December 2002
In This Issue
Robert Dallek, “The Medical Ordeals of JFK”; Marjorie Garber, “Our Genius Problem”; Jessica Cohen, “Grade A: The Market for a Yale Woman's Eggs”; Rene Chun, “Bobby Fischer's Pathetic Endgame”; Randall Kennedy, “Interracial Intimacy”; Jonathan Yardley on H. L. Mencken; fiction by Melissa Hardy; and much more.
Articles
Rite
Light Shows of the Mind
Einstein was right when he said that imagination is more important than knowledge
Bobby Fischer’s Pathetic Endgame
Paranoia, hubris, and hatred—the unraveling of the greatest chess player ever
Grade A: The Market for a Yale Woman’s Eggs
When a Yale undergraduate explored becoming an egg donor for a wealthy couple willing to pay top dollar to the right candidate, she didn't realize how unsettling the process of candidacy would prove to be
Hand Tools
Today's most noteworthy pencils, styluses, and pen scanners
What Now?
Developments, encouraging and otherwise
Interracial Intimacy
White-black dating, marriage, and adoption are on the rise. This development, however, is being met with resistance—more vocally by blacks than by whites
Grapes of Gascony
A vintners' cooperative in southwestern France is creating impressive new wines from rare old varieties
Duck Sauce À La Bidouze
A simple—and libertine—Gascon dish
The Rogues of Academe
Making dictators an offer they can't refuse
Third Person Singular
Having an ear bent by Henry Adams, the prototype of the modern thinker
Other Reviews
The At-Risk-Youth Industry
Private companies that run prisons and treatment centers for juveniles have turned out not to be very good at making money or rehabilitating kids
Wonders of the World
Three timeless Sicilian places
The Fat Tax
A modest proposal
Coming of Age on Long Island
Child of My Heart represents a radical—if characteristically quiet— departure in Alice McDermott's fiction
The Sage of Baltimore
Reading the prose of H. L. Mencken is one of the great joys that literacy bestows on the sentient
The Medical Ordeals of JFK
Recent assessments of Kennedy's presidency have tended to raise "questions of character"—to view his Administration in the context of his sometimes wayward personal behavior. Such assessments are incomplete. Newly uncovered medical records reveal that the scope and intensity of his physical suffering were beyond what we had previously imagined. What Kennedy endured—and what he hid from the public—both complicates and enlarges our understanding of his character
Our Genius Problem
Why this obsession with the word, with the idea, and with the people on whom we've bestowed the designation?
A Nine-Hour Resurrection
Alexander Herzen, Marx's rival and Tolstoy's nonfiction counterpart, enjoys a well-deserved return to center stage in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia
Letters to the Editors
New & Noteworthy
What to read this month
Aquerò
A short story
Word Fugitives
