T he Philadelphia Inquirer should not have been embarrassed last May when the Wall Street Journal uncovered a scandal in a Philadelphia charity. Even Pulitzer magnets like the Inky sometimes miss big stories right under their noses. But this was no ordinary case of being scooped by out-of-town competition. The foundation that the Journal exposed […]
Books, Culture & the Arts
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Do Ask, Do Tell: Freak Talk on TV
Daytime television has become a “freak show,” but it’s also an opportunity (and not an entirely bad one) for gays and others with nonconforming lives to talk directly with the public.
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Orwell’s Poor and Ours
Orwell depicted the poor unsentimentally, but with compassion and economic realism. Today’s conservative critics, who blame poverty on an absence of values, do neither.
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We’ll Talk About That: Can Liberals Do Radio?
Liberals do movies, rock and roll, talk TV, even local talk radio. So why no liberal Rush?
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Connecting with E.M. Forster
A futuristic fantasy from early in this century offers us a hellish version of life on the Internet.
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The Other Edmund Wilson
Today there is no shortage of writing about literature or of literature about writing. But there used to be writing that was about both.
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The Shaming Sham
Conservatives, and even a few liberals, insist that moral shaming isn’t as bad as government censorship. Don’t believe them, warns a conservative writer.
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Storylines: Scandals for Dummies
O n the first Sunday in March, the Washington Post published an investigative piece highlighting Vice President Al Gore’s central role in the Democratic Party fundraising operation. The article, by Bob Woodward, chronicled how Gore called donors one by one, hitting them up for money in a manner so direct even one veteran fundraiser called […]
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Lingo Jingo
The story told by the English-only movement is nonsense from beginning to end. No language was ever less in need of official protection.
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Recasting the Stones
In our multicultural society, traditional monuments may no longer possess the unifying power they once did. Some projects by contemporary artists suggest a way around this conundrum.
