Magazine

Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attack, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, two longtime figureheads of the evangelical movement, appeared together on the Christian Broadcasting Network to suggest the attack might have been caused by God’s anger at American liberalism and secularism. “I really believe,” Falwell said, with Robertson’s concurrence, “that the pagans, and the […]

McCain’s new book, again written with Salter’s help, is Worth The Fighting For. Sad to say, it does not quite measure up to its predecessor. The reason is obvious, and beyond his control: He simply doesn’t have as good a story to tell. This book is about his service in government. Rare indeed is the […]

Then there’s Naomi Wolf. Indisputably beautiful and confidently so, the Rhodes scholar published her first bestseller at age 28, inspired the “Third Wave” feminist movement, became a staple on the college lecture circuit, and went on to counsel the president (and a would-be president) on the zeitgeist of the day. Her success extends to her […]

Through tours at the CIA, the NSC, National Defense University, and back at the NSC again, Pollack developed a reputation as a hawk–by Clinton administration standards–and as a steady opponent of the Iraq hawks’ efforts to shove American policy behind Iraqi opposition leaders who would, they claimed, overthrow Saddam through some hybrid of an insurrection […]

Not only are we not drafting our young men. We are not even planning to draft them. Elected leaders are not even talking about the possibility of drafting them. That terrorists might poison municipal water supplies, spray anthrax from crop dusters, or suicidally infect themselves with small pox and stroll through busy city streets, is […]

The book is sometimes as unwieldy as its title, crammed with information aimed at pleasing virtually everyone from expert to novice, of use to both the first-time investor and the experienced policy wonk. But to the surprise, perhaps, of those who see Levitt as a silver-haired establishmentarian, what he has written is in essence an […]

There’s hardly an issue more difficult to untangle–or more important to the future of science and medicine–than that of human cloning and stem cells. But for reporters charged with covering the debate, sorting out the questions involved is as difficult as explaining the science behind them. There’s one argument over whether the government should ban […]

Powden, then Sen. Jim Jeffords’s staff director on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was part of a bipartisan group of congressional staffers readying the Bush plan for a vote by the full Senate. The House and Senate committees had already signed off on the plan and its core proposal to test every […]

In 1991, Hamburg was an aide to Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) and a wonk obsessed with the JFK assassination. Following the release of Stone’s film JFK that same year, there was a public clamor to open the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and Hamilton, prodded by his young aide, was at its […]