SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, Western publics have boned up on Saudi Arabia and its strict Wahhabi variant of Islam. In the process, some may have come to think of the Saudi kingdom, with its police-enforced public segregation of the sexes and total absence of religious freedom, as monolithic--a…
THE DARKLY BRILLIANT Pat Oliphant's post-election cartoon shows a tiny twerp of a cowboy Bush leading a huge, muscle-bound, headless giant off a cliff. The giant is wearing a T-shirt labeled "The Bush Electorate." Above the label is an emblem: an American flag with, in the place of the field of…
FINALLY CLINCHING the conversion of the Detroit News from a principled conservative voice to a liberal echo, the paper the other day declined to endorse a candidate for president. This abdication, ending a string of Republican endorsements unbroken since World War II, fooled no one: Michigan…
THE WEEK the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, had dinner at the White House, his party back home did something that stuck in Mayor McKelvey's craw. It named Jerry Springer Ohio Democrat of the Year for 2004.
WITH THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION just around the corner and the serious phase of the campaign looming after Labor Day, many signs point to another extremely close presidential election. There's nothing like the prospect of a repeat of 2000--a virtual tie on Election Day, leading to recounts…
MILITANT BUDDHISM may sound like a contradiction in terms, especially while Islamic holy war is hogging the headlines. Nevertheless, in one of its periodic flare-ups in Sri Lanka, extremist Buddhist nationalism is threatening both the physical safety and the legal rights of that nation's Christian…
YOU COULD EASILY HAVE MISSED the two-inch story on an inside page of yesterday's Washington Post about the young mother attacked on a train near Paris, but it dominated the front pages in France. "Train of hate," was the lead headline in the conservative Le Figaro, followed by the subhead, "The…
EVEN AS THE LAST OF THE TRIBUTES to Ronald Reagan straggle out, there's an elementary fact about his presidency that anyone who didn't live through it might not have picked up from the coverage. It's the fact that, after years and years of frightening drift, suddenly you could tell that someone in…
PRESIDENT BUSH last week called elections the "most important step" in a five-point plan he outlined for Iraq's transition to self-rule. If successful, elections can supply the ingredient so far lacking in its post-Saddam governing arrangements--popular legitimacy.
"THE USA PATRIOT ACT gives the government sweeping authority to monitor what books we read and buy." When that flat falsehood is being peddled by a national legislator, it's no wonder bookstores and libraries are circulating petitions to amend this fearful law, and ordinary American readers are…
IN BETWEEN ERUPTIONS of exceptional violence that propel the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back to the front pages, life goes on in the Palestinian Authority. Friday sermons, in particular, go on, and every Friday at noon, one of them is broadcast live on the radio and shown on the PA's single TV…
"NOT EVERYBODY got everything they wanted in this law--that's the way of democracy." So said Paul Bremer, top American in Baghdad, at the signing of Iraq's historic Transitional Administrative Law on Monday. This interim constitution sets the ground rules for Iraqi self-government after the…
THE OTHER MORNING, I came to grips with a minor disability. Thrusting aside residual feelings of guilt, I poured my morning coffee into a travel cup. Then I went outside and, walking down the street from my house to Union Station, I drank it.
WHEN THE PRESS GROTESQUELY DISTORTS YOUR ISSUE, don't get mad, set the record straight--clearly, affirmatively, with documents and web links at the ready, so that people can check your accuracy for themselves.
THE WORST THING about the collapse of the Howard Dean phenomenon is that it cuts short our acquaintance with the most appealing figure to emerge from the Democratic primaries--Dr. Judith Steinberg, as they know her at the office, and after hours, Judy Dean.
