Americans have always been of two minds about gamblers and gambling.
The United States has embarked on an unprecedented experiment with legalized gambling.
The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics, more important always than the acquisition of money.
-Joan Didion, The White Album
The idea of happiness has become so deeply embedded in American culture that it sometimes disappears from sight.
Among Paris's postwar intellectuals, Albert Camus stood apart—both for his independence and his compelling lucidity. Yet few of his admirers knew how different Camus was even from the persona that came through in his early, existential writings. As our author shows, the uncompleted novel brings us closer to the man we barely knew.
Though founded upon Western secularist principles, Turkey has not been immune to the Islamic fundamentalist upsurge of recent years. Nowhere is Ataturk's legacy more pointedly challenged, the author shows, than in heated public struggles over matters affecting women and their status as full and equal citizens.
Despite more than three decades of generous private and government support for the arts, arts education in the United States can boast of only meager results. In this time of diminished funding and growing skepticism, the solo oboist of the New York Philharmonic explains what was so crucial in his own musical education—and why it is precisely what is missing, and needed, in arts education today.
Between the intellectual and the political leader there inevitably lies a gap.