Books and Ideas

Sensation Sensation

A friend and I were sitting around commiserating about the things that get to us: unloading small indignities, comparing thorns. "So there I was," she said, "sitting on the bus a...

Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Patricia J. Williams

The Enemy The Enemy

The buildings' wounds are what I can't forget; though nothing could absorb my sense of loss, I stared into their blackness, what was not supposed to be there, billowing of soot...

Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Rafael Campo

Education of a Knife Education of a Knife

The third-year medical student held the intravenous catheter, poised to insert it into a patient's vein. Suddenly the patient asked, "Have you done this before?" As the student la...

Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Barron H. Lerner

Ghost Buster Ghost Buster

To immerse oneself in Robert Caro's heroic biographies is to come face to face with a shocking but unavoidable realization: Much of what we think we know about money, power and p...

Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Eric Alterman

It’s Only a Beginning It’s Only a Beginning

Nearly four years have elapsed since that merry month of May when France and the whole world were taken aback by a sudden and momentous upheaval.

Apr 17, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Singer

Stationary 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 n…

Apr 11, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Laura Manuelidis

The Undertaker’s Art, Exhumed The Undertaker’s Art, Exhumed

"It's a great mistake not to feel pleased when you have the chance," a rich, disfigured spinster advises a frail, well-mannered boy in The Shrimp and the Anemone, the first novel ...

Apr 11, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Caleb Crain

The Balfour Declaration The Balfour Declaration

Great Britain grants a homeland to the homeless Jews.

Apr 5, 2002 / Feature / H. M. Kallen

The Body Shop The Body Shop

There are those opposed to the use of cloning technology to create human embryos for stem-cell research whose concerns emanate from commitments to social justice. One of their arg...

Apr 4, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Ralph Brave

The Keyboard Campus The Keyboard Campus

"Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics," business "guru" Peter Drucker proclaimed in Forbes five years ago. "It took more than 200 years for the printed...

Apr 4, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stephen Brier and Roy Rosenzweig

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