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Vol. 10 No. 46September 1999
Features
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Bad Apples
Juliet Ellery was a terrible teacher. But she couldn’t be fired. How can we get rid of bad teachers without hurting unions? -
Voting Rights in Jeopardy
There is a real danger that the protections of the Voting Rights Act will be rolled back. That will be an invitation to invent dirty tricks to minimize black political influence. -
Prisoner Proliferation
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Smoking Guns
Even after Littleton, gun control advocates have been stymied in Congress, where the lobbying presence of the NRA is just too strong. But litigation against gun manufacturers, borrowed from the playbook of the anti-tobacco crusaders, may prove the real route to gun control. -
Color-Blind Affirmative Action
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Deregulation Run Riot
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Captive Labor
The old prison labor was chain gangs and license plates. The new prison labor is contracts with corporate America to employ inmates at less-than-minimum wage. -
Games Prosecutors Play
Ken Starr was no exception. Over the last 30 years, abetted by the Supreme Court, prosecutors have acquired fearsome power in the form of largely untrammeled authority and a bag of sneaky tricks. -
Affirming Opportunity
How do we reconcile multiracial coalition politics with special opportunities for minorities? In place of racial preferences, we need more imaginative conceptions of talent and merit. -
Solidarity Ever?
Has the new economy overtaken unions? -
The Diversity Defense
A pluralist, diverse society doesn’t depend on racial quotas at elite institutions. To pretend otherwise abuses the idea of merit and relies on tortured social science. -
Art: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Account Executive
Economic impact studies can demonstrate a return on public investments in the arts. This is a handy tool for arts advocates, but also a dangerous one that reduces art to commercial calculus. -
Uneasy Preferences
What will become of our ideal of truly equal opportunity if black progress remains chronically dependent on programs of racial categories and quotas? -
The Campus Anti-Sweatshop Movement
The campus anti-sweatshop movement is the first since the campaign against apartheid. Even better, it’s closely linked to the labor movement—and it’s beginning to bear fruit. -
George W.'s Compassion
George W. Bush can cut taxes and speak Spanish, too. But is compassionate conservatism anything more than Gingrichism with a human face?
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Vol. 10 No. 45July 1999
Features
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Associations Without Members
Civic America has changed. The local forms of participation have faded, and new national advocacy organizations relying on direct mail fundraising have mushroomed. While there are some benefits to the new forms of advocacy, the shift has hurt our shared sense of democratic citizenship. -
K Street Gore
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Can TV Improve Us?
We’ve heard it for years: television is bad for us. Maybe instead of fighting against it, we should be trying to make it better. Some public health groups have had surprising success in using television for positive ends. -
Can a Charity Tax Credit Help the Poor?
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Shoeless Joe Stiglitz
World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz didn’t set out to become a thorn in the administration’s side. But by being the odd man out in Clinton’s international economic policymaking apparatus, he has managed to have a very constructive effect. -
Postcript to The Choice In Kosovo
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Rorschach Politics
Sometimes political ideology is in the eye of the beholder. That’s one of the secrets of the prime minister’s striking success. -
Reform Gets Rolling
With campaign finance reform stalled in Washington, the real work of cleaning up American politics has shifted to the states. Look at what’s happened in Vermont, Massachusetts, and—of all places—Arizona. -
The Antifeminist Seduction
In a curious, back-handed compliment, conservatives have appropriated feminist language in arguing that feminism itself is the cause of women’s problems today. -
Darwin's Truth, Jefferson's Vision
When scientists on the left began attacking sociobiology, liberals nodded their heads. But take another look. The supposed contradiction between Darwinian reasoning and liberal political philosophy was based on a misunderstanding of both. -
Rwanda, Kosovo, and the Limits of Justice
The experience of genocide has forever altered our understanding of criminality. Should it change our approach to justice? -
Gore Or Bradley
Bill Bradley bailed out on some of the big political battles of the 1990s. Is that what’s behind the former New Jersey senator’s surprising strength? -
Still With Us
Social Security is our most successful antipoverty program, but large numbers of the elderly are still poor—and Social Security could be part of the solution. -
The Choice in Kosovo
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Vol. 10 No. 44May 1999
Features
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The Judicial Vigilantes
Tom Delay and other social conservatives are on the warpath against liberal judges, and would like nothing better than to impeach the lot of them. While impeachments are improbable, conservatives’ strategy is having a dangerous impact. -
Of Our Time: Surplus Worship
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End of the Second Chance?
Where the get-tough movement in education gets it wrong. -
The Trouble With Teletubbies
Jerry Falwell was right: the Teletubbies are insidious, but not because they’re insinuating dubious ideas into the minds of one-year olds. The program is the culmination of PBS’s long drift toward commercialization. -
Can Medicare Survive Its Saviors?
Turning Medicare into a voucher program would make it a dwindling basis of security in old age. -
The Smallpox Wars
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The Pollution Dividend
The sky isn’t falling. But it is filling—and emission rights are worth millions. Will we give those rights away, or use them to create a new source of public wealth? -
Where Have You Gone, Nelson Rockefeller?
