Code Blue
Police work in an unpredictable, sometimes violent, sometimes deadly environment. The potential danger of their workplace and their authority to use force to overcome resistance make it unsurprising that police actions can have brutal, even fatal, consequences–sometimes for innocent people, as Amadou Diallo’s family knows all too well. It’s also not surprising that, to cope…
The Assault on Miranda
Benbrook Lake near Fort Worth, Texas, is the kind of place where fishermen catch sandbass and lovers wake up to a tequila sunrise. But on a December day in 1983, violence came to Benbrook Lake in the person of Ronnie Dale Gaspard. He was affiliated with the Bandidos, a motorcycle gang whose members snorted methamphetamine…
Citizenship and Violence
Why, when the issue is violence against women, do some people talk about sex? While some violence directed at women is sexualized, calling it “sex” softens the brutality, implicates the victim as possibly an inciter or a participant, and offers the perpetrator the justification of lust. Think also about the phrase “domestic violence.” True, a…
Innovation, Regulation, and the Internet
In a small hearing room in the House Rayburn Office Building, I met with a group of Capitol Hill staffers to discuss the issue of “open access” in broadband cable. “Broadband” is what policy makers call the next generation of Internet access–faster and always on. Cable is now the dominant mode for serving broadband. And…
Will the Internet Always Speak English?
In 1898, when Otto von Bismarck was an old man, a journalist asked him what he took to be the decisive factor in modern history. He answered, “The fact that the North Americans speak English.” In retrospect, he was spot on the mark about the political and economic developments of the twentieth century, and up…
Storming the Gates
As the Microsoft Corporation anxiously awaits the verdict of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, whose decision may determine its fate (Will certain practices be prohibited? Will the company be broken apart?), the software giant could be forgiven for feeling that the greatest threat to its dominance of the computing industry is the U.S. Department of Justice.…
Can the Net Govern Itself?
It is easy to make fun of the Internet’s current culture of free-lunch libertarianism. Its leaders don’t want to be taxed, regulated, or trammeled in any way–meanwhile taking for granted that they can run to the sheriff when threatened by copyright pirates or local toughs like Microsoft. But the question of Net regulation has become…
The Electronic Commons
While the rise of electronic commerce excites visions of a new economy, the Internet continues to produce explosive growth in free, public communication. The sheer scale and variety of the electronic public domain are staggering, but the promise is not simply an information cornucopia. Despite all its problems, the Internet has the potential…
Comment: Dirty Windows
Every great political theorist from Aristotle to Madison to Martin Luther King, Jr., has understood the paradox that liberty requires rules and rules require governments. But Internet libertarians have assumed that the Net is a unique realm of benign, self-regulating anarchy. The problem with anarchy is less the inconvenience of chaos than the risk that…
Open Science Online
On January 1, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) opened an electronic archive on the Web that is intended, eventually, to house or link all biomedical research produced in the United States. But PubMed Central, as the archive is known, has drawn fire from leading figures in academic medicine for threatening to disrupt the established…
The New Black Caucus
Congressman James Clyburn has built his political career hammering out compromises behind the scenes. He has worked for economic growth in his eclectic South Carolina district, lobbying successfully for a Honda plant in Timmonsville, a significant increase in the state’s share of federal highway funds, direct flights from Charleston to Chicago, and the deepening of…
Electoral Dysfunction
The wrong lesson to be drawn from Super Titanic Tuesday is that both Bradley and McCain were too far to the left of their respective parties. The right lesson is that there’s a large and growing party of independents and nonvoters in America that neither party’s establishment has been interested in courting. The question now…
Vermont’s Right Not to Bear Arms
Vermonters have long stood behind their right to bear arms, boasting some of the highest rates of gun ownership and the least restrictive gun laws in the country. Currently the only state that allows its citizens to carry a concealed weapon without a permit, it may soon be the first to require a permit for…
Losing Hopi
