Print Magazine
May 31, 2004 Issue
Editorial
Letter From Ground Zero
On April 28 the subject of torture was discussed in oral arguments before the Supreme Court.
Straight, Not Narrow
In the early 1980s, soon after the right-wing grassroots movement gave us a Reagan presidency, I announced that I would be boycotting my straight friends' weddings.
The View From Prague
Only on my last day in this hilly, river-spliced city, with such beguiling old world charm and art nouveau elegance that unless you're Kafka a strenuous effort is required t...
Conditions of Atrocity
Even before the Congressional hearings on the criminal abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, Colin Powell brought up My Lai, the Vietnamese village where, in 1968, ...
‘Dead Man Walking’
"The unthinkable is becoming thinkable," neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan despaired recently in the Washington Post.
Column
Scandal’s Shame, Massachusetts’ Pride
What a wonderful image of democracy and tolerance the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has presented to the world by allowing same-sex marriages.
Green Lights for Torture
So there were WMDs in Iraq after all. They're called digital cameras. Partly because of them, the United States faces one of the most humiliating defeats in imperial history...
In Kind
As of this writing, seven in ten Americans want Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to remain at his post, a vote of confidence that exceeds that even for the President himsel...
Letters
Feature
Even Conservatives Are Wondering: Is Bush One of Us?
Most Americans long ago stopped believing that George W. Bush is what he claimed to be during the 2000 presidential campaign: a compassionate conservative.
Books & the Arts
Artists Without Borders
Three years ago I saw a work by the late Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth that so captivated me that I am determined to write a book just to be able to reproduce it on the ja...
The Good War
For the last three and a half years the Israeli army has deployed American-supplied F-16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, armored Caterpillar bulldozers and Merkava tanks...
Darkness Visible
Shortly after the first anniversary of September 11, when The New Yorker had published a slew of poems memorializing the events of that day--Galway Kinnell's "When th...