to the collateral constitutional damage of the War on Terror. But the author, former New York Times correspondent David K. Shipler, is in pursuit of a much larger and more troubling development. Shipler exposes the frayed edges of our “constitutional culture.” Most citizens don’t know much about our liberties, he argues persuasively, and so don’t guard them from […]

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“Mitt Romney takes his religion seriously, and he won’t let us know that,” a Mormon scholar told me. “He goes quiet, or dark, on the issue of religion.” Romney not only avoids discussing Mormonism, he rarely discusses his personal history with the church. Most Mormon men end their official connection to the church when they […]

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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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First, an attempt to define the odd bubble in which CPAC exists. I am sitting in the press gallery listening to Iowa Congressman Steve King tell a crowd of 3,500 that he orders his interns to replace the energy-efficient light bulbs in his Capitol office with “black-market Edison light bulbs.” “The janitors, Nancy’s [Pelosi] Stasi […]

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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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