IN THE April 16, 2012, ISSUE
Occupy the Senate
Boston — Elizabeth Warren would be a catastrophe in the Senate, but she is hell on wheels when it comes to directing human traffic, which is no small thing at ...
Also In This Issue
Articles
The Culture Warrior
In the fall of Rick Santorum’s second year as a senator, he asked an impertinent question of his colleague Russ Feingold (D., Wis.). Most Democrats in 1996, including Feingold, were ...
Islamists and Men in Khaki
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
– Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Chaos theory, at least as it reaches me, has it that a butterfly flapping ...
Polygamy, Too
Presidential candidate Rick Santorum got jeered for comparing the legalization of same-sex marriage to that of polygamy, but, whether or not the comparison is rationally sound, thoughts of the former’s ...
Remembering Priscilla Buckley
Den Mother
CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
Of my thousand memories of my beloved Aunt Pitts, an early one is of visiting the old NR offices at 150 East 35th Street when I was maybe ...
Features
Occupy the Senate
Boston — Elizabeth Warren would be a catastrophe in the Senate, but she is hell on wheels when it comes to directing human traffic, which is no small thing at ...
Working-Class Wonk
Youngstown, Ohio — Mitt Romney has left the building and the town-hall meeting has ended, but Rob Portman, Ohio’s rail-thin freshman senator, paces across the factory floor to shake hands ...
The Last Field Commander
Helmand Province, Afghanistan — In late August 2011, General John R. Allen visited a base built atop the ruins of a 19th-century British fort here. Allen, an avid historian, grasped ...
Titanic Presumption
The Titanic, name and thing, will stand for a monument and warning to human presumption.” That was the judgment of Edward Stuart Talbot, the Anglican bishop of Winchester, in the ...
Books, Arts & Manners
Chronicles of a Debt Foretold
You are not alone. Some of President Barack Obama’s own crackerjack advisers are surely as surprised and dismayed as anyone by America’s persistently weak economic recovery. Back in the spring ...
The Great Prize
What went wrong with the Nobel Peace Prize?
The same is often asked of the United Nations, another godly enterprise that sometimes proves less than human. Certainly, the luster of the ...
The Great Numbers Crunch
This year marks the centenary of British mathematician Alan Turing, whose researches in the unlikely and very abstruse field of mathematical logic did much to create the world in which ...
Bread and Circuses
The Hunger Games, the expensive adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s young-adult dystopia, has been so cleverly hyped, so successfully marketed, so effectively promoted in all the highways and byways of social ...
Trash Talking
Urban garbage goes down a chute, or is carried, to the basement of the apartment building, whence, by a process most of us do not understand, it ends up on ...
Sections
Letters
Missing the Point and Loving It
In response to John J. Miller’s article “Friends of the Lorax” (March 19), I must say enthusiastically that I love The Lorax. Now, I don’t ...
The Week
‐ We knew Obama would go negative in this campaign. We didn’t expect that his first target would be Rutherford B. Hayes.
‐ The fatal encounter of George Zimmerman and Trayvon ...
Progressively Profane
The official Obama merchandise store isn’t aimed at the 99 percent, unless they can get enough selling plasma to buy that $74 tank top. You can’t imagine anyone in the ...
Memorandum
TO: All CNN staff, DOMESTIC ONLY
FROM: Editorial Policy Committee
RE: New racial classifications as of March 2012
To All Producers, Writers, and On-Air Talent:
As you know, the recent events in Florida have ...
Poetry
LEAR IN FLORIDA
Lear had no grandchildren to aggrandize
him, fondle him with kisses, no photos kept
in a drawer, to convince him he’s alive:
time slices, filial fawning, thin as thought.
What denouement but ...
Exodus
As far as the media were concerned, the murder of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse and a black teenager in Florida were the same story — literally: Angry white male opens ...