Features

The vast majority of scientists who study climate issues now agree that carbon emissions are a potentially disastrous problem. However, economic fears have obstructed even the mildest remedies. Particularly in the United States, voters resist taxes that would raise fuel costs, and there has been little political support for massive investment in new technologies or […]

In September 1941, Werner Heisenberg, at the time Germany’s pre-eminent scientist and the head of its atom bomb program, traveled to Nazi-occupied Copenhagen to visit his old friend and mentor, Niels Bohr. Both were Nobel laureates; both were among the giants of modern theoretical physics. Eighteen months later, Bohr would escape and work on the […]

Fifteen hundred charter schools have been established nationwide since 1991, enrolling 300,000 schoolchildren. The original idea was for parents and teachers, with educational visions, to establish independent publicly funded schools, free from regulations that impede innovation. Superior results would stimulate imitation by regular schools. Charters have been endorsed by both liberal reformers and conservative critics […]

S everal of my favorite and most tattered books are cookbooks, and when I visit a foreign country, one of my first purchases is usually a volume of recipes, which (if the book is good) provides a sort of sensory shortcut into the heart of the place and people in question. Some travelers rely on […]

So, like, okay. It’s the first day of boarding school, and you’re the new kid. Not only that, but you’re not like these other boys. You’re on scholarship. Your name is Will Krudski, and you feel guilty because you bought the school’s entrance exam on the Internet. You know this was wrong, but you didn’t […]

O n the chill, wet afternoon of August 14, 1975, the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was buried as a bad military band thumped its way through the Soviet national anthem. He had died a hero. According to his obituary in Pravda, Shostakovich was a “loyal son of the Communist Party” who “devoted his entire life […]

I once got a postcard from a friend traveling–and reveling–in sunny France. “You really have to admire a people,” she wrote, “who have such disdain for hard work.” Affectionate slur aside, I think of her bon mot whenever evidence surfaces, which it does with frightening regularity, of our culture’s relentless emphasis on relentless work. You […]

Flying over San Jose at 4,000 feet, Silicon Valley unfolding below, one sees the stretch marks of the digital boom. Acres and acres of new tract housing, neighborhoods in progress, push their way up the verdant hillsides of the rolling Santa Clara Valley, waiting to absorb the thousands of newly minted dot-com millionaires and almost-millionaires […]

In the world of Washington insiders, you are either “a player” or “not a player.” Republican fundraiser Peter Terpeluk is a player. Described by Jeffrey Birnbaum as “one of the nation’s top money men,” whose vocation is giving “strategic advice to those who needed favors from government, whether federal or local,” here is Terpeluk hitting […]

Now we are told to add parents and children to the list of privileged groups who are getting a free ride from the government. Leading the backlash against “family friendly” social policy is Elinor Burkett’s Baby Boon, which argues that nonparents shouldn’t be forced to pay taxes and suffer other inconveniences to help support other […]