Features

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect yesterday’s ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The original version of the piece can be found in the December issue of the print magazine. Since last summer’s Supreme Court decision in Lawrence vs. Texas, overturningTexas’ anti-sodomy law, evangelicals have grown louder. Now that theMassachusetts Supreme […]

Since declaring themselves defunct more than 30 years ago, the Beatles have alternately receded and loomed as figures of cultural authority and musical influence. While their spirit has hovered over and coursed through reinventors as diverse as David Bowie, Funkadelic, Elvis Costello, Prince and Kurt Cobain, there are other shifts of the pop paradigm to […]

The aftermath of the Iraq war will surely see U.S. foreign policy at the forefront of national debates for years to come. Conservatives will claim — as they have been claiming for months — that only they were sufficiently prescient about “the present danger” of Saddam Hussein. And liberals will again find themselves on the […]

“If we’re going to create jobs, the first thing we have to do is make sure that George W. Bush loses his.” John Kerry’s refrain elicits raucous cheers wherever he goes, and it’s echoed by the other Democratic presidential contenders. All share a similar and compelling critique of Bush’s failure: More than 3 million private-sector […]

In a year of enormous global turmoil, the most astonishing political revolution of all has been unfolding not in Iraq but next door in Turkey. The first hint of its depth came on March 1, when Turkey’s parliament shocked the world by refusing to grant the United States permission to launch an Iraq invasion from […]

Sunday, Nov. 2 dawned sunny and hot, more like late spring than mid-autumn. At St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington’s posh Georgetown neighborhood, the open doors brought a welcome bit of air to women in sleeveless dresses, who drew shawls loosely about their shoulders. The rector, choir members and seminarians were surely sweating beneath their […]

Terry McAuliffe doesn’t know how to shut it off. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), says Democratic strategist Harold Ickes, “is a great salesman; he has this infectious optimism.” Even in the face of abjectly awful election outcomes, McAuliffe hasn’t been able to tone down that optimism. Nuance seems beyond him. On election […]

John F. Kennedy was decorated for his military heroism in the South Pacific in World War II. However, he showed even greater courage as president during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. At that time, his right-wing critics were denouncing him for pursuing a “no-win policy” in his approach to the Soviet Union’s Cold […]

In The Fog of War, a revelatory new documentary about his life and times, a disquieted Robert McNamara implores us to understand why he did the things he did as an Air Force lieutenant colonel who helped plan the firebombing of Japanese cities in World War II, and, later, as a secretary of defense and […]

To hear American television networks talk about documentaries — well, there’s a self-canceling sentence. If they did talk about documentaries, they’d say that they’re like bomb threats: they clear the room. Those eye-glazing, ad-killing relics of a stodgier age might be good for awards, but they’re bad for thrills and therefore bad for business. It’s […]