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               Slate: A
Fashion Statement
            

            We certainly don't intend to
be a magazine of fashion, either in the sense of being about clothing or in the
sense of following the fashion in general matters. Yet, by one of those weird
coincidences that less scrupulous publications sometimes turn into "special
issues," we have posted two features relating to fashion (in the clothing
sense) this week, and will post a third Wednesday.

            Our "Letter From
Washington" concerns an admirable (but possibly doomed) campaign to improve
the style sense on the Microsoft campus. Our "Tangled Web"
column reports on (and follows, through links) the bizarre theories bouncing
around the Internet about the unlikely figure of Tommy Hilfiger, producer of
somewhat mysterious ads in many magazines and, apparently, of a line of
clothing as well. Wednesday (April 16) brings "Clothes Sense," our regular
monthly column from Anne Hollander. Anne's subject this month isn't exactly
clothes--she writes about a show of Cartier jewelry at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York. But that's still fashion.

            You would
assume, from this onslaught of sartorial hectoring, that the staff of Slate
must dress in exquisite taste. And you would be correct. Any one of us could be
transported from this sylvan landscape in Redmond, Wash., strewn with cow
chips, computer chips, and potato chips, to the haughty elevators of the Condé
Nast Building on Madison Avenue, and instantly fit right in--stylewise, at
least. We pride ourselves on our fabrics. The staffs of other magazines have
spats; we wear them. Other magazines employ heels; we wear them. Not long ago,
Bill Gates saw one of Slate's program managers, Peter Randall, walking across
the campus, and observed, to no one in particular, "I'd kill for that tie." But
that turned out not to be necessary.

            
               Lawyer
Cake
            

            If you haven't checked in
since last week, two new "Dialogues" have started. And a couple more might have
started by the time you read this. Ronald Dworkin, professor of jurisprudence
at Oxford, is debating assisted suicide with Michael McConnell, who recently left
the University of Chicago Law School for the University of Utah. Peter Edelman,
a former Clinton-administration official who has become the most vocal critic
of the welfare reform President Clinton signed last year, is being
challenged by Mickey Kaus, author of The End of Equality , who supports
the reform. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School will be engaging Akhil Reed
Amar of Yale Law School on whether the truth gets short shrift in America's
criminal-justice system. (Dershowitz recently reviewed Amar's book on this subject
for Slate.) And Gary Bauer, head of the Family Research Council, will be
engaging Wendell Willkie II, general counsel of the Commerce Department under
George Bush, on the subject of human rights and trade with China.

            Coming soon: Undersecretary
of State Strobe Talbott and the managing editor of Foreign Affairs ,
Fareed Zakaria, on U.S. support for the expansion of NATO. (Read our recent
"Gist" on this
subject if you need to get up to speed.)

            These dialogues, conducted by
e-mail, are fulfilling our hope that they would develop into a new mode of
civilized debate. E-mail (at its best) combines the immediacy of talking with
the reflectiveness of writing. It also seems to lend itself--more than "live"
debates--to actual dialectical progress. Slate's dialogues tend to feature not
just thesis and antithesis, but a bit of synthesis as well. (Occasionally, of
course, a dialogue serves to reveal the utter superiority of one side of the
argument, as in the recent discussion of the capital-gains
tax.)

            Often, we've discovered, the
best way to frame an interesting and useful dialogue is not to get a liberal
vs. a conservative, but to get two people from roughly the same part of the
spectrum who disagree on the application of their shared values to a particular
issue. In our current lineup, Willkie and Bauer are both conservatives, while
Dershowitz and Amar are both liberals. But we're not beyond the occasional
ideological dust-up, such as the recently concluded exchange on divorce between Katha Pollitt and David Blankenhorn.

            We do seem
to end up with a lot of lawyers. Sorry about that.

            -- Michael
Kinsley