Mobilizing Energy Solutions
For an annotated version of this article, go to www.rmi.org America is at war. The economy is down. Global prosperity, stability, and environment are at risk. Domestic politics is reverting to gridlock, driven by the coming battle for both houses of Congress. And energy policy, strongly polarized, is back on the agenda. Have we learned…
Literature: The Humor and the Pity
There is a feature that has often marked the dust jackets of V.S. Naipaul’s books. We are first given some perfunctory details about the writer’s birth in Trinidad, his education at University College, Oxford, and the year, 1954, when he began to write in London. And then, like a card being put on the table…
Can Buffy’s Brilliance Last?
When future critics ask whether turn-of-the-century American TV produced any works of genius, the verdict on the entire medium–all 128 channels of it–is likely to depend on their assessment of a cult teen hit currently airing on UPN, with syndicated reruns on FX. At first glance, Buffy the Vampire Slayer seems indistinguishable from the WB’s…
Postcards From the Edge
Orphaned Cambodian amputees, Bosnian war widows, prepubescent Liberian soldiers, Rwandan rape victims forced to bear and raise the children of their attackers. . . . The upcoming Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (which will travel to Boston, New York, Berkeley, and London over the course of the next few months) plunges viewers headlong into…
Listening to Lyndon
Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965 Edited by Michael Beschloss. Simon and Schuster, 475 pages, $30.00 When dealing with the amazing personality of Lyndon Baines Johnson, there is just no substitute for an encounter with the real thing. This is an inescapable conclusion of reading the second volume of Michael Beschloss’s…
The Control of Ideas
The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World By Lawrence Lessig. Random House, 352 pages, $30.00 Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity By Siva Vaidhyanathan. New York University Press, 243 pages, $27.95 A specter is haunting culture: the specter of intellectual-property law. Soon…
Tougher Than Terror:
The debate over military tribunals has been largely conducted in terms of the trade-offs between national security and civil liberties. But this debate has tended to obscure an equally important issue: How does the question of where to try accused terrorists fit into the larger goals of fighting terrorism? The Bush administration has tried to…
The War at Home
Once upon a time, the war at home meant frugality and sacrifice. Our parents or grandparents collected string and made balls of tinfoil, one gum wrapper at a time. They accepted rationing and went each week to the grocer with coupons for butter, meat, and sugar. They took all sorts of jobs to serve the…
Down, Argentine Way
A week before Christmas, the slow-motion collapse of Argentina suddenly turned swift and violent. Two days of rioting brought down the government and left 31 people dead. All but one were killed by gunfire from shopkeepers and police. Some died while shouting political slogans, others while looting food that they had no money to buy.…
Bush-League Economics
The Bush administration is getting an A for its prosecution of the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but it is flunking international economics. While energetically lobbying Congress for “fast track” authority (which is not a trade agreement, but merely a means of winning approval of one), it has botched every actual economic-policy challenge that…
Networks:
Recess Wars. . . Wasn’t it just yesterday that The Wall Street Journal editorial page was thundering at Bill Clinton for appointing Bill Lann Lee to the Justice Department’s civil-rights desk without congressional approval? Now, under the very same terms of the Vacancy Act that Clinton invoked, which permit a president to appoint officials all…
Getting By
Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail By Rubén Martínez. Metropolitan Books, 330 pages, $26.00 Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted … They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves. We died in your hills, we died in your deserts, We died in your valleys and died on…
Spy Tech
The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology By Jeffrey T. Richelson. Westview Press, 416 pages, $26.00 In 1954, James R. Killian, Jr., then president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Edwin H. Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation, sent a letter to Central Intelligence Agency Director Allen Dulles outlining…
The Other War at Home
Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do about It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs By Judge James P. Gray. Temple University Press, 272 pages, $19.95 One day about eight years ago, Judge James P. Gray held a press conference on the steps of the Santa Ana courthouse where…
Illuminating the Enlightenment
Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment By Emma Rothschild. Harvard University Press, 353 pages, $45.00 Should you care about the Enlightenment? Yes, you should, and more than a little, says Emma Rothschild, the distinguished British economist. In Economic Sentiments, Rothschild reinterprets the Enlightenment by breathing new life into Adam Smith, Jacques Turgot, and…
Why There Was No Stimulus Bill
The best news on the economic and budget front in December was the failure of Republicans to ram their big corporate tax-cut package through Congress in the name of “stimulus.” The bad news was that nothing was done to boost the economy and help those most hurt by the recession. What went wrong? Unfortunately, press…
The Coca-Cola Killings:
After the leader of their union was shot down at their plant gate in late 1996, Edgar Paéz and his co-workers at the Coca-Cola bottling factory in Carepa, Colombia, tried for more than four years to get their government to take action against the responsible parties. Instead, some of the workers themselves wound up behind…
Gun Shy
Gun sales are said to have increased dramatically since September 11 — to the bemusement of some, who point out that guns won’t protect us from terrorists armed with viruses or nuclear bombs. Still, it’s long been clear that many Americans feel reassured by firearms; and if you fear the civil disorder that further attacks…
Liberty Since 9-11
Wartime generates violations of civil liberties.Wartime justifies restrictions of civil liberties. So we have heard sinceSeptember 11 from people variously trying to explain or to defenddepartures from standing protections of individual rights. A historicalperspective suggests, however, that we have reason for vigilance but notfor resignation about liberty’s fate–and at this point no grounds forbelieving doom…
Comment: Springtime for Democrats?
As this election year begins, one can imagine two equally plausible scenarios. In the first, George W. Bush wraps the whole Republican Party in the flag. He outflanks the Democrats’ latent advantage on virtually every domestic issue; the Republicans dominate the agenda and keep control of Congress. In the second scenario, Bush’s wartime popularity fades;…
