Final Payments by Mary Gordon (Random House), a first novel published last year to considerable acclaim, is an admirable book—admirable for its clean, careful, perceptive, and accurate writing, and for its main themes, extremely unusual for a novel about a young single person looking for love in New York in the seventies. Final Payments is about freedom and sex, […]
taxes
Posted inMagazine
Independent Oilmen: Why They Take the Risks
On the southern edge of Amarillo, Texas, on an access road beside a highway, sandwiched between D&B Equipment and Pools by Tenorio, stands a building called the Oil Center, which is home to eleven independent oilmen. The Oil Center is set back behind a parking lot full of potholes, the entrance to which is guarded […]
Posted inMagazine
Antisocial Security
Every once in a while, the federal government will do something that seems to have been calculated to foster bitterness and hostility among the populace as they realize what’s being done to them. A recent example came in late October, when the House, under intense pressure from the federal employee unions, voted to shelve a […]
