James M. Wall
Jackson closes a chapter
It was the winter of 1967, and Jesse Jackson was completing his master’s degree at Chicago Theological Seminary....
The polar bear’s perspective
Family members gather in a Liverpool hotel ballroom to learn the fate of loved ones who were traveling on the Titanic. Everyone is frantically seeking information on survivors....
A jungle peace
The U.S. Congress is debating President Clinton’s request for a $1.6 billion aid package for Colombia, our troubled South American neighbor....
Embargo is a crime
If Al Gore wants to recover from the serious political and moral mistake he made when he broke with the White House in the Elián González affair, he should repudiate another Clinton administration ...
Preemptive apologies
Pope John Paul II has issued a mea culpa for 2,000 years of his church’s history, a millennium wrap-up that apologizes for sins of omission like the Holocaust, before which the Catholic Church rema...
What did you call me?
John McCain was the most innovative and exciting campaigner of the presidential primary season....
Élian’s hometown
The U.S. embargo against Cuba is crumbling of its own absurdity. An increasing number of religious, academic and business groups are eager to visit Cuba....
Candid reporting
If you want to correctly interpret the news, stop assuming that the mainstream media know it all; pay attention instead to voices speaking quietly over in the corner....
Where they belong
The four front-runners for the presidency are following what has become a political pattern: candor when there are no votes to be lost, extreme caution when votes are at risk....
Film picks of ’99
Bringing Out the Dead, director Martin Scorcese’s frenetic examination of three days in the life of a paramedic, is easily my choice for the best film of 1999....
Public passions
Linda Tripp and Virginia Woodhull, living more than a century apart, were central figures in two public scandals involving high-profile figures....
Palestinian bantustans
Palestinians recognize the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks for what they are: the mopping-up process following a power struggle that Israel won....
Behind the curtain
A climactic moment in The Wizard of Oz is when Toto pulls aside the green curtain, and exposes a man turning levers which he had been using to fool people into thinking he was a wizard....
Cuban initiative
From a trip to Havana in the fall of 1980, I returned with two small statues of African female warriors, one with a machete, the other carrying a rifle....
Tribal conflict
There is a story in the Book of Genesis, rarely examined by modern readers, that is so pertinent to today's headlines that it should be required reading for any journalist reporting on the tribal c...
Refugees with dwindling rights
To reach the Israeli settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, you drive due east on a new highway built through the Israeli-occupied West Bank, ignoring, if you can, the occasional Palestinian refugee camp in ...
The angelic taxi
Cuban film director Fernando Pérez was inspired to make Life Is to Whistle by the work of modernist painter René Magritte, in whose work "reality does not stop being reality, but is, at on...
True compassion
It is hard not to conclude, given his recent stumbling about on the issue, that at some point prior to his 30th birthday Governor George W. Bush used cocaine....
Kubrick’s search
Rarely does blatant commercial hypocrisy sit so close to artistic excellence as was the case at the Hollywood screening of Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut....