February 2001
In This Issue
Fourteen writers on “Bill Clinton and His Consequences”; Abraham Verghese, “The Bandit King and the Movie Star”; Daniel Smith, “Shock and Disbelief”; Ian Frazier, “Walking Tour”; and much more.
Articles
New & Noteworthy
The Way It Wasn’t
An alternative history of the Clinton Administration
Relativism as Teflon
How Clinton kept us from getting his goat
Sovereigns of the Sky
In Mongolia a falconer finds the ultimate expression of his sport—hunting with the majestic golden eagle
New & Noteworthy
The Promise Keeper
At least when it came to campaign pledges, Bill Clinton told the truth
It’s a Bug-Eat-Bug World
Biocontrols are the newest old thing in gardening
New & Noteworthy
The Tiki Wars
How do we distinguish the historic from the sentimental?
All the President’s Sidemen
Savvy enough about rhythm
New & Noteworthy
FLOTUS Blossoms
From a political appendage to a free-standing figure—who is, oddly enough, not really there
Sister Godzilla
A short story
He Was Slick, Thank God
Bill Clinton's talent for confounding his enemies, manipulating his friends, and playing all sides against the middle helped to create the economic golden years
77 North Washington Street
The Wedding Merchants
Marriage is in Chapter Eleven, but the white wedding is in the black
Walking Tour
A journey through a metropolis that, once seen, can never be forgotten
A Generation Without Public Passion
Clinton's chief legacy to the young was to drain politics of idealism
New & Noteworthy
The Triumph of Robust Tokenism
Clinton's racial strategy helped mainly those who had already helped themselves
New & Noteworthy
The Return of the “Undeserving Poor”
Welfare reform revived a hateful notion
The Curse of Normalcy
Writers in post-Milosevic Yugoslavia discover that angst no longer sells
“The First Hip White Person”
Common Stock
Knowing something about everything versus everything about something
Sneak Preview
To the Manor Bought
Aristocratic status is just a mouse click and a bank transfer away
Was Clinton Cool?
Talking about my generation. And talking and talking and talking
The Lost Islands
Is the United States quietly, mysteriously, skrinking?
Clinton and the Democrats
The President's party has lost its power base, both in Washington and in the states
Mutual Assured Destruction
He made sex obsolete—at least as a weapon of political war
Shock and Disbelief
Electroconvulsive therapy was once psychiatry's most terrifying tool—blunt, painful, and widely abused. It is now a safe and effective treatment for a wide range of mental illnesses. But an unlikely trio of activist groups stands against it
Class and the Classroom
The 1990s were the time when "public education" lost its hold on our hearts
Esteemed Passengers!
Searching for equanimity in the skies above Siberia
Las Vegas, 'Tis of Thee
The sweet land of liberties deserves our respect—or at least our ambivalence
The Bandit King
On July 30 of last year a notorious Indian smuggler and poacher named Veerappan kidnapped an elderly and beloved Indian actor named Rajkumar and squirreled him away in a forest hideout. The ransom demands were political—and unacceptable. The kidnapping roiled India and churned an American-style media frenzy. Then, suddenly, in November, Rajkumar was set free, under circumstances fraught with mystery
Bill Clinton and His Consequences
Letters to the Editors
A Maverick Historian
Rarely has comedy of manners been so artfully infused with pathos as in Evelyn Waugh's recently reissued Sword of Honour trilogy: "the finest work of fiction in English," our author argues, "to emerge from World War II"
Off Its Rocker
Dame Muriel's surreal meditation on belief
