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Volume 51, Number 6 · April 8, 2004
Spring Books Issue

Photo by NASA/AP/Wide World

The Wrong Stuff
By Steven Weinberg
Ever since NASA was founded, the greater part of its resources have gone into putting men and women into space. On January 14 of this year, President Bush announced a "New Vision for Space Exploration" that would further intensify NASA's concentration on manned space flight. The President's new initiative makes it necessary once more to take up a question that has been with us since the first space ventures: What is the value of sending human beings into space?

God in the Hands of Angry Sinners
By Garry Wills
If you relish the sight of a healthy male body being systematically demolished, beyond the farthest reach of plausible endurance, The Passion of the Christ is your movie. Jesus arrives at his first legal hearing already mauled and with one eye closed behind swollen bruises. From then on, he is never moved or stopped without spontaneous blows and kicks and shoves from all kinds of bystanders wanting to get in on the fun. On the way to execution, he is whipped while fainting under the cross. A soldier says to lay off or he'll never make it. But the crowd just keeps whipping and beating him all the rest of the way. My wife and I had to stop glancing furtively at each other for fear we would burst out laughing. It had gone beyond sadism into the comic surreal, like an apocalyptic version of Swinburne's The Whipping Papers.

Me, Myself, and I
By Stephen Greenblatt
On Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation by Thomas W. Laqueur

The Lives and Loves of Samuel Clemens
By Larry McMurtry
"My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water," Mark Twain observed, in a note. Was he bragging or complaining? Did he realize that two of his books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, were among the richest word-wines ever vinted in America? His cranky, abstemious admirer George Bernard Shaw went so far as to say that it was Mark Twain who taught him that "telling the truth was the funniest joke in the world." But did Twain's enormous success have much to do with truth-telling, or did he, like Shaw, treat truth like a bicycle that could be abruptly kicked aside when the author couldn't make it go as fast or far as he wanted it to go?

The American Mission?
By William Pfaff
On The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership by Zbigniew Brzezinski

'Iraq: Now They Tell Us': An Exchange
With Dana Milbank, Michael Gordon, and Michael Massing
Gordon: In making his argument Mr. Massing leaves out references to my work that do not fit his thesis. He also provides an incomplete account of the views of the expert community. In short, Mr. Massing commits the very sins for which the critics have taken the Bush administration to task: to bolster his case he has cherry-picked the evidence.
Massing: In retrospect, the September 8, 2002, article by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction seems one of the most serious cases of misreporting in the entire run-up to the war. The piece provided a major boost to the administration's case for war—and proved to be wrong in almost every detail. Rather than own up to this and ponder what went wrong, Gordon offers excuses and rationalizations.



Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004

Volume 51, Number 4 · March 11, 2004

Volume 51, Number 3 · February 26, 2004