Features

“The rich are different from you and me” is a famous remark supposedly made by F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway, although what made it famous — or at least made Hemingway famously repeat it — was not the remark itself but Hemingway’s reply: “Yes, they have more money.” In other words, to Hemingway, the […]

On the evening of September 11, 2001, I was one of a small group of State Department staffers called in to confer with Secretary of State Colin Powell and work through the night to produce a diplomatic strategy for assembling an international coalition to destroy Osama bin Laden’s base in Afghanistan. Powell took this strategy […]

The late 1990s were heady times for technology companies in Virginia. The future looked bright, and arguably nowhere more so than in Northern Virginia’s new technology corridor, where boxy, smoked-glass structures filled with well-capitalized startups sprouted by the dozens along the highway leading from Washington, D.C., to Washington Dulles International Airport. While California had Silicon […]

One December night in 2003, Adel L. Nakhla, a chunky, broad-shouldered Egyptian American interpreter with a soft, almost feminine voice, went to Cell 43 in Abu Ghraib’s Tier 1A. He was accompanied by Army Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., a reservist convicted in January 2005 of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, to the […]

Taking its name from a series of antityranny pamphlets published in the early 18th century, the libertarian Cato Institute is the foremost advocate for small-government principles in American life. Its 95 full-time employees, 70 adjunct scholars, 20 fellows, and army of interns work out of an eye-catching cube of glass and steel on Massachusetts Avenue […]

It’s a cool, smogless noontime at the Los Angeles-long Beach harbor, and the guys who could be the future of American labor have lined up for lunch. Three weeks earlier, on May 1, the day that immigrants had stayed away from work, these truck drivers had shut down the port — America’s busiest, through which […]

After more than a decade of stability, the Supreme Court was overdue for a makeover. Impatient conservatives, long plotting a high-court coup to match their lower-court triumphs, had their eyes on poor old liberal Justice John Paul Stevens. Then, last July, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced she was stepping down. He does have His ways. […]

From the archives: It is difficult to know when a contrarian idea has been repeated so much as to become the new conventional wisdom. However, it’s not just “contrarian” for center-left pundits to claim Roe v. Wade doesn’t matter. It’s stupid.

“Party in Search of a Notion,” the essay by Prospect editor Michael Tomasky, provoked a tremendous response from readers, other writers, and political leaders. Press attention included a front-page article in The New York Times on May 9. To keep the conversation going, we invited five people to write responses. The ideologically diverse […]

On May 23, the House of Representatives passed Resolution 4681, the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, by a vote of 361 to 37. Nothing remarkable about that. But the passage of H.R. 4681 had all the ingredients of the worrying way in which the Israel-Palestine conflict has played out in American politics and policy for the past […]