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Olivier Todd, (New York: Knopf, 1997) 434 pp., $30, cloth. It's a mantra: Why can't we be debonair, like the French, about the private pleasures of public figures? As we [...]

By Nal Riley Fitch. Doubleday. 569 pp. $25.95. She's not a cook, but she plays one on TV That's how a friend visiting us in Paris in the late sixties [...]

Jim Hightower says that in Texas there's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow line and dead armadillos. In the middle of our national political highway, there [...]

The trouble with us geezers is that we live too long. If we don't bankrupt the country with our pensions, we'll do it with our medical bills. That is the [...]

I see by the papers, damn near every day, that I'm a Greedy Geezer. Not any old Greedy Geezer, either, but one of those quintessentially avaricious members of the breed [...]

As the cold war plays in reruns on TV, old combatants relive its bloody quarrels. In the thirties, Spain was the gut issue that Vietnam would become in the sixties. [...]

By Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Harvard. 245 pp. $22.95. When the federal guarantee of aid to families with children was repealed after sixty years, no voice keened more loudly than that [...]

Scapegoats are essential to the orderly transfer of wealth from the many to the few. As it happens, we are at the moment oversupplied with effective ones: teenage girls and [...]

The end of history, billed as the terminal victory of the free market, has turned out to be a rather tumultuous affair. That is nowhere more true than in the [...]

The end of history, billed as the terminal victory of the free market, has turned out to be a rather tumultuous affair. That is nowhere more true than in the [...]

Investigators poking among the smoking ruins of the Great Society tend to identify Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy as the detonator. Hence, the title of this fine study summons up the [...]

Economist Thomas Robert Malthus based his arguments on the ostensibly scientific observation that population grows geometrically, while the food supply at best may grow arithmetically, hence, anything that improves the condition of the masses enough to encourage sex to do its work must lead to starvation. Malthus was notoriously mistaken. Even at that time the productivity of agriculture and industry was growing more rapidly than population. But his mathematical formula was only a gimmick, like the supply-side argument that lower taxes would produce higher revenues for the treasury. Like the Poor Law of 1834, the election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. President in 1980 marked a triumph for Malthusianism. Welfare programs were drastically cut, and taxes too.

The article presents information on various social and political developments around the world. It is reported that, barely recovered from the Statue of Liberty gala, the U.S. is now bracing for a year of constitutional and Congressional bicentenaries, which will be generally dedicated to reinterpreting those institutions with an eye to the ideology of the current Administration. Moreover, it is reported that, the U.S. Administration has refused to take seriously the Soviet leader's unprecedented arms control actions, including a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, a promise to remove all medium-range missiles from Europe if the United States withdraws its own, and the acceptance of U.S. demands for rigorous on-site verification procedures.

This article presents information on the book "Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS et al., Sharon v. Time," by Renata Adler. Adler's strange new book has become the scandal of the publishing season. Adler goes beyond the paranoid right in assailing the media as a hateful monolith whose nature the framers of the Bill of Rights could not have contemplated. Adler demonstrates over and again what the media had reported long before the trial and during it: that CBS coached witnesses, spliced tape, played up what supported its thesis and played down what did not.

The article focuses on the book "Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child," by Noël Riley Fitch. A year after the Time-Life debacle, Julia and her husband, Paul, looked up in Paris and asked to visit some newly "in" place. Child did not care for the chef's cooking or his company, and that she resented the failure of the French to publish her instructions on their cooking. When, a bit later, Child told The Washington Post, "French women don't know a damn thing about French cooking, although they pretend they know everything."

This article presents information about the book "Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir," by Bill Bradley. Bradley's reference to himself as a putative outsider might raise eyebrows on both sides of the aisle but his availability is no surprise. Indeed, in this campaign autobiography he tells us that his basketball teammates used to call him, alternatively "Dollar Bill" and "Mr. President," a significant pairing, as his drive for the gold in both senses has been legendary. In a chapter headed "Money Is Power," he confides that he spent 40 percent of his first term in the Senate scrounging at the rate of $20,000 a week, then doubled his take during his second term, having learned that it was more efficient to go after rich donors than not so rich ones and to avoid controversial issues.

