New York Times

With Ethiopian troops deep inside western Eritrea, it would appear that Ethiopia had scored a decisive victory in the Horn of Africa. But the chances are small that … more

"At the end of September, in 1919, the presidential train bearing Woodrow Wilson on a Western tour of speechmaking in his last-ditch, desperate effort to rally the nation behind the ratification of… more

President Clinton's trip to South Asia is being viewed in terms of a stark contrast: He is visiting India to pay homage to a rising economic and nuclear power, … more

The notion that kids grow up too fast these days is a complaint so familiar that it can seem both true and meaningless at the same time. It has the status of received wisdom, and received wisdom doesn't usually inspire anybody to make the case for it. You may as well present… more

The approach of the millennium has inspired visions of apocalypse driven by technology and utopia delivered by it. The Internet will lead to world peace and the withering away of the nation-state -- unless we are fighting over food and water in the aftermath of a disaster caused by the Y2K bug.… more

The resignation of Richard M. Nixon on the eve of his impeachment in 1974 and the impeachment of Bill Clinton by the House of Representatives and his acquittal by the Senate in the winter of 1998-99 frame three decades of Presidential scandals and scandalmongering in the United States. In "Shadow: Five Presidents… more

Recently I happened to be reading, around the same time, Anthony Heilbut's "Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature" (1996) and James Anderson Winn's "John Dryden and His World" (1987). I was in for a surprise. When I was in college, Mann meant far more to me than neo-classical poets. Today, Mann and his… more

The journalist who writes out of devotion to an idea -- not a political program but a philosophical conceit -- is a rare animal. There are journalists who cover the world of ideas, which is to say they report on the lives and work of people who have them. There are scholarly essayists and social critics who write for magazines, but it's hard to imagine them engaged in the daily labor of… more

No sooner had President Clinton unveiled his plan to save Social Security than it was savaged as big government run amok.

Republicans are reacting so hysterically precisely because the plan -- a solid proposal surrounded by poll-driven vacuities in his State of the Union address -- is not wild liberalism. Rather, it is fiscal conservatism -- what Republicans used to stand for before they invented supply-side economics -- devoted to progressive… more