The Outlook—If Senator Kerry wins, George Packer, the essayist and author of the excellent political meditation Blood of the Liberals, says Kerry will inherit a great deal of trouble from the man he replaces. In the October 25 New Yorker magazine, Packer sketches the difficult outlook for the possible new president: “The constraints won’t come only from the […]

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The Debates—Polemics 1 and 2 left us calling for a rebate. As the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it, “it was obfuscating versus oscillating.” The Washington Post‘s TV critic Tom Shales wrote that “Kerry came off as more presidential than the president”; and a New York Times editorial said that if the question was whether Kerry seemed “presidential,” […]

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Editor’s note: Max Holland, a veteran Washington reporter and a contributing editor at theNation magazine, is a longtime investigator of the murder of President John F. Kennedy. He is just out with an exclusive new book, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes: The White House Conversations of Lyndon B. Johnson Regarding the Assassination, the Warren Commission, and the Aftermath. […]

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Ask the Internet—“Ask your doctor” is the pitch promoted in all those TV prescription-drug ads. But your doctor may have been influenced to prescribe certain high-priced drugs by the industry’s big-bucks wooing of the medical profession. Among other things, that includes giving doctors free, give-away patient samples of purple pills to encourage expensive drugstore purchases […]

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We noticed a headline in the Washington Post that called the Republican convention in New York an “Electoral Collage.” Our dictionary defines a collage as “an artistic composition made of various materials glued onto a picture, and/or an assembly of fragments.” As the New York Times put it, “for all the lack of real news,” the G.O.P. convention was “intriguing” for […]

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