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Camus's classic novel has served as an allegory for World War II, facism, and AIDS. In a post-9-11world his tale still vibrates with the questions about war, resistance, faith, and personal responsibility in the pestilences of our time....
One out of eight major league baseball players comes from the island nation of the Dominican Republic. It's the classic dream that epic talent can pull you out of staggering poverty -- but both the talent and the poverty are growing by the ...
Mac Maharaj, lifer and survivor in South Africa's freedom movement. He smuggled Nelson Mandela's autiobiography out of prison and has the whole context of the African National Congress's epic struggle....
The ageless American wisdom of William James: his ideas about religious belief, the process of thinking, and very public issues like war and imperialism still frame our discourse and mark the gold-standard of argumentative style....
"New Yorker" writer Dan Baum has spent nearly a year and a half in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina: in the Lower Ninth Ward, blogging an outsider's insights into the idiosyncracies of a city still struggling to survive....
The ageless American wisdom of William James: his ideas about religious belief, the process of thinking, and very public issues like war and imperialism still frame our discourse and mark the gold-standard of argumentative style....
"New Yorker" writer Dan Baum has spent nearly a year and a half in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina: in the Lower Ninth Ward, blogging an outsider's insights into the idiosyncracies of a city still struggling to survive....
One out of eight major league baseball players comes from the island nation of the Dominican Republic. It's the classic dream that epic talent can pull you out of staggering poverty -- but both the talent and the poverty are growing by the ...
Mac Maharaj, lifer and survivor in South Africa's freedom movement. He smuggled Nelson Mandela's autiobiography out of prison and has the whole context of the African National Congress's epic struggle....
When it's easier to google a fact than head to the stacks, what does the future hold for the library?...
Faith and Reason, Take Two: In this moment of religious fervor and anti-religious fear, is it possible to talk calmly about the varieties of religious meaning, ritual, and experience?...
Polemicist Christopher Hitchens joins the neo-atheist movement, which begins to look like a literary crusade. His fighting flags say: God is Not Great. And: Religion, in our time especially, poisons everything....
A made-for-TV domestic spying drama. The inside story is out: about resignation threats at the Justice Department and a siren-blaring dash to John Ashcroft's hospital bed. Does it punch another hole in the Bush-Cheney case for a unitary ex...
With a million homeowners going into foreclosure this year and dozens of unregulated lenders going belly-up, what is the "subprime" mortage crunch doing to the American dream?...
Equity: More Private, Less Public? Cerberus's purchase of Chrysler is the latest in a slew of recent private-equity deals worth billions of dollars. Does this buyout frenzy signal a broad shift in the public-private equity balance?...
Regrouping against HIV in Africa. In the so-called "ABC" anti-AIDS campaign, conservatives pushed for A, abstinence, and liberals for C, condoms. But as infections skyrocket what about the African voices pushing for B: "be faithful"?...
The gold rush for financial information that surfaced in Rupert Murdoch's bid for the Wall Street Journal. CNBC, Bloomberg News and now Reuters are in on it, too. It's not "let's do the numbers." It's "let's OWN the numbers."...
The doctor who writes, Atul Gawande, the Chekhov of our American times, on the science and sociology of aging. Medicine has added decades of quantity to our lives, but who's thinking about their quality?...
Ishmael Beah was 12 when the civil war erupted in Sierra Leone. At 13 he was orphaned, high on drugs, wielding an AK-47 for the army. Now 26, he's written the story of losing his humanity and finding a new life after war....
Japanese Baseball in America: with Dice-K pitching for Boston, Ichiro dreaming of .400 and Hideki Matsui's all-around excellence, can we imagine a new MLB work ethic? With post-game "self-reflection conferences," or post-season FALL trainin...
The last round of France's presidential fight: in the right corner, the agile climber Nicolas Sarkozy. And in the left: the charismatic net roots socialist Segolene Royal. Who's ready to rescue the economy, the social fabric, the pride of F...
The US military's report card on itself, in Iraq. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling has ignited a blogstorm with his Armed Forces Journal article blasting the military commanders of the Iraq War. Could an open, honest, public debate about th...
New Zoology. When rats laugh, elephants cry, and dolphins preen in front of the mirror, is it time to reassess the line between humans and animals?...
Dewey and his decimal system, Linnaeus and his order of species, even Pluto and its planethood: categories of everything are suddenly up for grabs, and miscellaneous, in David Weinberger's Web world of tagging....
