Magazine May 14, 2012, Issue

Aren’t They Cute?

By Jay Nordlinger

April 26, 2012 4:00 AM

Walter Patterson (1920–1962) and Waverly Brown (1935–1981) (Patterson: Wayne Parry/AP)

America and some special criminals

According to news reports, George Wright is entertaining book and movie deals. He’s a star, practically — yet another glam criminal out of reach of the law. Safe abroad, smirking at justice, holding forth on the iniquities of America. Wright and his comrades often spelled this word with a “k.” Sometimes three of them.

He has an exciting story to tell, it’s true. It has been all too exciting for those on the wrong end of his guns. In 1962, the day after Thanksgiving, he and some buddies went on a crime spree. This was at home in New Jersey. One …

In This Issue

Articles

Politics & Policy

Ask Me about Your Volt

By Daniel Foster

It’s a boxy, snub-nosed little bastard, with roughly the rear visibility of a Mercury space capsule. But Chevrolet’s Volt is plenty slick, in its way. The one I’ve just strapped to ...

Politics & Policy

Let Detroit Fail

By Kevin D. Williamson

An industrial juggernaut in the days of Packard and Hudson, Detroit today is home to a new and uniquely 21st-century industry: the art of urban ruin. Detroit has become a ...

Politics & Policy

Aren’t They Cute?

By Jay Nordlinger

According to news reports, George Wright is entertaining book and movie deals. He’s a star, practically — yet another glam criminal out of reach of the law. Safe abroad, smirking ...

Politics & Policy

Rigorously Modest

By Jim Manzi

Imagine that a U.S. president is considering his options vis-à-vis a rapidly developing Iranian nuclear-weapons program. First, a science adviser comes into the room and predicts that if the Iranians ...

Politics & Policy

Differently the Same

By Anthony Daniels

Just before the Moscow Olympics in 1980, the now-defunct British humor magazine Punch ran a number of cartoons about them. One showed the sex test that would be run there ...

Features

Politics & Policy

The Tyranny of Clichés

By Jonah Goldberg

In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell says that a writer can avoid the heavy lifting of making an original or insightful argument by simply turning his pen on ...

Politics & Policy

Magic Accounting

By William Voegeli

‘Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It,” read the front-page headline in the February 12 issue of the New York Times. Reporting from Chisago County, north of Minneapolis, ...

Politics & Policy

A Lethargic Dragon

By Reihan Salam

Americans have always looked abroad for inspiration. Alexander Hamilton drew on the experience of Britain and France to shape the economic institutions of the early republic. In the early 19th ...

Books, Arts & Manners

Politics & Policy

Tales of the Tellers

By Florence King

Thick reference books traditionally have been solemn tomes, housed and read in library reference rooms where sudden snorts of laughter are unexpected and unappreciated. By this standard, the doorstopper under ...

Politics & Policy

Unreal Campus

By Ross Douthat

When Terrence Malick returned to filmmaking after a two-decade hiatus, the result was 1998’s The Thin Red Line, which is in many ways the most Malicky of all his movies: ...

City Desk

Night Time Is the Right Time

By Richard Brookhiser

Eating late was a sign of sophistication. To eat in darkness, even in midsummer, when sun and birds have gone to bed and parents, back in their suburban habitats, are ...

Politics & Policy

It’s Not Our World

By Mark Steyn

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and even more of it in the nation’s publishing catalogue. Robert Kagan has noticed the resurgence of declinism; he doesn’t ...

Politics & Policy

NR’s Other Bill

By Linda Bridges

Bill Buckley was the founder and editor of NR, and the fount of much of its cheeky personality. Bill Rusher became, early in the magazine’s life, the publisher who made ...

Sections

Politics & Policy

Letters

By NR Staff

The Biker’s Code Bravo to National Review for Charles C. W. Cooke’s article on bikers (“Right Turn on the Open Road,” April 30). I haven’t been to Daytona or Sturgis, but I have ...

Politics & Policy

The Week

By NR Staff

‐ Perhaps the Secret Service picked up some bad habits protecting John Edwards back in 2004. ‐ For months, the Obama campaign and its media militia harped on the story that ...

Athwart

Incontinental

By James Lileks

You’re forgiven if you don’t want to hear anything about the Titanic for another century, but heed this: The death of the great ship is intimately connected to the matter ...

From the Twitter stream of Kim Jong Un, @youthcaptain . . .

By Rob Long

That awkward moment when you realize that the uncle you think you’re talking to is the uncle that executed the uncle you think you’re talking to. Tweeps, need advice. Be honest ...

Politics & Policy

Poetry

By Stephen Scaer

EXPOSURE The wind is much too strong. He tries to shelter where a split rock hides a narrow patch of grass beneath the summit shining like stained glass and sees the sun go down ...

A Ravening Justice

By Mark Steyn

To get the obvious out of the way: I loathe John Edwards. I loathe him as a slick ambulance-chasing trial lawyer, as a preening poseur of a presidential candidate, as ...

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