This issue: January 24, 2011 (Vol. 16, No. 18)

‘It Did Not'

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

After a depressing week—a horrible shooting that killed 6 people and wounded 14 others, followed by days of demagoguery and idiocy surpassing even the normal standards of our power-without-responsibility punditocracy—recent days have brought encouraging news. The medical prognosis for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords seems more hopeful than had been thought likely. And the American people have once again demonstrated their good sense in the face of efforts by the media to stampede them toward foolishness.

Consider, for example, this January 14, 2011, story: “Few U.S. Voters Blame Guns, Rhetoric For Ariz. Shooting, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds”:

Modern Mélisande

From the ashes of communism, a voice for the new century.

BY CATHY YOUNG

One of the most sought-after classical singers in Europe, Magdalena Kozena has very little of the diva about her. The 37-year-old Czech-born, Berlin-based mezzo-soprano is warm and unpretentious, whether in interviews or in conversation with backstage visitors. A mother of two sons, ages five and two, she speaks of family as her first priority and readily turns down engagements that would interfere with it. This may be one of the reasons that, while Kozena has many devoted American fans, she is not as widely known among opera and classical music audiences here as she is across the Atlantic.

Her name was new to me when I heard her in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony at a Berlin Philharmonic concert in New York in 2006. Struck by her luminous voice and wrenching dramatic ...

The Price of Power

The benefits of U.S. defense spending far outweigh the costs

BY ROBERT KAGAN

The looming battle over the defense budget could produce a useful national discussion about American foreign and defense policy. But we would need to begin by dispensing with the most commonly repeated fallacy: that cutting defense is essential to restoring the nation’s fiscal health. People can be forgiven for believing this myth, given how often they hear it. Typical is a recent Foreign Affairs article claiming that the United States faces “a watershed moment” and “must decide whether to increase its already massive debt in order to continue being the world’s sheriff or restrain its military missions and focus on economic recovery.”

This is nonsense. No serious budget analyst or ...

Gentleman of Letters

John Gross, 1935-2011.

BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN

My friend John Gross died on Monday, January 10. His son Tom, who sent out an email announcing John’s death to a large number of his friends, noted that his father’s death was caused by complications relating to his heart and kidneys. His health had been failing in various ways for quite a long spell. Tom Gross also mentioned that his sister Susanna, John’s daughter, was reading to him from Shakespeare’s Sonnets when he died. That is a proper touch, for John knew English literature, knew it with greater breadth and more deeply than anyone I have ever met.

If a decently educated person knows Shakespeare, and someone with a specialized interest in the theater also knows the plays of Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Kyd, John knew Elizabethan playwrights at the next level down. The same was true of ...

Memento Mori

Matt Labash, nostalgic.

BY MATT LABASH

As last year morphed into this one, I, like so many others, held out hope that 2011 would be better than 2010, though not as good as 2007. Because why set yourself up for disappointment?

But when I signed onto my home-page early in the New Year, things got off to an unpromising start. Ordinarily, I welcome exposure to news stories I’d never see otherwise, helpful checklist pieces that tell me 5 ways to kill a man with my bare hands, or 10 ways to break up with Taylor Swift so that she’ll write vengeful yet melodically accessible songs about me. But one story, republished from MoneyTalks-News, set my teeth on edge: “Things Babies Born in ...

A Climate of Slander

Liberal pundits suffered a psychotic break last week, metaphorically speaking, of course. When a gunman opened fire on Representative -Gabrielle Giffords and a crowd that had gathered to hear her speak in Tucson, they were certain that conservatives must, somehow, be to blame. So the liberal intelligentsia rushed to erect a gallows in the public square (metaphorically speaking, again) and lined up Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, talk radio hosts, and conservatives collectively for summary execution on grounds that they had created a climate of political hatred and rhetorical excess that had incited murder—not to mention conservatives’ general lack of civility and poor manners in debate.