Most Americans long ago stopped believing that George W. Bush is what he claimed to be during the 2000 presidential campaign: a compassionate conservative.

On April 28 the subject of torture was discussed in oral arguments before the Supreme Court.

A Nation of WASPs?

In the early 1980s, soon after the right-wing grassroots movement gave us a Reagan presidency, I announced that I would be boycotting my straight friends' weddings.

Only on my last day in this hilly, river-spliced city, with such beguiling old world charm and art nouveau elegance that unless you're Kafka a strenuous effort is required to maintain fury or g

Even before the Congressional hearings on the criminal abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, Colin Powell brought up My Lai, the Vietnamese village where, in 1968, American troops slau

"The unthinkable is becoming thinkable," neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan despaired recently in the Washington Post.

What a wonderful image of democracy and tolerance the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has presented to the world by allowing same-sex marriages.

So there were WMDs in Iraq after all. They're called digital cameras. Partly because of them, the United States faces one of the most humiliating defeats in imperial history.

We're told that the few rotten apples
Who brought on this sordid affair'll
Be punished. But what if those apples
Are right at the top of the barrel?

As of this writing, seven in ten Americans want Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to remain at his post, a vote of confidence that exceeds that even for the President himself.

Three years ago I saw a work by the late Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth that so captivated me that I am determined to write a book just to be able to reproduce it on the jacket.

For the last three and a half years the Israeli army has deployed American-supplied F-16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, armored Caterpillar bulldozers and Merkava tanks powered by engines

Shortly after the first anniversary of September 11, when The New Yorker had published a slew of poems memorializing the events of that day--Galway Kinnell's "When the Towers Fell" and C