First, the fuss: Beinart, who attends an Orthodox synagogue and is at pains to stress he believes 100 percent in the Zionist project, would like to save Israel from itself. The ongoing colonization of Palestinian land seized in the 1967 war is killing any chance of a two-state solution, while Israel’s treatment of its non-Jewish […]

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In Hawaii in 1996, leaders of the Mormon church petitioned the court to intervene in a lawsuit filed by three gay couples who claimed that their constitutional rights were violated when the state denied them marriage licenses. In Alaska in 1988, the church contributed $500,000 to a campaign to define marriage as a union between […]

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So asks a Brooklyn teenager in the question at the heart of Tracie McMillan’s ambitious The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table. Writers on food rarely focus on why people eat what they do when their choices are scant. McMillan, a journalist who has long covered a […]

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It actually makes journalism sound fairly enticing. It’s a gross overstatement, though. Most working reporters I’ve met have been very conscientious in exercising whatever little clout they wield. Become the foreign-affairs columnist for one of the world’s leading newspapers, though, and all fetters are off. The only limits that remain are those of the imagination, as Thomas […]

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…as William deBuys demonstrates in his wonderful new book, A Great Aridness. DeBuys, an accomplished New Mexico writer and conservationist, understands that a lack of water is what gives this iconic landscape its impossibly blue skies and unique wildlife. But life in these arid lands is a precarious affair. Death or even extinction is never more […]

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