IN THE April 22, 2013, ISSUE
The Quiet Gold Rush
Alberta, Canada – While we are sitting on the tarmac waiting interminably for Newark’s permission to take off, the man in the seat to my right turns and asks me ...
Also In This Issue
Articles
Modern Family
Over the coming decade, the debate over the size and shape of government is likely to grow more intense. In the wake of the Affordable Care Act, the project of ...
Higher Education Revalued
Grade inflation is real, rampant, and ravaging a university near you. It would be a scandal if more people knew about it.
A bill filed in March in the Texas legislature ...
Quakers and Bootleggers
What are these Republicans drinking? In 2011, Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia tried to privatize his state’s Soviet-style liquor stores and was handed a stinging legislative defeat. In 2013, another ...
A Court in Cambodia
The court in Cambodia announced the death of Ieng Sary “with regret.” Those words were puzzling: Did the court regret the passing of a human being, who may have meant ...
Passion’s Fetters
Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!
— Sir Walter Scott, Marmion
If proof were needed that high intelligence is no certain protection against self-destructive foolishness, ...
The Portman Position
When Senator Rob Portman of Ohio endorsed same-sex marriage, he joined a very small club — or, actually, two of them. He is the first Republican senator to have taken ...
Features
Cyprus Sinking
It says something about the lunatic calculus of Europe’s monetary union that the Republic of Cyprus, a slice of a Mediterranean rock known mainly, if not always fairly, for sunshine, ...
The Quiet Gold Rush
Alberta, Canada – While we are sitting on the tarmac waiting interminably for Newark’s permission to take off, the man in the seat to my right turns and asks me ...
Books, Arts & Manners
The Great Abyss
It was the most momentous act of terrorism in history.
On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, his morganatic wife at his side, ...
Where She’s Coming From
Many young girls devour Nancy Drew mysteries, but those books fed a special hunger in our newly minted U.S. Supreme Court justice when she was growing up in the Puerto ...
Landscape After
The new dawn that broke over Eastern Europe in 1989 was bright, but the landscape it illuminated was exhausted, a territory of shadows and regret, where hope was jostled by ...
Evelyn Waugh, Catholic Optimist
Evelyn Waugh defies easy categorization. He was simultaneously a defender of social hierarchy and an anarchist (“He liked life,” his longtime friend Christopher Hollis once remarked, “to be full of ...
On the Brink
Ginger and Rosa, an intense little coming-of-age drama from the British director Sally Potter, begins with three births: The mushroom cloud goes up over Hiroshima, ushering in the nuclear age, ...
Roots Quest
It was not a tough winter in the country, but it was a lingering one, throwing frosts and squalls right through the equinox and beyond. Snow would fall, thin to ...
Sections
Letters
Have Some Compassion
I write to express my disappointment at yet another paragraph in The Week devoted to transsexuals (March 25). If I recall correctly, this is the third such news ...
The Week
‐ On the basketball court over Easter, Obama shot 2 for 22. Must be the sequester.
‐ While a few state governments enacted new gun-control measures in the wake of the ...
A Portrait of the Columnist as a Young Nerd
A School Board has decided that children should not experience one of the most important and instructive moments of youth: getting hit in the head — hard — by a ...
From the Twitter stream of Kim Jong Un — @youthcaptain
Spent an hour today studying missile-launch and -guidance technology. Or thought that’s what I was doing. Turned out it was only @angrybirds! Hilarious! #gottalaugh #humorheals
Do not really understand this whole ...
Poetry
A BAD FIT
The grapeshot of his words makes ribbons of
Her vitals. When one hits a major vein,
Her heart will burst, and finally her love
Will recognize its efforts were in vain.
He ...
Undead Reckoning
I try to resist the siren song of metaphor, luring the polemicist onto the gaudy rocks of glibness and meretriciousness only for his sturdy column to crack and sink 400 ...