Features

Nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. Early for the phone. Woodwind snapped awake. It was the city desk. There had been some kind of burglary at Democratic Party headquarters. There was speculation in the newsroom that the White House, even the President himself, might be implicated. Perhaps some kind of botched spy job by an […]

For years many of us have been calling for a national conversation about what it means to be a multiracial democracy. We have enumerated the glaring flaws inherent in our winner-take-all form of voting, which has produced a steady decline in voter participation, underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in office, lack of meaningful competition […]

A year and a half after the headline-making Sensation exhibit, the Brooklyn Museum of Art has sparked yet another controversy involving art, religion, freedom of expression, the role of the museum, and, not least of all, the nature of art criticism–which the philosopher Arthur Danto not long ago characterized as “a form of zealous howling.” […]

Readers of the Sunday New York Times Magazine were treated on April 1 to an extensive advertising supplement on allergies and asthma. The supplement ran from page 30 to page 42, with regular Times Magazine page numbering. The ostensible news copy was prepared by an outside agency; the section carried the disclaimer, in small type, […]

George W. Bush is getting lots of credit for giving the National Institutes of Health (NIH) their biggest boost ever, but his increases in spending on research in health care and defense are obscuring drastic cuts in all other kinds of scientific research. When you look closely at Bush’s science budget, what you discover is […]

I recently proposed that instead of getting rid of what the Bush people call the death tax we abolish the “pre-death tax.” This term, coined by my friend Michael Lipsky, refers to the Medicaid provision that requires people to spend down their personal assets on nursing-home care before Medicaid starts paying the cost. Medicaid is […]

In late March, when the National Association of Broadcasters held its annual Futures Summit in Pebble Beach, California, the assembled pack of Wall Street financial-analyst invitees presented the broadcasters with an astonishing but presumably welcome fact: Recent auctions in Europe and the United States indicated that the market value of the spectrum space–the airwaves over […]

“No other people,” wrote Henry Steele Commager, themost widely read American historian of the generation following World War II,”ever demanded so much of schools and of education as have the American. Noneother was ever so well served by its schools and its educators.” A lot of us,bombarded by the educational controversies and the ongoing schools-are-failingrhetoric […]

Considering last year’s frenzied coverage of Monicagate and then the sniping coverage of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, one might wonder what has happened to the Great Liberal Media Conspiracy. If the myth is not yet buried, here’s another nail for the coffin: A study released in June by Fairness & Accuracy in […]

The New York Times is known for its scrupulous approach to assigning book reviews, frequently disqualifying reviewers who have even the most tenuous personal or professional links to a book’s author or authors. It was surprising, then, when the Times assigned Neil Lewis, a well-regarded political reporter at the paper’s D.C. bureau, to review Joe […]