Who
Is John McCain?
By Michael Tomasky
It is little
remembered today that the political career of John Sidney McCain III, a career
now thoroughly laundered in mythology, began with the help of several
fortuities.
Jihadi
Suicide Bombers: The New Wave
By Ahmed Rashid
After
September 11, 2001, readers around the world quickly learned about the basic
tenets of jihad and its distortion by al-Qaeda. Now the shelves of Western
bookshops are again filled with books on the subject, which gives no sign of
going away.
The
Library in the New Age
By Robert Darnton
Information is
exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such
bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in
the new landscape? How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that
problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways
information has been communicated.
Economics:
Which Way for Obama?
By John Cassidy
A review of
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard
H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.
The
Truth Force at the Met
Daniel Mendelsohn
Good people do
not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas. Like the Greek tragedies
that the sixteenth-century Venetian inventors of opera sought to recreate,
Western musical drama has tended to be preoccupied with the darker extremes of
human emotions: excessive passion and wild jealousy, smoldering resentment and
implacable rage. These, after all, are the emotions that spark the kinds of
actions—adultery, betrayal, revenge, murder—that make for gripping drama.
The
Question of Global Warming
By Freeman Dyson
On A
Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies by
William Nordhaus and Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto, edited by
Ernesto Zedillo.
In
the Emperor's Dream House
By Joyce Carol Oates
On The
Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie.
Plus: Martin Filler on Eero Saarinen, Edward Mendelson on
Alfred Kazin, Jasper Griffin on Richard Stoneman's Alexander the Great,
Helen Vendler on Jorie Graham's Sea Change, and more.
Table
of Contents
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