Roundup: Media's Take

Tom McGough: Rehnquist Leaves An Enormous Judicial Legacy

My turn to stand vigil came at 11 on Tuesday morning, an hour after the flag-draped coffin of William Hubbs Rehnquist had been carried into the Great Hall of the Supreme Court and placed for public viewing on the same velvet-covered platform that had once borne the coffin of Abraham Lincoln. At the head of the platform stood a portrait of the man who had presided over the judicial branch of our federal system for the last 19 years. Standing vigil meant standing silent and stock stil

Robert Little/Douglas Birch: Rebuilding New Orleans Means Considering Old, New

... The New Orleans' City Council met last week at Louis Armstrong International Airport, and its members also pledged to rebuild. Past floods and hurricanes, along with yellow fever epidemics in the 1800s, all failed to drive the city to ruin, and so will Katrina, they said. "New Orleans has been built back from many disasters," said Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge Morrell. "New Orleans was here before there was a United States of America." One saving gr

Felipe Fernández-Armesto: Cities Do Not Last

THE SURPRISING THING about New Orleans is not that the city should have been engulfed, but that it took so long for it to happen. Cities do not last. Those built in precarious places collapse. The rest are doomed to decay or suffer humanly induced destruction. It is only our historical myopia, which prevents most of us from seeing much of the past at once, that makes us think our cities are solid or enduring. We should know better. There are plenty of authors rushing to put us righ

Edward Rothstein: Seeking Justice, of Gods or the Politicians

In the history of humankind, there has rarely been a disaster like the New Orleans flood without a theodicy to go along with it. The word "theodicy," coined in the 18th century by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, derives from Greek roots invoking the "justice of the gods." A theodicy is an attempt to show that such justice exists, to prove that we really do live in what Leibniz insisted was the "best of all possible worlds." So theodicies have been p

Tim Cornwell: 12 Books That Changed The World

Football's first rule book was named as one of 12 works that changed the world yesterday - alongside the King James Bible and Darwin's Origin of Species. Melvyn Bragg revealed the list as the basis of a new TV show, the follow-up to his last literary series, The Adventure of English. The texts listed range from the first folio of William Shakespeare's works in 1623, to the patent for Richard Arkwright's spinning machine, from 1769. But the Scottish historian Tom Devine

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Faye Fiore: Katrina's Aftermath

The federal government has handled many disasters, but never a challenge like this: resettling hundreds of thousands of people uprooted within the nation's borders. Dozens of federal agencies -- working with state and local governments and private charities -- are trying to improvise a safety net capable of helping support displaced people for months. ... Some historians look back to the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the 1930s to find a comparison to the displaceme

Ron Briley: The Shame of a Nation

[Mr. Briley is Assistant Headmaster, Sandia Preparatory School.] Those of us who assert that consideration of race, gender, and class be at the heart of the American experience are often ridiculed by conservative critics. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans exposes the myth of America as a middle-class melting pot with equal opportunity for all its citizens. The failure of the federal government to provide funding to strengthen the levee system, of course, endanger

Simon Rozendaal: What the Dutch Did to Save Themselves After the Flood of 1953

[Mr. Rozendaal is the science writer for Elsevier, a Dutch weekly newsmagazine.] Many Dutch, shocked by seeing the devastation caused in the U.S. by Hurricane Katrina, were reminded of what happened to their own country more than 50 years ago. On Feb. 1, 1953, the southwestern part of the Netherlands was struck by a flood of biblical proportions. The Dutch levee system collapsed in 500 places. There was nowhere to hide. More than 1,800 people drowned, together with tens of thousands

Fred Barnes: President Bush had a rough summer. That doesn't mean he's in for a fall.

This summer hasn't been kind to President Bush. Persistent terrorism in Iraq continued to drive up the toll of American dead. The media transformed Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain soldier, into an anti-Bush celebrity. On top of soaring gas prices, devastation from Hurricane Katrina gave the president a huge, new crisis and a deluge of criticism to deal with. Naturally, his job approval rating, measured relentlessly in polls, sank to a new low. Yet two things remain true about t

Steven Aftergood: Once Upon a Time the US Led the World in Negotiating a Reduction in Nukes

