Trevor Corson

In the film John Q., Denzel Washington plays a working-class dad who holds a hospital emergency room at gunpoint to get a heart transplant for his nine-year-old son. The film’s critique of health care in the United States is hard to miss: The poor lack the funds and often the insurance coverage needed for organ […]

Works Discussed in this Essay: The Paradox of China’s Post-Mao Reforms, edited by Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar. Harvard University Press, 424 pages, $49.50. After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics and “Thought Work” in Reformed China, by Daniel C. Lynch. Stanford University Press, 424 pages, $49.50. About Face: A History of America’s […]

M y fourth-grade research project on dams lacked data from the field until I got a lucky break: An uncle had connections at the Conowingo Dam. (He was in the concrete business; Conowingo is 435,000 cubic yards of concrete.) We drove down U.S. 1 to the Susquehanna River in Maryland and took an official tour. […]

The dramas in April over the downed U.S. reconnaissance plane and the sale of arms to Taiwan have revealed a burgeoning American hawkishness toward China. Centrists have joined conservatives in blaming America for being soft on the Communists and weak in supporting democratic Taiwan. But this growing fashion for fulmination is misguided, for two reasons: […]