Features

P eople who try to get their arms around California inevitably have trouble. The place is too large, diverse, and complex; it isn’t really one place at all, except maybe in the minds of outsiders. So it’s not surprising that Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, the monumentally ambitious and grandly titled show […]

Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in the Land of No Alternatives, by Greil Marcus. Henry Holt and Company, 248 pages, $25.00. E ven now, it is an indelible image: Bill Clinton in sunglasses blowing “Heartbreak Hotel” through his saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992. It was the meeting of politics and […]

“W hy do people who are so smart get up and say things that are so dumb?” wonders lefty political commentator Bill Press, announcing his pick for “spin of the day” on CNN’s snarky new talk show, The Spin Room. Press’s baby-faced on-air sidekick, the bow-tied Weekly Standard writer Tucker Carlson, defines the “spin of […]

A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Houghton Mifflin, 557 pages, $28.95. I first met Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 54 years ago at the founding convention of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in Washington, D.C. I was dazzled by the array of notables in attendance–from Eleanor Roosevelt to the young […]

F lying cross-country after a photo-op with the border patrol, newly appointed U.S. drug czar Robert Wakefield tries to rouse his troops. Thrusting out a dimpled chin as only Michael Douglas can, Wakefield dares them to be creative. “I want everyone thinking out of the box for the next few minutes,” he barks in the […]

Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen, by Jorge G. Castañeda. The New Press, 248 pages, $26.00. W hen businessman-turned-politician Vicente Fox was elected to the Mexican presidency last July, he helped bring an end to more than 70 years of one-party rule. As long as most Mexicans could remember, presidents had been selected by […]

A bsurdly high prices have put lifesaving prescription drugs out of reach for millions of Americans and for hundreds of millions of people in developing countries. In large part, patent protection is to blame. The patent system is a trade-off: Consumers pay a monopoly price on a drug for 17 years to provide incentives for […]

R emember the name: Michael Winterbottom. Not yet 40 and already the director of eight features, Winterbottom is the remarkably versatile, remarkably gifted Englishman one great film away from a place among today’s moviemaking elite. His latest and most ambitious effort, The Claim, won’t be that launching pad. A romantic epic set just after the […]