The New Republic

What does it take to make Jerry Springer squirm? During his decade as the king of trash TV, Springer has endured assaults from religious leaders, politicians, community activists, and even members of his own industry. He has been charged with corrupting America's youth, dragging cultural standards to new lows, exploiting the poor and the stupid, promoting violence with on-air brawls, defrauding viewers by staging those brawls, and generally unraveling the moral fiber of this great nation. Having weathered READ MORE >>

GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA READ MORE >>

BOSTON READ MORE >>

The once and future Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, we are told, is very, very sorry. Yes, he silenced the crowd at Strom Thurmond's one- hundredth birthday party by boasting, "I'll say this about my state, when Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And, if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." And, when the political fallout began and Lott was peppered with questions about the wisdom of saluting his home READ MORE >>

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, redbaiting has pretty much fallen out of favor in American politics. Particularly these days, with wild- eyed Islamists holding the national imagination hostage, labeling someone a commie sympathizer just doesn't resonate like it used to. But that didn't stop the Minnesota-based Citizens Opposed to Racism and Discrimination (CORAD) from sponsoring an ad in mid-August that so shamelessly accused Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone of pinko tendencies that "Hardball"'s Chris Matthews READ MORE >>

By late last summer Roy Olofson, then the vice president of finance for Global Crossing, was convinced something was rotten with the company's books. Hit hard by the deflating telecom bubble, Global Crossing, Olofson suspected, had begun using a range of accounting tricks to artificially inflate its revenue statements. So on August 6, 2001, he sent a five-page letter to the corporation's general counsel, James Gorton, outlining his concern that company shareholders and bankers, as well as the Securities and Exchange READ MORE >>

Downtown Washington, D.C. READ MORE >>

THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY READ MORE >>

FOR A YEAR AND A HALF now, my husband and I have lived in a tall, tomato-red house near the southern end of Washington's Embassy Row. Built in 1898, the house had the exact combination of personality and sturdiness we had been looking for. Just as important, it came with an array of age-related quirks that scared away all other potential buyers. This allowed us to avoid the bloody bidding wars so common in D.C. READ MORE >>

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND Kathy Cullinen, head of the Rhode Island Department of Health's Obesity Control Program, spends the first hour or so of our interview doing her best impression of a garden-variety bureaucrat. Soft-spokenand subdued, Cullinen speaks of her small-scale, mostly school-based fat-fighting efforts in a gray, tranquilizing blend of alphabet-soup acronyms (PI, RFP, BRFSS, ASTD) and mind-numbing terms like "needs-assessment" and "incentivize." But as she relaxes and starts READ MORE >>