“A dog’s obeyed in office,” and the power of the welfare state to grab your money, property, health, and—through “no-fault” divorce—your children, too, is already bad enough. Now it is getting worse, via the usurpation of punitive court prerogatives by bureaucrats whose sole purpose is “revenue enhancement” and the growth of the state. The case...
Post
May 1, 1997April 21, 2022Correspondence
The Return of Katherine Ann Power
Last fall, an editor at my suburban Boston daily urged readers to reflect on “a personal essay, lyrical but not flowery,” by one of our “neighbors” at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Framingham, the state penitentiary for women. “The least we can do,” he wrote, “is put our ears against the tall brick walls” and...
Post
October 1, 1996April 21, 2022Correspondence
The Sex Quiz
“Is it possible heterosexuality is a phase you will grow out of? Are you heterosexual because you fear the same sex? If you have never slept with anyone of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer it? Is it possible you merely need a good gay experience?” Far from rhetorical questions and...
Post
May 1, 1996April 21, 2022Correspondence
Latin Quotas
The fall of 1995 may be remembered as the time when the miscast and overheated melting pot cracked and spat its singed ingredients all over us. O.J. Simpson was freed, Mark Fuhrman convicted, and Louis Farrakhan lectured us “on the idea that undergirds the Western world, white supremacy.” But while O.J. walked, Colin Powell posed,...
Post
September 1, 1995April 21, 2022Correspondence
Our Mr. Brooks
Hometown of John F. Kennedy, Brookline, Massachusetts, blends small-scale charm with a shabby urbanity. Plugged like a weak rib into Boston’s west edge, Brookline is laced with picturesque trolleys and dotted with quaint buildings. Its citizenry is an odd mix of recent immigrants from Russia and the Caribbean, college students, seniors, a tasteful dollop of...
Post
July 1, 1995April 21, 2022Correspondence
Beacon to the Nations
A few months ago and despite my better judgment, I spent some time watching the NFL playoffs. Seeking relief from rather than in work, I soon was reminded that the tube is a conduit of malaise and of pop cultural propaganda. For every glimpse of the tenacious gifts of Dan Marino, there were hours of...
Post
April 1, 1995April 21, 2022Vital Signs
Crooning Over Chechnya
Leonard Bernstein was a fine midcentury American composer and conductor. He also achieved notoriety as one of the postwar period’s first and most visible celebrants of extreme leftwing attitudes. Bernstein’s garden parties for the Black Panthers in their baddest days evoked the phrase radical chic, which entered our language as an early marker of what...