Leads

Right after I reread Zinsser's chapter on Leads and Endings today, I flipped through this week's Newsweek. Guess what caught my attention?

The following are the opening sentences of all essays in the Sept. 13 issue:

People started jumping almost immediately.

Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat?

Barack Obama's redecoration of the Oval Office includes a nice personal touch: a carpet ringed with favorite quotations from Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, both Presidents Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of the most startling things about the post-crisis landscape is how tone-deaf the wealthiest Americans remain to outrage over their Croesus-like pay packages.

As 56 million children return to the nation's 133,000 elementary and secondary schools, the promise of "reform" is again in the air.

Is there a company on earth, in any industry, that is as restless and innovative as Apple?

The name Ground Zero conjures up a vast emptiness, and for years, the site in fact did remain desolate, a public emblem of our grief.

The incident didn't get much international attention at the time: just another Predator strike on suspected jihadis in the mountains of North Waziristan.

In late January, Osama Bin Laden released an audiotape praising the Nigerian who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 82-year-old firebrand of France's far right--the man who for decades has played on the inchoate fears, xenophobia, knee-jerk racism, and ill-disguised anti-Semitism of many of his supporters--had just finished speaking to the faithful on a farm not far from the English Channel.

It had all the trappings of a globally significant confab: big-deal appearances (by Google, BBC), a weighty theme ("the digital age"), and speechifying by international pooh-bahs.

Given a choice, no one would opt to get cancer.

In America's cultural life, there are foxes, there are hedgehogs, and there is Stanley Kauffmann.

It may have occurred to you that our culture's attention span for all things Justin Bieber knows no limit.

In 1934, when Gertrude Stein was invited to return to America from Paris to deliver a series of lectures, the thing that troubled her most, according to her companion, Alice B. Toklas, was "the question of the food she would be eating there."