Magazine

Rosetta Meeks lives in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, but she didn’t get to vote in the presidential election. Nobody scrutinized her ballot for hanging chads or screamed himself hoarse trying to prevent officials from counting it. An African-American woman who has devoted her last six years to teaching computer skills to low-income people, Meeks wanted to […]

Now probably isn’t the best time to release a hip, ironic book about how funny extremists can be, what with the ongoing tremors over anthrax, airline safety, and international terror networks manned by ferocious Islamic Jew-haters. Still, it would be a shame if Jon Ronson’s Them: Adventures With Extremists gets overlooked just because the national […]

O’Neill stormed off to Pittsburgh and within days the White House had announced his replacement. Yet the new treasury secretary nominee turned out not to be much of an improvement. Like O’Neill, John Snow was a veteran of the Ford administration who ran an old-economy titan (the railroad firm CSX) and seemed to lack the […]

Today no one denies that technology plays a central role in the economy, foreign policy, and our daily lives. There’s genetically engineered food on our plates, cell phones attached to teenage ears, smart bombs searching for targets, and e-everything everywhere. That trend is reflected in action on Capitol Hill, where most bills contain at least […]

Third-wave feminists waving copies of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth once proclaimed that men had hatched an ominous conspiracy to trick women into pursuing an impossible beauty ideal rather than real social progress. In The Corset: A Cultural History, Valerie Steele lays waste to that doctrine by documenting the extent to which women, not men, […]

Unlike Bush, our first Republican president was a long-standing proponent of progressive taxation. As New York Times reporter Stephen R. Weisman explains in his new book, The Great Tax Wars, Lincoln started early, when he pushed (unsuccessfully) for a graduated property tax as an Illinois state legislator, arguing that such an approach was not only […]

Bauer Meat was an unlikely target for such a huge government raid. The 50-year-old company had faithfully followed all current government regulations, monitored by two on-site USDA inspectors, and it had never been cited for violations of meat handling regulations. In the mid-’70s, Frank Bauer had actually made national headlines for exposing corruption among government […]

As it turned out, I couldn’t quite manage The Voice–the hosting gig went to someone else–but I quickly realized that if I wanted anything to do with NPR, I’d need to figure it out pretty quick. NPR’s ascendancy has been striking–“Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” its drivetime shows, are the second and third most […]

Yet there is another group of countries for which the connection to September 11th is far more apparent. These are the countries from which Al Qaida and its allied movements actually sprung, the countries where their fighters are recruited, where their hatreds are cultivated, and where their aims too often are embraced. No set of […]