David Halberstam's last dinner with his colleagues last Saturday night. Part master-class, part gossip session, part retrospective on the journalism of the Iraq war -- with David's own intimations of mortality....
Former Air Force counterterrorism expert and Internet analyst John Robb says globalized connectivity leads not just to creative possibility but also to sophisticated terror attacks -- and that local self-sufficiency is the key to survival....
In 1919 music met electricity, and an unearthly voice with a haunting tremor and a groovy wobble was born....
Is there anything to learn about the way we use new technologies in this first mass-murder made, as it were, for YouTube?...
From Aesop's Fables to Porky Pig we talk to the animals and they right talk back. But are they telling us less about themselves and more about us?...
Entertaining Violence. From gladiators to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and boxing to "24," what combination of voyeurism and catharsis, fantasy and blood lust makes the spectacle of violence such a perennial thrill?...
What happens when a neuroscientist, a reverend, and an ethicist walk into a bar? We don't know, but when they walk into a radio show the conversation is one of morality, and meaning; evolution, and God....
Fears of voter fraud have led to the firings of federal prosecutors and voter ID laws. But a recently released report tells a different story: What if the real story about voter fraud is that it doesn't exist?...
Former Marine colonel and Princeton constitutional law expert Walter Murphy -- just one of many unlikely terrorists -- on how he landed on the government's "no-fly" watchlist....
Sonny Rollins, the saxophone colossus, 50 years later, and still blowing us away: not only with his music but with the amazing way he has modeled a humble life of self-improvement and learning....
Camille Paglia, the warrior intellectual and professed atheist, says of course we should all be studying religions, plural, as metaphysical lenses on the vastness and sublimity of the universe....
If Scots have kilts, and the Welsh have dragons -- and both have their own languages -- are the English the "none of the above" of the British Isles?...
"...in Shakespeare no character with a clear moral vision has a will to power and, conversely, no character with a strong desire to rule over others has an ethically adequate object."...
Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist of the Stanford Prison Experiment. He looked at the bad apples of Abu Ghraib and saw a bad barrel. He talks not just of Hannah Arrendt's banality of evil but also the banality of heroism....
One in ten American soldiers fighting in Iraq is a woman, and in a war that makes no distinction between combat and support, they're patroling, driving, and dying -- all the while fearing not just enemy IEDs but sometimes sexual assault fro...
Jazz, that quintessentially American art, through French ears, with the Paris-born guitarist Alain Pacowski, who grew up listening to jazz and dreaming of America. With remembrances of Bechet, Mingus, Monk and Duke, it's a Proustian mix of ...
Under the Iraqi constitution passed in 2005, the Iraqi Kurds have a good deal of regional autonomy: they have their own parliament, their own army, and depending how you read the Constitution, a certain amount of discretion over the region'...
The Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek, and what he calls The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. He puts the Marx Brothers, Psycho, and The Conversation on the couch, using psychoanalysis to understand movies and movies to understand psychoanalysis....
The Straight Talk Express is on the road again; can McCain be the same maverick he was in 2000? Is he a maverick in the first place, or does he just play one on TV?...
Playing tuba isn't too different than playing bass guitar in a rock band, except that you're lugging around 15-30 pounds of shiny brass. But recently, tubas have started to come into their own....
Veterans affairs. Half a million GIs have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, to the battles of life AFTER war. For some it's a homecoming with prosthetic legs, or post-traumatic stress, or a homeless life on the street. For some the batt...
What if the real iPod revolution isn't about the techno-cool of fitting your CD collection in your pocket? What if it's really the shuffle function and its cult of the random: the end of genre, and the beginning of gated communities of eng...
The Adolf Eichmann Hannah Arendt observed on trial was neither brilliant nor a sociopath. Evil, Arendt suggests, can be extraordinary acts committed by otherwise unremarkable people....
The heretical, beloved pioneer of modern thinking: Baruch Spinoza. A 17th-century Dutch Jew who accepted banishment from his synagogue, Spinoza lives and lurks in many conversations still today about God and science, dissent and the good l...
Barack Obama: the post-boomer presidential hopeful, age 46, who's free of the psychodrama, the grudges, the generational politics hatched on college campuses in the 60s. What would it mean to have a post-Vietnam, post-civil rights, post-se...
The "Ecstacy of Influence" with novelist Jonathan Lethem, who asks: without borrowing, stealing, cribbing, remixing, mashing-up, collaging and compiling -- without influences great and small, in other words -- is "creating" even possible?...
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