January/February 2004
In This Issue
James Fallows, “Blind Into Baghdad”; Kenneth M. Pollack, “Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong”; “State of the Union”; Ben Birnbaum, “A Family Deposition”; P. J. O'Rourke, “Speaking of the Candidates”; Joshua Green, “In Search of the Elusive Swing Voter”; Kenji Fujimoto, “I Was Kim Jong Il's Cook”; fiction by Nathan Roberts; and much more.
Articles
Close Call
A Family Deposition
Should Egypt receive reparations for the Exodus?
A Beautiful Mind
As the Philadelphia Eagles' Hank Fraley demonstrates, the behemoth who snaps the ball must also be one of the most mentally nimble players on the field
Information, Please
Sounds crazy, but one way to arrest the spiraling cost of health care would be to figure out what treatments actually work
High Plains Drifter
Don Quixote, a masterpiece of comic seriousness, gets a new and 'virtually twee-free' translation
America's Fortunes
In terms of personal prosperity most people are doing better than they think. But prospects for the unemployed are only getting worse. And two big storm clouds loom over everything
Blind Into Baghdad
The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge. The inside story of a historic failure
Do as I Say
Dr. Laura's counsel is caustic and oftentimes hypocritical, but it is also persuasive
Nation-Building 101
The chief threats to us and to world order come from weak, collapsed, or failed states. Learning how to fix such states—and building necessary political support at home—will be a defining issue for America in the century ahead
Young Fogeys
Young reactionaries, aging radicals—the U.S. Catholic Church's unusual clerical divide
A Gambling Man
Blair Hull thinks he has found the formula for how to buy a Senate seat
In Search of the Elusive Swing Voter
It almost doesn't matter who the Democratic candidate is. In terms of strategy, the road map for the coming presidential campaign was set long before the primaries—and it runs straight through the handful of states with the largest numbers of independent voters. Any candidate needs to hunt them down
The Chieftains and the Church
An intellectual audit of the Democrats and the Republicans
Aftermath
In Jerusalem cleaning up after a suicide bombing is business as usual
A Two-Planet Species?
The right way to think about our space program
Are We Still a Middle-Class Nation?
It's no accident that the United States has always been an economic paradise for the middle class—that class was invented and reinvented by the government. Now the government needs to reinvent it again—before it's too late
The $45 Trillion Problem
Carefree spending, huge tax cuts, and—above all—unalterable demographic facts have put us all in a box. And there's no easy way out
Radical Tax Reform
The tax system is unfair and inefficient, and fails to generate enough revenue to cover government expenditures. Here's how to fix that
Looking for Trouble
Get a life—at your own risk
New & Noteworthy
Why we review the books we do
Speaking of the Candidates
Our correspondent looks much too closely at the current crop of stump speeches
Putting a Value on Health
The way to arrest spiraling costs is to admit that we already do what we say we never will—ration health care—and then figure out how to do that better
The Other Gender Gap
Maybe boys just weren't meant for the classroom
Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong
How could we have been so far off in our estimates of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs? A leading Iraq expert and intelligence analyst in the Clinton Administration—whose book The Threatening Storm proved deeply influential in the run-up to the war—gives a detailed account of how and why we erred
An Incomplete Map of the Northern Polarity
If you were to ask George why he loves Margaret, he would say, "Because she's so mean to me."
Insurance Required
If mandatory insurance is good enough for your car...
America's "Suez Moment"
The growing trade deficit threatens U.S. living standards and makes the country dangerously vulnerable to economic extortion. The way out is to make foreigners act more like us
No Hands Clapping
The Angry American
Social rage as a measure of the country's moral and political well-being
Word Court
The Tuition Crunch
For low-income students college is increasingly out of reach
I Was Kim Jong Il's Cook
True stories from the Dear Leader's onetime chef
Letters to the Editors
The Acutest Ear in Paris
To be so perceptive and yet so innocent—that, in a phrase, is the achievement of Proust
