Features

In 1997 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) undertook a routine reassessment of its national air pollution standards. After reviewing new public-health studies, EPA Director Carol Browner proposed strengthening limits on two major pollutants–ozone, the source of smog; and particulates, tiny particles that lodge in the lungs and cause respiratory illness. Her proposal promised to anger […]

T he two main characters in South African playwright Athol Fugard’s classic chamber drama Boesman & Lena are a poor mixed-race couple. Their shanty has been razed by the “whiteman’s bulldozers,” leaving them to wander the dismal mudflats near Port Elizabeth, and as the play opens Boesman picks a spot for the night by silently […]

Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of the American Empire, by Chalmers Johnson. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 288 pages, $15.00 (paper). Americans around the world are targets of terrorist attacks. Not just soldiers such as those killed on the USS Cole in Yemen this fall, but civilians, as well. Last year the State Department […]

W hen the second season of NBC’s West Wing premiered in October, with nine Emmys on the mantel and the lives of many key presidential staffers dangling in the balance thanks to last season’s cliff-hanger assassination attempt, a stunning 25.1 million viewers tuned in to survey the damage. True, a bigger audience–about 50 million–watched the […]

G eorge Washington opens on a close-up of a boy’s sneakered feet carefully maneuvering along a rusted beam. Dusted in sunlight, it’s a quintessential image of American boyhood, evoking freedom as well as risk. He may be a kid killing time, testing his balance on a fence. Or a wanderer on a train track, both […]

W hen I learned that Thirteen Days, the new movie dramatizing the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, would follow events through the eyes of Kenneth O’Donnell, John F. Kennedy’s appointments secretary–who would be played by the movie’s headliner, Kevin Costner–I had strong misgivings. In 1997 I had transcribed and edited (with Philip Zelikow of the […]

T he new movie by Joel and Ethan Coen, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a picaresque comic strip “based”–as the credits inform us with the filmmakers’ trademark brand of knowing tongue-in-cheekiness–“upon The Odyssey by Homer.” Set in the Deep South during the Depression, the movie does borrow certain figures from the ancient Greek epic […]

I f there’s one thing most Americans agree on, it is the ideal of giving all children a fair opportunity to succeed in life. Government programs such as Head Start and election-year slogans such as “Leave no child behind” invoke the time-honored metaphor of a contest that every child has a chance to win. The […]

School reform has become a major industry since the Reagan era, when the 1983 report A Nation at Risk judged U.S. schools to be so mediocre as to endanger the economic future of the country. Mayors and presidents, corporate leaders and small-business owners, parents and taxpayers have said again (and again and again): […]

W ith George W. Bush’s assumption of the presidency, a campaign to provide vouchers for private schooling may gain new life. The idea of public funding of private schools is not new, nor does it belong exclusively to conservative free market reformers. In the 1960s and early 1970s, academics on the left, such as Christopher […]