Ad Policy

December 11, 2006 Issue

Cover art by: Cover by Gene Case & Stephen Kling/Avenging Angels

purchase current issue

TO DOWNLOAD PDF VERSION Click Here

Download PDF of this issue


  • Feature

    A Soldier’s Story

    “For just a minute or two, step into my life. I am a soldier in the Army Special Forces, just back from Iraq, where I lived and fought beside my Iraqi counterpart as we battled the insurgency. I am a conflicted man.”

    Major Bill Edmonds

  • The Day the Music Died

    It’s the end of the world as we know it: Tower Records, the last great CD emporium, is closing, victim of the iPod and MP3 revolution. As Wal-Mart and other big-box stores pick up the slack, will niche music also perish?

    Max Fraser

  • Editorial

    Protect the Vote Locally

    As the Democratic majority in Congress weighs several measures to address voter suppression, the time is right for real voting reform on the local level.

    Paul Rogat Loeb

  • Prop 209: Ten Long Years

    Ten years after its passage, California’s Prop 209 has had a devastating impact on diversity in higher education.

    Carmina Ocampo

  • Friedman’s Cruel Legacy

    Milton Friedman’s free-market faith produced a bastardized system of interest-group politics that favors sectors of citizens at the expense of many others.

    William Greider

  • Big Win for Enviros

    America’s environmentalists won big in the midterm elections. But can they make real progress on climate change by 2008 and beyond?

    Mark Hertsgaard

  • An Immodest Proposal

    Modesty is a virtue, but rather than telling the courts to practice restraint, the Bush Administration should rein in its own abuses of power.

    David Cole

  • The Odd Attack on Dean

    James Carville’s bizarre attack on Howard Dean exposed an explosive battle for control between Clintonistas-in-waiting and advocates of renewal. This is a good fight to have.

    The Editors
  • GET UNLIMITED DIGITAL ACCESS FOR LESS THAN $3 A MONTH!


  • Books & the Arts

    The Day the Music Died

    It’s the end of the world as we know it: Tower Records, the last great CD emporium, is closing, victim of the iPod and MP3 revolution. As Wal-Mart and other big-box stores pick up the slack, will niche music also perish?

    Max Fraser

  • A Life of His Own

    Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf looks at a remarkable public intellectual whose life and work were eclipsed by his more famous spouse.

    Brenda Wineapple

  • God’s Willing Executioners

    God’s War explores the barbaric clash of Christianity and Islam, and what happens when people follow religious voices that no one else can hear.

    Daniel Lazare

  • The Man Who Loved Children

    Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate details the trials of a very smug and special class of parents raising children in post-9/11 New York.

    Suzy Hansen

  • Class Consciousness

    Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford explores the contradictions of a social revolutionary possessed of an aristocrat’s sense of the wrong and right kind of people.

    Charles Taylor

  • Secrets

    Your coffin was so small,
    Only I knew it was full of
    candlewick bedspreads,
    orange pekoe tea leaves
    smoking chimneys over wet peat;

    Eavan Boland

  • The Collaborator

    The Unfree French looks at the German occupation of Vichy; Bad Faith is a grim biography of a French collaborator.

    David A. Bell

  • I Can’t Get No Satisfaction

    Laura Kipnis’s The Female Thing takes women to task for perpetuating the notion that they’re vulnerable.

    Christine Smallwood

  • Getting Even

    Roald Dahl’s Collected Stories are best enjoyed by adult readers who take their humor black.

    Stephen Amidon

  • Not Dark Yet

    Gore Vidal’s Point to Point Navigation is a brave and continuous affirmation of life and an assurance that though the Republic has been betrayed, we are not to give up hope.

    Michael Wood

  • Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind

    Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day is actually four stories, each replete with brilliant patter, fancy footwork, wishful thinking and a plaintive ukulele.

    John Leonard
  • The stakes are higher now than ever. Get The Nation in your inbox.

x