September 2001
In This Issue
James Fallows, “The Early-Decision Racket”; Caitlin Flanagan, “Confessions of a Prep School College Counselor”; Samantha Power, “Bystanders to Genocide”; William Hamilton, “Suitably Attired”; fiction by Beth Lordan; Philip Hensher on Dawn Powell; and much more.
Articles
India's Disappearing Vultures
The mysterious dwindling of the Subcontinent's natural, and vital, "garbage men"
The King of Closed Captions
The self-appointed watchdog of a growing industry
The Early-Decision Racket
Early-decision programs—whereby a student applies early to a single school, receives an early answer, and promises to attend if accepted—have added an insane intensity to middle-class obsessions about college. They also distort the admissions process, rewarding the richest students from the most exclusive high schools and penalizing nearly everyone else. But the incentives for many colleges and students are as irresistable as they are perverse
Confessions of a Prep School College Counselor
Our author looks at books about college admissions—and at the unexamined prejudices fueling the "elite" college admissions frenzy
Help Wanted
The head of NASA forecasts a bleak future for American science
Suitably Attired
Well-dressed men have worn the same thing for a century now. A history and an appreciation of the suit
The Country and the City
With her inclusion in The Library of America, the neglected novelist Dawn Powell has finally achieved literary canonization. Our critic assesses the contrasting worlds of Powell's fiction
77 North Washington Street
Potato Salad
The German version is surprisingly light and intensely flavored
Letters to the editor
Digging
A short story
Tales of the Alhambra
The lost Islamic world of Southern Spain—and its modern echoes
New & Noteworthy
This fall's hot novel; Rushdie's latest; correcting the blather about "globalization"
All the City's a Stage
An eccentric mayor with a flair for the dramatic is bringing hope to a notoriously troubled capital
Bozzy's Life
A dazzling portrait of James Boswell as a literary artist
Up in Smoke
Next door to deadly violence life goes on
Word Court
Bystanders to Genocide
The author's exclusive interviews with scores of the participants in the decision-making, together with her analysis of newly declassified documents, yield a chilling narrative of self-serving caution and flaccid will—and countless missed opportunities to mitigate a colossal crime
Immaterial Civilization
What is the intangible equivalent of Angkor Wat or the Acropolis? The United Nations wants to know
