Ending the Death Dance

Israel and Palestine will not find peace until both have security and sovereignty.

Richard Falk

An Uneasy Peace

Afghan women are free of the Taliban, but liberation is still a distant dream.

Jan Goodwin

Campaign Finance: The Sequel

With McCain-Feingold finally passed, it's time to focus again on public funding.

John Nichols

The Isle of Polyphemus

Like the Cyclops in the tale of Ulysses, Israel is striking at its enemy in blind fury.

Wole Soyinka

Is Smuggling a Patriotic Act?

On the one-month anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the tobacco industry took aim at Congress's first effort to respond to the crisis with a major piece of new legislation-what wou

Mark Schapiro

Palestine Militias Rising

Graham Usher

Unsigning the ICC

John B. Anderson

Sharon Hawks Down?

David Corn

Lonesome Cowboy

the Editors

Where Are the Peaceniks?

Neve Gordon

Going Down the Road

Jim Hightower

Angola After Savimbi

William Minter

Social Security Fixes

Paul Simon

Sharon Wears Oppressor’s Cloak

What is the fundamental difference between Slobodan Milosevic and Ariel Sharon? The former is on trial for war crimes, while the latter still leads an occupying army.

Robert Scheer

The Royal Scam

I really must come to England more often. The last time I was here, in mid-February, Princess Margaret gave up the ghost. And now, even as I step off the wondrous train that connects Paris to London, the flags are hauled halfway down to mark the passing of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, last Empress of India. This was supposed to be a Jubilee year, marking half a century of the present sovereign's rule. But it has been a series of black-draped obsequies so far. And I plan to come back in early June...

Christopher Hitchens

Four Rms, Rent Slashed, Sad Vu

Katha Pollitt

Elizabeth Dole

Get set again for Liddy Dole.
She's back, to let the good times roll.
She's entering another race,
Her hair and diction all in place.
(Her hair is even more precise
Than that of Condoleezza Rice.)
Her problem is that she's been cast
As someone with a Beltway past.
Although she's Carolina bred,
She left her home to get ahead.
And now they say her luggage tag
Says DC--on a carpetbag.
"But ahm from heah," she'll say to all.
She'll say it in a Tarheel drawl.
The drawl alone should do the trick,
Unless she lays it on too thick--
Unless the voters say, in candor,
"We simply cannot understand her."

Calvin Trillin

What Are They Reading?

Pick: THE AMERICAN SOUL: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders.

Victor Navasky

Witness in the Territories

Russell Banks

The Undertaker’s Art, Exhumed

Caleb Crain

The Show They Love to Hate

Arthur C. Danto

African Queen

Stuart Klawans

Stationary

Perhaps time is our invention
To make things seem to move
Like the uncovering tail of the blue jay
As it lights its feet on the wet
Trembling wood.

Perhaps the seasons are really not
More than a single space with walls inside, disconnected
While fall and winter, and spring
Which we always anticipate, are only
Expansions of our own longings.

Perhaps there is only the now
Neither age nor youth, not even the vertigo of memories stilettoed
Except wounded into this present second
Shorter than the birth of a cell, or the nest dropped
With the sun and the rain always out together.

This center is absolute, it needs no endlessness
For heaven or hell. Or for creation, our own illusion of ourselves.
The minor variations we unfold are all the same
Inherently permutating at once
Repeating one design. Obscure. Lit at the edges of our time.

Laura Manuelidis

Letters

Jon Wiener and Our Readers