The New Republic

Las Vegas, Nevada  READ MORE >>

SOME YEARS AGO I SPENT A weekend in Las Vegas and enjoyed it. The bounteous vulgarity in every possible way, from displays to entertainments to phalanxes of slot machines, seemed to me exactly what it ought to be. Anything more chaste and sensible would have been out of order, a disappointment.  READ MORE >>

For a long time now, whenever I've gone to Los Angeles, I've been alarmed by how impossibly tall the palm trees have grown. Whether I'm driving in Santa Monica or Venice, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, or Pasadena, the familiar sight of row after row of palm trees, their thin, fibrous trunks topped by rough-hewn, yet shimmering fronds stretching hundreds of feet into the broad, shadowless light, has come to fill me with gloom. READ MORE >>

AS THE WORLD’S bankers gathered last September in the Persian Gulf city of Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), for the annual International Monetary Fund/World Bank meetings, talk inevitably turned to the economic stagnation of the Arab world. The statistics are grim: The 280 million people of the 22 Arab countries have a combined gross domestic product (GDP) less than that of 40 million Spaniards, some 25 percent of Arabs live below the poverty line, and some 20 million are out of work. The region’s economic growth—an insipid 0.5 percent over the past 30 years—is among the lowes READ MORE >>

John Sweeney's name rarely appears in print without the word "militant" attached to it. Sweeney first gained national prominence in 1995, when, as president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), he led striking janitors in a sit-in that blocked morning rush-hour traffic on Washington, D.C.'s Fourteenth Street Bridge for two hours. Later that year, Sweeney burnished his reputation as a confrontationalist by running (and winning) an insurgent campaign in the first-ever contested election for the presidency of the AFLl-CIO. Heavy-set and balding, Sweeney comes across like centra READ MORE >>

Political corruption comes in two forms. Most familiar is the hand-in-the-till variety: bribes, payoffs, influence-peddling, lobbyists lining the pockets of public officials in exchange for access and favors. This corruption thrives in secrecy, and is usually condemned when exposed. READ MORE >>

READ MORE >>

  I.   My dream was to become Frank Sinatra. I loved his phrasing, especially when he was very young and pure…. Now this is going to surprise you, but I also dug Dean Martin and especially Perry Como. — Marvin Gaye READ MORE >>

Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History by Robert Draper (Doubleday, 389 pp., $19.95) Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream Gonzo Papers: Volume 3 by Hunter S. Thompson (Summit Books, 315 pp., $21.95) Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties by A. E. Hotchner (Simon and Schuster, 349 pp., $21.95) READ MORE >>