Does this describe you? From Tunku Varadarajan, in today’s WSJ Opinion Journal: [A] new America has emerged from all this sentiment; perhaps for the first time in its existence, America is prepared to be coldly, ruthlessly unsentimental. I refer here not to the Bush administration–there have, after all, been some memorably unsentimental presidencies in American history–but to the entire civitas. With the exception of a small band of leftists, who

Writing in Reason, the Hudson Institute’s Michael Fumento argues that the latest hype over so-called “Gulf War Syndrome” is not to be believed. To wit: [T]he incidence of ALS in the U.S. male population is about two per million per year. So for 1.8 million such persons over ten years we

“Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat tried to enlist the backing of Pope John Paul II in a Christmas showdown with Israel, as he vowed to defy an Israeli ban on him attending midnight mass in Bethlehem,” this story reports. How should the civilized world react to Arafat’s latest posturings? Should good and kind people everywhere feel sorry for him? Or believe a sudden revelation has compelled him to convert to Christianity

“Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat tried to enlist the backing of Pope John Paul II in a Christmas showdown with Israel, as he vowed to defy an Israeli ban on him attending midnight mass in Bethlehem,” this story reports. How should the civilized world react to Arafat’s latest posturings? Should good and kind people everywhere feel sorry for him? Or believe a sudden revelation has compelled him to convert to Christianity

Edward Jay Epstein

Edward Jay Epstein

Tremendously exercised blogger response today to Stephanie Salter’s San Francisco Chronicle essay, “W.W.J.D.?” — a first-person “letter” to George Bush written from the perspective of, well…Jesus Christ. Or, as Brian Linse more forcefully puts it (in an email he dashed off to Ms. Salter), “Oh my god, I still can’t believe it. You wrote in the voice of Jesus H. God Almighty Christ! Shit, I’m laughing so hard I can’t

This story in The New York Times reports that the quantity of spam e-mail has spiked in the last three months. Critics say the deluge of junk e- mail threatens to undermine the utility of the Internet at precisely the time when anthrax fears and cost- cutting efforts have prompted more businesses to use it as a substitute for postal mail. (My guess? The Arab street’s behind this. What else

This story in The New York Times reports that the quantity of spam e-mail has spiked in the last three months. Critics say the deluge of junk e- mail threatens to undermine the utility of the Internet at precisely the time when anthrax fears and cost- cutting efforts have prompted more businesses to use it as a substitute for postal mail. (My guess? The Arab street’s behind this. What else

James Morrow’s latest Reason column, “Goo-Goo Dolls: The media