In a Ruined Country
How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine
September 2005
In This Issue
David Samuels, "In a Ruined Country"; Sridhar Pappu, "The Holy Cow! Candidate"; fiction by Christopher Buckley; Lori Gottlieb, "The XY Files"; Christopher Hitchens on Salman Rushdie; Stuart Tayler Jr. on the Supreme Court's greatest flaw; Sandra Tsing Loh on a mother who fled; and much more.
Features
One of Our Whales Is Missing
In which Rick Renard, PR hustler par excellence, sets out to save Grimland's gentle giants of the deep. A short story
The Holy Cow! Candidate
Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, loves data, hates waste, and reveres Dwight Eisenhower. He's also the Next Big Thing in the Republican Party. But can anyone so clean-cut, so pure of character, and (by gosh!) so square overcome the "two Ms"—Mormonism and Massachusetts—to be our next president?
Lost Verizon
Intercepted phone call outside the gates of Vienna, recently declassified
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Remote Control
The Supreme Court's greatest failing is not ideological bias—it's the justices' increasingly tenuous grasp of how the real world works
Without Precedent
Actually, the Supreme Court's problem is not merely disconnection from the real world—it's also arrogance, dishonesty, grandiosity, and a lack of respect for principle, history, or logic
"Blue Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty"
photograph by Stephen Hird
Waiting for Sarko
Will Nicolas Sarkozy vanquish his mentor Jacques Chirac to become France's first "American" president?
Primary Sources
Terrorism tallies; do good grades cost minority kids popularity?; the long-term benefits of nonviolence; why athletes should wear red
Nature's Wrath
A field guide
Books
He Found It at the Movies
James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, Shorter Fiction and James Agee: Film Writing & Selected Journalism, edited by Michael Sragow; Louis I. Kahn, by Robert McCarter; Tired of Weeping, by Jónína Einarsdóttir; The Chosen, by Jerome Karabel
Hobbes in the Himalayas
The situation in horrible, magical modern Kashmir—where East battles East in a war that fuses the psychopathic and the apocalyptic—defies political analysis. But Salman Rushdie's new novel captures it as nothing else can
Gender Bending
Men's books that women should read
The Great Escape
A grudging salute to an absentee mom
New Fiction
Antwerp, by Nicholas Royle
If Pigs Could Swim
Why our farm animals would be better off on the other side of the Atlantic
A Close Read
Perfect Strangers and Other Stories, by Roxana Robinson
Pursuits
Jason Schneider The XY Files
Forgoing a trip down the aisle, our correspondent heads straight to the sperm bank. But does she want the Truffaut aficionado or the mentor to underprivileged kids?
The Pariah Guy
Edward J. von Kloberg III (1942—2005)
Who's Who
A selective index to this month's issue
Also in this issue
Calendar
What to watch for in the weeks ahead
