Free Republic

He drew pictures of himself with angel wings. He left a set of his dog tags on a nightstand in my Manhattan apartment. He bought a tiny blue sweat suit for our baby to wear home from the hospital. “Follow your heart,” Charles M. King wrote in a 200-page journal for his son, Jordan, whom he first held this fall just weeks before he died in Iraq. The United States has reached another grim milestone in the war in Iraq: 3,000 military deaths. The Times’s Dana Canedy, whose fiancé was killed in Iraq, is taking questions from readers. Her responses...

SAM MENDES has the unenviable distinction of having directed one of the three most undeserving Best Picture winners in the last 30 years. In 1999, his directorial debut, American Beauty, won the Oscar and then, immediately, began sliding to oblivion. A paint-by-numbers critique of American middle-class mores, American Beauty was so heavy-handed and obvious as to be insulting even to the elite sophisticates it attempted to flatter. Of course experimentation with marijuana brings happiness. Of course the homophobic, wife-beating Marine father next door is really a closet case. Of course the only well-adjusted adults in the neighborhood are the...