Watch and wait
Election night could provide a quick White House winner, or a flood of mail-in ballots and social division could delay results for weeks
Houses divided
The GOP's shaky base has Democrats bickering among themselves over how to stage a mid-term election coup
Pennsylvania wake-up
Voter revolt tells Republicans big spending is a big problem
The world according to Hitch
What's a pro-war, anti-abortion, religion-hating Darwinist doing in the Bush camp, or any camp?
Police thyself
A new human-rights panel has a familiar problem: Some of world's worst violators are charter members
Radio days
Homeschoolers' twist on real-life drama takes top prize
Voices
Andrée Seu Peterson
Abstinence stigma
When Iona Nikitchenko, Joseph Stalin's hand-picked jurist for the Nuremberg tribunal, showed up for duty, he asked his fellow judges, "What is meant in the English by 'cross-examine'?" Not a good ...
Marvin Olasky
Rivers on the bare heights
May and June are full of uplifting commencement addresses. Speakers offer sentiments such as, "Today you embark on a great adventure. Endeavor to persevere." There is nothing wrong with suc...
Mailbag
On beat Your article about white suburban kids taking to hip-hop music was on beat ("Black man's world?" May 6). The chart showing how youth in the suburbs and the city make such similar ch...
Joel Belz
Comparison shopping
When I rejoiced yesterday to spot a gas station selling regular for just $2.53 a gallon, I had to remind myself how elastic are the standards by which we judge the value of just about everything. ...
Busted blockbuster
It never occurred to most of us who worried about the impact of The Da Vinci Code that it would turn out to be a really bad movie. We assumed with its Academy Award--winning director and cast that...
Notebook
Sports
Breaking the stops to fix Barbaro
Barbaro's Triple Crown quest ended in a tragically short way when the Kentucky Derby winner pulled up lame just 100 yards into the Triple Crown's second leg, the Preakness Stakes. Barbaro's jockey...
Business
Stressful leisure
It has become axiomatic that the United States is, in the words of CIO magazine, "a nation of stressed-out workaholics." A Gallup poll last year found that 44 percent of Americans consider themsel...
Culture
Movies & TV
Art School Confidential
The so-called "art world," as social chronicler Tom Wolfe has pointed out, is not so much a world as a small town, a few thousand people who set the artistic fashions for the rest of civilization....
Video
Duma
Last year, director Carroll Ballard returned to theaters after a nearly 10-year absence with Duma (rated PG for mild adventure peril), a delightful family film about a South African boy and his pe...
Notable Books
Bestselling books
CONTENT This eighth novel in the Myron Bolitar series features a talent agent/amateur detective who was a top athlete until injured. Here he fulfills a promise by rescuing a friend's teenage daugh...
Movies & TV
Over the Hedge
Here it comes again. That inevitable comparison. Another computer-animated cartoon arrives in theaters, and it is immediately judged against the very best of its type. The result is often not pret...
Dispatches
The Buzz Sidebar
DeWine detractors
U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio has been in Congress for 20 years. The American Conservative Union assigns Sen. DeWine a lifetime "rating" of 80-which means that in the opinion of the ACU he casts h...
Quick Takes
Quick Takes
Oh, do you know the muffin man? An apparent prank at Lake Highlands High School in Dallas sent nearly 20 teachers, administrators, and support staff to the hospital complaining of nausea an...
Quotables
Quotables
"More than any president in the history of our country has ever received." American Idol host Ryan Seacrest on the 63.4 million votes cast for the show's two finalists. Taylor Hicks from Bi...
The Buzz
The Buzz
ENRON When the jury was done with them, former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were forced to trade in their golden parachutes for striped prison jumpers. After almost four month...