Like a born politician, Mark Steward, director of Missouri’s Division of Youth Services, seldom forgets a name. Ambling through the gleaming halls of the Hogan Street Regional Youth Center in St. Louis on a recent summer afternoon, Steward stopped in several classrooms to shake hands and chat with the teenage residents, who are also some […]
Ayelish McGarvey
Ayelish McGarvey is former a Prospect writing fellow.
Posted inDispatches
Clothes Call
At midnight on December 31, Americans will toast the new year with a drunken round of “Auld Lang Syne.” On the other side of the globe, China will be celebrating by opening new factories — more than 3,000 new textile and apparel factories that will begin their work as decade-old quotas are lifted on China’s […]
Posted inArticle
As God Is His Witness
Late in the summer, at the Republican national convention in New York, a movie billed as the conservative alternative to Fahrenheit 9/11 debuted for the party faithful. The film, George W. Bush: Faith in the White House, opens with a montage of a billowing American flag, a softly lit portrait of Jesus in Gethsemane, and […]
Posted inSpecial Report
Women and Children Last
One reason for the relative success of welfare reform in the 1990s was expanded child-care subsidies to women making the shift from welfare to work. Since then, experts have been mining the data, seeking to understand the wide-ranging effects on children when their mothers work outside the home. What programs helped school-aged children? How did […]
Posted inArticle
Outsourcing Private Ryan
Peter Singer is the author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry and the director of the Project on U.S. Policy Toward the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Prospect writing fellow Ayelish McGarvey spoke with him last week to discuss the rise of private military contractors in modern […]
Posted inArticle
A-Hunting We Will Go
In late March of this year, the Office of the Independent Counsel for the Whitewater matter quietly shuttered its D.C. operation. All told, Kenneth Starr waged the most expensive independent counsel inquiry in the nation’s history: Ten years after it began its witch hunt against Bill and Hillary Clinton, the office had spent $80 million […]
Posted inArticle
Carter’s Crusade
Former President Jimmy Carter, America’s first evangelical Christian president, still teaches Sunday school at his Baptist church in Plains, Georgia, and he and his wife, Rosalynn, continue their human-rights work in developing nations through the Carter Center at Emory University. In recent months, the Carters toured Togo, Ghana, and Mali to raise awareness of the […]
Posted inFeatures
Reaching to the Choir
In early February, 60 minutes‘ Morley Safer portrayed white evangelical Christians as the carnies of American Protestantism. Nine million viewers tuned in and saw shots of vast “megachurch” congregations swaying hypnotically and raising their hands in song. Tacky cinematic renderings of a fiery Armageddon added some dramatic tension. The slick ringmaster of these goings-on, of […]
Posted inArticle
Goodbye, Joe
Who would go to a “Joe Lieberman New Hampshire Primary Party,” as a media advisory mistakenly described it, in suburban Washington on February 3? People on the Lieberman payroll, or so it would appear, especially considering that the event was conveniently located near the campaign’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. It’s not clear where his other supporters […]
Posted inSpecial Report
The Best Investment We Can Make
Scotty and I shared a table in Mrs. Kerner’s kindergarten class in 1984. He was the classroom’s centripetal force, always drawing the teacher’s attention away from the rest of us. He rarely finished even the simplest assignment, instead wandering the room or doodling on his desk. He cried easily and threw raging tantrums. Other days, […]