The cold war has been over for a decade but it lingers on the American home front.

Our New Year's number is a mother goose with three eggs tucked behind. It could be a sign of cryptic rhymes and unhatched possibilities--or maybe of silliness, tailed by a lot of nothing.

Nelson Algren's 1961 review of Catch-22 is at www.thenation.com.

Never in history until the Soviet Union collapsed eight years ago had a great empire gone through such cataclysmic changes and accepted such staggering territorial losses without suffering defeat

The plan to take Israeli athletes hostage during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games was conceived at a cafe on the Piazza della Rotonda in Rome, in the shadow of the Pantheon and the tomb of Raphael.

He looks like a pear that's going bad. Tall, corpulent and much the worse for gravity, W.S.

Not since Charlton Heston painted the Sistine Chapel has there been so epic a film about arts patronage as Cradle Will Rock. Heston, you will recall, had to cope only with the Vatican.

The fifties may have been the last great moment when Americans entrusted their dreams of transformation to the material world.

The spectacle of human beings acting out mindless violence through pack behavior instills more terror in the heart than perhaps any other event in the natural world.

It is remarkable to what extent almost anything having to do with the Middle East in this country--be it political, cultural, historical or even personal--is permeated by the triumphalist vision