Founding editor Harold Ross made The New Yorker the great American magazine; Shawn made it, for many years, indispensable. As Ross’s managing editor, Shawn helped him move from a jazz-age sensibility to engagement with the gravest issues of the century. James Thurber, the archetypal New Yorker humorist, felt estranged from the magazine’s new direction; but even he argued that without Shawn, “Ross would never have made the distinguished record he did....

The euro, of course, has been tumbling since its inception. No matter how hard the Europeans have worked to bring their growth rate up–it will be around 3 percent this year–they just can’t compete with the returns that 6 percent growth in the United States offers to people holding dollar-based investments. Political leaders are increasingly dismayed. Still, EU president Romano Prodi says that, after waiting “40 or 50 years to have a single currency… we will give it time to strengthen and find its rightful place....

Unlike most modern economists, the University of Chicago law professor avoids complex mathematics; his works, although highly theoretical, are written in plain English. In the 1960 paper that made his reputation, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Coase used the example of a rancher whose cattle sometimes stray and eat the corn of the adjacent farmer. So long as they can negotiate, the rancher and the farmer can solve their problem privately....

Property mania in Britain is back. After a steady rise in the late ’90s, home prices are tipping skyward. Last month alone the value of the average house rose a dizzying 4.5 percent. The annual rate of increase now stands at 18 percent, double the figure last September. Newspapers are filled with stories of converted public toilets selling as [Pound sterling]135,000 “studio” apartments or London homeowners who’ve seen their wealth double without stirring from the couch....

For the first time in a long time, “60 Minutes” blinked. Always arrogantly resistant to change, the 28-year-old program will finally accede to a few format changes over the coming months. The taping schedule will be pushed back to accommodate late-breaking news. And three new commentators are joining the cast: cranky liberal humorist Molly Ivins, cranky conservative humorist P. J. O’Rourke and cranky African-American essayist Stanley Crouch. They’ll be dueling in the style of “Point/Counterpoint,” the old “60 Minutes” crossfires that Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin parodied on “Saturday Night Live” with the phrase “Jane, you ignorant slut!...

He took Nixon’s counsel to heart–and became a better president for it. Succeed or fail this week at Camp David, Clinton is a far stronger statesman today than skeptics expected after early stumbles in Haiti, Bosnia and Somalia. How did he do it? By honing his intelligence with hard work and exploiting his gift for empathy. Reviewing how Clinton has managed the Middle East peace process is a good way to gauge how Al Gore and George W....

Last week President Bill Clinton proposed a corollary to the patients’ bill of rights now before Congress: a right to medical privacy. Beginning in 2002, under rules set to become law in February, patients would be able to stipulate the conditions under which their personal medical data could be divulged. They would be able to examine their records and make corrections. They could learn who else had seen the information....

Take the informal grid design in maroon and dark blue by Annie Mae Young (b. 1928). Of course there’s a pattern to it–patterning is the heart of quilt making. But where does the visual wit come from to distribute the maroon shafts in such a clever way (with, for instance, one on the left balanced by a sudden insertion of railroad denim)? Not from Bauhaus Design 101, but from the artist’s own sophisticated imagination....

The killing spree was the most serious challenge yet to the nine-month-old government of President Olusegun Obasanjo. “Both religions have love as cardinal in their creeds,” he said in a nationwide address. “We must return to tolerance, constitutionality, decency and good neighborliness.” Obasanjo said that the bloodshed violated a new spirit of dialogue that began a year ago, when national elections ended 16 years of nearly unbroken military rule....

For more than a half century, America’s elite universities have made room for the children of their loyal alums. But the extensive use of the policy has now been brought into embarrassing relief by a U.S. Department of Education study and a new Harvard grad who won’t let the story die. The federal study stems from complaints by Asian-Americans that some colleges were discriminating against them in favor of less-qualified white students....

There was just one problem: while Bush was busy building a colossal campaign network across the country, his rivals–mainly Arizona Sen. John McCain–were getting personal with New Hampshire voters. The state’s small size makes it easy for low-budget candidates like McCain to get around, and with its streak of Yankee independence, New Hampshire is impervious to the sway of national polls. By the time the leaves turned in Manchester, McCain was chiseling away at Bush’s lead....

For all the self-congratulation, the Americans’ unprecedented display of unity is a measure of how much the $64 billion-a-year women’s fashion business is smarting. Financially, so many retailers have cut back or gone out of business in the last five years that only 50 major department stores and specialty shops in the United States still carry couture-level clothes. Stylistically, Europeans such as Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld pose stiff competition....

Members of the two rival parties held their first-ever national meetings this week to try to drag their troubled southern African country out of its accelerating spiral of political violence and socioeconomic decline. The talks–brokered by South Africa and Nigeria in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare–got off to a rocky start. Monday’s session ended in stalemate when the two sides couldn’t even agree on what they wanted to discuss. Today’s gathering was marginally more successful, adjourning with a statement that the two parties have agreed on “an agenda for dialogue” and will meet again on May 13....

Yeltsin himself is feeling the pinch at home. Russians seem to be suffering a prolonged bout of post-superpower blues– and eager to reproach the president, who garners only 7 percent support in recent polls. Communists, now the most popular party in Russia, and nationalists threaten to reverse four years of economic reform if they gain control of Parliament in December’s elections. Hard-liners complain that Yeltsin has sold out to the West, is not doing enough to torpedo the idea of NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and has hewed to the sidelines in the Bosnia conflict....

I’ve known guys like Hugo–masters of self-loathing, crazed spinners of phrase, “attuned to that same deviant, anything goes frequency,” so dazzling you want to kiss their words. But this novel was written by a woman. Kate Christensen’s Hugo, with his talent for duplicity and the daily inhumanity, descends from a long line of cad lit–the perverser he gets, the more delicious it seems. But will he actually commit suicide? Whittier’s literary touchstones tip us off: why does he persist in mastering the self-referential 16th-century political essayist Michel de Montaigne, in French?...

There the similarities end. While IRA guns have been silent for three years, ETA ended its ceasefire last December. And last week in Zumarraga, in the Basque country, ETA’s terror campaign claimed its 12th victim in eight months, a 29-year-old town councilor shot in the head as he tended his candy store. Thousands of Spaniards protested the latest ETA atrocity, but Spain’s conundrum is that for ETA, unlike the IRA, there are no small steps left....