Forever Young
Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion By Brian Alexander, Basic Books, 289 pages, $25.95 Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension By Stephen S. Hall, Houghton Mifflin, 439 pages, $25.00 To see what happens when market forces meet wishful thinking, just have a look at the history of anti-aging medicine. In…
The Unraveler
The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century By Paul Krugman, W.W. Norton & Company, 462 pages, $25.95 Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist and Princeton University economist, is not quite the liberal most of his enemies and many of his admirers believe he is. Some might prefer him, for example, to…
The 2-Percent Illusion
The 2% Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love By Matthew Miller, Public Affairs, 320 pages, $26.00 Matthew Miller is a serious, well-read man of genuinely public-minded impulses. A veteran of Bill Clinton’s budget office, he writes an often-liberal syndicated column and co-hosts a nationally syndicated public-radio program called “Left, Right…
The President’s New Crusade
On Nov. 6, George W. Bush claimed the legacy of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan in a speech setting out a “forward strategy” to extend freedom and democracy to the Islamic nations of the Middle East. Liberty, the president said, is the “plan of heaven for humanity,” which seemed to imply, in an…
Lawful Re-entry
On an average day in 2000, more than 10 percent of all black American men in their 20s were either in prison or in jail. Most of them had very little schooling. About one in three black male high-school dropouts were behind bars. A black man reaching his early 30s was nearly twice as likely…
No Resources, No Results
In the early 1970s, America’s prison population began a dramatic expansion that has continued, uninterrupted, ever since. By the year 2000, one in every 14 general-fund dollars spent by the states was being spent on incarceration. Vast high-security prisons were constructed at a cost of a quarter of a billion dollars each. Today, prison spending…
The Shawshank Succession
In the mid-1990s, when then-Gov. Angus King unveiled an ambitious prison-construction plan, the proposal had nothing to do with any “lock-’em-up” agenda. Maine had one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country, a tradition of moderation on law-and-order issues, and no intention of changing either one. The centerpiece of King’s plan was a $65…
Treatment with Teeth
In the movie Traffic, the recently appointed federal drug czar, played by Michael Douglas, is returning with his advisers on an airplane after viewing an interdiction site on the Mexican border. He asks them to “think outside the box” for a moment. Everyone is silent. He then asks, “What does treatment think?” Again, silence. Douglas…
Reform Done Right
Christopher Mixen, 23, looks very much like a college student in baggy cargo jeans, clean white sneakers and an oversized navy sweatshirt. His blond hair is cropped close, and his sharp, blue eyes gaze out from behind wire-framed glasses. But clipped to Mixen’s shirt is a photo ID badge that sums up his adulthood thus…
The Research Wars
Walking to my hotel through Amsterdam’s deserted early morning streets, I felt a sharp poke in my back and heard an accented voice behind me. “Do you know what this is? It’s a knife. Now, you are going to give me your money or else I will stab you, and kick you, and kill you,…
Crime and Redemption
Because the Texas legislature is in session a mere five months out of the year, serving as a Lone Star state representative is not the most time-consuming of jobs. It’s hardly unusual, therefore, that Ray Allen, the Republican chairman of the House Corrections Committee, has a couple of careers on the side. When he’s not…
The Religious Wars
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect yesterday’s ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The original version of the piece can be found in the December issue of the print magazine. Since last summer’s Supreme Court decision in Lawrence vs. Texas, overturningTexas’ anti-sodomy law, evangelicals have grown louder. Now that theMassachusetts Supreme…
’60s for Sale
Since declaring themselves defunct more than 30 years ago, the Beatles have alternately receded and loomed as figures of cultural authority and musical influence. While their spirit has hovered over and coursed through reinventors as diverse as David Bowie, Funkadelic, Elvis Costello, Prince and Kurt Cobain, there are other shifts of the pop paradigm to…
The -Ism That Failed
The aftermath of the Iraq war will surely see U.S. foreign policy at the forefront of national debates for years to come. Conservatives will claim — as they have been claiming for months — that only they were sufficiently prescient about “the present danger” of Saddam Hussein. And liberals will again find themselves on the…
The Wrong Target
“If we’re going to create jobs, the first thing we have to do is make sure that George W. Bush loses his.” John Kerry’s refrain elicits raucous cheers wherever he goes, and it’s echoed by the other Democratic presidential contenders. All share a similar and compelling critique of Bush’s failure: More than 3 million private-sector…
The Quiet Revolution
In a year of enormous global turmoil, the most astonishing political revolution of all has been unfolding not in Iraq but next door in Turkey. The first hint of its depth came on March 1, when Turkey’s parliament shocked the world by refusing to grant the United States permission to launch an Iraq invasion from…
Gay Rites Movement
Sunday, Nov. 2 dawned sunny and hot, more like late spring than mid-autumn. At St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington’s posh Georgetown neighborhood, the open doors brought a welcome bit of air to women in sleeveless dresses, who drew shawls loosely about their shoulders. The rector, choir members and seminarians were surely sweating beneath their…
Judging Terry
Terry McAuliffe doesn’t know how to shut it off. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), says Democratic strategist Harold Ickes, “is a great salesman; he has this infectious optimism.” Even in the face of abjectly awful election outcomes, McAuliffe hasn’t been able to tone down that optimism. Nuance seems beyond him. On election…
