Let's have a little story: Three characters are standing on a street corner somewhere in Brooklyn. The tall blonde woman with glasses is a quantum physicist named Mary. Beside her stands a short fellow named Steve who's a social philosopher. And facing them on the other side of his pushcart...

On the front page of the New York Times today, there begins a long article about the most current attempt by print publishers and editors to hold onto their turf. And the attempt? Elaborate book covers. A dramatic shift from a supposed emphasis on content to an emphasis on packaging.

Six years ago, on December 20, 2005, a judge in Pennsylvania ruled that the counterargument to Darwinian evolution called "Intelligent Design" was not science and the teaching of it as science must be barred in Pennsylvania public schools. We don't hear much about Intelligent Design anymore, at least not in...

One of the great tragedies of American education is its control by local school boards. Yes, I know, the original idea was to prevent indoctrination by a central government authority. But really, folks, it works only if the school boards are themselves educated and careful about their own biases. It...

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, classic Alka-Seltzer, which among other things contained both anti-acid and aspirin, was offered to the public as a cure-all not only for indigestion, headache, and heartburn, but also for the blahs. Alka-Seltzer sold by the ton in America's great blah decade -- people...

One of our current amusements is how so many media pundits on TV and in print are befuddled by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They say they don't understand it. "What do these people want?" At first the pundits were ordered to kill the movement by ignoring it. Now the...

Nothing looks good. It seems obvious that Republican obstructionism is designed only to get a Republican into the White House -- at any cost to the country -- in the coming presidential election. The major Republican goals are to avoid raising taxes, particularly taxes on the very wealthy, and to...

New York City seems to be in the midst of some difficulty, a convulsion that may ultimately change the local political scene. The management, of course, is Mayor Bloomberg and police chief Ray Kelly. The musical Occupy Wall Street will open soon on Broadway. But for those Have-Nots who can't...

One of the great jokes of modern America is so-called "libertarianism" -- an ill-defined "ism" with a multitude of meanings in a spectrum of attitudes about government intrusion.

At one extreme, the libertarian is a total anarchist, a believer in no government at all, and a hundred years ago a...

What kills socially useful journalism is an ideological agenda and a stupid hunt for "news" often manufactured at the news desk.

In the New York Times of June 20, 2011, buried in the Arts section (at least in the Midwest edition), you will find a sterling example of one reason...

My first published literary effort, an article about New York City, appeared in 1945 in a magazine called Gotham, the house organ of the New Yorker Hotel. Since this is 2011, I claim 66 years as both a participant and observer of American publishing.

The magazine Gotham folded.

The New...

There's always a great deal of loud quacking about "political philosophy" in Congress and on the op-ed pages, but the most important question in political philosophy -- although simple -- is rarely stated: Who will live and who will die?

The Wall Street money manager lives -- but the janitor...

The booboisie is rattled. A 22-year-old kid in Tucson walks into a gunshop, puts down a credit card, buys a Glock machine pistol, goes to a shopping center and shoots more than a dozen people, killing a nine-year-old girl, a Federal judge, various civilians, and severely wounding a U.S. Congresswoman....

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, apparently burdened by a parochial ideology that overwhelms his reasoning ability, has recently repeated his idea that tyranny of the majority is acceptable in our democracy as long as the victims of that tyranny are not specifically protected by our Constitution.

The problem is...

In October 1938 a boy named Donald T., age five years one month, arrived at the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children in Baltimore. The Home, established in 1912 as the first full-time children's clinic in America, was a 5-story building on the grounds of the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Donald...

The facts are grim. With or without John Boehner's phony suntan or Barack Obama's phony empathy, the reality is that each year four million young people become 21 years of age, with only about three million seniors moving out of the workforce. At least 10 million people are already unemployed...

If you're born into it, you may not recognize it. If you're not born into it, it's a glaring phenomenon--the transition in the last fifty years from individual striving for truth and excellence to individual striving for baloney and mediocrity.

What has apparently happened is that the 19th century business...

The term "off-label" refers to use of a drug for treatments not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In the US, physicians are essentially autonomous, and when a drug is approved by the FDA for use in the treatment, for example, of epilepsy, any physician can write a...

With all the overheated gas blown at us about corporate expertise and corporate excellence and corporate wisdom, what is usually avoided is the reality that the people who gravitate to corporate management positions -- such as the people who ultimately may appear before congressional hearings to explain oil spills --...

Arguments between academics are usually entertaining, and arguments between academic literary critics are often the most entertaining of all.

Literary criticism is not a science, it's more like an ennobled conversation in which one's values and attitudes masquerade as substantive statements about literary art. The irony is that literary artists...