Our Prison Complex Our Prison Complex

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

Sep 23, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Theodore Hamm

The Boys of Summer The Boys of Summer

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 ...

Sep 23, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

Sunstein’s Law Sunstein’s Law

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 conse...

Sep 23, 1999 / Books & the Arts / David Rudenstine

‘Finality’ or Justice? ‘Finality’ or Justice?

Remember the bizarre daycare center "ritual abuse" trials of the eighties--the McMartin case in Los Angeles, the Little Rascals case in Edenton, North Carolina, the Kelly Micha...

Sep 18, 1999 / Column / Katha Pollitt

George W. Bush’s Education Plan George W. Bush’s Education Plan

A public school whose students don't test well
Would lose some funds unless its score improves.
If cutting funds won't help the kids advance,

Sep 16, 1999 / Column / Calvin Trillin

Polymaritally Perverse Polymaritally Perverse

I've always vowed I would never be one of those people--and you know who you are!--who cancel their ACLU membership in a fit of pique over a single issue.

Sep 16, 1999 / Column / Katha Pollitt

Adults Only Adults Only

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.

Sep 16, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

Pacifica/Bellicosica Pacifica/Bellicosica

Our coverage of the situation at KPFA in San Francisco--Marc Cooper's "Pacifica on the Brink" (Aug.