Features

After years of relative quiet, America’s educational system is coming under renewed pressure over issues of fairness, access, and privilege. As competition intensifies over entry to college, it becomes harder to believe the system’s rhetoric of merit and equity. Some students and their families are litigating over AP courses, high school funding, and affirmative action. […]

In his films, underdog-with-a-camera Michael Moore has taken on former GM Chairman Roger Smith (Roger & Me) and Nike CEO Phil Knight (The Big One), but the premiere of Moore’s newest half-hour series on Bravo, The Awful Truth (Wednesday nights, continuing through August 9), went up, appropriately, against Jesus Christ. It didn’t make a dent […]

I‘d like to write a bit about my father, Philip G. Epstein, and my uncle, Julius J., and the feud that developed between them and their boss, Jack L. Warner–a feud that shines a certain light on larger conflicts in American culture. Julie got to Warner Bros. first. After giving up a career as a […]

The jazz critics love a horse race, especially when they help create it. The late 1950s saw what is arguably their greatest fabrication. Trumpeter Miles Davis, with his high-profile contract with Columbia Records (not to mention his impeccable style in clothing and Ferarris), was already a star, and the jazz press was on the lookout […]

Once upon a time, Henry Wallace was a liberal hero. At the dawn of the New Deal, the brilliant agronomist transformed the stodgy Agriculture Department (which his father, a Republican, headed a decade before) into the savior of the farm economy and a well-funded crusader for the scientific raising of crops and animals. In the […]

By his own definition, Malcolm Gladwell is a “translator,” one of a special class of people who “take ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand.” In his articles for The New Yorker, Gladwell has been a bloodhound for speci-ficity, sniffing around obscure […]

High school gave me my first lessons in bureaucracy: Rules were meant to be rigidly applied, not questioned; power was meant to be abused by petty functionaries. I don’t mean to malign the entire faculty of my school. It included some very good teachers who encouraged curiosity and provocation and never lost their sense of […]

The American Association of Health Plans (AAHP)—the main HMO trade association—has a novel strategy for persuading Congress not to take patients’ rights seriously. Rather than arguing with polling data that shows broad public support for tough HMO regulation, they point to other polling data showing that Americans are basically satisfied with managed care plans. Therefore, […]

During the Roaring Twenties, President Calvin Coolidge had himself photographed in a Vermont hayfield, a fresh pair of overalls covering his dress shirt, his black shoes still gleaming from their morning shine. Despite the incongruity, no one laughed. In 1994, after the Republican take-over of Congress, Bill Clinton’s pollsters devised the model American vacation for […]