September 2005

How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine

In which Rick Renard, PR hustler par excellence, sets out to save Grimland's gentle giants of the deep. A short story

Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, loves data, hates waste, and reveres Dwight Eisenhower. He's also the Next Big Thing in the Republican Party. But can anyone so clean-cut, so pure of character, and (by gosh!) so square overcome the "two Ms"—Mormonism and Massachusetts—to be our next president?

Intercepted phone call outside the gates of Vienna, recently declassified

The Supreme Court's greatest failing is not ideological bias—it's the justices' increasingly tenuous grasp of how the real world works

Actually, the Supreme Court's problem is not merely disconnection from the real world—it's also arrogance, dishonesty, grandiosity, and a lack of respect for principle, history, or logic

photograph by Stephen Hird

Will Nicolas Sarkozy vanquish his mentor Jacques Chirac to become France's first "American" president?

Terrorism tallies; do good grades cost minority kids popularity?; the long-term benefits of nonviolence; why athletes should wear red

A field guide

James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, Shorter Fiction and James Agee: Film Writing & Selected Journalism, edited by Michael Sragow; Louis I. Kahn, by Robert McCarter; Tired of Weeping, by Jónína Einarsdóttir; The Chosen, by Jerome Karabel

The situation in horrible, magical modern Kashmir—where East battles East in a war that fuses the psychopathic and the apocalyptic—defies political analysis. But Salman Rushdie's new novel captures it as nothing else can

Men's books that women should read

A grudging salute to an absentee mom

Antwerp, by Nicholas Royle

Why our farm animals would be better off on the other side of the Atlantic

Perfect Strangers and Other Stories, by Roxana Robinson

Forgoing a trip down the aisle, our correspondent heads straight to the sperm bank. But does she want the Truffaut aficionado or the mentor to underprivileged kids?

Edward J. von Kloberg III (1942—2005)

A selective index to this month's issue