TO DIE PEACEFULLY at home at 93, attended by a cherished wife, and four children, and some of seven grandchildren--full of years, as the Bible has it, and loved and esteemed on every side--is given to few. It was the only fit end for Richard L. Masland, an eminent neurologist and faithful man, who…
NO LESS SURREAL than the details of Saddam Hussein's hideaway--the copy of "Crime and Punishment," the Catholic image headed "God Bless Our Home," the can of 7-Up--were the photographs of reporters crawling all over the compound, inspecting it minutely, and even personally trying out the "spider…
THERE'S NO GAINSAYING the quality of many of the people who are risking their lives to build the new Iraq. On that score, it was gratifying to learn that Rend Rahim Francke will represent the Iraqi Governing Council in Washington. A longtime supporter of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and one who…
I ONCE SAW Sandra Day O'Connor in my corner store, and years ago, before Justice O'Connor even sat on the U.S. Supreme Court, I used to push a stroller on the terrace surrounding the white marble temple where she works. But until Tuesday--even though the Court is only four blocks from my house--I'd…
ODDLY ENOUGH, words figure prominently among the souvenirs I brought back from a recent short visit to Montana. It all began when we stopped at our very first overlook on the Yellowstone River. Staring down at the whitewater, my friend remembered being at a similar spot maybe 50 years ago and…
IN THE TURBULENT and dangerous politics of Pakistan, credible public figures willing to stand up for pluralist democracy are no commonplace. So it was a privilege to meet with Afrasiab Khattak and Asfandyar Wali Khan--middle-aged men who between them have spent more than a decade in prison in the…
IT'S WORTH RECYCLING John Burns's stunning denunciation of corruption in the media, already touted on Andrew Sullivan's indispensable blog on Tuesday and elsewhere since. The scandal of some Western media's silence about the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's regime, of course, is old news. It's…
UNLESS WE WANT Al Jazeera to be the principal media influence on the new political culture of Iraq, the U.S. occupation needs to find its voice. In a letter to the editor of the Washington Post last week, Cold War elder statesman Max Kampelman faulted the U.S. occupation for failing to use…
THE NAMING of Iraq's interim Governing Council is a big step in the long process of midwifing institutions for a country reborn. With a few diehard Saddam loyalists fighting on, the men and women serving on the council may be risking their lives by working with Americans to lay the foundations of a…
THEY'VE DONE IT AGAIN. This time liberals have backed themselves into the position of defending library patrons' right to view pornography at federal expense. They've landed there by way of excoriating the Children's Internet Protection Act, which the Supreme Court yesterday upheld 6-3. This law…
ALONG WITH FREEDOM, opinion polls have come to Iraq--opinion polls and newspapers to publish them. While admittedly not yet pretending to Western polling science, the informal survey of 620 people on the streets of Baghdad taken by Al-Mu'tamar, one of the newspapers that have sprung up in Iraq in…
TEN MONTHS AGO, the man The Daily Standard called Egypt's Sakharov was sentenced to seven years in prison for his work promoting democracy. Last week, Saad Eddin Ibrahim passed through Washington a free man, and recounted his remarkable acquittal on appeal by Egypt's highest court. It's a…
PRESIDENT BUSH made his visit with Iraqi Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, yesterday into something more than a feel-good photo op with natural fans. Bush used the occasion to hammer on two crucial themes. One was America's unequivocal commitment to the rebuilding of Iraq. The other was his…
"TOO GOOD TO CHECK" is the technical term for a story like the censoring of "Guernica." Secretary of State Colin Powell, so the story goes, went to the United Nations to present the case for war against Iraq to the Security Council, then took questions from the press standing before a blue…
REND RAHIM FRANCKE talks to Iraqis--her own wide contacts inside her native country, but also a network of exiles, who in turn stay in touch with family and friends back home. As executive director of the Iraq Foundation, which promotes democracy and human rights in Iraq, Francke keeps abreast of…
BUSH AND BLAIR, two leaders who have in common monosyllabic names beginning with "B" and spines of steel, are linked forever in history by their decision to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. In the last two days, the one has addressed his nation, the other his parliament about the coming war. For…
ONE REASON the coming war disturbs many Americans is that it seems optional. While the fight in Afghanistan was thrust upon us, this conflict is one our country enters by choice. It is a war we wouldn't be undertaking but for the conviction of our leaders--crucially, our president.
