out at those who have detected a " feminization" of American society. "What an unfortunate term," she said. " After all, don't fathers worry about how long their wives and babies can stay in the hospital when they need care? Don't men want to be able to take time off…

Come February, the tongues of congressmen will be folding themselves around such names as Arief Wiriadinata, Jim Riady, Grigory Loutchansky, Samir Danou, Jorge Cabrera, George Psaltis, and Tai-Ying. These are, of course, the donors of the shady contributions to the Clinton campaign that have been…

THE SCANDAL OVER FOREIGN campaign donations to the Clinton campaign -- to date, three shady contributions of "Asian money" -- has broadened with amazing speed. Close Clinton associates are being accused not only of campaign finance fraud, but also of profiting off White House connections,…

TWO OF THE COUNTRY'S best-known journalists embark on a two-and-a-half-year economics investigation that results in an article so long it has to be divided into ten parts. Their cash-strapped newspaper pours half a million dollars into an advertising campaign, and a leading publisher plans a book…

THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE is more spectacularly "on-message" than any administration in memory. For example, every single person working there, from economist Gene Sperling down to the lowliest receptionist, has exactly the same worry about Bob Dole's proposed 15 percent tax cut: It will "blow a…

A friend who has taught college-level creative writing tells me that whenever he chastises his students for having written something outlandish, or flat, or discordant, they resort to the same disclaimer: "But that's the way it really happened!" Which leads him to explain with a sigh that for three…

LATE ON THE NIGHT OF JULY 27, Pat and Shelly Buchanan were getting ready to go see Indepenence Day when they found a message from Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour on their answering machine. Reached at home, Barbour informed Buchanan that his speaking duties at next week's…

THE MOST STIRRING MOMENT on television this year was Kerri Strug's glorious final vault -- achieved despite a lateral tendon sprain so severe that she had to be carried from the gym on a stretcher -- to secure the U.S. Olympic team the gold medal in women's gymnastics. It was the most extraordinary…

Two years after murdering his ex-wife Nicole and Ronald Goldman and eight months after being acquitted of those murders, O. J. Simpson recently made front-page news. He hosted his friend A. C. Cowlings, two former trial jurors, and various gang members and philanthropists at his Brentwood mansion…

Since the 1989 publication of Amy Tan's enormously popular The Joy Luck Club, "a substantial literary sub-genre has emerged," according to literary critic Jonathan Yardley, "to rival the fiction from the 1950s and 1960s by Bellow, Malamud, Roth et al." Yardley is not the only writer to compare the…

Since the 1989 publication of Amy Tan's enormously popular The Joy Luck Club, "a substantial literary sub-genre has emerged," according to literary critic Jonathan Yardley, "to rival the fiction from the 1950s and 1960s by Bellow, Malamud, Roth et al." Yardley is not the only writer to compare the…

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is by general agreement the greatest German- language lyric poet of this century-indeed, of any century, by an agreement scarcely less general. He is a Mount Everest of translation: Because his poetry relies so heavily on the consonantal logjams of German vocabulary…

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is by general agreement the greatest German- language lyric poet of this century-indeed, of any century, by an agreement scarcely less general. He is a Mount Everest of translation: Because his poetry relies so heavily on the consonantal logjams of German vocabulary…

Our newspapers are so full of gloomy stories about income inequality, downsizing, destitution, and stagnation you'd almost think they're being generated by a buggy software program that somebody has neglected to de- install. After all, the statistics -- on per capita income, unemployment, job…

I arrived at the Orioles-Twins game a few Sundays ago just in time for the singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner." A young grungeball named Edwin McCain, with hair all the way down his back, was standing in front of home plate, groaning as if drunk, "Orra ramparts we warrrrrshed . . ." Apparently…

Boston OF ALL THE PLACES WHERE AL GORE could have celebrated Earth Day 1996, he chose a pier in Chariestown, Mass. The vice president came to explain to 200 Massachusetts mayors, hacks, and Americorps volunteers just why Sen. John Kerry is a national treasure. Gore boasted that a Kerry- supported…

