Features

On successive days in mid-November 2002, Tom DeLay was elected House majority leader, replacing the retired Dick Armey, and Nancy Pelosi was chosen as the House Democrats’ leader, succeeding Dick Gephardt. One of those had amassed a capable but relatively quiet record of service in the House of Representatives, stirring controversy only once (by supporting […]

For those who claim to understand the global economy, here’s a pertinent question: Which East Asian economic powerhouse recently announced the largest current-account surplus in world history? The answer is Japan, although very few readers of the American press are likely to have noticed. Given the continuing media obsession with China, little news about East […]

“Aim well, miliciano, for you defend the Republic.” On a barren hill in Asturias, Spain, near the border with León, José Fernández, a Loyalist soldier, etched this phrase into wet cement in September 1936, adding, “The Trench of Captain Lozano.” Written to commemorate a friend who’d been shot weeks before by Nationalist troops for refusing […]

Eleven years ago, my first year living in New York, I sat on the roof of International House on the edge of Harlem, with hundreds of other students, raucously celebrating as elections in South Africa, half a world away, finished off the apartheid regime and brought Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress to power. Drinking beers […]

Last October, Osama bin Laden released his יִrst videotaped message in nearly three years. It was lengthier than anything he’d sent out for a while because he got wrapped up in business talk. “So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” he said, quoting the British Royal Institute of […]

It’s not just “contrarian” for center-left pundits to claim Roe doesn’t matter. It’s stupid.

Kimberly was at home with her two sleeping children when her estranged husband, high on methamphetamines and angry about their impending divorce, showed up at her door last September. “He came in and said he wanted to talk about child-support payments. We were fighting about everything. The divorce was not final,” Kimberly said. “He raped […]

For Iranians in exile — and the Americans who become embroiled in their intrigues — Paris has long been the city of shadows. This is where the Ayatollah Khomenei awaited the ominous victory of his Islamic revolution; and where the deposed ministers and brutal spies from the late shah’s government washed up in the 1979 […]