For the first time in the nation’s various wars on drugs, the scientific, political and spiritual stars are aligned for a revolution to balance and strengthen all four legs of this country’s effort to tackle substance abuse and addiction: research, prevention, treatment and law enforceme

Niall Ferguson is one of the leading mdash and almost certainly the most controversial mdash historian in contemporary Britain He last shocked his compatriots with The Pity of War which argued that Britain was as much to blame as Germany for World War I that the war could have been avoided and th

Historians and political scientists endlessly debate the sources of change in human societies What is more important in epochal transformation ideas or institutions personalities or power structures material or intellectual motives In the field of Russian studies the end of the cold war and i

During the cold war, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists became famous for its Doomsday Clock. The position of the hands on the clock showed how close the world was, in the judgment of the publication’s board of directors, to the midnight of mass nuclear annihilation. Every time the directors mo

A conference in Washington, D.C., with hunger as its theme? Some might assume that such a conference would be about hunger in the developing world. At this particular gathering on the first three days of April, however, the focus was on the often-hidden but widespread levels of hunger that pose a se

Soaring energy prices rapidly turned last winter into a season of severe discontent. In the Northeast the price of residential heating oil rose by more than 50 percent since the previous winter. In the Midwest homeowners paid at least 60 percent more for natural gas. In California households braced

Has the time come to revive the idea of a national pastoral council for the Catholic Church in the United States a quarter-century after the scheme was effectively abandoned? Opinions will differ on that. But two events this year are reminders that establishing some such body really is part of the u

The statistics from Sudan appall any decent observer. In the last 17 years, two million persons have been killed, four million have been internally displaced and hundreds of thousands made refugees. Yet the West seems to evince little interest in the hidden holocaust that is consuming Southern Sudan

How many times have I uttered those words, sung those jubilant words at Mass, and paid scant heed to their meaning? I’m a poor singer, so mostly I just fake them, scarcely letting a sound escape from a tight mouth and heart. I’ve probably concentrated more on the hairdo of the woman in f