‘Controlling Authority’
In campaign speeches George W. Bush repeats Al Gore's defense of his 1996 campaign fundraising phone calls from his government office--"there is no controlling legal authority...
Print Magazine
October 16, 2000 Issue
Purchase Current Issue or Login to Download the PDF of this Issue Download the PDF of this Issue
Editorial
Policing Pregnancy
The Supreme Court opens its new term with a case that raises the stakes dramatically in the politics of fetal rights. At issue in Ferguson v. City of Charleston is whet...
If Politics Got Real…
To Nader or not to Nader, that is the question. A debate over whether Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader is a savior or a spoiler has raged for months among progre...
CIA Outrages in Chile
"Covert action," the late Senator Frank Church concluded in 1976 after his long inquiry into CIA operations in Chile and elsewhere, is a "semantic disguise for murder, coercio...
High-Tech Cheap Labor
Only months after a major victory on China trade, Big Business is again scavenging for cheap labor. This time, the high-tech industry is pressuring Congress to allow additiona...
Questions From the Floor
On the eve of the first presidential debate, a new poll has found that strong majorities of Americans have high levels of interest and concern about a range of issues that are...
Questions From the Floor
A new poll has found that strong majorities of Americans have high levels of interest and concern about a range of issues that are rarely being discussed in the current poli...
Column
Mary Cheney Just Might Teach the Right a Lesson
Let's give up some applause for Dick Cheney for affirming in deed, if not words, that homosexuality is perfectly consistent with traditional family values. The decision for a ...
Circus Maximus
We don't have a TV at home, so we've missed the much-drubbed NBC Olympics coverage. So when a little friend of my son's said she'd been watching, I asked her if any of the ev...
Gore and His Reinventions
What an odd presidential race! So long as George W. Bush keeps his mouth shut and remains in seclusion he floats up in the polls. His best strategy would be to bag the debates...
Stop, Thief!
Neoconservatives are serial grave-robbers. Back in the early eighties, Norman Podhoretz tried to claim both Ronald Reagan and George Orwell as part of his meshuggeneh mishp...
Letters
Feature
Bush or Gore: Does It Matter?
It has become fashionable of late to deny the relative importance of politics, on the one hand, and the fact of any important differences between Democrats and Republicans, on...
Books & the Arts
Circus Maximus
We don't have a TV at home, so we've missed the much-drubbed NBC Olympics coverage. So when a little friend of my son's said she'd been watching, I asked her if any of the ev...
North of the Border
One of the most haunting images in David Riker's film La Ciudad is of the New York City skyline seen from a work site miles away from midtown. There, a group of Hispani...
A Riot of Personality
The first time I saw Anna Deavere Smith, I realized a new meaning had been given to the term "body politic." She was appearing in Fires in the Mirror, her show about th...
2000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations represents a life's work in poetry. The component volumes did not meet with fanfare, yet the work is brill...
from ‘Mary in Old Age’
"I don't want to stay here. I want to stop it."
Was "here" the nursing home? Was it the chair?
The condition she was in? Her life? Life? The body? ...
The Chair
The chair left out in the garden night all winter
Sits waiting for the summer day all night.
The insides of the metal arms are frozen.
Over the hou...
Horace: Ode I.11
Don't be too eager to ask
What the gods have in mind for us,
What will become of you,
&n...
from ‘That Evening at Dinner’
By the last few times we saw her it was clear
That things were different. When you tried to help her
Get out of the car or get from the car to the door
...
Nocturnal
It is always among sleepers we walk.
We walk in their dreams. None of us
Knows what he is as he walks
In the dream of another. Tell me my name <...
Rereading Old Writing
Looking back, the language scribbles.
What's hidden, having been said?
Almost everything? Thrilling to think
There was a secret there somewhere,
A...
Walker in the Imagined City
Ben Katchor had been a bit of a cultural phenomenon for nearly a decade before he became a MacArthur fellow--a first for a cartoonist--this summer; is this the beginning of comi...
