Fall 2025

George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant!

Notes from Down Under, after a month in Melbourne: The kangaroo isn’t as peculiar as the platypus or as funny-looking as the emu, but it is still a powerful argument against intelligent design. Of course, there is a counter-argument, according …

What happens after the union splits

Ian McEwan’s Saturday

WMD: Threat and Strategies

Sex, Viagra, and taxes

Herman Benson’s Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers

An international campaign for a boycott of Israeli artists, musicians, teachers, thinkers, writers, and researchers calls itself the “Academic Intifada.” Two years ago, it proposed that the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) should require its members to blacklist colleagues …

As the U.S. occupation of Iraq dragged on, George W. Bush declared in April 2004 that the United States is “the greatest power on the face of the earth,” and that “we have an obligation to help the spread of …

Sixty years ago, with victory over Japan in sight, Ernie Pyle, America’s greatest World War II correspondent, was killed by a sniper while covering the war in the Pacific. For a nation still reeling from President Roosevelt’s death, the loss …

Cambodia confronts its internal genocide

As we go to press, a great American city is being destroyed; tens of thousands of its inhabitants are in desperate straits. What happened in New Orleans at the end of August should prompt an urgent reconsideration of homeland security. …

Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, A History

A curious and revealing symmetry has developed between Republican and Democratic approaches to the issue of private health insurance. In the 2004 election campaign, John Kerry proposed that the federal government clamp a lid on premiums by relieving insurers of …