Adding to the normal questions raised by this abnormal nomination season is the odd occurrence of the arrest of Sidney Blumenthal, a senior unpaid advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Blumenthal was arrested for DWI in New Hampshire on the Monday before the New Hampshire primary…

A 150-inch TV? A remote-controlled mobile beer cooler? GPS, videogames, and salacious material aplenty? All these things are the domain of the Consumer Electronics Show, the largest trade show in the United States. Our intrepid correspondent ponders the meaning of it all….

If you are finding the presidential nominating campaign, which has now run longer than The Mousetrap, a trifle tedious, I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that, like all good things and some bad ones, the campaign will come to an end within the next ten months. Probably.

I have great respect for Barack Obama as a presidential candidate. Despite widespread agreement with Hillary Clinton on most issues he has proven to be the one candidate capable of inspiring people to think beyond the compass of their daily lives.

But now that Obama has played the race card in the Democratic presidential campaign my respect for him has diminished.

When President George W. Bush visited Israel’s Memorial to the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, last Friday, he paused at the photograph of Auschwitz, called over Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and said: “We should have bombed Auschwitz.”

Yet the issue is far more complex …

Sir Edmund Hillary died Friday, January 11, 2008, at the age of 88, in his native Auckland, New Zealand. He will forever be known as the first man to scale the summit of Mount Everest, along with the Sherpa mountaineer and guide Tenzing Norgay, but he did much else besides, including service as his country’s ambassador to India and his extensive philanthropic work in Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he founded in 1962. He also climbed many other mountains besides Everest, the world’s tallest.

Apart from the maxim “Return with your shield or on it,” Sparta contributed nothing to Greek thought or literature. It contributed nothing to science or art. It has left only this notion of an ascetic warrior society that has exerted its continuing appeal down through the ages to autocrats and adolescents who somehow manage to see something “pure” in it. We encounter it in our day mainly among the skinhead and white-supremacy groups that hide in sundry benighted corners.

In both Clinton’s case and in Muskie’s, tears seemed in indicate that what had once been believed about a candidate was wrong—emoting on the campaign trail is understood as more “real” than the carefully scripted messages and managed images. In Muskie’s case, this proved to be disastrous; in Clinton’s, it was fortuitous.

At the end of December, the Department of Health (DH) in the United Kingdom announced that the incidence of vitamin D deficiency and rickets, a disorder caused by lack of vitamin D that is characterized by soft, deformed bones in infants and children, are increasing. In fact, vitamin D deficiency and rickets are on the […]

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has declared 2008 to be a National Year of Reading, and his education secretary has called on Britons to change their attitudes toward reading. But what type of reading is Brown promoting? And should that archaic thing known as a book play a role in it?