IN THE November 3, 2014, ISSUE
Pathetic Privilege
Lena Dunham is fond of lists. Here is a list of things in Lena Dunham’s life that do not strike Lena Dunham as being unusual: growing up in a $6.25 ...
Also In This Issue
Articles
Two Iraq Choices
Just as George W. Bush’s foreign-policy legacy will be defined by his decision to invade Iraq in 2003, Barack Obama’s is rapidly being defined by his decision to abandon Iraq ...
The Rape of the Yazidis
Kurdistan, Iraq — Lalesh, the religious capital of the Yazidis, is deceptively tranquil. Tucked in the mountains of northern Iraq, it enjoys a cool breeze as the afternoon disappears. Young ...
Twin Cities Terrorists
Minneapolis — “Are you a spy?”
Yusuf laughs as he says it, but the question is not unthinkable. I am, after all, likely the only person of pallor within a square ...
A Hard Left for High-School History
At the height of the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, conservatives were alive to the dangers of a leftist takeover of American higher education. Today, with ...
Privacy Down the Toilet
Co-ed bathrooms — let me go on record as hating them.
I hate them at Starbucks, where I will do anything to avoid a trip to the toilet-paper-littered, seat-up (always!), unisex ...
The Joys of Vaping
Second chances at happiness do not come along every day. But for this former cigarette slave, who once enjoyed every single moment of breathing in a cool, mentholated hit of ...
A Senate to Come
Don’t expect the results of the Senate elections to change the policies of the federal government very much over the next two years. Overthrowing Harry Reid isn’t going to yield ...
Features
The Book in the Drawer
For as long as anyone can remember, the Gideon Bible has been a fixture in hotel rooms. The Gideons started putting them there in 1908. But there is a campaign ...
The Hayekian Hoosier
However talented he may be, no writer will ever be safe from his audience, for it is they who will eventually pronounce upon his meaning. Ray Bradbury once stormed indignantly ...
Pathetic Privilege
Lena Dunham is fond of lists. Here is a list of things in Lena Dunham’s life that do not strike Lena Dunham as being unusual: growing up in a $6.25 ...
Books, Arts & Manners
Mythmaker
America needs a good history of the Republican party; unfortunately, this isn’t it.
A good history would, for example, look to explain the amazing reemergence of the GOP from World War ...
Shiny, Empty Uteruses
In the opening pages of this book, Katha Pollitt tells readers that her mother had an abortion in 1960. Her mother’s FBI file, which Katha read after her death, said ...
Greatness in Miniature
Paul Johnson’s new book covers Ike in less than 150 pages; it’s that rare thing, a fine biography that can be read in a single sitting.
None of the many books ...
A ‘Wise Latina’ Rises
Breaking In takes its title from Sonia Sotomayor’s reputation for interrupting counsel and colleagues from the bench. As we learn in the book, Sotomayor once said she was trying not ...
Odd Lot
The pattern with David Fincher has been that only his even-numbered films are truly great. The odd-numbered ones are usually worth seeing, always technically proficient, but ultimately a little messier, ...
Meeting Lincoln
‘Another damn’d, thick square book!” groused the Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon on the publication of a volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and one ...
Sections
The Week
‐ The Secret Service let a crazy man be alone with President Obama for an hour. Luckily Tom Friedman isn’t due for another interview for a while.
‐ Leon Panetta’s memoir, ...
Keep Calm and Conspire On
‘UFO Refuels in Jet Chemtrail over Amsterdam,” said the headline on the website. Given the location, you could translate that as “Pothead Sees Things in the Sky, and, Whoa, Man,” ...
From the New York Times, November 12, 2017
Front Page
Economy Sputters, Lurches and
A President Is Left Feeling Heat
Economic growth continued at an anemic pace in the past quarter, fueling speculation that President Ted Cruz, the embattled Republican, ...
Poetry
A REVERIE
Some days in August there’s a summer hum
Of distant outboard motors, or a plane
Relentlessly pursuing a puffed cloud,
Echoes of past revelers, and then some
More silent moments, full of what’s ...
Meaning and Meaningfulness
A federal judge struck down Alaska’s first-in-the-nation ban on homosexual unions. The law dated to 1998, which shows you just how recently it became worthwhile to even bother.
For most of ...
Letters
Heroic Drudgery
Regarding the otherwise excellent article by Charles C. W. Cooke in the September 8 issue (“A Gruesome Drudgery”), I must take exception in one matter. Cooke asserts that in ...