Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health-Care Crisis and the People Who Pay the Priceby Jonathan Cohn, HarperCollins, 292 pp. $25.95. From the plight of the uninsured to the sorry future of Medicare, the failings of American health care make constant headlines, and have become a theme on the presidential campaign trail. Publishers, too, have

The immigration debate has been the subject of a prime-time address by President Bush, sparked demonstrations in the streets of several major cities, and last year played a key role in a number of congressional races. It is constantly on the lips of pundits and political commentators, and is already a factor in the presidential

Americans say they are very worried about health care: on generic lists of voter concerns, health issues regularly rank just behind terrorism and the Iraq war. And politicians are eager to do something about it. To empower consumers, the White House has advanced the idea of Health Savings Accounts; to help the uninsured, it has

Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitasby Tom Callahan, Crown. 292 pp. $24.95 The National Football League (NFL) is the most successful professional sports operation in history, a money-making machine that seems never to sleep. But is the game as sound as the balance sheet, or has the corporate and bureaucratic ethos that

Barack Obama, the Democratic star of the moment in American politics, is the junior Senator from Illinois, and for the past two years has been the only black member of the U.S. Senate. Elected after seven years in the Illinois state legislature and a short career as a lawyer and community activist in Chicago, he

In the contest for oddest pronouncement in a State of the Union address, high marks should go to President Bush’s call last January for a national ban on “creating human-animal hybrids.” Fortunately, the modern biotech laboratory does not yet resemble H.G. Wells’s island of Dr. Moreau, that fictional place where an exiled scientist blends man

In the most modern parts of the modern world, three aspects of fertility do seem historically unprecedented and clearly important. First, there is no stigma attached to being childless; a woman’s worth, in this life or the next, is not judged adversely if she chooses never to have children. Second, children are no longer economic

There are two interrelated culture wars that beset Western Europe today. The first of these wars is a sharper form of the red state/blue state divide in America: a war between the postmodern forces of moral relativism and the defenders of traditional moral conviction. The second is the struggle to define the nature of civil

Death and dying are once again subjects of intense public attention. During his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts was grilled about his views on removing life-sustaining treatments from debilitated patients and warned by various liberal Senators not to interfere with the “right to die.” In California and Vermont, state legislators are working to legalize