As cultures ancient and modern continue their clash along the bleeding arc from Timbuktu to Afghanistan, America's policy mandarins are searching for a way out of a dilemma that has existed since the First Crusade. The more men at arms sent into Islamic territory, the greater the indignation ...
Though she was short, squat, and still learning to read at age forty, none who encountered her handiwork could doubt that Suzy Simmons was numbered among the Lord's elect. She could cook like an angel. A latticework of shortbread encrusted her cherry pies, the golden skin of her fried chicken ...
Board up the TV screen and plug your ears with seaweed, boys! Hurricane Gore is about to come ashore with another gale-force climate sermon. Interviews that the former next president has been giving suggest 24 Hours of Reality is calculated to make markets crash. The question is: Which ones? Al ...
Where would college football be if games were played only every other year and coaches were unable to recruit enough freshmen to replace graduating seniors? In the last decade, egalitarian college admissions policies have turned into a sort of athletic neutron bomb that leaves stadium sports intact ...
Seven score and twenty-something years ago, a boat crossed the Atlantic from Hoboken, New Jersey for a day sail around the Isle of Wight. Thirty proper yachts vied with the sharp pilot schooner America at the start of the All Nations Race, but not one boat was left in sight when she finished to win ...
For somewhere a long way from anywhere, Nanga Parbat is a pretty lively place. The five-mile-high peak rises from a syntaxis, a center of compression where folding rocks collide and steam spits from its sides as Earth's ninth-highest mountain rises heavenward as fast as the continents can ...
The Occupy movement brags that the parks it seized once hosted Depression-era shantytowns. But on the eve of WWII, America heard little talk of class warfare. Back then the nation’s social fabric remained intact because the 1% employed 2% of the 99% as domestic servants. Back then the 1% pulled ...
My sometime college classmate and debate judge, Al, has just published a very long rant in Rolling Stone. Though I know little of that scene–it’s been years since I last dined with Jagger—I see Al has something interesting to say, as recovering Nobel laureates often do, once he’s gotten the ...
Though Abbottabad's eponymous founder might approve of the rough justice OBL received there early Monday morning, something is very wrong with the establishment that calls the old cantonment home. Neither Sandhurst nostalgia nor Punjabi equivocation can explain a respect for privacy that extended ...
What a Rich Pyre!, by Russell Setiz Being a poem in the style of “Under Which Lyre?” WH Auden’s adieu to WWII, which Norman Podhoretz ought to have read before taking the poet’s name in vain in his epic fantasy, World War IV. The Bushies at last have quit the ...