Impeachment may have hurt conservatives, but it also revealed just how weak GOP moderates are. The plight of northern Republicans isn’t just temporary; it’s structural. -
The Power Elite Now
Power in America today looks far different from the picture that C. Wright Mills painted nearly half a century ago. -
The New Map of American Politics
The Pacific coast is becoming more Democratic, the Mountain States more Republican—and the South is back up for grabs. Migration is changing America’s electoral geography, and Democrats may yet come out the winners. -
Two Cheers for Clinton's Social Security Plan
Think Social Security should invest in the stock market? Take a closer look. -
The Smallpox Wars
Public health leaders eradicated smallpox epidemics; the final step was to kill off the last live virus in laboratories. Then came intelligence reports that the Russians—and maybe the North Koreans—had “weaponized” smallpox. -
If Wishing Only Made it So
Two recent movies, Patch Adams and Life Is Beautiful, each claim to reveal the relation between fantasy and politics. One succeeds magnificently; the other is a fraud. -
The Big Chill
Has the right’s campaign to “defund the left” intimidated large foundations? In fact, tax-exempt organizations of all kinds have far more latitude to promote social change than many of them realize.
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Vol. 10 No. 43March 1999
Features
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We Are All Third Wayers Now
The Third Way doesn’t have to be market conservatism in centrist clothing. -
Forty Acres and a Sheepskin
Redistributing income has always been difficult politics, but recent books propose a host of wealth-building ideas that may have some purchase even in today’s free market political environment. -
The Storm Amid the Calm
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Recasting the Stones
In our multicultural society, traditional monuments may no longer possess the unifying power they once did. Some projects by contemporary artists suggest a way around this conundrum. -
Devil in the Details
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Investor Illiteracy
The great bull market of the 1990s has generated euphoria in millions of inexperienced investors and laid the groundwork for privatization of Social Security. But extensive poll data suggest that investor expectations are grossly unrealistic. -
Green Herring
Is the Green Party the worst threat to progressive politics since Reagan or its best hope since the New Deal? -
Mississippi Waltz
While the House Republican leadership imploded after the 1998 elections, the Senate majority leader kept a low profile. Despite his reputation as a conservative ideologue, Trent Lott is a big-money pragmatist—some would say an opportunist. -
Care and Trembling
As provision of care for the sick and the elderly moves from the domestic sphere to the public realm and the market, caregivers often find themselves in the role of bedside bureaucrats. -
Is He a Soul Man?
As Democrats’ most loyal constituency, blacks have rallied around the President during his political crisis, even (some argue) going so far as to confer on him honorary black status. Maybe blacks are selling their political capital too cheaply. -
Lynne Cheney, Policy Assassin
Her role is simple but important: produce a steady supply of screeds for major media outlets claiming that our culture has been commandeered by the left. But there is often less to Lynne Cheney’s work than meets the eye. -
Rush from Judgment
We used to expect reporters and editors to place events in their proper context. Post-O.J., post-Diana, and soon (we hope) post-Monica, perhaps it’s time to ask: What happened to news judgment? -
Exhuming McCarthy
By encouraging Joe McCarthy and his red baiting tactics in the 1950s, conservatives embarrassed themselves. Emboldened by new evidence, they’re going to embarrass themselves again. -
Muddy Waters
New data show just how successful affirmative action programs have been at elite colleges and universities. Too bad those data might not have much relevance for the current debate over preferences in higher education.
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Vol. 10 No. 42January 1999
Features
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Bull Market Keynesianism
What if the reasonable growth, low unemployment, and low inflation of the last few years are in fact the vindication of Keynesian theory about consumption spending? And what if this spending has been driven not by government but by the stock market run-up? And what if the stock market collapses? -
Devil in the Details
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Power Play
The deregulation of the electric utility industry has been billed as a boon for consumers, because competition is supposed to lower prices. But utility companies are using the opportunity to pass the cost of abandoned nuclear reactors to customers. Big business may save, but consumers will pay more and the environment may suffer. -
Policing the Police
Where is the line between effective crime control and violation of civil liberties? -
The Indelible Color Line: The Persistence of Housing Discrimination
Overt racism and active discrimination have decreased significantly over the last 30 years. So how come acute urban segregation persists? We need to look at our mortgage and insurance practices. -
Of Our Time: The Age of Trespass
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Choice Options
Conservatives ask, “Are you for or against school choice?” The question should be, “What kind of choice are you for?” Americans’ historical experience can help answer that question. -
Arresting Developments
In a variety of ways, police now serve private organizations, not just mixing missions but putting the coercive power of the state in unaccountable hands. -
One Pill Makes You Larger
The development of human growth hormone and antidepressants like Prozac has already begun to blur the line between “treating” an illness and “enhancing” an otherwise already healthy person, making it difficult for insurance companies to know how and what to pay for. -
The Prosecutorial State
Ken Starr is the least of it. -
Secrets and Lies
Critics from the right often condemned the old liberal foreign policy establishment for an excess of secrecy. Now the right has a new elitist establishment of its own. -
The Feminism Gap
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From Purity to Politics
Under repressive totalitarian regimes, the absolute moral rectitude of Eastern European intellectuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik was heroic. Ten years after the fall of the Wall, what happens when the reality of democratic politics calls for quotidian pragmatism and petty compromise? -
Global Warming and the Big Shill
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Clinton's Darkness At Noon
Bill Clinton has likened his Starr Chamber travails to those of Rubashov, the protagonist of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. The comparison is more apt than he knows. -
Taking Liberties: The New Assault on Freedom
Freedom is falling out of fashion all across the political spectrum, and new moves by Congress and the courts threaten basic liberties.
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