Author: Nat Hentoff

All the growing furor about the vital need to reform education is based entirely on changing what happens in schools: making sure kids can go on to college, evaluating teachers to get rid of incompetents, broadening parents’ choices of schools. Does that mean that hordes of dropouts are doomed to poverty and uselessness? I’ve known...

I began reporting on jazz and knowing its key players in the late 1940s, also learning life lessons from them ever since. Tenor saxophonist Ben Webster advised, “Listen, kid, when the rhythm section ain’t making it, go for yourself!” I’ve done that in hassles with editors and wives. Obituaries for my favorite musical genre began...

Impressed by his insistent, often-solitary championing of civil liberties in the U.S. Senate, I twice wrote that Rand Paul should be our next President. But at that time I knew it was just a pipe dream because the Republican’s national name recognition was so low. Now, thanks to his filibuster during the Senate’s ultimate confirmation...