When Kweisi Mfume ended a 10-year congressional career to become president and CEO of the NAACP in February, House colleagues asked if he had gone out of his mind. Just 47, Mfume had a carefully tended and impregnable seat. He had been chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus during its period of…

It snowed for the first time in three years in Paris, and it was .freezing cold, to boot. But how glad I was to come out of the Muse d'Orsay at 9 o'clock on a Thursday night, into a full roaring blizzard on the Quai Anatole France. On the Seine, barges were combing their searchlights through the…

In his his 1991 Autobiography, Kingsley Amis recalled "a small group of posh chaps," the literary critics who exercised undue sway over London writers of the 1950s: "They were second-generation Blooms-buryites, I suppose, junior and dilute modernists . . . men of small original output and uncertain…

PRIMARY COLORS HAS OBSESSED Washington, especially its Democrats, for the last week or two. Not only because it's a roman a clef of the 1992 Clinton campaign, or because its author's identity is unknown -- but because the very people it's supposed to be about are vouching for its verisimilitude.…

Flying at 500 miles an hour over the snow-dappled hog country of southeastern Iowa, Lamar Alexander calls the time remaining until the Iowa caucuses on February 12 and the New Hampshire primary on February 20 a "forty- yard dash." "I need to be able to make it essentially a two-man race after New…

In his columns for Newsweek and the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson challenges, with crystalline clarity, the economic cliches of the day. So it's worth noting that his first book, The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement 1945-1995 (Time Books, 432 pages, $…

CLINTON'S FOREIGN POLICY," says a friend of the president who discusses policy with him, "belies the idea that he's always watching the polls." Sure do es. For months, administration offIcials have been touting last year's invasion to restore Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but all that…

THE USUAL PATTERN IS FOR REPUBLICANS tO win a squeaker election, while Democrats moan about the dirty tactics used to pull it off. That pattern was reversed with this November's races, when Democrats employed a campaign of" scare calls" over Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to halt…

THE USUAL PATTERN IS FOR REPUBLICANS tO win a squeaker election, while Democrats moan about the dirty tactics used to pull it off. That pattern was reversed with this November's races, when Democrats employed a campaign of" scare calls" over Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to halt…

THIS MESSAGE BROUGHT TO YOU by the Republican National Committee: Two months ago, Mike Foster was an obscure Democrat in the Louisiana State Senate. In September, he switched parties. Last week he won his state's non-partisan gubernatorial primary and is considered a shoo-in when Louisianans cast…

Four days after O.J. Simpson's acquittal, Jack F. Kemp went on Meet the Press a'nd talked about the delirious joy with which" certain blacks greeted the verdict. "! am convxnced, said Kemp, "that a lot of the black experience, arid a lot of black people, cheered for the reason that . . . this…

People who don't follow the Cleveland Indians baseball team too closely were introduced to Jose Mesa last week when he strode to the mound in the first game of the American League division series. Mesa is the hard-throwing Indians "closer" -- a pitcher brought into a game in the late innings to…

Ward 3, where I live, is the District of Columbia's largest, taking up practically all of the land west of Rock Creek Park and north of Georgetown. This year, in the "murder capital of the United States," there have been zero murders in Ward 3. The ward is 88 percent white and has no one of working…

The good news for Senator William Roth (R-Del.) is that his place in history is secure: There's a big entry on him in the most thumbed-through reference book in Washington. The bad news is that it begins as follows: " With his trademark toupee,he does not cut a social figure nor is he dazzlingly…

Last month, Sports Illustrated" s 3.15 million subscribers were treated to a worshipful ac- count of San Diego Charger Kellen Winslow's politicized induction into the Football Hall of Fame. The great tight end accused Clarence Thomas and Newt Gingrich -- who was in attendance -- of having "tar-…