Buchanan Breaks Ranks
In Washington, a city in which (to borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf) all is gossip, corruption and chatter, the end-of-summer buzz has been about Pat Buchanan and whether he'...
Print Magazine
September 20, 1999 Issue
Purchase Current Issue or Login to Download the PDF of this Issue Download the PDF of this Issue
Editorial
Burned by Waco
On July 26 I sat for almost fourteen hours in a hearing room waiting to testify before Congress on the tragedy at Waco, and watched a dismal performance.
Holbrooke’s Time to Lead
In assuming his position at the United Nations, ambassador Richard Holbrooke brings his personal access to power, a sharp intelligence and a capacity, unusual in government, t...
Column
Weird Science
My first thought upon hearing that the Kansas state education board had removed evolution from its mandatory curriculum was: Go ahead! Be like that! Handicap your kids for lif...
The Commentary School of Falsification
Israeli schoolchildren returned to their desks this year to find a new history curriculum.
Feature
The Road to Reform
Nearly everyone seems to agree that the war on drugs has been a disaster, but little progress in ending it has been made.
Marijuana Made Easy
For more than half a century, the US government has maintained a hard line on marijuana, denying that the plant has any medical value at all.
Does Europe Do It Better?
Listen to a debate among drug policy advocates and you're likely to hear impassioned claims about the brilliant success (or dismal failure) of more "liberal" approaches in cer...
An Old City Seeks a New Model
In early December 1984, an undercover police officer named Marcellus Ward met with a pair of heroin dealers above a candy store in southwest Baltimore.
Life of a Scandal
In mid-October 1996, two months after the publication of Gary Webb's series "Dark Alliance" in the San Jose Mercury News, an extraordinary town meeting took place in Co...
Books & the Arts
Harnessing the Rising Sun
Americans aren't much for history these days. History is for Europeans--for Germans, with their thickets of theory, and the French, who are forever going on about their revolu...
Kilroy Was There
In the summer of 1941, Adolf Hitler's apparently invincible Wehrmacht was grinding hundreds of miles into the Soviet Union, spreading mayhem all the way.
Humiliation With a Smile
To suffer humiliation can be tragic. To bear humiliation for much longer than necessary, yet with loud impatience, is the comic gift of Albert Brooks.