IN 1983, when my sisters and I were divvying up our parents' possessions after our mother had died, I put dibs on a favorite block print of Dunedin harbor at night. Mom and Dad had bought it in the late 1950s; it had appealed to them because it looked so much like another New Zealand…
AS THE ONLY PERSON in North America with anything bad to say about "The Hours," I feel a certain obligation to speak up. Stylish and watchable, perhaps, graced even with some nice performances in the minor roles and some touching moments, "The Hours" tackles a challenging theme--mental disturbance…
THE RELIGION GAP--the tendency of religious conservatives to vote Republican and of atheists, agnostics, and non-churchgoers to vote Democratic--is large, relatively new, and systematically underreported in the media. For while half the story, the GOP activism of religious traditionalists, is…
IN A NOBEL LECTURE YESTERDAY that is a familiar mixture of personal self-satisfaction and national self-abasement, Jimmy Carter names the greatest challenge in the world today, and it is us: the tragic failure of the wealthiest nations to cure the poverty of the poorest.
BLOGGER EXTRAORDINARE Andrew Sullivan noted a long, strident letter allegedly from Osama bin Laden that's been circulating on Islamist websites in Britain. The letter made the print media on Sunday, in the London Observer. The State Department hasn't pronounced on its authenticity, but one who's…
THE SENSIBLE PEOPLE of Oregon last week voted down a universal health care scheme by 79 percent to 21 percent. But while Measure 23 deserved defeat, it shouldn't be allowed to sink quietly into oblivion. It wasn't some fringe initiative, after all: It had the endorsement of the Oregon Democratic…
BURIED UNDER ALL THE coverage of the snipers' capture was a news story whose sequel makes it worth retrieving.
AS CONGRESS settles in to debate the confrontation with Iraq, one truly terrible policy option is off the table: Virtually no one is calling for a mere resumption of old-style U.N. weapons inspections as a way to contain Saddam Hussein. Suddenly, even outside the charmed circle of President Bush,…
RELIGION IS THE PROBLEM: So say two celebrity professors--Steven Pinker and Simon Schama--opining on the 9/11 anniversary. Islamist fanatics with a murderous hatred of the West, they imply or say outright, pose no greater threat to peace than religious believers generally. To do justice to these…
OUR OLD FAMILY FRIEND Chuck Lichenstein had his 15 minutes of fame back in 1983. At a moment of high tension in the Cold War, he delivered a remark, while representing the United States at the United Nations, that precipitated headlines and inspired cartoons far and wide. All these years later, the…
THE NAME Sarah Orne Jewett, for those to whom it means anything at all, evokes principally the landscape of southern Maine and the particular serenity of her 1896 novel "The Country of the Pointed Firs." Because she captured there the harmonies of undramatic lives lived out in their native place,…
FOR THE PAST WEEK, a U.S.-German debate over the war on terrorism has been raging in the German press. Here, almost no one has noticed.
BAD CASES make bad law, they say, and so good cases ought to make good law--or in this instance good U.S. policy. Egypt's conviction on trumped up charges of Egyptian-American academic and pro-democracy intellectual Saad Eddin Ibrahim and several associates ought to be an ideal test for President…
TWO MORE ITEMS for the Voices of Reason from the Islamic World file:
WHILE CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS are tripping over one another to see who can most vociferously pledge allegiance "under God," two straws in the popular-cultural wind further confirm the return of traditional values: No less a Hollywood vehicle than the new Spiderman movie depicts a pious family in a…
AFTER WEEKS of embarrassing headlines about leads flubbed by the FBI and the CIA, followed by the revelation that a government loan officer had conducted a lengthy interview with chief-9/11-hijacker-to-be Mohammed Atta straight out of "Saturday Night Live"--she never got suspicious though he first…
A RECENT PIECE in Newsweek prompts an editor to reflect on that subversive phrase "rote memorization."
A NEW ZEALANDER I've never met sent me a present last week. When it arrived, I was immersed in our magazine's latest ruminations on European ambivalence about America, and the unexpected gift from a faraway friend-of-a-friend felt like a tonic.
WHILE DEMONSTRATIONS for and against Israel, the Palestinians, and Jean-Marie Le Pen were hogging the headlines last week, a quintessentially American flap was unfolding in Chester County, Pennsylvania. There, a crowd reportedly reaching 350 gathered in "boisterous" protest as a work crew affixed a…
ON APRIL 5 the Daily Targum, campus newspaper of Rutgers University, published a front-page report on a pro-Palestinian student rally. It quoted one protester, a fourth-year pharmacy student, as claiming that the media portray Palestinians as terrorists, "but when the Israeli government went into…
The Marriage Problem How Our Culture Has Weakened Families by James Q. Wilson HarperCollins, 274 pp., $25.95 IN "The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families," the eminent social scientist James Q. Wilson sets out to offer an explanation deeper than "the Sixties" for the…
SEPTEMBER 11 started something: a new conversation about freedom. No doubt philosophers in their conclaves have been at this all along, but suddenly Americans more generally are being invited to refurbish our views about the core of our heritage.
