This issue: December 12, 2011 (Vol. 17, No. 13)

We Do Not Know

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

“The phrase ‘I do not know’ becomes inexpressibly bitter once one has proclaimed oneself to be a pundit, if not a polymath, especially when station, office, and dignity seem to demand that we should know.”

—Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or
on Religious Power and Judaism (1783)

Mendelssohn ...

Bobby, We Hardly Know Ye

Governor Jindal’s unheralded success story.

BY FRED BARNES

Baton Rouge

Bobby Jindal is forgotten but not gone. He followed the surest path of all to lose the attention of the national media. More than a year ago, he announced he wouldn’t run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Except for a spate of news coverage last year when, as governor of Louisiana, he had to cope with the BP oil spill, Jindal all but vanished from the national political scene.

Now he’s reemerging, and for good reason. He has a success story to tell or for others to ...

Climategate (Part II)

A sequel as ugly as the original.

BY STEVEN F. HAYWARD

The conventional wisdom about blockbuster movie sequels is that the second acts are seldom as good as the originals. The exceptions, like The Godfather: Part II or The Empire Strikes Back, succeed because they build a bigger backstory and add dimensions to the original characters. The sudden release last week of another 5,000 emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University​—​ground zero of “Climategate I” in 2009​—​immediately raised the question of whether this would be one of those rare exceptions or Revenge of the Nerds II. 

Before anyone had time to get very far into this vast archive, the climate ...

There at the New Yorker

The wit and wisdom of Wolcott Gibbs

BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN

The New Yorker, like New York itself, is always better in the past. In the present, it seems always to be slipping, never quite as good as it once was. Did the magazine, founded in 1925, have a true heyday? People differ about when this might be. The New Yorker’s heyday, it frequently turns out, was often their own.

I began reading the magazine in 1955, at the age of 18—not my heyday, which, near as I can tell, has yet to arrive—drawn to it originally because someone ...

Marion Montgomery, 1925-2011

Joseph Bottum on Marion Montgomery

BY JOSEPH BOTTUM

I was at the clock-repair shop when a friend called with the news that Marion had slipped away—Marion Montgomery, the great Southern critic and teacher. I was dropping off my grandfather’s broken watch when the call came. I was standing at the counter, holding a run-down timepiece, when my friend told me. And the clocks on the wall ticked, and ticked, and tocked. 

The pocket watches on faded velvet pads beneath the scratched counter glass. Wristwatches, too: whole armfuls of old Timexes and Rolexes, Omegas and Cartiers. That pseudo-Swiss cuckoo thing on the back wall. The battered case clock looming in the corner. The table clocks, with gilded feet and little pillars on the sides, like miniature temples to forgotten gods. ...

D.C.’s Discrimination Escalation

Readers outside of Washington may or may not be aware that there has been a more or less continuous movement, since the late 1960s, to grant statehood to the District of Columbia, the nation’s capital city. It came about as close to success as it ever will during the Carter administration (1978), when a constitutional voting rights amendment passed Congress but failed to be ratified by the requisite number of states. 

The Scrapbook isn’t about to rehearse the arguments for or against statehood; we simply mention this fact by way of introducing the latest reason why statehood will never be granted to the District. Councilman Marion Barry​—​the onetime four-term mayor of Washington​—​has just introduced legislation to add ...