The Editors

arack Obama, it is safe to say, likes books more than his predecessor did. We know that much because he has written a couple of good onesmost notably, the well-received memoir Dreams From My Father, which launched him into the public sphere as a writer before his political career beganand because it is not a […]

n most issues of the Washington Monthly, we favor articles that we hope will launch a debate. In this issue we seek to end one. The unifying message of the articles that follow is, simply, Stop. In the wake of September 11, the United States became a nation that practiced torture. Astonishinglydespite the repudiation of […]

This summer, a group of sixty-one liberal arts college presidents announced that they would no longer participate in the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings. We were of two minds about this news. On the one hand, weve long argued that the U.S. News ratings are silly, because they dont measure what its […]

here are two primary goals to our methodology. First, we considered no single category to be more important than any other. Second, the final rankings needed to reflect excellence across the full breadth of our measures, rather than reward an exceptionally high focus on, say, research. All categories were weighted equally when calculating the final […]

When a presidential candidate today gives an important speech, his actual words are usually heard by a live audience of no more than a few thousand. The rest of us 300 million Americans are lucky to pick up even a sentence or twothe soundbites selected by the news media. Coverage didnt use to be so […]

If youre a senator with reservations about our policy in Iraq, maybe you should listen more to James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Inhofe has traveled to Iraq to observe the situation firsthand, and he wishes that his colleagues would disregard negative press coverage and pay more attention to some of the good news from the region. Therefore, […]

Each of our three categories includes several components.We determined the Community Service score by measuring each school’s performance in three different areas: the percentage of its students enrolled in the Army and Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps; the percentage of its alumni who are currently serving in the Peace Corps; and the percentage of its […]

Each of our three categories includes several components.We determined the Community Service score by measuring each school’s performance in three different areas: the percentage of its students enrolled in the Army and Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps; the percentage of its alumni who are currently serving in the Peace Corps; and the percentage of its […]