May 1999
In This Issue
Francis Fukuyama, “The Great Disruption”; Charles Portis, “Combinations of Jacksons”; Francis Davis, “Napoleon in Rags”; Mary Gordon, “The Deacon”; and much more.
Articles
Flouting the Convention
The ongoing campaign to ban all commercial whaling is driven by politics rather than science, and is setting a terrible precedent
Woodcock
Combinations of Jacksons
Six Days
On learning a new alphabet
The Clinical-Trials Bottleneck
Randomized clinical trials are the most conclusive way to test new treatments for cancer, but these trials are often resisted by patients, by doctors, and by insurers reluctant to pay for unproven therapies
Napoleon in Rags
Bob Dylan changed the popular music of his time and the music that followed, and the commercial release of a formerly bootlegged concert recording shows how he did it
The Deacon
If anyone had asked her, Sister Joan would have said that her daily half hour of prayer and meditation provided the most satisfying consolation she could imagine for a world that was random and violent and endlessly inventive in its cruelty toward the weak
Deus Ex Machina
Fresh and French
A pilgrimage among the potagers, or kitchen gardens, of France
Was the Great War Necessary?
A young historian argues iconoclastically that Britain's entry into the First World War, in 1914, was "the greatest error of modern history," born of neurotic fears projected onto Germany.
77 North Washington Street
Letters
The Almanac
Word Court
