April 2002
In This Issue
Christopher Hitchens, “The Medals of His Defeats”; Jonathan Rauch, “Seeing Around Corners”; Phyllis Rose, “Dances With Daffodils”; James Rosen, “Nixon and the Chiefs”; Trevor Corson, “Stalking the American Lobster”; David Brooks, “Looking Back on Tomorrow”; fiction by A. S. Byatt; and much more.
Articles
Looking Back on Tomorrow
If the century ahead turns out to have a theme, what will it be?
Stalking the American Lobster
Government scientists say that lobsters are being dangerously overfished. Lobstermen insist that stocks are plentiful. It's a familiar kind of standoff—except that now a new breed of ecologist has taken to the waters, using scuba gear, underwater robots, and even nuclear submarines, in order to figure out what's going on. It turns out that the lore and lessons of the lobsterman are worth paying attention to
Behavior Modification
Soon after the Afghan war began, the Air Force dramatically altered its tactics. What lay behind the change?
The Other Deficit
America's ballooning trade deficit may be the worst economic problem we face—and no one wants to talk about it
The Splendor of Angkor
Now is the best time in many decades to visit Cambodia and its ancient Khmer capital
The Air-Power Revolution
Historians and military analysts have long stressed the limitations of air power. Their arguments are no longer tenable
Blind Spot
Racial profiling, meet your alter ego: affirmative action
Fore Street
Restaurants worth building a trip around
Letters to the editor
The Case Against Europe
The very things that Europeans think make their political judgment better than Americans' actually make it worse
Fast-Free Living
What Americans would do if they were serious about stopping to smell the flowers
How to Stuff a Wild Enron
Everyone blames too little regulation for the Enron mess, but maybe the culprit was too much
On Plagiarism
In the wake of recent scandals some distinctions are in order
Seeing Around Corners
The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail—but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work
Dances With Daffodils
A fanciful form of wordplay known as "N plus 7" can be surprisingly effective at exposing literary pretense
Nixon and the Chiefs
In the last days of 1971 President Richard Nixon and his closest aides met to discuss the astonishing discovery that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been spying on the White House. Transcripts of Nixon's secret tapes of these meetings, published here for the first time, offer a case study in Nixon's paranoid style of governing—and his surprisingly successful efforts to salvage advantage from misfortune
Conducting: A Backwoods Guide
In the intense quiet of a Maine camp aspiring conductors work on bossiness, passivity, and how to move to the music
A Magnificent Misfit
Lorna Sage rejected empty romanticizing in favor of complex truth
A Generation of Gidgets
Female surfers are back in the lineup, in droves
The Medals of His Defeats
Our author takes the Great Man down a peg or two—and still finds that Churchill was a great man
New & Noteworthy
Irish contentment and Irish misery; Robert Cohen's "formidable comic energy"; a much-hyped "immature fictional excursion"
Raw Material
A short story
