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
Voices
Joel Belz
For good or ill?
Are poor people poor because they're paying the price for their own personal failures—or because the systems in which they find themselves have been broken and have failed the people within them? ...
Janie B. Cheaney
Grim fairy tale
How's this for a plot outline for a young adult novel? A teenage girl lives with her widowed father, who regularly impregnates her and purchases abortion herbs from the local witch. After his acci...
A grief conserved
"Something's wrong with this baby," my ultrasound technician told me. She had just scanned Mrs. Jones (a fictitious name) at 20 weeks and went on to describe her findings, findings that surely mea...
Mindy Belz
No right of return
Sami Jajouhana is the keeper of Nahum's tomb. The last of the Jews to leave al-Qosh in 1948 handed him the keys to the synagogue and a leather ledger, which he has used to this day to record visit...
The Editors
Mailbag
A great one I just completed the 2009 Book Issue. It is a great edition, very instructive and informative. The last two columns, "Be shrill" and "Liberty's champion," make it worth the inve...
Andrée Seu Peterson
Getting to know Him
Last December, trying to be on time to Nassia's preschool Christmas party in Philadelphia, I asked the Lord-out loud, so my granddaughter would hear-for a parking spot. After 15 minutes of circlin...
Marvin Olasky
Innovation again
New Orleans was once a city of American innovation: first opera house (1796), first Jewish U.S. senator (1852), first theater dedicated exclusively to showing motion pictures (1896), and, of cours...
Culture
Notable CDs
Notable CDs
Other than the fact that the "Choral" and "Collection" in the title aren't misspelled with "k"s, this album is a typical Kinks compilation, with 14 of its 15 tracks long familiar to fans of the gr...
Notable Books
Notable books
When Rob Walker moved to New Orleans with his girlfriend in 2000, he wrote letters to his friends in which he described his early impressions of his adopted city. The letters don't pretend to offe...
Movies & TV
Lacking spirit
Like many New Age religious books, The Answer Man is a lofty title in search of justification for itself. Director John Hindman's first film stars Jeff Daniels as the titular character, who has ma...
Movies & TV
Federal pigs
What's more ridiculous than an elite crew of FBI special agents who happen to be talking guinea pigs? Their mission, of course. When a billionaire appliance tycoon programs every machine in...
Movies & TV
'Piece of filth'
WORLD makes it a rule not to criticize movies without having seen them. It's time for the exceedingly rare exception. Orphan is a horror film about a husband and wife who bring a 9-year-old...
Movies & TV
Ugly to the end
The overwhelming success of director Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad) was bound to inspire imitation. The Ugly Truth is a crass romantic comedy that tries and fails to captur...
Music
Out of the rat race
For nearly 30 years, Bruce Sodano has been better known for being Donna Summer's husband than for having been a member of Alive N Kickin' in the 1970s or for being a gifted singer-songwriter in hi...
Books
Challenges for the church
If you want to learn more about adopting children and why, biblically, it's such a good thing to do, read Russell D. Moore's Adopted for Life (Crossway, 2009). Moore weaves in the story of the two...
Video
Rise of The Turtles
The line between an obscure flop and a cult favorite may be thin, but it's real, and few films have walked it as patiently as My Dinner with Jimi. A hit on the independent festival circuit ...
Dispatches
Quick Takes
Quick Takes
Painted popular Figuring perhaps the whole routine of blowing water out of the proboscis had gotten old, elephants at the Chiang Mai zoo in Bangkok, Thailand, have a new method of attractin...
Quotables
Quotables
"I am not a saint. Everyone understands that." Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister of Italy, on recordings of conversations he had with a prostitute that were made public. His wife had alread...
The Buzz
The Buzz
Supreme fizz Sonia Sotomayor's road to becoming the nation's first Hispanic justice was relegated to the media's back pages under a sense that her confirmation was a fait accompli-once the ...