This article presents information on the recent political developments in Russia. It is informed that the U.S. government is surprised by Boris Yeltsin's announcement that he was dissolving the Russian parliament. However, the same U.S. administration supported Yeltsin's March 20, 1993 dress rehearsal when he threatened to dissolve parliament and chuck the constitution. There was a surreal quality to the U.S. administration's reaction to events in Moscow. Bill Clinton, President of the U.S., opined in a radio talk show that Russians are trying to come to terms with what it means to be a democracy and what it means to try to change the economy.

The article focuses on role of press in politics. In an era of overt corruption of government it may fairly be said that the major media would rather not know about it. In New York City, everyone was aware that Mayor Ed Koch had received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from donors who received billions of dollars in benefactions from his office, yet the media kept saying that his integrity could not be questioned. The political reporters were able journalists, and honorable by their lights. They just happened to like politicians and to approve of what politicians do. They were all more or less under the spell of a romantic illusion.

The article focuses on the life and works of the U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. When the federal guarantee of aid to families with children was repealed, no voice keened more loudly than that of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. No voice, either, had resounded more effectively to achieve that end. U.S. President Bill Clinton made that very point in defending his decision. In 1994, he hailed a Clinton proposal to cut allowances for children born on welfare and require their mothers to work. He wrote the book "Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy."

The article presents information about the book "The AARP: America's Most Powerful Lobby and the Clash of Generations," by Charles R. Morris. While there is useful data to be gleaned from the book, it comes larded with disinformation. The emergence of he A.A.R.P. as the 800-pound gorilla is not new; it was a great media bogy in 1982. That was the year when the Greenspan Commission created the hoax that Social Security was "careening toward bankruptcy." The resulting "Rescue Act" raised the regressive payroll tax and trimmed benefits to the point that the I.O.Us called trust funds are expected to reach their trillion dollars in a few years.

The article focuses on the books "The Cigarette Papers," by Stanton A. Glantz and John Slade and "Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris," by Richard Kluger. One is fittingly titled "The Cigarette Papers," because it does for the tobacco war have done what the Pentagon papers did for the Vietnam War. It confirms what every admirer of private enterprise should have surmised: that the tobacco manufacturers always, but always knew more about their product than their critics did. In "Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris," Kluger holds that if the tobacco executives were morally reprehensible, it was less for peddling a product commonly understood to be dangerous than for lying to reassure the clientele.

The article focuses on the appointment of Lawrence Summers as Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs, where he will be in charge of formulating U.S. policy regarding the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Group of Seven and debt negotiations. Earlier Summers was the World Bank chief economist and in 1991 wrote an internal memo arguing that toxic wastes and dirty industries should be encouraged to move to less-developed nations. Though Summers claimed he was being ironic, World Bank-watchers fault him for discouraging efforts to promote environmentally sustainable development and for ignoring on going pleas for local input on World Bank projects.

Focuses on the effect of inflation on the U.S. economy as of September 1978. Impact of inflation on the standard of living; Implications for the labor sector; Description of the U.S. inflation during World War II; Effect of world affairs on the value of the U.S. dollar; View of inflation as an adulteration of the coinage.

Presents letters to the editor on articles published in previous issues. Information related to gay rights in the U.S.; Views of the U.S. President on gay rights; Discussion on women's personal observation on feminism.

The article presents information about the book "PM: A New Deal in Journalism, 1940-1948," by Paul Milkman. The author of the book observes that many newspapers have died and that readership continues to decline. PM was the only newspaper in its sympathetic coverage of labor's triumphant battles in the coal mines, at Ford, at Bethlehem Steel and in the political and propaganda wars then raging. It was the only paper to support New York City's transit strikers. But there was savage hostility and the Daily News barred PM from newsstands for a time and got a gangster union to hamper distribution.

Presents letters to the editor about the article "The Left and Clinton: As Bill Goes, So Do We," by Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, published in one of the previous issues of this periodical. Views on U.S. President Bill Clinton; Comments on party policies in the U.S.; Opinion on U.S. politicians.

RECKLESS DISREGARD: Westmoreland v. CBS et al., Sharon v. Time. Renata Adler's strange new book has become the scandal of the publishing season. This is a pity because, like so [...]