IN THE January 28, 2013, ISSUE
An End to Bailouts
Perhaps no issue in financial reform is more important to the public than the need to end bank bailouts, which only shift losses from banks and investors to taxpayers. Just ...
Magazine
Also In This Issue
Articles
The Original Originalist
In an article for Fortune magazine in 1971, Professor Robert H. Bork of Yale Law School wrote that “the two fields that I know best, antitrust law and constitutional law, ...
Bork Vivant
Was Bob Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court finally undone by the fact that he had a beard? Not that his beard was the sole obstacle, of course. The vicious ...
Off the Cliff
For a few weeks around New Year’s Day, Washington, D.C., turned topsy-turvy. Well, topsy-turvier than usual. Conservative groups blasted a huge tax increase, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the size ...
Defense Is Different
In 1953, the Nobel committee in Oslo gave the Nobel Peace Prize to George C. Marshall: the former U.S. secretary of state and secretary of defense — and, before that, ...
Nixon at 100
As President Nixon sat in the Oval Office on Wednesday, June 2, 1971, the sun’s rays splashing brilliantly across the blue and gold carpet embroidered with the presidential seal, he ...
Treat the 1 Percent
Erika Menendez, the 31-year-old woman who is alleged to have pushed a man to his death beneath a subway train in New York City, represents everything that is wrong with ...
Features
An End to Bailouts
Perhaps no issue in financial reform is more important to the public than the need to end bank bailouts, which only shift losses from banks and investors to taxpayers. Just ...
Against Swedenization
Imagine a foreign visitor who has learned just one fact about America: For the past century our politics has been defined by a contest between two movements, one intermittently calling ...
Race and the Constitution
November’s electoral setbacks have prompted conservatives to reconsider their beliefs and rhetoric on a variety of issues. While they debate new ideas on immigration, taxes, and entitlements, they should not ...
Books, Arts & Manners
Nation-Building
The emergence and ultimate ascendance of the English-speaking peoples — the Anglosphere — is the salient fact of modern history. And the colonization of America is the turning point in ...
Keats’s World
Without being truly subjective, John Keats is the most personal of poets. His poetry is concerned with questions and longings that seem to come from the depths of the individual ...
City of Lights
‘From the moment it began,” argues Michael Neiberg, a history professor at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., “the liberation of Paris was an almost mythical affair.” He is ...
Hollywood’s America
Amid the tumescent number of academic books on popular culture, there is very little of genuine interest. The books are mostly attempts to make philosophy or literature seem relevant by ...
Rewriting Slavery
One of the first adult movies that I remember seeing in a theater was Kevin Costner’s prairie epic Dances with Wolves. Because I was ten years old and a history ...
Pigeon Watching
The city has been great for species other than man — roaches and rats; cats and dogs; once upon a time, horses. Another big winner in the lottery of urbanization ...
Sections
Letters
O’Neill Uncensored
In his memoir In Confidence, former Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin wrote of an encounter he had had with House speaker Tip O’Neill: “O’Neill said no effort should be spared ...
The Week
‐ Egyptian prosecutors are investigating a popular television comedian for insulting the president. That could never happen here. When do popular television comedians insult the president?
‐ Chuck Hagel, the Republican ...
From the Twitter feed of Kim Jong Un @youthcaptain:
Just found out that I’m going to be a father. Really puts stuff in perspective. Had a couple of people executed today and it really made me think about the ...
Keep the Change
There are many compelling reasons to mint a trillion-dollar coin, including “plot device for Mission: Impossible 5.” The coin has been stolen, and nefarious enemies of the United States intend ...
Poetry
SCRAPS
The hunt, for both, was empty
as the light blue sky . . .
the solitary gull and the eagle, at day’s end,
find what little remains
from the ice fisherman’s bucket;
the gull landing ...
The Veil Descends
In the summer of 2010, mourners lined the streets of Wales’s capital city to pay tribute to a seven-year-old boy killed in a house fire. In fact, Yaseen Ali Ege ...