POLITICS

Some of the world’s most offensive contemporary fiction is being produced by the government of Saudi Arabia. Consider the mainstream Saudi newspaper Al-Jazeera, which recently asserted that terrorism against the United States does not stem from Islamist...

There are good cops and there are bad cops. Sept. 11 has not changed that fact. We saw the best of the best sacrifice their lives for their fellow citizens when the World Trade Center crumbled. But while we honor the memory of heroic police officers, we must not turn...

A few days ago, Bill Gates received a rather malicious piece of hate mail singed, “Ralph Nader.” It wasn’t his first. Presumably, the infamous “Consumer Advocate” left his return address off of the envelope, because someone at Microsoft...

I was in the university section of Pittsburgh for a meeting right after the attacks of September 11, just an hour after thousands of people had been burned alive or crushed to death or jumped to their deaths from the top of the inferno that had been the World Trade...

Imagine that your child comes home from school one day and announces that in his math course there are no textbooks, no teaching — and no right answers. Instead, students form groups to construct their own math “strategies.” They add fractions by...

The events of September 11 have intensified a long-standing debate: What causes Muslims to turn to militant Islam? Some analysts have noted the poverty of Afghanistan and concluded that herein lay the problem. Jessica Stern of Harvard University wrote that the United...

Basketball star Scottie Pippen played for some great Chicago Bulls teams and won multiple NBA championships. Then, as now, he also pulled down some hefty paychecks. This year, for instance, Pippen will make $18.1 million playing pro hoops for the Portland Trail...

An odd controversy briefly dominated the sports pages in March 1996. A player in the National Basketball Association, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, refused to follow the league’s rule requiring that players stand in a “dignified posture” during the national...

If homeland defense means anything, it means being able to dictate who can and cannot call our country home. The case of Melanie Jeanbeaucejour shows that America does not yet have the guts or willpower to swiftly throw out unwelcome guests. This story is sure to...

Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett’s famous fictional detective, tells a story about one of his early cases: An accountant, he says, was walking down the street when a steel beam fell from a construction site and smashed into the ground, narrowly missing him. After his...

The murder trial of the year began a few days ago (January 7th) in Atlanta. The case began in May 1999, when a 55-year-old Black-American named Jamil Al-Amin was stopped in the outskirts of Atlanta for driving a stolen car. To avoid arrest, Al-Amin flashed a fake...

“We will not rest until we stop all terrorists of global reach, and for every nation that harbors or supports terrorists there will be a day of reckoning,” says President Bush. Let’s hope he means it. Until we overwhelmingly smash every government...

While the world’s attention has been focused on the Middle East, South America has been headed toward chaos and collapse. And worse, it is not merely an economic collapse, but a collapse into a disastrous intellectual confusion that threatens to make recovery...

Newspaper readers have been treated in recent days to an orgy of gut-spilling by Clinton administration officials rather painfully eager to show that when they were in office they, too, exerted themselves mightily to get rid of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda...

Say you fall and break your leg. The leg hurts, so you take aspirin for the pain. But you don’t stop there. You go get a cast, so the leg can heal permanently. Yet the wisdom of treating the cause of suffering rather than merely masking the pain, appears to...