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The Atlantic | May 2003 ITcame to me recently in a blinding vision that I am an apatheist. Well, “blinding vision” may be an overstatement. “Wine-induced haze” might be more strictly accurate. This was after a couple of glasses of merlot, when someone asked me about my religion. “Atheist,” I was about to say, but…
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The Atlantic Monthly | March 2003 DO YOU KNOW someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the…
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The Atlantic Monthly | December 2002…..IN SEPTEMBER, McDonald’s announced plans to cook its fries in healthier oil. And not a moment too soon. Just a few days later the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that in 2000 (the latest year for which final figures are available) the death rate in America, adjusted for…
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The Atlantic Monthly | October 2002 IN WASHINGTON, D.C., where I live, and in many other urban areas with troubled school systems, here is how it works for people with ambition and mobility: As they begin their careers, they live in the city for fun and convenience and dating. Then they marry and have kids.…
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The Atlantic Monthly | July/August 2002 IN 1990, when I was traveling in Japan, my friend Masayuki introduced me to his mother, Mrs. Tadokoro. One night, as the three of us sat together after dinner in her apartment in Osaka, she told me of the firebombing of Tokyo. She was nineteen when the American bombers…
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The Atlantic Monthly | December 2001 IN the days following the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center and demolished part of the Pentagon, I received a series of e-mails from my sister asking what I thought she could do to protect herself and her family. Should she stock up on water? On…
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Wall Street Journal | July 27, 2001 THE other day I attended what seemed an unusually disingenuous press conference, even by Washington’s standards. The event was the unveiling, by a coalition of church and community groups called the Alliance for Marriage, of a proposed 28th Amendment to the Constitution. The “Federal Marriage Amendment” was soon…
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The Atlantic | January 2001 I ARRIVED on Pompano, an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, on a hot day last July, hoping to be on hand when the drillers hit pay. Pompano, which belongs to BP (the former British Petroleum, now merged with Amoco and ARCO), stands in 1,295 feet of water about eighty…
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Reason | November 2000 [Review of The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession, by Harrison G. Pope Jr., Katharine A. Phillips, and Roberto Olivardia, New York: The Free Press, 286 pages, $25] BY THE TIME I graduated from high school, I had reached my full height-–not quite five feet, eight inches–-and I weighed 105…
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The New Republic | May 22, 2000 IN early 1998, if you had rummaged through the questions that pollsters tuck in, almost as afterthoughts, at the end of their surveys, you might have noticed something peculiar. Gallup asked people whether they approved or disapproved of the job performance of five past presidents:…