My first vote remains my best. It was for James L. Buckley’s reelection as a United States senator from New York. In six years in office, he had shown himself fearlessly principled, whether in calling for Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate scandal before any other conservative in Congress or in opposing a taxpayer bailout for New York City, where about half his constituents lived. He also possessed the model demeanor for a statesman: Lucid, logical, and dispassionate, he focused on issues, not personalities. He brought this approach to bear not just in the Senate, but, later, on the federal bench, …
Reviving Federalism
Saving Congress from Itself: Emancipating the States and Empowering Their People, by James L. Buckley (Encounter, 120 pp., $19.99)
In This Issue
Articles
A Hand Withheld
It’s rare for a president to conclude a State of the Union address with a long passage noting that his presidency “hasn’t delivered” on one of its central promises. President ...
Sorry, Charlie
Just a few short days elapsed between the march for Charlie Hebdo and the beginning of the crackdown.
On January 11, leaders from Europe and beyond took to the streets of ...
The Time-Card App
At Mystique Boutique, a chain of fashion stores in New York, workers were forced to accept long shifts, sometimes ten to eleven hours a day for six days a week, ...
The Dynasty Question
When people discuss Jeb Bush, they naturally bring up the “dynasty question”: How can we have three presidents from one family in the space of 25 years or so? And ...
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being NPR
National Public Radio is worried that it sounds “too white.” This moral panic is inspired by a report from Chenjerai Kumanyika, a black Clemson professor and hip-hop artist, who wrote ...
Features
Grievance School
Of all the college towns fixed in the American mind as bastions of elite leftism, a Big Four stand out: Cambridge, Madison, Berkeley, and Boulder. It was no wonder, then, ...
Foreign Policy by Map
George W. Bush left office with his activist foreign policy in disrepute. Fast-forward six years: President Barack Obama has pursued, in some respects, the opposite approach, and yet he has ...
Books, Arts & Manners
Labor without Romance
In 2012, Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, was forced into a recall election after less than two years in office. The reason: his plan to restrict collective-bargaining rights for public-sector ...
Government-Sponsored Meltdowns
Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute has written a comprehensive new book on the 2008–09 financial crisis. It is your duty to read it — and it feels like ...
Midcentury Mores
Edward Mendelson is one of our mandarin humanistic intellectuals — Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, literary executor of the estate of W. H. Auden, an expert on ...
Reviving Federalism
My first vote remains my best. It was for James L. Buckley’s reelection as a United States senator from New York. In six years in office, he had shown himself ...
Bloody Crossroads Redux
There have been two great political wars this Oscar season, and both have involved American liberals’ complex relationship with the movies. What makes this relationship complicated is that liberals have ...
The City, from Afar
The road follows the right angles of everything out here, farms, townships, counties, states. On either side, fields showing stubble. Thick gnarly trees mark homesteads and cemeteries. Where the land ...
Sections
Letters
Contraception, Continued
Robert VerBruggen agues that pro-lifers should support the promotion of contraceptives that sometimes may act as abortifacients (“On a LARC,” December 31). The death rate for unimplanted embryos is ...
The Week
‐ Vaccines seem to do strange things to the mind — at least for politicians.
‐ Wisconsin governor Scott Walker took an early, if narrow, lead in a poll of Iowa Republicans. ...
Lifespan Liberalism
There’s no shortage of studies that attempt to show how liberals and conservatives are different species who happen to share hominid form. Liberals are conveniently revealed by Cold Science to ...
Great Works of American Fiction: No Trigger Warnings Needed
A note to educators: The following editions of American “classics” have been carefully reviewed and edited with regard to insensitive and inaccurate portrayals of people of color (POCs) and non–traditionally ...
Poetry
THE MESSENGER
This blind matter troubleth my wit.
Everyman
We waited for the messenger all night,
A mixed report though certainly it shocks,
When summoning what little souls we have
He drums them like dumb echoes ...
Lids Eternally Apart
A few years back, I was stricken with the stomach flu and sequestered from my family, friends, and colleagues. It was hunkered down in this solitary misery that I had ...