When President Clinton stood this January in the Arizona sunshine at Grand Canyon Hopi Point and announced the designation of three new national monuments and the expansion of a fourth, he was confident that “the good Lord” must be smiling on him. “I know we’re doing the right thing, because look at the day we’ve…
Reproductive Entitlement
nce women were considered disabled by pregnancy or the mere possibility of it. Before the modern civil rights era, women could be fired because they were pregnant or not hired because they seemed likely to become pregnant. From the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, women were excluded, under law, from presumptively masculine occupations that…
Second Thoughts on the Death Penalty
Republican Governor George Ryan of Illinois made national news last month by announcing that he would halt executions until properly satisfied that “everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty.” His concern isn’t difficult to understand. Since Illinois reinstated the death penalty in 1977, more death row inmates have been exonerated (13) than executed…
Lethal Injustice
Since he took office in January 1995, George W. Bush has presided over more than 120 executions, accounting for more than a third of the executions in the nation at large during that time. Bush is not, of course, entirely responsible for this astonishing record, and he typically dismisses any questions about it by noting…
Character and Campaign Finance
For years, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell has steeled the spines of his fellow opponents of campaign finance reform by telling them, don’t worry, no one has ever won or lost an election because of his or her position on the issue. Well, McConnell’s maxim is losing its power. Senator John McCain’s stunning victories over Texas…
Impeachment at Harvard
Benbrook Lake near Fort Worth, Texas, is the kind of place where fishermen catch sandbass and lovers wake up to a tequila sunrise. But on a December day in 1983, violence came to Benbrook Lake in the person of Ronnie Dale Gaspard. He was affiliated with the Bandidos, a motorcycle gang whose members snorted methamphetamine…
Philip Morris Money
In Virginia, fresh-faced, environmentally minded schoolchildren gather biological samples and test water quality in rivers and waterways, part of the Izaak Walton League’s Save Our Streams initiative. In Chicago, amid Tai Chi classes and body massages, families with young children enjoy performance art and teenagers flock to an all-night “rave,” all part of the Museum…
The Burden of Western History
There have been revisionist histories of America and the American West at least since the middle of the sixteenth century, when the priest-historian Bartolomé de las Casas accused his fellow Spaniards of the mass murder, essentially the genocide, of millions of Native Americans. In 1879, even as Manifest Destiny and the dream of the open…
Minimum Wage Careers
Business opponents of the minimum wage often argue that it is little more than an “entry-level” wage–water-wings for those workers taking their first dip in the labor pool–and therefore needn’t be high enough to sustain a worker over many years. A recent study by two government economists, William Carrington at the Bureau of Labor Statistics…
Long Island Dreamin’
Every weekend of my childhood, it seemed, my parents would pack my sisters and me into the family Montego, and we’d head to Long Island, looking for houses. We children didn’t dread the routine, the highway drive from Brooklyn and the perpetually deferred decisions. Instead, we reveled in the fantasy. First we chose which room…
Bearing Witness for Tobacco
In 1994, before book after book documented how the tobacco industry had successfully manipulated the public’s perceptions about smoking, the eminent historian and author Stephen E. Ambrose took the stand in a Louisiana case brought by Gere Covert, a Baton Rouge attorney who decided to sue after the death of his wife, a longtime smoker,…
I am Woman, Hear Me Bore
When last I wrote in these pages about the portrayal of women on television, I argued that the creators of shows such as FOX’s Ally McBeal and NBC’s Providence seem unable to conceive of thirty-something women as concerned about anything other than marriage and childbearing. After perusing the offerings of Oxygen, the new cable television…
Why “World Music” Isn’t
Balinese gamelan sounds like magic: part rain on the roof, hammering down in relentless cascades as it does on this small, tropical Indonesian island; part sunlit shimmer, as the quavering melodies float from the synchronized mallets of as many as 50 or 100 musicians in the gamelan orchestra. Balinese gamelan sounds impossible–fragile and invigorating–and for…
Political Puzzler
ACROSS: 1 DI(STANCE)S; 6 FOSSE (hidden rev.); 7 P(ROVER)B; 9 IGUANAS (anag.); 10 BE(N)DS; 11 HEBRON (hidden); 13 BRID(G)E; 16 FERRY (fairy hom.); 18 CHOW + DER (red rev.); 20 LOO + K-SEE (seek anag.); 21 E(MEN)D; 22 EGYPTIANS (anag.) DOWN: 1 DI(STUR)B (ruts in bid rev.); 2 STERN (2 defs.; ref. Howard Stern); 3…
