Indy

It happens every May: Four hundred thousand people pack the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to watch the 500, the premier event in American motor sport. Next month J. M. Fenster uses the Memorial Day classic as a jumping-off point to examine the raucous and dynamic history of car racing in this country.

The health-care mess

“Perhaps the most astonishing thing about modern medicine,” says John Steele Gordon at the outset of a most significant article, “is just how very, very modern it is. Ninety percent of the medicine being practiced today did not exist in 1950.” This unprecedented burst of expansion and sophistication has brought in its wake the urgent problems that bedevil our health-care system today. In a lucid and lively essay, Gordon not only traces the crisis back to its very beginnings at the dawn of modern medicine, he also offers a prescription.

Plus…

On the twentieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, a newly discovered diary reveals a startlingly similar conspiracy forty years earlier … John Updike writes of a somber, moving—and entirely vanished—American mourning custom … the latest installment of “American House Styles” examines a superb example of the allpervasive Colonial Revival… Bernard Weisberger explains why every politician who doesn’t actually own a bank feels free to call himself a “populist” … and, in a season of fecundity and renewal, more.