With the death last year of Czeslaw Milosz, the world lost a Nobel Prize–winning poet and a singular voice of the 20th century. A survivor of Nazism and communism, Milosz refused to regard the world bleakly—or to retreat into the romantic illusions that beckoned to many of his fellow intellectuals. His intimate verses declare the individual’s connection to history, his spiritual autonomy, and his innate dignity.
America’s falling dollar and mounting internationaldebt are not, as pundits often declare, the wages ofprofligacy and sin. They are the inevitable products of dysfunctional international financial arrangements—a system that now appears likely to come crashing down, with alarming implications for the American economy.
America’s political and military efforts in the Middle East go by many names: War on terror. Clash of civilizations. Democratization. But our author argues that all of these undertakings grow from a fateful decision made decades ago that the American way of life requires unlimited access to foreign oil.
Nearly 170 years ago, an upstart New York City newspaper reported that an astronomer had discovered life on the moon. For days, the paper regaled its readers with tales of winged humanoids and intelligent beavers, and the public bought the story. Why did so many readers believe it?
Down through the ages, philosophers and poets, politicians and theologians, friends and strangers have argued about the nature of happiness. They haven’t been able to settle on what happiness isexactly, but that hasn’t kept them from chasing it down. In the end, and the beginning, too, happiness may be a lot easier to experience than to define.
Long after the last witnesses to momentous events in the history of a nation have died, the memory of those events may continue to alter the course of the nation. What matters most is not whether historical recollection is accurate, but whether it liberates or imprisons.
Partisan bickering has become the rule on Capitol Hill, but once--and not all that long ago--debate and compromise got things done.
From the sudden spread of West Nile virus in the United States to the discovery that Galápagos Island finches are evolving by unexpected means, there are signs that the natural world does not function quite as we thought. A variety of scientific findings now point to the need for a radically revised understanding of the way evolution itself works.
Mud-slinging in politics is a time-honored American tradition. But is there anything so bad about throwing a few political barbs?
The election of 2004 suggested much bad blood between the two parties, but questions remain about how polarized the electorate really is.