POLITICS

Election Ballots Shed New Light on Cursive Writing Debate

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In the 26 states that don’t require cursive instruction, the lack of ’set signatures’ by younger voters who never learned penmanship may be a concern. Election workers, attempting to verify ballots in the 2024 presidential election race, ran into difficulties and delays because signatures on mail-in ballots didn’t match those by the same individuals on

Sleeping With the Enemy

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If Martha Dodd Stern had been a minimally important or competent Soviet spy, her story would make a rip-roaring Hollywood movie. But despite Brendan McNally’s effort to inflate the damage she did to American interests—Traitor’s Odyssey: The Untold Story of Martha Dodd and a Strange Saga of Soviet Espionage—the fact remains that her career as

Mesopotamia Through the Millennia

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In the years on either side of General Petraeus’s surge (2008) I spent many a month living in Baghdad covering culture for the Wall Street Journal’s arts section. That meant abiding not in the secure Green Zone but out among the locals—very rare for outsiders—unarmed, unembedded, and frequently exposed to the city’s turbulence in search