IN THE May 25, 2009, ISSUE
Diagnosis
We are bombarded with messages about the need for health-care reform. But we are not always clear about the problem we are trying to solve. Most Americans are satisfied with ...
Also In This Issue
Articles
Defeating Obamacare
One of the clichés of the moment is that it isn’t 1993: Republicans are going to have a much harder time defeating liberal health-care plans than they did during the ...
Socialized Failure
The health-care systems of all developed countries face three unrelenting problems: rising costs, inadequate quality, and incomplete access to care. A slew of recent articles, published mainly in medical journals, ...
Torture is a State of Mind
It’s not torture, the government lawyers insisted, because torture is a “specific intent” crime. This was in a controversial discussion of mens rea, the element of criminal intent in the ...
Features
Diagnosis
We are bombarded with messages about the need for health-care reform. But we are not always clear about the problem we are trying to solve. Most Americans are satisfied with ...
Placebo
The key congressional committees have yet to introduce the legislation that will carry Democrats’ hopes for “universal coverage” — i.e., a government guarantee that all Americans will have health insurance, ...
Prescription
The most powerful constituency in the debate over the future of health care in the United States comprises those families enrolled in stable, employer-based health plans run by large and ...
Ahmadinejad’s Last Stand?
At first glance, a presidential election in the Islamic Republic of Iran might not arouse much interest. With all candidates pre-approved by the authorities, and the entire electoral process controlled ...
Books, Arts & Manners
Is There an American Mind?
Do Americans have minds?
Of course not. “The greater part of the public, and a greater part even of the intelligent and alert public, is simply non-intellectual,” declared Richard Hofstadter in ...
Hinge of History
In this important debut book, Michael Kimmage — a young scholar who promises to become one of America’s preeminent intellectual historians — addresses himself to the journeys of two Columbia ...
Four Nights
Salzburg, Austria
The summer festival that takes place here in this fair city is a very big deal: probably the most prominent music festival in the world. It stretches for ...
A Strange Voyage
Across more than 40 years of Star Trek — the five television incarnations, the eleven motion pictures, the galaxy knows how many novels — there have been few sequences as ...
Country Life: Bright Wings
There is a window — it will shut even as these words appear — between the melting of the snow and the unfurling of leaves. The trees stand crowded together ...
Sections
Letters
Government-Sponsored Fiscal Crisis
Chuck Blahous certainly mounts an impressive case against those who downplay the Social Security crisis (“Social Security Myths,” May 4). As for me, I’m not going to push ...
The Week
‐ In a recent press conference, a New York Times reporter asked President Obama what had “enchanted” him the most during his first 100 days as president. Obama might have ...
The Bent Pin
Pleasantly Peasantry
The sudden transformation of the American consumer from drunken sailor to Silas Marner is the talk of the economic meltdown. After barely a year of hard times, we have ...
The Long View
The Literary Arlen Specter
From the Oresteia of Aeschylus, trans. Arlen Specter:
[Enter Chorus of Argive elders, very old men who carry staves to help them stand up. As they speak, servants ...
Poetry
THE INHERITANCE
Blond, you favored your mother,
But named John, after your dad,
You inherited all he had:
A farm in debt, an old hound,
Long-horns and Rhode Island Reds,
Guinea and pea fowl,
A family of ...
Happy Warrior
I was in one of those hotels where they give you the New York Times whether you want it or not. And, even if you leave it in the corridor, ...