Features

The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel So Alone By Laura Pappano. Rutgers University Press, 224 pages, $26.00 Better Together: Report of the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement inAmerica John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 108 pages More than 100 years ago, Friedrich Nietzscheobserved the gradual turning inward of the German population, away from […]

President Bush insisted that we could afford botha tax cut and the shoring up of Social Security. He was dead wrong. So theDemocrats could hardly pick a better set of galvanizing issues. But as RobertBorosage points out in “The Austerity Trap” (see page 13), many Democrats aretaking surplus-worship to such an extreme that they are […]

On Tuesday evening, October 22, the phone rang. It was a federal official I have known for years. “The U.S. government can’t sit on this much longer,” he told me. His normally calm voice was cracking. “Three people down in Florida have a rash; 30 are in quarantine. The CDC is all over it.” He […]

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for aFaith By Studs Terkel. New Press, 407 pages, $25.95 Studs Terkel, that national treasure, has providedus another gift in Willthe Circle Be Unbroken? As Studs says (to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever called him “Mr. Terkel”), when you’re going […]

In 1996 the Central Intelligence Agency, having taken many well-deserved public-relations hits over the years, hired a full-time “entertainment liaison officer”–a veteran paramilitary operative with the movie-hero name of Chase Brandon. Until September 11, the strategy seemed to be paying off. The CIA was set to star in three new network series: ABC’s Alias would […]

No sooner had American culture bid its sober official farewell to irony than the literary world veered headlong yet again into the gruesome (yet ever comforting) ironies of cultural warfare. The occasion was novelist Jonathan Franzen’s widely publicized affront to Oprah Winfrey, who had made his novel TheCorrections the choice of her book club for […]

Peter D. Kramer will always be known as the author of Listening toProzac, his 1993 work that both described a new, psychopharmacologically based “climate of opinion” in our culture and helped bring it about. But if he doesn’t become known, too, for Spectacular Happiness, that will not be the fault of this daring first novel. […]

Is Washington Post reporter Steve Vogel covering the war in Afghanistan or pounding out a script for Top Gun II? “Kabul had flashed by, and Cmdr Morris ‘Moby’ Leland rolled over the target area north of the city, looking for a Taliban bunker to destroy with his F/A-18 Hornet, a trusted fighter he had nicknamed […]

In their efforts to enforce multiculturalism, university administrators have unwittingly created new breeding grounds for conservative rebellion.

For nearly a century, childhood has been a mitigating condition in the eyes of the criminal law. Now that legislators want to try more children as adults, we need to be careful about throwing the baby out with the jail key.