Ask any hurricane expert, any disaster planner. Or ask anyone who knows about evacuations and he’ll tell you: There are always some people who stay behind. During Hurricane Elena in 1985, 10 percent of the inhabitants of the washed-out coastal barrier islands refused to leave, despite repeated warnings and despite their relative wealth.
Walk down Long Market Street, past the shops selling amber beads and cavalry swords, through the medieval gates of the city of Gdansk, Poland. Cross the highway, head toward the shipyard and look up. When I did so a few days ago, I saw an enormous billboard featuring a list of cities: “Gdansk. Budapest. Prague. …
Since the bombing attacks in London last month, a welter of columnists, writers, talking heads and ordinary people have puzzled over the mystery of British Muslims, one in four of whom recently told pollsters that they sympathize with the July 7 suicide bombers.
Only two senators were in the room when Karen Hughes testified at her confirmation hearings. When it came time for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to vote on her nomination yesterday, she was easily approved. And thus with no discussion and no debate, Hughes takes over the least noticed, least respected and possibly most important …
In 1949, when George Orwell wrote his dystopian novel “1984,” he gave its hero, Winston, a job at the Ministry of Truth. All day long, Winston clips politically unacceptable facts, stuffs them into little pneumatic tubes, and then pushes the tubes down a chute.
By now we’ve all had that feeling. You’re waiting in a crowded underground station, about to step onto a train. Suddenly you think: What if it happened here? What if this station, or this escalator, or this train, is a target? If you’re like most people, the feeling passes. You shrug, get out your newspaper, …
For reasons that don’t merit elaboration, I spent several hours over the past weekend stuck in European airports. That unexpected chunk of downtime — a little gift from the airline industry — gave me the equally unexpected opportunity to read all of the British and French newspapers, or at least all of the ones they …
So familiar are the numbers, and so often have we heard them analyzed, that the release of a new poll on international anti-Americanism last week caused barely a ripple. Once again the Pew Global Attitudes Project showed that most Frenchmen have a highly unfavorable view of the United States; that the Spanish prefer China to …
According to its director, the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History needs new plumbing, new wiring and better lighting. So desperately does the building require renovation, in fact, that there is talk of shutting the whole place down for a year or two, of bringing in some fresher architecture, even of designing a “museum for the …
If you happen to be reading this while standing in one of those disturbingly slow, zigzag lines at airport security — looking repeatedly at your watch, wondering if this time you really will miss the plane — here’s something to make you feel worse: Almost none of the agony you are experiencing is making you …
