News Item: The House of Representatives passed a farm bill this week and, for the first time in decades, it did not include an appropriation for SNAP, the Food Stamp program. Instead, the bill dealt solely with subsidies for farmers and… more »

  (The names in the following account are omitted so as not to embarrass the guilty.) Here’s a short account of how the lack of competition- the absence of those all-powerful “free market forces” we are incessantly being told to worship- leaves even a… more »

The unique structure of our republican form of government, with its bicameral legislature and three checked and balanced branches, tendered carefully to posterity by the founders after great debates, has matured into a sclerosal conglomeration of… more »

In his 1963 Pulitzer Prize-winning opus, Anti Intellectualism in American Life, historian Richard Hofstadter charted the cultural history of America’s peculiar rejection of the intellectual in America society from the colonial era through the mid-20th C… more »

  Last month, I commented on the controversy in academia over the discovery of errors in a paper by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff by a University of Massachusetts graduate student (“April Shower”, April 28). We were then witness… more »

  The Queen of Passion and Pain and I spent Sunday in Manhattan, enjoying the first warm Spring day with a stroll through Bryant Park, and taking in the Parade of Trains at Grand Central Terminal. The iconic Beaux-Arts buildingis celebrating its One Hu… more »