The Washington Monthly

With control of the House and Senate hanging in the balance, every pundit, politico, and poli-sci professor has a theory on which party will win in November's elections. Opposition parties always gain in midterm elections, Republicans could ride Bush's coattails, Enron could swing the country to the Democrats.

Although these issues matter, close elections often hinge on a much less sexy factor: which party does a better job of getting out the vote. After all, when the polls open, policies don't vote. People do.

John Cassidy probably set out to write the first really readable, definitive history of the Internet: from the wild levers of early punch-card machines to the glorious late '90s, when you could log onto Kozmo.com, order a pint of ice cream or an old comic book, and get it delivered in minutes for free.

In the mid-1990s, embryologist Jacques Cohen pioneered a promising new technique for helping infertile women have children. His technique, known as cytoplasmic transfer, was intended to "rescue" the eggs of infertile women who had undergone repeated, unsuccessful attempts at in vitro fertilization, or IVF. It involved injecting the cytoplasm found inside the eggs of a fertile donor, into the patient's eggs.

How did educated Westerners come to make enemies of an inspiration that has changed the lives of billions of people?" Robert H. Wiebe writes at the beginning of his eloquent and profound new study of the phenomenon of nationalism, Who We Are. During World War I, American progressives like Woodrow Wilson viewed national self-determination as one of the building blocks of a new, more humane global order. "But disillusionment after the First World War turned to revulsion after the Second, and at mid-century Western intellectuals dug in to battle the nationalist spirit."

On the last Friday in August, President Bush, fresh from his vacation in Texas, was asked by a reporter about his plans to address the frustration so many Americans currently face trying to get high-speed Internet access. The president didn't appear terribly worried. "The technologies are evolving," he said, with equanimity.

AOL is muscling its way into online journalism. Be afraid

With 1.5 billion credit cards floating around, $560 billion in outstanding credit-card debt, clearly credit-card debt in the United States is a problem. With a million-plus bankruptcies each year, borrowing has taken on a role far beyond traditional economic justifications or income smoothing.

Democrats are already lining up in opposition to the President's plan to reform Social Security. Bush has put forth only an outline of what he proposes to do-allow workers to use part of their payroll tax to fund private investment accounts, which, upon retirement, would be used to help augment Social Security benefits. Beyond that, the President intends to leave the specifics up to a bipartisan commission.

George W. Bush is now the third president and the second Bush to claim to be our "Education President." Yet neither he nor anyone else can plausibly claim that title when less than one-tenth of school funding comes from federal sources, and when vast disparities between per pupil spending exist because of the antiquated link between school funding and state and local taxes.

Daily coverage of the Microsoft antitrust trial was depressingly predictable. Reporters assigned to the case can't be blamed for churning out pabulum, however, for both sides were exasperatingly tight-lipped. Microsoft, in particular, expertly stymied all journalistic efforts to divine its stratagems, thanks to a phalanx of Waggener Edstrom flacks that surely cost more than the gross national product of Bhutan.