Sins of Petition:
In late January, The New York Times ran an influential story with the headline “Some for Abortion Rights Lean Right in Cloning Fight.” Certain members of the “political left,” Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg revealed, had united with religious conservatives to support a ban on not only human reproductive cloning — that is, on cloning…
The Real Foreign-Policy Debate
The Bush administration is on the verge of making momentous decisions in foreign policy that will shape the country’s role in the world for the next quarter-century. Nonetheless, there is an astonishing lack of public discussion of these decisions, particularly among Democrats. Most Democratic senators and House members, intimidated by Bush’s popularity, are afraid to…
War on the SAT
Wherever he went in the past year, University of California President Richard Atkinson was handing out verbal analogies questions: DRAPERY is to FABRIC as (pick one) fireplace is to wood; curtain to stage; shutter to light; sieve to liquid; window to glass. The questions come from the SAT I exam that 1.3 million college applicantstake…
Media: Label Whores
Listening to people complain about bias in the media, you’re reminded that there is more than one paranoid style in American politics. While the left has busied itself unpacking interlocking directorates and corporate ownership, the right has made a specialty of close reading, with an extraordinary attentiveness to the nuances of usage and address. There’s…
A General Theory of Keynes
John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom, 1937-1946 By Robert Skidelsky, Viking, 580 pages, $34.95. John Maynard Keynes was an economist, a policyadviser tothe British government (and, at times, a coruscating critic), an influentialfigurein the Liberal Party, an intimate member of the Bloomsbury Group, a prolificjournalist of opinion, a patron of the arts, a gentleman farmer,…
Oil Drill:
Drilling in Alaska looks like a nonstarter in the Senate. Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts has promised to filibuster the issue when the energy bill is reopened for debate, and the GOP probably won’t muster enough votes to win. Are the greens celebrating? Not entirely. The ones at Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy nonprofit started…
Comment: A Tipping Point?
Malcolm Gladwell has observed, in The Tipping Point, that trends sometimes build gradually but explode suddenly. As an editor of a liberal magazine, I wonder whether we are nearly at that point with the ascendance of conservatism. For more than two decades conservative media organs, think tanks, foundations, political donors, and politically engaged corporations have…
The Unrelenting Corporate Welfare Lobby
It’s not often that I agree with Representative Bill Thomas, Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. But when it comes to his explanation of the so-called stimulus bill that Congress enacted in March, I couldn’t agree more. Thomas disputed Washington Post coverage that said the bill would be focused on unemployed workers.…
The Mighty Wurlitzer
David Brock says he’s sorry. His extended mea culpa — Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex Conservative — recounts the tale of a recovering right-winger. He describes his journey from unformed gay, vaguely libertarian Berkeley undergraduate; to closeted right-wing wordsmith; to hit man on Anita Hill and Bill Clinton; to remorseful independent.…
Of Mice and Monkeys:
Don’t go see Human Nature in the art house. Stay away, if you can, from the like minds and the cineastes and the smell of Central American coffee. The place to see a film as fluidly daft, as limpidly out-there as this is at the mall, where you can slide from the theater’s darkness into…
Who Is Roger Hertog?
Sometime this month — assuming all the gears are turning according to schedule, on April 16 — New Yorkers will have walked to their local newsstands and been greeted by a sight the city hasn’t seen in more than 50 years: a new daily newspaper. If you think that sounds like some bizarre time warp…
While the Mideast Burns:
“I have to drop some papers off at Zion Square,” my wife told a fellow staffer at her office, a news bureau near downtown Jerusalem. “I’ll be back in five.” Her colleague pointed to one of the flak jackets that correspondents wear for covering battles. “Here,” he said, “take this.” It was dark newsroom humor.…
Biographia Literaria: Just a Story
Sometime in the early 1980s, when I was still a graduate student in English at UC-Berkeley, I received an invitation from a member of my dissertation committee. He and his wife were having a dinner party for a visiting writer, a much-lionized British novelist who was spending a week or two on the Berkeley campus…
Peace By Other Means
If Israel and the Palestinians cannot make peace with each other, what should the United States and the rest of the world do? Merely offering to mediate may not be enough. The descent into savage violence in recent weeks is not just another episode in a long -running dispute; it is a turn toward outright…
Copywrongs
If I drop dead tomorrow, all the work I’ve produced since 1978 will enjoy copyright protection for the next 70 years, until 2072, some 120 years after my birth. If I live another 30 years or so all the work I’ve produced since 1978 will be protected into the beginning of the twenty-second century. Much…
