Vol. 77 Nbr. 1, January 2008

Index

• Balancing acts.
• Wonder bread.
• Oops.
• Unto Caesar.
• Lady of the Lake.
• Poetry Stand.
• The Trojan War.
• Apologies all around.
• Atonality and beyond.
• Death on the installment plan.
• Red-pen patriots.
• Trapped in a golden age.
• Works in progress.
• Sign language: at their best, pictograms tell us clearly where to go and what to do; at their worst, things can get interesting.
• Who cares about executive supremacy? The scope of presidential power is the most urgent--and fundamentally ignored--legal and political issue of our time.
• Moral principle vs. military necessity: the first code of conduct during warfare, created by a Civil War-era Prussian immigrant, reflected ambiguities we struggle with to this day.
• Dreaming of a Democratic Russia: memories of a year in Moscow promoting a post-Soviet political process, an undertaking that now seems futile.
• Politics.
• Under the Auspices.
• The Long Hall.
• Windy Ode.
• The daily miracle: life with the mavericks and oddballs at the Herald Tribune.
• Cuss time: by limiting freedom of expression, we take away thoughts and ideas before they have the opportunity to hatch.
• Alone at the movies: my days in the dark with Robert Altman and Woody Allen.
• Balanchine's cabinet: a young woman wins a drawing and learns to give and to receive.
• Confluences: as a beloved uncle makes his final journey in the wilderness, a new life begins.
• The Leap.
• Moonbow.
• On the road to nowhere: Tom Stoppard's Russian intellectuals take a wrong turn with Hegel, just as Edmund Wilson once did with Marx.
• The quiet sideman: tenor saxist 'Chu' Berry emerged from the pack at the end of his short life.
• Souls hungering after meaning: in Aegypt, John Crowley's just-completed four-book masterwork, ordinary people bear a faint symbolic glow through real and mythological realms.
• The work of death: how the Civil War changed forever Americans' relationship with mortality.
• Subjectivity is all: using a lifetime of colorful examples to define the undefinable.
• The casserole inquisition: chronicles from America's culinary transformation.
• Wry eye on the bard: sorting through the little we know about the best we've got.
• Latin's eminent career: is the language of empire, the church, scholarship, and Europe nearing retirement?
• A long walk in the new world: of 300 settlers sent by Spain to Florida, only four survived.
• Correction.
• Gratitude.
• For Jacques Barzun on his centennial.