Magazine

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 […]

The Internet post-mortems are coming fast and furious nowadays, from John Cassidy’s trifling Dot.con to James Ledbetter’s forthcoming Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year, a tell-all about The Industry Standard’s fleeting heyday. So far, this literature of failure has portrayed the technology boom as a madcap adventure, and the subsequent bust as little […]

It wasn’t long before Roberto landed in Peggy Salazar’s office to discuss his disruptive behavior and poor academic performance. The acting principal of Oak View Elementary School coaxed some information out of her young student that helped to explain why he was struggling. Salazar learned that Roberto’s parents were divorced. Sometimes he lived with his […]

After the workshop, Bush met with Heritage president Anne Badgley, who began teaching abstinence after a decade running a pro-life counseling and adoption referral center. A politically connected GOP activist, Badgley organized a meeting for Bush with local conservative leaders and put her Roladex at his disposal. “I could see he was very sincere, and […]

I had been asked to the hotel to interview Vang Pobzeb, head of something called the Lao Human Rights Council, an organization in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, that lobbies on behalf of the Hmong, a Laotian ethnic minority, and against closer relations between our country and the government of Laos. Despite the fact that his chosen […]

Inside the Cult of Kibu and Other Tales of the Millennial Gold Rush, by Lori Gottlieb and Jesse Jacobs, aims to tell the story of those years in the words of the people who were out there in the trenches, drinking the Kool Aid by the vat. Gottlieb was the editor of Kibu.com, a Web […]

In Exit Wounds, the martial-arts afficionado and star of macho classics Hard to Kill and Out for Justice employed Hong Kong kung-fu-movie wire tricks made famous in The Matrix and now standard fare in action-chick flicks. But where the wires only added to the grace and agility of lithesome Zhang Zi Yi in Crouching Tiger, […]

After September 11, that is no longer true. Anti-Americanism has emerged as more ugly, widespread, and dangerous than we realized. Not only are thousands of angry Muslim men trained and ready to kill, but millions of their coreligionists, even if they disapprove of terrorism, share their anger. In Europe, meanwhile, popular disdain and even loathing […]