June 16, 2003 | The Nation

House Republicans anticipated smooth sailing for legislation to reauthorize the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

New York, NY

BARDS OF BAGHDAD

New York City

THE DON'T-BLAME-US CROWD

With the Bush Administration continuing to fill the federal courts with
right-wing judges, liberals have turned with renewed vigor to a strategy
that not only allows them to defeat individual n

At long last, the military appears to be gearing up to try some of the
Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

With all the words laundered over the Jayson Blair affair, why is my
soul still disquieted? Why do I feel even further from the truth than on
the day the journalistic fraud was first revealed?

Under cover of darkness in the early morning hours of March 18, Qusay
Saddam Hussein carted off nearly $1 billion in hard currency from Iraq's
central bank.

The early-bird presidential campaign is under way among Democrats with
the usual characteristics.

In 1900 Maurice Denis painted a large canvas titled Hommage à
Cézanne, which shows the esteemed master next to one of his
paintings and surrounded by a crowd of admiring yo

As the bombs cease falling on Baghdad, and the world argues over an
American presence in Iraq, the publication of Diana Abu-Jaber's funny,
thoughtful second novel, Crescent, seems uncann

Near the end of Parallels and Paradoxes, a recent collection of
dialogues on music and society between the conductor and pianist Daniel
Barenboim, music director of the Chicago Symphony

THE QUALITY OF LIFE REPORT: A Novel.
By Meghan Daum.
Viking. 309 pp. $24.95.

During the harsh New York City winter of 1909-10, 20,000 garment workers
marched and picketed to win recognition of their union.

"That was a benefit shooting." So said a shaken Kenneth Koch to a
stunned audience seconds after a tall, scraggly man fired a pistol at
him on January 10, 1968.

For years it was one of those intriguing asterisk marks in many a great
writer's career--a book that might have been but wasn't.

Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own is a deft and
ambitious four-part biography interweaving the lives of Dorothy Day,
Thomas Merton, Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor, the mo

Steal this book.

Somewhere, and it's not in this new Everyman's Library edition, James M.
Cain betrayed a state secret when he said that "a writer can only write
two hours a day." The truth in this observation

During the early years of the civil rights revolution, Theodore Bilbo,
the ferocious segregationist senator from Mississippi, published a book
titled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongreli

In the deformed, malignant years of the Ayatollah and the mullahs, women
in Iran in the 1980s sometimes found subversive ways to mutiny against
the cruelties imposed on them by wrathful men.

Leave it to a Marine to be blunt. When Lieut. Gen.

It is one thing when the talk-show bullies who shamelessly smeared the last President, even as he attacked the training camps of Al Qaeda, now term it anti-American or even treasonous to dare cri

Nothing deepens your cynicism quicker than the power of money in
American politics.

The radio went on in the middle of the night and there in my ear was the
voice of a young man.

A Joyous Song of Deliverance for Spring