Magazine

If you were to choose a single race that sums up what’s at stake this fall, it would have to be the one in South Dakota. To political insiders in Washington, the matchup between Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson and his Repub-lican challenger, Rep. John Thune, is considered this season’s defining contest between the two national […]

Along with a large group of scientists—including Harold Varmus, the acclaimed former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—Roberts has been pushing the buildup of a massive repository of scientific literature called PubMed Central, hosted by NIH’s National Library of Medicine. According to its advocates’ vision, PMC would allow anyone in the world to […]

This new consensus, however, only reopens another debate: Which values do we choose to promote. A thoughtful investigation into the limits of what our society should accept–and expect–from its members could help us navigate these choices. And such an analysis is what University of San Diego sociology professor Anne Hendershott advertises in the introduction to […]

This is more than just an historical coincidence. In many faiths, including Catholicism, service and belief in God are linked. That’s certainly the case at Notre Dame. Indeed, upon graduating, some 60 graduating seniors annually enlist in a university-run program called the Alliance for Catholic Education. The program trains these students as teachers and places […]

Perhaps nothing better symbolizes American culture’s secondary emphasis on community more than the public political apathy and anemic voter-participation levels of the past quarter century. Though presidential and congressional midterm election turnout among eligible voters has declined only slightly since 1972, Patterson, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, says that the confounding (and […]

That no trace of Sipuel’s struggle marred Watts’s stay at OU was, inarguably, a sign of progress. But to Watts’s uncle Wade, it is also a sign of a problem. The 77-year-old had helped fight the battle for Sipuel and then went on to head the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement […]

Days prior to the attack, Republicans were beginning to panic amid signs that the economy is doing worse, not better, since President George W. Bush signed his big tax cut. At a private dinner at Washington’s Metropolitan Club, senior Bush adviser Karl Rove was subjected to what The New York Times calls an “unvarnished critique” […]

On a bright California day last April, Arnold Schwarzenegger was out of character. Instead of shooting up bad guys on a movie set, he was driving to the Los Angeles county clerk’s office in a truck loaded with petitions bearing 750,000 signatures in support of a ballot initiative to fund California after-school programs, known as […]

I was once proud of my profession and resentful of those who criticized it. For more than 20 years, I rode the great boom in business journalism that began in the early 1980s. I like to believe that at least some of my stories helped to enlighten readers and remedy wrongdoing. But today, I’m more […]