Magazine

People do not want to believe that Bush v. Gore is actually the worst Supreme Court decision in our history because we want that title to belong for all time to the infamous Dred Scott decision (1857), which found that African-Americans could not be “citizens”within the meaning of the diversity jurisdiction clause of the Constitution. […]

Over the years, interpreters of Hollywood tea leaves have learned that the happening place to be if you were a kid in swinging ’60s Tinseltown was Dean and Jeanne Martin’s Beverly Hills pad, preferably poolside. Previously, this information had been gleaned from secondhand sources, winking hints, and name-checks dropped in puffy interviews with celebrity children […]

Those who offer suggestions to the Washington media need not worry that their advice will be taken. The mental grooves here are worn too deep, and self-importance serves to set them in concrete. The only cause for hope is that time still passes. In journalism, as in physics, bad ideas generally don’t concede; they succumb […]

Tama Mattocks is a lively, articulate, 42-year-old African-American woman who lobbies for a healthcare association in Washington, D.C. A native of Detroit, she attended Wayne State University before pursuing a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Stopping just short of getting her degree, she went to work for a state assemblyman, […]

The reassurances were superfluous, not only because the Ted Kennedys and Chuck Schumers knew how to feign combat without them, but because it’s too late to forestall a general ebbing of respect for the presidency, the Congress, and of course, the Supreme Court, which has shaken “confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of […]

Accused spy Wen Ho Lee may have gotten an apology from the FBI and big bucks from his new book, but that hasn’t saved him from Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, who represents Notra Trulock, the Department of Energy whistleblower who raised questions about security at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and is now […]

Markovic was trying to invoke the ghosts of the swashbuckling, sinister CIA of the past that might have plotted to finish Milosevic off with an exploding cigar or sent Stinger missiles to his political opponents. But Markovic didn’t have a lot to go on. The nefarious plan consisted of congressional testimony prepared by a fellow […]

Sexual transmission of HIV from female to male is extremely rare, and random drug tests make IV-drug use an almost impossible transmission route for the virus among servicemembers. Nonetheless—because of regulations requiring all gay military personnel to be discharged—we lived a bizarre fiction that all the alumni (as the HIV-positive personnel call themselves) were heterosexual, […]

When the first baby conceived through cytoplasmic transfer was born in 1997, the press instantly hailed Cohen’s technique as yet another technological miracle. But four years later, the real story has proven somewhat more complicated. Last year, Cohen and his colleagues at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St. Barnabas, a New Jersey […]

By Rock’s definition, I know exactly where I belong among African Americans today. For I am sure that even for this meager deed of fatherhood I am performing, I deserve a lot more than credit. My mission sounds simple enough: carting my young son through West Manhattan to visit another friend, working in Chelsea. I […]