Leah Platt

The 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade in January of 1998 was a bittersweet celebration. While pro-choice organizations were publicly paying tribute to a quarter-century of legal abortion, they were privately worried that the alarming decline in the number of abortion providers would soon strip reproductive rights of their meaning. After all, what good is […]

On the night of september 10, 1997, Toronto police officers raided more than a dozen apartments suspected of being houses of ill repute. Twenty-two women, including the alleged madam, Wai Hing “Kitty” Chu, were charged on a total of 750 prostitution and immigration-related charges. All of the women were Asian and spoke no more than […]

The New Yorker, as the only widely circulated general-interest American magazine without an active Web presence, is one of the last holdouts against the barbarians at the digital gate. Which is why we were surprised when, not long ago, a piece by Malcolm Gladwell, a New Yorker staff writer, popped up in our online Nexis […]

The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, by Gershom Gorenberg. The Free Press, 275 pages, $25.00. A dispatch from the Middle East: “On the Mount, … Palestinians began hurling rocks… . a police paramilitary unit opened up with live fire, killing a score of Palestinians. Riots spread through the occupied […]

Who will control the holy sites of Jerusalem? Israelis? Palestinians? Both? It’s an old conundrum–and, as the latest round of violence sparked by a dispute over the Temple Mount area suggested once again, an intractable one. Now another answer is emerging. How about none of the above? Specifically, how about giving up on the idea […]

“Virtually all the leaders who met in Quebec to expand trade were democratically elected, while ‘the people’ in the streets clamoring for ‘justice’ were self-appointed or paid union activists.” — Thomas Friedman, New York Times, April 24, 2001 Somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 protesters descended on Quebec City last month to demonstrate against the Free […]

R epublican Mike Ferguson is vying for a hotly contested open seat in central New Jersey. He’s running squarely in the center, playing up his commitment to improving the public schools and passing gun control legislation. The one taboo: any talk of George W. When pressed for Ferguson’s views on Bush’s Social Security initiative–or any […]

Tel Aviv’s city bus number four runs down Allenby Street through the heart of secular Israel’s glittering urban showcase. Just visible in one direction is the crowded Mediterranean coast, dotted with international hotels and frolicking sunbathers. A few blocks in the other direction are the cafés and boutiques of Dizengoff Street. As the bus […]

A s the school bell signals the end of another day at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, a sprawling concrete structure two blocks from the Harvard University campus, the kids of Project 10 East gather around a shiny black lab table to munch on chips and clementines and wait for their adviser. Project 10, […]