December 31, 2009

General Motors is hiring. In Canada. In what must have been a vexatious development for Barack Obama, who moonlights as de facto chairman of GM and a dozen other ailing ...

When newspaper reporters and bloggers across the nation skewered the Obama administration’s estimates of jobs “created” or “saved” in November 2009, they focused on the obvious target: the thousands of ...

While on the surface it seems to be a simple matter of environmental policy, the finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare actually ...

As I waited recently for the Darjeeling Mail in the New Jalpaiguri Station in West Bengal, my eye was caught by three titles in English in the platform bookstall: My ...

Permit a reviewer to begin with a personal note: One of the best biographies I have ever read is a biography of Louis Armstrong by Laurence Bergreen. It was published ...

Every once in a while there washes up on shore some strange object from the deep. A half-decayed cuttlefish of a kind that no one’s ever seen before. The broken ...

High, wavering. Cutting (it must be, to carry from such a distance). I am walking along a street that runs into Union Square in the early evening. Last-century office buildings ...

Regression Dissection I am normally a fan of Kevin A. Hassett’s NR contributions, but I found his most recent column (“The Metamorphosis,” December 21) unconvincing. The graph accompanying the piece appears ...

In the beforetime, under a different administration, There were marsupial words, chameleon words in trees, Words shedding their wings and tunneling in the sea –  Clever and strong, out-thronging all our mute associations. Among ...