Issue 87
June 2003
Contents
Emmanuel Todd
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
Many French intellectuals see their country as leading the challenge to US power. Few are as outspoken as Emmanuel Todd, the author of "Après l'Empire," a bestseller prophesying the decline of America.
Niger, lies and uranium
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
Why did the Bush administration endorse a forgery about Iraq's nuclear programme? Did it come from British intelligence?
Nutrition: the new medicine
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
Medicine today focuses on suppressing the symptoms of disease. A truly preventive medicine, capable of tackling degenerative diseases like arthritis and Alzheimer's, will be based on diet supplements, not drugs. Drug companies don't like it
The road to war
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
There are lessons to be learned from the mistakes made in the heart of government that led to Britain's defeat at the UN
Fabricated flesh
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
Through Ingres's portraits I learned how to fuse the real and the abstract in folds of cloth
Petersburg reborn
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
Out of dereliction, St Petersburg is re-emerging as a great Russian city. The concrete of communism has peeled off to reveal a human logic in the streets, and the return of a belle époque atmosphere
Believing theatre
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
As a critic, I lost faith in the meaning of live drama. Yet my belief came back
An African lament
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
Liberal whites are emigrating from the African countries they call home. This can only mean further decline
Imperial history
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
Americans are stuck with the burden of empire without having chosen it. No wonder they're feeling truculent.
The justice gap
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
A London youth court magistrate welcomes a shake-up of the criminal justice system which tries to make it harder for the guilty to escape conviction by playing the system. When his own son was mugged on Clapham common, he discovered just how inhospitable the justice system is to victims of crime
A better quagmire
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
Bush has spent the world's goodwill on reform in the Arab world. It was the most dangerous path, except for all the others
Motherland
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
Women hold more power in New Zealand than in any other country in the world. History doesn't explain it. So why?
George at 100
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
The last job for Orwell biographers is to examine his faults and catalogue his enemies. But it only serves to confirm his virtues
Theodore or Franklin?
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt turned the US into a hyperpower in its own western hemisphere, providing some eerie precedents for today
The ghost of the gulag
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
The camps were a microcosm of the Soviet Union, which may be why so few contemporary Russians want to think very much about them
The feeling brain
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
Antonio Damasio takes neuroscience back to its philosophical origins in Spinoza's "mind-body" and reveals the "embodied consciousness" of art
Emerson and America
20th June 2003 — Issue 87
A philosophy of self-invention was Emerson's gift, and curse, to American thought. But what good is originality, if the new self is a monster?