The New Republic

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On Reading the Constitution By Laurence H. Tribe and Michael C. Dorf (Harvard University Press, 144 pp., $18.95) READ MORE >>

Ms. Byatt is more annoyed [with] American publishers who insist on changing English idioms and spellings for American audiences. She got off quite easily in "Possession." The lifts and taps stayed. But, she says, her editors at Random House insisted she make her main character … a sexier guy. READ MORE >>

When I was a kid in Minnesota my family had a huge Scandinavian feast every Christmas Eve, complete with two dozen relatives, three feet of snow, a mountainous evergreen trimmed to the top, a six-course dinner with lutefisk and turkey and eight or ten pies, long-winded after-dinner stories about baseball and World War II, and, of course, lots of brightly wrapped presents. It has taken me three decades of rigorous economics training and life on the East Coast to shake off the warm nostalgia of those holidays. READ MORE >>

In the mid-1980s, as word of the French abortion pill rippled across the world, the new drug was greeted as a thing of awesome powers. READ MORE >>

This article originally appeared on November 20, 1961 These last hundred days have been so dizzying, so astonishing, and to some of us so dismaying a reversal of what we all took to be the inevitable course of history, that one can still hardly believe, much less explain it all. A reporter, trying to sum it all up in a few columns, cannot hope to capture the drama, the acute anxiety, the universal confusion. All he can attempt is the patchiest of outlines. READ MORE >>

"Why don't I learn? The answers to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle. They're on TV!"—Homer Simpson READ MORE >>

"Do you genuinely love your country? Are you truly considerate of the people? And do you really want democracy? If so, walk along the flower-strewn path laid down by the Tatmadaw [the Burmese army]." — Working People's Daily Dateline: RANGOON READ MORE >>

Although I have no special desire to be governor of Texas, and would actively prefer not to become head of the Office of Thrift Supervision (the poor soul charged with cleaning up the savings and loan mess), the traumas of aspirants to these posts in recent days compel me to make the following statement. It has been cleared with political consultants of both parties. Like many members of my generation—Senator Al Gore and Representative Newt Gingrich, to name but two—I too have experimented with marijuana in the distant past. READ MORE >>

I arrived in Moscow late on a fall evening. In my mind's eye I can still see three faces that appeared to me in succession at Sheremyetevo International Airport. In the walkway from the door of the Lufthansa plane stood a tiotka, a dumpy, shabbily dressed lady of indeterminate age. In Russian, when "ka" is added to the word for "aunt," it denotes an entirely distinct social status, a specific stratum of society that even a doctoral dissertation could not describe. READ MORE >>