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    Reviews and Essays

    In With Both Feet

    June 14, 2010  | 

    When the great attorney Louis Brandeis wrote a legal brief in a constitutional case, it was short on legal arguments and packed with so many facts that it required a sturdy binding. In 1908 the brief he submitted to the Supreme Court in Muller v. Oregon—he successfully defended that state’s ten-hour workday for women laborers against …

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    Infinite Regret

    May 1, 2010  | 

    One struggles to find a concise, representative anecdote about the late David Foster Wallace for an audience of politically minded readers. Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008 at age forty-six, was the most promising and accomplished writer of his generation. An athlete of prolixity, he published a celebrated novel of 1,100 pages called Infinite Jest, …

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    Classless Action

    March 1, 2010  | 

    People like to call Bill Lerach names. The disgraced plaintiff’s lawyer, who in March will complete his two-year prison sentence for participating in an illegal kickback scheme, has been called a shakedown artist, a carjacker, an economic terrorist, pond scum, even the Anti-christ. In 1995, then Congressman and future SEC Chairman Chris Cox contended that …

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     Scalia v. The World: On Antonin Scalia

    February 22, 2010  | 

    The dean of the modern conservative legal movement, Justice Antonin Scalia, is neither an intellectual nor a primitive. He is both. Scalia has fused the cerebral and the atavistic strains of conservatism in a manner that leaves one wondering if they were ever distinct at all. For decades Scalia has beguiled conservative law students with …

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    Unhappy Meals

    February 1, 2010  | 

    In his brilliant and distressing essay on the cruelties of English boarding school life in the 1910s, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” George Orwell devoted a few lines to the prevailing attitudes toward feeding children. A boy’s appetite was seen as “a sort of morbid growth which should be kept in check as much as …

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    John Brown’s Trial

    January 16, 2010  | 

    Eight days after the militant abolitionist John Brown was arrested while raiding the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in 1859, he stood trial for treason and murder in a Virginia court. Brian McGinty persuasively contends that Brown’s trial was even more consequential than the raid itself — for had he died during the fighting, he …

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    Open

    November 27, 2009  | 

    Before reading a single page of Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open, I determined to evaluate it according to the standards established in a lovely little essay called “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” by David Foster Wallace.  Austin was a tennis star in the 1970s whose memoir Wallace, an exuberant observer of the game, agreed to …

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    Eating Animals

    November 16, 2009  | 

    The birth of his first child posed a painful quandary for novelist Jonathan Safran Foer: Would he serve turkey at his son’s first Thanksgiving? In “Eating Animals,” a work of nonfiction, Foer (author of “Everything is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”) confesses to a lifelong ambivalence toward eating meat. Yet he cherishes memories …

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    A Life of Contempt

    November 14, 2009  | 

    I began counting Ayn Rand’s uses of the word “contempt” on page 43 of The Fountainhead, by which point it had already appeared four times, and twice on that very page. The word shows up thirty-nine times more in the book, by my count, for a total of two score and three. Rand’s villains and …

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    No Impact Man

    September 21, 2009  | 

    In this companion volume to the documentary film and popular blog, writer Colin Beavan chronicles a year spent making “as little environmental impact as possible” while living and working in New York City. The rules are: no elevators, subways, planes, cars, consumer purchases, plastics, paper goods, electricity, or non-local food; also, he must plant trees …

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    Empire of Illusion

    July 27, 2009  | 

    In this short, grim, fiercely argued book, journalist Chris Hedges explains that we are doomed. He catalogues in essay-length chapters four examples of what he calls modern America’s “moral nihilism”: its fawning celebrity culture, sadistic pornography industry, insipidly vocational universities, and pervasive corporate influence. Hedges concludes with a wake-up call for a society that, he …

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    By His Own Rules

    July 6, 2009  | 

    Few will be surprised to learn that Donald Rumsfeld’s signature wrestling move was a body slam. His preferred version, euphemistically called the “fireman’s carry,” is neither subtle nor delicate, a creature more of the Rowdy Roddy Piper school of bruising than the staid and honorable Greco-Roman tradition. Throughout his successful wrestling career in high school, …

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