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She Would Have Turned 60 Today
I wrote this in 2010, but have not published it until today, February 28, 2020. I wrote the headline today, but I have not otherwise updated time references. Twenty-seven years ago, on October 16, 1983, a deeply troubled young woman let go of her last hold on life, and tumbled off the Golden Gate Bridge.…
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Dictionaries: A Modern-Day Morality Play
“If you don’t look up the words you don’t know, you don’t deserve the beauty of literature,” my teacher said. Four decades later I still feel the lash in her voice.
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Seeking More Muslim Heroes
Unlike the thugs who killed him, Merabet had assimilated into French society, while retaining his Muslim identity.
Topics
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Oliphant Takes Dehumanization of Jews into the Mainstream
Clifford May of the indispensable Foundation for Defense of Democracies weighs in on the Oliphant cartoon: Let’s not call the political cartoonist Pat Oliphant an anti-Semite or even an Israel-basher. Let’s just be clear about what he is doing: encouraging those whose intentions are genocidal. … The symbolism here is unoriginal. Dehumanizing Jews in cartoons…
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What National Election? Electoral College Is the Only Tally That Counts
For better or worse, we don’t have national elections in America. We have 51 state elections. Occasionally this matters a lot — just ask President Gore about his half-million-vote “national victory” in 2000.
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Facebook Bleg
I wish I’d thought of this before my BFF Andrew Sullivan sent more than 5,000 of his readers to my “Catfight” post, but here we are. For those of you who have found your way back here, I have a “bleg” (as in “blog beg,” a parallel coinage with “blog” from “web log.” Forgive me…
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Financial Follies: Plenty of Blame to Go Around
A straightforward guide to the financial mess. I missed it when it first came out, but the New York Review of Books last month published one of the best comprehensive explanations I’ve seen of the causes of the current economic unpleasantness. Weighing in at just over 5,000 words, it’s not a quick read — but…
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How to Tell When They Get Serious About Deficit Reduction
“The joke re the original $38.5 billion deal was that, in the time it took to negotiate it, we added as much again in new debt (we’re borrowing about $4 billion a day). … At some point, you have to close a cabinet department just to show you’re serious. Instead, the governing class is sending…