Equal Rights Postponement
Ask state and federal legislators if they believethat legal rights should be extended or withheld on the basis of sex. Most wouldprobably say no, and many of them would be lying. Adoption of the Equal RightsAmendment to the U.S. Constitution remains a feminist fantasy. Its simpledeclaration of fairness–“Equality of rights under the law shall not…
What Killed the Boom?
The worry is obvious: just as an expanding high-tech sector contributed to strong growth in the 1990s, so might a deepening slump intechnology drag down the entire economy. High among the sources of concern is therecent meltdown in the telecom industry. Even after the dot-com collapse, abroadband upgrade of the Internet seemed sure to be…
Bush’s House of Cards
On a sweltering morning in late July, 300 demonstrators, rallying to defend Social Security against President Bush’s plan to dismantle it, swarmed around the presidential limousine as it pulled up in front of the Capital Hilton. Inside the hotel, members of the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security–which is supposed to come up with a…
Investor Beware:
It has become nearly axiomatic in this country to argue that everything would be better if it were run like a business. In response, government has shifted its mission: If it used to operate like Super Glue, bonding Americans to one another, it is now working more like WD-40, minimizing friction in the pursuit of…
Bailing Out Private Jails
The private-prison industry is in trouble. For close to a decade, its business boomed and its stock prices soared because state legislators across the country thought they could look both tough on crime and fiscally conservative if they contracted with private companies to handle the growing multitudes being sent to prison under the new,…
Comment: The Great Obfuscator
President Bush’s heavily choreographed decisionto support “limited” stem cell research generated the desired headlines and TVcommentary. He had anguished over the decision, we were told, and navigated aprudent course between zealous scientists who would play God and zealoustraditionalists who claim a pipeline to God. Under Bush’s guidelines, stem cellresearch can qualify for federal funding if…
Libertarian Rhapsody
It’s so hard to teach New Yorkers,” says columnist John Tierney of The New York Times, lowering his binoculars and shaking his head. “I try twice a week, and it never works.” It’s morning in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, and Tierney and I are standing near 89th Street, spying on dog walkers on the promenade…
Insufficient Credits
As air leaks out of the economic balloon, the number of Americans withouthealth insurance will rise. For two decades, the number–now more than 45million–has been steadily growing, as it has during all but the last of oureight years of unprecedented prosperity. There are only two large payers forhealth insurance: government and private employers. Both have…
Learning to Count
The electoral circus in Florida shined a klieg light on the need to overhaul our elections across the nation. The debacle yielded a chorus of reform pledges from politicians. As if to prove they meant it, they introduced enough bills to level a small forest: at last count, more than 1,500 in state legislatures and…
Being Black and White
Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He WasBlack By Gregory Howard Williams. Plume (1996), 285 pages, $13.95 paperback The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother By James McBride. Riverhead Books (1996), 297 pages, $12.95 paperback Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a…
Smells Like School Spirit
“No other people,” wrote Henry Steele Commager, themost widely read American historian of the generation following World War II,”ever demanded so much of schools and of education as have the American. Noneother was ever so well served by its schools and its educators.” A lot of us,bombarded by the educational controversies and the ongoing schools-are-failingrhetoric…
Monkey Doo
How dare director Tim Burton “reimagine” (he avoids the word “remake”) theclassic 1968 film Planet of the Apes? It’s a milestone in sci-fi history, a brilliant, many-layered social commentary, many Apes buffs would argue, and its timing and essence can never be revivified. Actually, it’s been more than ripe for reimagining for years. It isterribly…
Beyond the Multiplex
In “The Moviegoers,” a bleak New Yorker article from a few years back, the film critic David Denby bemoaned both the current state of movie culture and the marginal role of serious criticism in shaping popular taste. According to Denby, the commercialization of the whole enterprise has brought about a brand of slicked-up, dumbed-down cinema…
