Magazine

The question is of great urgency among U.S. farmers these days. Out beyond the prosperity of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the producers in America’s food economy are struggling for survival. The weather has been miserable. Prices for some commodities are at Depression-era levels. Imports are soaring, and giant agribusiness firms are squeezing out farmers […]

The story behind Bushs delays should challenge investigative reporters and historians for years to come. Don Van Natta Jr. and Dexter Filkings of The New York Times have already come up with some fascinating clues to what happened in Miami-Dade, where the recount was off, then on, then reduced in size, and finally, called off, […]

That’s what happens when your party tries to do health care reform and it blows up in your face. But these days, just five years after the death of the Clinton health care reform plan, universal coverage is back on the table. It’s not hard to see why. In 1994, the year the Clinton plan […]

Did you see Ken Starr’s piece in The Wall Street Journal trying to explain his disastrous investigation? He points out that 75 percent of Whitewater cases ended in hung juries compared to a 5 percent hung jury rate in criminal trials generally. This he attributes to “some people entered the jury room with agendas” and […]

How did we get here? Twenty years ago the Reagan administration had a conservative social agenda and no way to achieve it. A Democratic House of Representatives stood squarely in the way of the White House on issues like abortion, school prayer, and busing. In Pursuit of Justices, a history of the modern Supreme Court […]

When John Crotty and Peter Lyons learned the National Football League’s New York Jets were being put up for sale this summer, they asked each other a seemingly naive question: why can’t Jets fans like us buy the team ourselves? The 30-year-old boyhood friends from New York decided to find out. They created a website, […]

HOPE works. It has financed higher education for hundreds of thousands of students in Georgia. It also seems wondrously simple: a voluntary tax (no one is forced to buy lottery tickets) to fund a clear, concise, and universally acclaimed goal. Every high school student in Georgia with at least a B average now has the […]

Frank and Lois Dezelich never considered themselves poor. Frank worked in construction and building insulation all his life, and when they retired they built their own home in Bedford, Va. Then Frank had a stroke, and lost his speech and became paralyzed on one side. Medicare, the federal program to insure the elderly against the […]

On September 18, The New York Times ran a breathless front-page account of corporate propaganda. The Microsoft Corporation, we learned, had bankrolled a California think tank—ironically named the Independent Institute—to run full-page newspaper ads supporting Microsoft’s claim of innocence in the face of federal antitrust charges. The ads took the form of a letter signed […]