A PIECE I wrote two weeks ago featuring Benjamin Franklin's anti-Semitism--alleged anti-Semitism, that is, as portrayed in a repulsive 1935 Nazi forgery lately recycled in the Egyptian government press--drew a response from an editor in Saudi Arabia. He objected to my citing the work of MEMRI.org,…
LIKE THE Cold War, the war on terrorism is partly a battle of ideas--ideas about, for example, the tension between truth and tolerance. Some of the challenges before us are suggested in the juxtaposition of two documents relating to the American founding, one an authentic letter from George…
YESTERDAY'S resignation of the head of the Kuwait Information Office in Washington is the latest twist in what has become an open battle between Islamists and democrats in Kuwait. It all began when the smiling face of Islamic fascism appeared on "60 Minutes" back in November. A segment entitled…
THE DAY OF SEPTEMBER 11 I spent at the office watching TV with colleagues, dumbstruck. Around 6, I walked home through the deserted city to my house five blocks past the Capitol, on Capitol Hill. Washington was silent that clear, balmy evening. Police barricades blocked my normal route, past the…
A CHRONIC annoyance in the media these days is the casual equation of religious conservatives with the Taliban. One example from the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian is a doozy. In a January 15 editorial mocking a prominent conservative Southern Baptist on the occasion of his death at 92,…
IN A KIND OF apotheosis of multiculturalism, the choicest al Qaeda suspects captured in the war on terrorism are about to take up residence under the American flag, at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. Navy base at the eastern tip of Cuba that has incongruously stayed in operation throughout the four…
SEVEN OUT OF TEN of the least-free countries in the world have Islamic majorities. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Turkmenistan join Burma, Cuba, and North Korea in the dubious distinction of achieving the lowest possible ratings in the latest global survey of political…
TWO CASES making their way through courts in Europe are symptomatic of a heightened interest in war crimes. They illustrate two contrasting approaches to reckoning with the past. In Paris, an 83-year-old general and his publisher are on trial for statements in his memoir defending his actions in…
LUTON, England--Famous for hat-making and home of the straw boater, Luton, is about an hour north of London by rail. It's just far enough that some glimpses of cows on green slopes interrupt the urban blur seen from the window of the train. The conductor who asks for my ticket is a wiry,…
AS STAGE ONE of the war on terrorism picks up momentum, Americans continue our crash course in radical Islam. We're getting used to the notion that Osama bin Laden represents an extremist movement with manifestations worldwide. Today's lesson spotlights a group called the Laskar Jihad, now waging a…
WINTER IS COMING once again to an Afghanistan at war, and what the bureaucrats call a "complex humanitarian disaster" is unfolding. As news accumulates of relief warehouses accidentally bombed and refugees fleeing U.S. strikes, some would have us believe that the American campaign is the principal…
AMERICANS ARE BRUSHING UP on Afghanistan, Islam, anthrax, the capabilities of precision-guided weapons, and a score of related subjects--notable among them our old adversary Iraq. Anyone looking for current information on that singularly forbidding country should know about the Iraq Report, updated…
Whether or not the culture war is history, one of its more colorful rhetorical excesses appears to have been retired on September 11. We haven't heard much lately about the Republican party's "Taliban wing." Back in the heady days of impeachment, this was liberal shorthand for the puritanical…
WHAT -- ANOTHER ANTHOLOGY ON MARRIAGE? Just a year after Leon and Amy Kass of the University of Chicago produced Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying, a sophisticated six-hundred-page collection of texts from literature and philosophy, what place can there possibly be for The…
Pride goes before a fall, as everyone knows, and some of us know keenly. Spring this year has acquired a sting that forces my thoughts back to last December.
