William Neikirk

Nothing succeeds like failure. That is the credo of modern economics by which our policymakers and thinkers live, the intellectual underpinning for this current unpleasantness known as recession. It was...

Americans have a love affair with bigness. The big car and big home have long been symbols of the nation`s character. Our preferred size is extra large, with all the...

When Donald T. Regan served as White House chief of staff, he made headlines by bragging that he functioned as a ''shovel brigade'' for misstatements and mistakes made by his...

Inside the White House, we`re told, there`s a donnybrook raging over something called a paradigm. Paramilitary, paratroop and Paraguay are familiar enough, but ''paradigm'' sounds like a word you should...

In these agonizing days of economic self-analysis, the word ''leverage'' brings back bad memories. Its role in busting up American corporations and feeding greed for a decade put an unfortunate...

I can give you all the fancy reasons we appear to be in a recession, but somehow they don`t cut through all the layers straight to the bedrock of truth....

In ''Brave New World,'' Aldous Huxley`s biting satire of the potential abuses of science and technology, history is divided into two eras, B.F. and A.F.-Before Ford and After Ford. After...

Everywhere you go these days, you encounter gloom on a grand scale. You turn on the television, and it`s there. You go to a speech, and the speakers talk about...

Everyone is down on the American people. Despite cries to throw the rascals out in Washington and other officialdoms, public discourse has turned against the very people who are complaining...

Dressed in next to nothing and draped in the flag, Madonna has become patriotic. ''If you don`t vote, you`re going to get a spanky,'' she sings naughtily to a generation...