Once upon a time, the government of the United States sought ways and means to achieve negotiated reductions in stockpiles of nuclear weapons through the verified destruction of such weapons. In 1965, US Ambassador to the United Nations Arthur J. Goldberg presented what was known as the "Transfer" proposal, under which the U.S. would transfer 60,000 kilograms of weapons grade uranium to nonweapons uses if the Soviet Union would transfer 40,000 kilograms. Each country woul

Max Boot: Katrina's Windbags

SOMETIMES I HAVE a strong urge to resign in disgust from the Amalgamated Federation of Pollsters, Pundits, Politicians and Pompous Pontificators. This is one of those times. No sooner had Hurricane Katrina roared through Louisiana and adjacent states than every blockhead with a microphone or a word processor felt compelled to spout off about What It All Means — and, more important, Who Is to Blame. Ordinary people are sitting at home, transfixed by the spectacle unfol

Bill McKibben: Sucker's Bets for the New Century

[Bill McKibben is the author of many books on the environment and related topics. His first, The End of Nature, was also the first book for a general audience on global warming. His most recent is Wandering Home, A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape.] If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one story -- the U.S. safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the world -- then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof

Godfrey Hodgson: After Katrina, a Government Adrift

It is not just the levees of New Orleans that are weak. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, George Bush’s predicament reveals serious breaches in the way the American government works – weaknesses that result from the domination of sectarian conservative politics in the country’s administration and culture. It would be nice to think that the conservative ascendancy is the democratic consequence of mass conversion of a majority of the American electorate to conservative shibboleth

Fred Glass: How Much Longer Will Unions Survive?

[Fred Glass is an instructor in the Labor and Community Studies Department at San Francisco City College, and the communications director for the California Federation of Teachers. Reach him at cftoakland@igc.org.] ... Under attack by the very federal agencies put in place 70 years ago to ensure free collective bargaining and facing political assaults in several states - including California - AFL-CIO unions have split into two groups, threat

John M. Barry: The 1927 Flood -- The Worst in History (Until Now)

[John M. Barry of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities is the author of"Rising Tide," about the 1927 Mississippi flood, and"The Great Influenza."] ... Before this, the flood on the Mississippi River in 1927 was doubtless the most terrible American disaster. In one obvious way, it eerily foreshadowed today's. For one thing, New Orleans officials loudly warned that a disaster was waiting to happen, and condemned Washington for

Anne Rice: New Orleans ... The Center of Black Culture in America

[Anne Rice is the author of the forthcoming novel "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt."] WHAT do people really know about New Orleans? Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land? The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the w

Lynne Duke and Teresa Wiltz: Katrina Blew In, and Tossed Up Reminders of a Tattered Racial Legacy

On TV, we watch them: His braids are flying above his head and he's got a wild look on his face. He's running, one arm clutching a load of looted clothes, the other reaching back to tug at his pants, which are in danger of sliding past his rump. She's crying and forlorn and too young to be carrying a baby in her arms, but carrying one she is, and both are dirty and sweaty and hungry, reduced to an animal-like state of waiting and starving and begging for help. We see them through our respective

James Castagnera: The Battle Over the Double Eagle Gold Coins

Philadelphia jeweler Joan S. Langbord is battling Uncle Sam for possession of 10 of the rarest coins ever minted. The last time such a so-called “Double Eagle” was auctioned off --- in 2002 by Sotheby’s --- the high bidder paid $7.59 million. That sale entered the Guinness Book of World records as the highest price ever paid for a single coin. The Sotheby’s Double Eagle, and its ten counterparts in what likely will go down in the law books as Langbord v. the U.S. Mint, aren’t just any D

Robert Samuelson: Greenspan's Brilliant Legacy

He is the dour optimist. Alan Greenspan, completing 18 years as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and the world's most influential economic figure, flew here last week for a conference to celebrate and criticize his record. There wasn't much criticism. Economists Alan Blinder (a former Fed vice chairman) and Ricardo Reis of Princeton concluded that Mr. Greenspan has a "legitimate claim to being the greatest central banker who ever lived." Economist Allan Meltzer o

Lawrence F. Kaplan: 4 Years After 9-11, We're Still Bowling Alone

"Without the Cold War," Rabbit Angstrom asks in John Updike's Rabbit at Rest, "what's the point of being an American?" Rabbit's question, which he posed in 1990, anticipated something in the national mood during the decade that followed.... ... The need for a moral equivalent of the cold war evaporated on September 11. Having failed to reverse the equation during the '90s, the architects of national greatness would henceforth make a virtue out of necessity. If mo