Fat Target
Some years ago The Economist published an impish feature in which the editors rated the world's best intellectual watering holes as if they were resorts. They focused on meetings at such places as...
View ArticleWonders Never Cease
It is often a plus, in advancing some novel proposition, to be able to say that the whole world backs you up. In 2002, when the manufacturers of M&Ms wanted to add a new color to their candies,...
View ArticleWitless Protection
Last spring a seventy-nine-year-old woman serving on the jury in the case of the alleged Tyco kleptocrats Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz was seen making a motion with her hand that observers...
View ArticleNever Mind
For nearly thirty years Cambridge University's Stephen W. Hawking has been the cosmologist most closely associated in the public mind with the phenomenon of black holes—cosmic concentrations of mass so...
View ArticleLet Someone Else Do It
The terminology of economics—"marginal utility," "vertical equity," "asymmetric information"—is not, by and large, the stuff of deep public passion. But in recent years one economic term has become hot...
View ArticleKnock It Off
One of the more salient sideshows during the past election campaign was the episode involving Dan Rather, 60 Minutes, and some documents that allegedly offered a glimpse into George W. Bush's career in...
View ArticlePeople to People
Much of the punditry in the immediate aftermath of the elections involved the apparent division of the United States into mutually unintelligible camps called red America and blue America. By now we...
View ArticleFeeling Entitled?
"A genuine college degree in 2 weeks!" The e-mail offer from one of America's burgeoning diploma mills has been arriving almost hourly, although about thirty years too late. The sales pitch continues:...
View ArticleFatwa City
"Underwear is called underwear for a reason—because it is normally worn under your clothes." This explanation was offered to fellow legislators earlier this year by a member of Virginia's House of...
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The George W. Bush Presidential Library
IN THE AUTUMN OF 2005, when George W. Bush had fallen victim to an avalanche of problems, and public confidence was at its lowest ebb, the president's aides were puzzled to see him take a sudden,...
View ArticleEmpire's End
There is no mystery about the origin of my romance with Hadrian’s Wall. I can trace it exactly to a September morning when, as a thirteen-year-old schoolboy in Ireland, I cracked open my new Third Year...
View ArticleThe Travel Advisory
Two days is enough to see Ravenna, whose historic center is compact and well suited to walking. Time a longer visit to coincide with the Ravenna Festival, which for seventeen years has brought music,...
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The Road from Ravenna
Ravenna grew out of the Adriatic marshes, as Venice one day would, built on pilings and tufts of land. It eventually became a major port, and a base for the Roman Empire’s fleet. Julius Caesar gathered...
View ArticleTorturer’s Apprentice
Umberto Eco, in his best-selling 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose, summons to life a dark and compelling character: Bernard Gui, a bishop and papal inquisitor. In the movie, he is played with...
View ArticleThe Press at War, From Vietnam to Iraq
The Iraq War, launched 15 years ago today, always brings another war immediately to mind for me, and did so even when it first began. It’s not that Iraq itself did not loom large. I was an editor at...
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Death Comes for the Gruppenführer
“There’s something going on here,” said Lisa Jardine, the British historian, as she scrolled on a laptop through a digitized cache of letters, ochre with age. “The sheer volume. It’s rare to have so...
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The Clinton Impeachment, as Told by the People Who Lived It
In 1998, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to impeach President Bill Clinton on one charge of perjury and one charge of obstruction of justice. The articles of impeachment had their...
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Remembering a Man Who Had the Thing Itself
Courtesy of Michael Bauman“If you would seek my monument, look around you”—the words of Christopher Wren’s famous epitaph, laid into the floor of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London, came to mind when a...
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An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry
The first quotation from Donald Trump ever to appear in The New York Times came on October 16, 1973. Trump was responding to charges filed by the Justice Department alleging racial bias at his family’s...
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Our Predictions About the Internet Are Probably Wrong
Alex MertoNot long ago, I stopped by the Morgan Library, in Manhattan, to pay a visit to the Gutenberg Bible on display within a cube of glass in the Morgan’s towering East Room. Gutenberg Bibles are...
View ArticleHitchens Remembered
In 2015, the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation inaugurated the Hitchens Prize, awarded annually to an author or a journalist whose work, in the spirit of the late Christopher Hitchens, “reflects a...
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The Man Who Sacked Rome
Rodrigo CorralThe sack of Rome by Alaric and his Goths has exerted an outsize influence on the Western imagination. It was a devastating event, and sent psychological aftershocks across the empire. On...
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The Bush-Gore Recount Is an Omen for 2020
Twenty years ago this fall, the United States was plunged into 36 days of turmoil as lawyers, judges, political operatives, and election workers grappled with the uncertain result of the presidential...
View ArticleTrump Needs a Safe Space
More than a week after losing the presidential election to Joe Biden, Donald Trump continues to proclaim victory and stall the transition. Some White House advisers profess (“privately”) to be nudging...
View ArticleThe Man Without a Country
Residents of Palm Beach are not amused. There has long been speculation that Donald Trump intends to take up postpresidential residence at Mar-a-Lago, the waterfront club he owns in Florida. Neighbors...
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