Book Review:
American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality By Myron Orfield. The Brookings Institution Press, 210 pages, $29.95 Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century By Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf and Todd Swanstrom. University of Kansas Press, 349 pages, $15.95 Who among us — and I think you’ll know who I mean by “us” — has not…
The West’s Griles Virus:
“This hopefully will be a breath of fresh air,” exclaimed National Mining Association spokesman John Grasser, with no intended irony, after he learned that J. Steven Griles had been nominated as the Department of the Interior’s deputy secretary. Griles, who epitomizes the revolving door between government and industry, has alternated between getting rich working for…
Game Over
“How could we have been so stupid?” In the old new economy, the woman who asked this question was a heroine of sorts, one of those feisty young dot-commers with stock options, mobility and sought-after skills. But the “new” is over now, those great jobs have vanished and many such heroes are asking themselves the…
No Surer Signs
One approaches the films of M. Night Shyamalan with the slightly hysterical goodwill of a parent attending a school play. Senses gaping, disbelief suspended a mile high, one so wants the evening to go well. And if clumsiness and mawkishness should rule the hour, well, so what? We’ll clap like seals and go home happy…
Closed Society, Open Source
In some ways it’s hard to think of anything more American than Linux. A Finnish computer programmer named Linus Torvalds created the operating system, but Thomas Jefferson would have loved it. When Torvalds finished, he simply posted the code online and asked other people to download it (for free), use it and improve it. Torvalds…
Artificial Intelligence?
When the first prisoners from the war on terrorism arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, their rights and treatment became the subject of heated international debate. Should those incarcerated be considered prisoners of war? Could they be brought before military tribunals? To what diplomatic and legal representation might they be entitled? But there has been comparatively…
The Pentagon Talks Turkey
The United States and Turkey have been locked in a strange mating ritual since September 11. The Pentagon plays the ardent suitor — making offers that meet with skepticism, admiring Turkey’s democratic trappings and secular state — to Turkey’s coy coquette. “It’s like a lover who promises everything to get the girl. But when it…
Gunfight, Utah-Style
By many indications, the gun-control cause would seem dead in America. Democrats, traditional champions of the cause, have been shrinking from the issue for fear that an anti-gun image would do them more harm than good at the polls. The gun lobby, whose membership and bank account grow bigger by the day, has successfully muscled…
On the Contrary
Women are hardwired to experience and recall emotions more readily than men, according to a study announced last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as on CNN’s morning show. “The wiring of emotional experience and the coding of that experience into memory is much more tightly integrated in women…
The Taxonomist: Jim McGreevey, Working-Class Hero
Suppose you’re a governor and your staff has just informed you that most of the biggest corporations doing business in your state have cooked their books so severely that they pay virtually nothing in state income taxes. Do you holler, “Hallelujah! Hunt ’em up and have ’em over for a campaign fundraiser!”? Well, that would…
Park Wars
It’s a high-energy scene in the interior department’s John Muir Room on the second Wednesday in June. Rangers from the National Park Service dispense information while their bosses dispense Bluebonnet ice cream. Guests from the Forest Service exchange gossip with their Interior counterparts, while other visitors pause to examine the displays set up around the…
Why Democrats Must Be Populists
The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) can take credit for many of the Democratic Party’s successes in the 1990s. It was instrumental in deflecting Republican charges that Democrats condoned crime, favored welfare over work, and backed higher deficits and taxes. But since the November 2000 election, the DLC and its leaders in Congress have waged a…
The Great Telecom Implosion
The dimensions of the collapse in the telecommunications industry during the past two years have been staggering. Half a million people have lost their jobs. In that time, the Dow Jones communication technology index has dropped 86 percent; the wireless communications index, 89 percent. These are declines in value worthy of comparison to the great…
The Democrats and Iraq
As war with Iraq looms bewilderingly larger this summer, it would be an overstatement to say that there’s now a Peace Camp (or more precisely, an Anti-Invasion-Now Camp) in Washington. There sure as hell is a Privately Held Doubts Camp, however. People worry about the costs — in lives, money and reputation — that such…
Comment: Useless Airways
The latest corporation to file for bankruptcy is not another fraudulent telecom, but US Airways. The airlines were among the sectors hardest hit by September 11. And with its concentration in the Northeast, US Airways was among the hardest hit of all. But it would be a mistake to blame the airlines’ woes on the…
