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LOS ANGELES -- IT isn't politically feasible for Washington to bail out Detroit, but President Obama and Congress must step in to avert the worst fiscal collapse in urban American [...]

It ought to be clear by now that hate-laced propaganda poses a particular challenge to open societies in this new age, when their contagion can be spread by little more [...]

At the turn of the last century, many Californians came to regard one powerful enterprise as the symbol of oppressive avarice. That was the Southern Pacific, whose railways kept a [...]

Mitt Romney was the target of both left-and right-wing Mormon-bashing in the last campaign, proving once again that vulgar religious prejudice is one of the few areas where true bipartisanship [...]

Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and the Democrats' legislative majority need to shake themselves free of the direct democracy delusion, and that process begins with abandoning efforts to put budget-balancing tax [...]

TWENTY YEARS AGO, the world was transfixed by an image of courageous resistance -- a lone young man standing in the road before a column of Chinese army tanks moving [...]

IN 1865, with the Confederacy 'in extremis,' Jefferson Davis bludgeoned appalled rebel lawmakers into accepting Robert E. Lee's request to recruit black troops into Northern Virginia's depleted army ranks. One [...]

SEAMUS HEANEY, the greatest living English-language poet, turned 70 this week. The Irish, of course, take their poets more seriously than most -- and they take their Nobel laureates, of [...]

WHEN IT COMES to selecting the country's head spy, our presidents have a pretty hit-and-miss history. That's why President-elect Barack Obama should ignore the sudden hysteria over his choice for [...]

NO MATTER how tenuous your connection to any particular tradition, this inevitably is a season of introspection and reflection. This year ends as a particularly anxious one, fraught with reminders [...]

THE FOREVER WAR, by Dexter Filkins; Alfred A. Knopf, 384 pages, $25. The literature of human conflict divides itself into two schools: One -- the more ancient -- is bardic [...]

* DEVIL MAY CARE: The New James Bond Novel, by Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming; Doubleday, 304 pages, $24.95. * James Bond was the 20th century's most famous spy [...]

ALL AMERICANS love free speech for themselves. We think the other guy should shut up and sit down. We all believe our own views are frank and provocative, things that [...]

* FIELDWORK, by Mischa Berlinski; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $24. Mischa Berlinski's first book, 'Fieldwork,' is that rare thing an entertainingly readable novel of ideas. The 34-year-old author [...]

At 60 and with a dozen novels behind him, Paul Auster seems at first blush to have returned to his metaphysical roots with 'Travels in the Scriptorium,' a novella-length fiction [...]

* MOTHERS AND SONS: Stories, by Colm Toibin; Scribner, 288 pages, $24. Nearly as formidable a critic as he is a writer of fiction which is very formidable, indeed Irish [...]

* TREASURE OF KHAN: A Dirk Pitt Novel, by Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler; Putnam, 552 pages, $27.95. Clive Cussler's 31st book, 'Treasure of Khan,' is a great big fat [...]

* A GLORIOUS DISASTER: Barry Goldwater's Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement, by J. William Middendorf II; Basic Books, 290 pages, $26.95. In an era of political [...]

* PHILIP ROTH: Novels 1973-1977 (The Great American Novel, My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire), Library of America, 912 pages, $35. It's fair to say that a [...]

'Grief Lessons,' the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson's new rendering of four plays by Euripides, reminds us that the difference between competent and inspired translation is more than a [...]

'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading,' quipped the Anglo-American aphorist Logan Pearsall Smith. The warming thought at the heart of Edward Mendelson's elegant new collection [...]

* THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE, by Ron Suskind, Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, $27. For a government so obsessed with secrecy that it has weighed prosecuting reporters for espionage, George [...]

* STATE OF WAR: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, by James Risen; Free Press, 242 pages, $26. James Risen's 'State of War: The Secret History [...]

IF ANOTHER 10 Marines had not been killed last Thursday outside Fallujah, it would have been the week to note that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's preening gamecock persona [...]

WHATEVER the electoral result of yesterday's vote, there's a growing sense that this race may involve tectonic shifts in the landscape of political journalism. It's still much too early to [...]

AT THE CORE of the relentless partisan assault on the American news media's tradition that good journalism can and should be unbiased is a campaign to obliterate the distinction between [...]

BILL CLINTON bestrode the worlds of American politics and publishing like a colossus with the publication of his book, “My Life.” This may be an election year, but since it [...]

FROM THEIR BEGINNING, American politics have been a blood sport. It would be fine if there were some Periclean age of civility and reason to which the nostalgic might repair. [...]

ONE OF THE SLY conceits of columns such as this is to participate in the media frenzy of the moment by decrying it. That admission is required because this column [...]

Throughout the week, reports circulated that other Times reporters now have come under suspicion. Thursday night, a spokeswoman for the paper confirmed to Newsweek's online edition that complaints had been [...]

AS IT TURNS OUT, medical news is a lot like a medicine: Too much can be as serious a problem as too little - and the wrong sort can be [...]