November 2001
In This Issue
William Langewiesche, “The Crash of EgyptAir 990”; P. J. O'Rourke, “Zion's Vital Signs”; Peter Landesman, “The Curse of the Sevso Silver”; Byron York, “The Life and Death of The American Spectator”; fiction by Edward J. Delaney; Benjamin Schwarz on the British Empire; and much more.
Articles
Order in the Family
Not our politicians but our public servants have called us to a higher standard
A New Mask
The terrorists temporarily created a civil society in New York—but the city can't mind its manners forever
No Room at the Inn
Whatever happened to the NO VACANCY sign?
Reverberations of the Irish Boom
Prosperity and its discontents come to Ireland's towns and countryside
The Warp and the Weft
A Short Story
A Head Full of Swirling Dreams
The short-lived Robert Louis Stevenson was perhaps the most comprehensively accomplished writer in the English language
Looking Alive
The objects around us are becoming more and more like living things
Penny-wise
Thrift, stinginess, eccentricity, and tact
What's Past is Present
A town long linked to organized crime and racism fails a recent exercise in image rehabilitation
Restaurant Vila Lisa
Introducing a new series: restaurants worth building a trip around
The Curse of the Sevso Silver
A treasure trove of Roman-era silver, perhaps worth $200 million as a complete collection, came to light in the late 1970s—most likely discovered by a Hungarian laborer. He had little sense of the value of his find. In the years that followed, efforts to sell the silver have led to a web of plots and counterplots, the close attention of police officials in several European capitals, and, quite possibly, three murders
The Crash of EgyptAir 990
Two years afterward the U.S. and Egyptian governments are still quarreling over the cause—a clash that grows out of cultural division, not factual uncertainty. A look at the flight data from a pilot's perspective, with the help of simulations of the accident, points to what the Egyptians must already know: the crash was caused not by any mechanical failure but by a pilot's intentional act
Letters to the editor
The Scrapbook
An accidental encounter with two briefly famous lives
South Africans Only
Africans from all over their war-torn continent have lately been flocking to South Africa. They are generally not met with open arms
Zion's Vital Signs
A journey through modern Israel, where terrorism has been a fact of ordinary life for decades—and where ordinary life defeats terrorism
What Auden Didn't Know
The things that stay in place
A Bit of Bunting
A new history of the British Empire elevates expediency to principle
The New Counterculture
The rapid growth of the home-schooling movement owes much to the energy and organizational skills of its Christian advocates
Word Court
The Life and Death of The American Spectator
The conservative magazine survived and prospered for twenty-five years before Bill Clinton came into its sights. Now the former President is rich and smiling, and the Spectator is dead
America's Bard
A collection of writings by and about Walt Whitman, the free-spirited poet who championed democracy and America.
New & Noteworthy
A gritty, dark, and comic novel of the Other America; Naipaul's sunny vision; four tales by a master of American prose
77 North Washington Street
