Barbarism seems an obvious enough category. Ordinarily in our world, the barbarians are them. They act in ways that seem unimaginably primitive and brutal to us. For instance, they kidnap or capture someone, American or Iraqi, and cut off his head. Now, isn't that the...

Jonathan Schell, who ended his Nation magazine column, "Letter From Ground Zero," last February, now takes up "The Crisis of the Republic" in what will be a series of periodic, longer essays appearing in the Nation under that rubric. For all its wealth, its power, its...

Last week, Attorney General Alberto J. Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the president had personally shut down a Justice Department investigation into the domestic eavesdropping program being run by the National Security Agency. According...

Imagine a government in which the names of those who worked as key aides in the office of the second (if not, arguably, the first) most important official in the country were not available. Oh gosh, there is such a government – and it's ours. Journalist Robert...

So, as the world spins on a dime, where exactly are we? As a man who is no fan of fundamentalists of any sort, let me offer a proposition that might make some modest sense of our reeling planet. Consider the possibility that the most fundamental belief, perhaps in all...

One of these days, some scholar will do a little history of the odd moments when microphones or recording systems were turned on or left on, whether on purpose or not, and so gave us a bit of history in the raw. We have plenty of American examples of this phenomenon,...

Five American soldiers have been charged in a horrendous rape and murder case in Iraq (and a sixth for not reporting it). In the United States, rape is now a public crime. Cases are regularly discussed and followed in the media; victims are far less often blamed; if...

On the one hand, there's the madness of devolving Iraq, where dead bodies and sectarian bloodletting are now the daily norm; on the other hand, there's the eternal madness of the never less than devolving Israeli/Palestinian situation. There, last week, the Israeli...

Here's how a Washington Post piece soon after the Supreme Court's smack-down of the Bush administration's Guantanamo policies began: "Republicans yesterday looked to wrest a political victory from a legal defeat in the Supreme Court, serving notice to Democrats that...

One of the least noticed success stories of George Bush's years in power has been his administration's ability to focus the world's attention so singularly first on Saddam Hussein 's "nuclear program" – remember that yellowcake brick road? – which had...