IN THE September 19, 2011, ISSUE
The Department of Sharia
Suppose, for the sake of argument, you share the goal of Osama bin Laden and his surviving lieutenants: In other words, you desire to see the world dominated by a ...
Also In This Issue
Articles
What Constitutionalism Means
Soon after Texas governor Rick Perry announced his presidential campaign, a few websites, mostly liberal, compiled a list of the constitutional amendments he has at various times touted. He has ...
Less-Than-Total Recall
Controlling expectations is an invaluable weapon in a campaign manager’s arsenal. Before a debate, you make it sound like your candidate barely speaks English, so that when he reaches a ...
Who’s Next?
Imagine a corporation that hired people without reading their résumés, or a major university that drew admissions applications from a hat, or a sports team that filled its roster by ...
His Father’s Son
Moammar Qaddafi has been rich in sons, in a culture that especially prizes sons. He has seven of them, and one daughter. Some of the sons, it’s true, are nothing ...
Features
The Innocents Abroad
Barack Obama’s badly flawed worldview and the incoherent foreign policy flowing from it have now disintegrated. Within the past few months, his media acolytes notwithstanding, the evidence has become conclusive: ...
Houston, We Have a Solution
On a warm Saturday evening in June 1943, crowds were relaxing on Belle Isle, a retreat slightly larger than New York’s Central Park nestled in the Detroit River, which separates ...
Books, Arts & Manners
Shows and Sideshows
Salzburg, Austria — At the Salzburg Festival, you expect some operas by Mozart, for it’s the boy’s hometown. And the festival is duly staging three Mozart operas this year: The ...
A Monkey Shines
I did not intend to review Rise of the Planet of the Apes. From afar, it looked like just another late-summer dud, an even more disposable reimagining of a beloved ...
Trailer Park
A black bounded space. Longer than wide, wider than tall. Tilted. Distant red lights: possible ways out. A colorless shine, paler, marks a stepped, uphill pathway. Side trails lead off ...
Translucent Truth
When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died three years ago, on Aug. 3, 2008, it was apparent that even sympathetic commentators were not familiar with the breadth and depth of the Russian writer’s ...
God and Man in the Boardroom
What am I here for? What am I meant to do with my life? Of all the questions that religious believers ask, these may be the ones that baffle and ...
Reality Shows
In the world of presidential campaigns, Jim Lehrer has become an institution: He has moderated, or served on a questioners’ panel for, eleven presidential and vice-presidential debates. In doing so, ...
Sections
Poetry
TRANSLATING CAMÕES
It’s 1925, I sit in the chair
across from Capablanca. I’m here to replace
Herr Lasker, but the Cuban couldn’t care,
the clock is ticking; there’s sweat on my face.
I see that black’s ...
The Department of Sharia
Suppose, for the sake of argument, you share the goal of Osama bin Laden and his surviving lieutenants: In other words, you desire to see the world dominated by a ...
Letters
Organized Labor vs. Fundamental Rights
Robert VerBruggen did an excellent job in a short space of demonstrating the egregious flaws in the National Labor Relations Act (“National Labor Relations Bias,” August ...
Postcards from the Continent
Five days, five ports, five bus tours: The vacation is over, and I am fully qualified to make broad, shallow generalizations about Europe. May I have the first slide?
‐ The ...
From the Archives of the New York Times . . .
Readinge through the progreffion and litanye of religious and Godly language that suffuses the text, we are discomfited by the copious references to the Deity — should he even exist ...