Includes index.

1. Broadening incidents: "The last virgin in America" ; Autopsy on the sixties ; The democracy of angling ; Bruuuuuce ; Realism creeps into academia ; Ah, idealism ; AIDS and the community ; Sex as tabasco sauce ; Herpes and full disclosure ; Norman Mailer, economist ; This crime wave wants you! ; "... and the home of the brave play ball." ; Let us now praise anger ; Washington's little miracles ; Well, I don't love you, E.T. ; Technology that cares ; Government as black hole ; The genius of Winchester, Kansas ; Looters in a queue ; The indignation industry ; Teenagers and birth control ; At first blush ; The shocking bourgeoisie ; Art and the conscientious janitor ; Miami wild"Ex-cel-lent!" ; Miss Manners's ignoble savages ; Light at the end of the day ; Baltimore sunrise ; Don't beep in my outfield ; Academic thought police ; Chicago's favorite sons ; Baseball : "We do this every day." ; Detroit's craftsman ; The rain forest in the lobby ; Neurobiology and us ; When homicide is noble ; The "Twinkie defense" ; Metaphysics in Pittsburgh ; Einstein revealed as brilliant youth ; "Chicago ain't ready for reform" ; "Eeeek! Heterosexism!" ; Baseball is a worrying thing ; Movies as child abuse ; The nobles use of cinema ; Literary voyeurism ; Summ Contra Super Bowl ; Sport and civility ; Exploring the racer's edge ; Intrusion by telephone ; Wilde in Leadville ; Making distinctions and moccasins ; Ike Ward, 1862-1982 ; 1981 : that depends ; 1982 : oh; well ... ; 1983 : Such, such were the joys ; 1984 : God help us, everyone! ; 1985 : a tolerably adequate year -- 2. Skirmishes on the home front: In defense of the mother tongue ; Academic license ; A doctrine of high priests ; The perils of urban planning ; A word for the wilderness ; Bearbaiting and boxing ; Violence as a communicable disease ; Ideology masquerading as medicine ; The value of punishment ; Punishment and "official straighteners" ; Beyond civil rights ; "Compassion" that dehumanizes ; First Amendment follies ; Abortion and fetal pain ; Abortion : the Court's intellectual scandal ; Noticing the difference between boys and girls ; The decline of liberalism : a case study ; Against prefabricated prayer ; Unconstitutional silence ; The ACLU and sobriety ; The ACLU's second thoughts on freedom ; Tactile government ; Phillip Becker : a boy ; "A trip toward death" ; Reagan's expansion of civil rights ; The short life and long dying of Infant Doe ; Reagan's two Carnegieisms ; Grading the President ; A need for simple arithmetic ; America the undertaxed ; The shocking of David Stockman ; Will's doctrine of double meaning ; The grandfathered society ; The economy of leadership ; The Senate : not suited for prime time ; The architecture of democracy ; Martin Luther, founding father ; Democracy's foot soldiers ; A devil of a town ; In defense of nonvoting ; Gary Hart : Jay Gatsby in politics ; The art of invective ; Jesse Jackson, political pilgrim ; Ronald Reagan's paradoxes ; A lovely disregard of logic ; Mondale : bullied and buried ; The great 49-state "non-mandate" ; Reagan's small Republican renaissance ; A Roman candle called Iaccoca ; Mario Cuomo takes batting practice ; Arf -- 3. The world so much with us: Defeat in Berlin ; "Victory" in Cuba ; Vietnam : choosing defeat ; Grenada and the price of power ; The perils of legalism ; Why arms control is harmful ; Nuclear morality ; Giving peace a bad name ; A license to lie ; Henry Kissinger's craft ; The un-American Jane Kirkpatrick ; Dissipating an asset ; A Third World kleptocracy ; The President tunes the atmosphere ; Mitterand kills socialism ; The last 19th-century war? ; Taking sides in the Falklands ; Woodrow Wilson's ghost ; South Africa : dismounting from a tiger ; Right-mindedness about South Africa ; Why study Hitler? ; Hitler's inkwell ; Sophistries about Poland ; Revel : the essential pessimist ; Reagan's dim candle ; Pepsi Marxism ; Demoralization by agreement ; Iron Curtain, rubber words ; Raoul Wallenberg : lost in a gauze of lies ; Raoul Wallenberg and the price of neutrality ; Death on Waterloo Bridge ; The boot in Afghanistan's face ; Brezhnev's successes ; Ivan X, jogger, maybe ; George Bush's surmise ; Miss Manners's diplomatic message ; "Fresh starts" and other fictions ; Trotsky assassinated, yet again ; No-fault murder ; The Cold War as a misunderstanding ; Lenin's children ; America's therapeutic impulses ; The 20th century has not happened --

4. Midday: Well, actually, you can't have it all ; H. Rap Brown, radical at last ; Conservatism and character ; Billy Graham, an embarrassing export ; The moral limits to peace ; Whittaker Chambers's winding staircase ; The take-for-granted quotient ; The Madison legacy ; The splendid legacy of FDR ; The unsentimental man from Missouri ; The least artistic great artist ; Miss Manners : between anarchism and Stalinism ; The black sun ; Keeping faith with Mengele's victims ; Mesmerized by the moment ; The real utility of education ; Journalism and passions ; Conservatism and cheerfulness ; Murray Kempton, craftsman ; Raymond Aron, anti-ideologue ; Philosophy and fierceness ; Jack Swigert's example ; The finest public servant I have known ; In praise of mortality ; Baseball, before nigh descends ; Huck at a hundred.