March 2004
In This Issue
Caitlin Flanagan, “How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement”; Robert D. Kaplan, “The Man Who Would Be Khan”; James Mann, “The Armageddon Plan”; Keith Gessen, “We Will Bury You”; Bruce Ackerman and David Fontana, “How Jefferson Counted Himself In”; John Katzman, Andy Lutz, and Erik Olson, “Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore?”; fiction by Mona Simpson; and much more.
Articles
How Jefferson Counted Himself In
Something was funny about the Georgia ballot during the 1800 election. Did Thomas Jefferson act properly in making himself President in 1801? A historical detective story
When the Front Page Meets the Big Screen
Hollywood is not a reliable moral arbiter of anything, so it's not surprising that when it holds a mirror up to journalism, Shattered Glass is the result
God’s Lonely Man
Johnny Cash was a Christian who didn't cast stones, a patriot who wasn't a bully
The Hollow Army
The U.S. military is stretched to the breaking point—and one more crisis could break it
How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement
Dispatches from the nanny wars
Marriage Counselor
Matt Daniels believes he's found a solution to the political problem of gay marriage. So why do his fellow conservatives want to divorce him?
We Will Bury You
How the caretakers of Lenin's corpse have made a killing in post-Soviet Russia
Madonna Wants Me
Every candidate now needs a "celebrity wrangler"—matchmaker to the stars
The Southern Cross
Georgians want the Confederate emblem back on their state flag, and are frustrated that a referendum this month won't give them that option. What they don't know is that if the emblem's creator were alive, he'd vote to bury it
Great Scot
Between Kipling and Fleming stands John Buchan, the father of the modern spy thriller
Fortress of Solitude
The Man Who Would Be Khan
A new breed of American soldier—call him the soldier-diplomat—has come into being since the end of the Cold War. Meet the colonel who was our man in Mongolia, an officer who probably wielded more local influence than many Mongol rulers of yore
Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore?
How several well-known writers (and the Unabomber) would fare on the new SAT
Letters to the editor
The Armageddon Plan
During the Reagan era Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were key players in a clandestine program designed to set aside the legal lines of succession and immediately install a new "President" in the event that a nuclear attack killed the country's leaders. The program helps explain the behavior of the Bush Administration on and after 9/11
The Next Testament
If the Bible were being compiled for the first time right now, what would we put in it? Making the case for a NEW New Revised Standard Version
New & Noteworthy
The war that never ends
Primary Sources
The EU's suppressed report on anti-Semitism; the real relationship between pot smoking and crime; how nonvoting aliens affect U.S. elections; why Republicans benefit more than Democrats from high taxes; Al Sharpton's taste in hotels
Life Sentence
America's Most Wanted
Washington is paying more and more to find its Most Wanted
Dependents
Making beds for my employers, I know too much of them. Their bed here, it is like the bed of a seven-year-old: dry, neat, white, what Bing calls pretty princess perfect perfect
