For more information about Positive Force, or to send donations to the Arthur S. Flemming Center, write to Positive Force, 3510 North 8th Street, Arlington, VA 22201. Checks should be made payable to Emmaus Services for the Aging.

Sagesse (meaning "wisdom") LaBasse, the narrator of Claire Messud's second novel, The Last Life, is French-Algerian on her father's side and American on her mother's.

Karen Rosenberg has taught Russian literary history in the United States and Austria.

In 1980, amid debates about "cleaning up" Times Square, New York City Mayor Ed Koch warned, "New York cannot and should not become Disneyland.

To die for art: No one takes the idea seriously anymore, and yet people do it every day.

This past winter both Edwin Meese and Gen. Barry McCaffrey expressed surprising misgivings about the current direction of the War on Drugs.

To the list of movie characters who look back on their lives from the Beyond, add Lester Burnham, the 42-year-old, dead narrator of American Beauty. He is a murder victim--so it would seem

He criticizes the liberal Warren Court for breaking new constitutional ground on too many fronts too broadly, while also giving no quarter to the constitutional theories of conservative Supreme C

Conventional wisdom has it that Americans stopped attending foreign films as soon as the domestic ones started featuring bare breasts. Convention, as usual, is too simple.

As Hawaii's first American century comes to an end, marking grim anniversaries of overthrow and forced annexation by the United States, a groundswell for Native Hawaiian sovereignty continues to