"MARRIAGE EDUCATION" in the schools? Before you object that any self-respecting school ought to have its hands full teaching history and algebra, consider that most public school systems are already teaching kids about sex, family, and relationships in courses like sex ed, health, and that…
Editor's Note: The death of psychologist and sexologist John Money, on July 7, 2006, prompted us to reread this review, published in The Weekly Standard six years ago. We should note also a relevant development since the essay first appeared: Dr. Money's former patient, David Reimer, committed…
MARK SILVERMAN, publisher and editor of the Detroit News, is clearly annoyed at being pestered by the press. When I ask to speak with him, his secretary informs me that the photograph of him our art department has requested will be supplied only if her boss can clear our story first. I assure her…
Just in time for Valentine's Day, Amy and Leon Kass of the University of Chicago have produced an anthology of classic readings on courtship and marriage. Ranging from Homer and the Song of Songs to Allan Bloom and Miss Manners, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar is their constructive response to what they…
Flying down to Texas the other day, I sat beside a man who pilots helicopters for lumber operations in the West. He'd learned to fly in the Army, long ago, and had hundreds of combat missions in Vietnam under his belt. When I told him I was on my way to Kingsville to watch my son Tom graduate from…
Don't be put off by the book's opaque title: Kay S. Hymowitz's Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Future -- and Ours is a fresh and grimly convincing look at what we're doing wrong in the way we socialize the young.
It's ten years exactly since Jim first took me to his farm in Casey Country. I'd read about it often. A lot of Jim's columns in the paper we worked for, the Cincinnati Post, were set on the farm where he'd grown up in Kentucky, in the foothills of the Cumberlands. Yet somehow what I'd read had…
WHAT WAS MOST REMARKABLE about the Barbara Walters interview with Monica Lewinsky was its revelation of the moral derangement of Monica's world. Consider, first, the embarrassing nature of the program itself. What exactly was this disconcertingly childlike woman doing baring her love life in our…
With On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins has labored and brought forth an intriguing artifact: an articulate study of a turning point in American mores, full of worthy material -- yet so distorted by ideological myopia as to be more valuable as…
I once watched my gentle, white-haired grandmother browse through Last Exit to Brooklyn, the avidly obscene novel of life in the projects ca. 1960. When she had finished, Grandma put down the book and said with great dignity, "Well, when I was growing up there, Brooklyn was a very refined place."
The other morning, I climbed a volcano. Just a little one, that rejoices in the comic-opera name of Rangitoto and sits on an island of its own near New Zealand's Auckland harbor. As America's Cup aficionados know, Auckland is a mariner's dream of bays and sheltering peninsulas, littered with…
A high point of my summer vacation was a long-anticipated visit to the sculpture garden at the San Francisco dump.
"Only connect," said E. M. Forster. Alexandra Danilova's motto could have been, "Only distinguish."
The other day I came across some diaries from my childhood and browsed in them enough to find them quaint and intriguing. When I actually read them, I realized what gave them their piquancy: They're a window on a child's life before TV.
Richard Rhodes
The first surprise on delving back into Dr. Spock on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Baby and Child Care is that his much-denounced " permissiveness" is scarcely to be found. Peruse the pages of this record bestseller -- still second only to the Bible -- and you discover much practical…
On October 8, the state of Maryland will put on trial a distinguished scientist. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, winner of a Nobel prize for medicine in 1976, famed for his work with primitive New Guinea tribes, and a man whose friends describe him as "some kind of genius," stands charged with molesting…
Thirty years ago, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff identified the goal of the cultural revolution of the 20th century as the " permanent disestablishment of any deeply internalized moral demands." Under the tutelage of Freud and his successors, Rieff wrote, modern man was learning a…
An evolutionary biologist and a black man, Joseph Graves took pleasure in the coincidence: His symposium "Pseudo-science, Biology, and the Education of African American Students" was held on February 12, the birthday of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.
In her 1991 book Feminism Without Illusions, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese called herself "temperamentally and culturally conservative" but also "a proud feminist." Now, the second half of that paradox has given way. In her new book, "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 275…
Dudley was staring at my I refrigerator. A neighbor, he had come by at the suggestion of a mutual friend to measure my small fireplace for a custom-made screen. As it turned out, my house had strong associations for him. He'd known the couple who bought it in the late 1950s and lived here until…