Sisterhood was Powerful
When a history of civil disobedience moves us, it is because the writer is able to convey the human emotion at the heart of efforts to stand against the crowd. Ruth Rosen in The World Split Open captures the rage that both forged and tore the women’s movement in the latter half of the twentieth…
Comment: Different Strokes
Vice President Gore has unveiled a supplemental retirement plan. The government would match private savings put aside by working families, with a match as generous as three to one for families with incomes under $30,000. Families with incomes as high as $100,000 could qualify for a partial match. The plan works through refundable tax credits,…
The Spiritual is Political
Confronted with low voter participation rates and high levels of ignorance about politics and policy, many of us regularly bemoan the apparently apathetic American electorate. But we’re mostly concerned with the apathy of people whom we imagine as potential political allies. When right-wing Christians made a dramatic entrance onto the political stage some 20 years…
Chamber of Horrors
The upper chamber of Congress should be up for grabs. But in too many Senate races, Democrats have issues but not candidates. Or they have national issues but not local ones. Or they have candidates but not money. Can they win anyway? Politically speaking, Rod Grams is mired in what a leader of his party…
The Greening of Giuliani
This June found New York City’s crusading public advocate Mark Green courting financial support at a fundraising “comedy gala” in honor of his 55th birthday. To raise around $1 million for his 2001 mayoral bid, Green culled a selection of celebrities finely tuned to appeal to the sensibilities of the left-leaning (yet moneyed) baby boomer.…
$80,000 and a Dream
America has become a three-class society. While more than 25 percent of its children now graduate from four-year colleges, the lowest 20 percent inhabit a world of low wages and dead-end jobs. And then there is the vast middle. Despite the economic boom, real wages for men have declined, and only the massive entry by…
Molly Ivins: The W. Files
Every American has a relationship with Texas–the state, the idea, the Alamo, or some other part of the place–shaped by the movies, the Kennedy assassination, or being stranded in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, overhearing conversations in that languid, steel-braced drawl, and admiring the glistening steel-braced hairdos. In my case, it was being stationed in two…
Pork, Sweet, and Sour
Word was out in May that the Clinton administration was offering enticements to undecided congressional Democrats in order to win enough votes to permanently normalize trade with China–which the White House had singled out as key to the Clinton foreign policy legacy. After all, during the North American Free Trade Agreement vote in 1993, the…
Ridge Over Troubled Waters
The last time a Catholic bishop from Pennsylvania took an ax to some promising piece of vice presidential timber, it was a Democrat who got felled. That was in 1984, when the late Cardinal John O’Connor–then recently promoted to New York’s archdiocese from Scranton, Pennsylvania–attacked Geraldine Ferraro at a pro-life convention for “distorting” the church’s…
The Era of Great Social Rest
We are slouching toward two of the most inconsequential political conventions in American history, followed by the more riveting prospects of a World Series, the Olympics, the TV networks’ fall premieres, Alan Greenspan’s attempt at a soft landing, a bruising Senate battle in New York guaranteed to captivate America’s Hillary-haters and Hillary-lovers, and then an…
Clinton-Hating
Beginning in Arkansas when Bill Clinton first decided to run for president, a cluster of the future president’s die-hard opponents set about trying to derail his quest. They plied eager journalists with tales of Clinton’s immoralities and illegalities. Aficionados of the Clinton scandal stories will recognize many of the names. Cliff Jackson: Clinton’s contemporary and…
The Taxonomist
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Republican from Texas, recently bragged that she was the key instigator in persuading the Senate Finance Committee, as part of its pending “marriage penalty reduction” bill, to raise the income level at which a couple enters the 31 percent income tax bracket. The Finance Committee had already decided to raise…
Putnam’s America
In 1995 Hal Salwen released a movie, Denise Calls Up, about people who conduct their lives on the telephone, living so entirely on that instrument that the characters who share their most intimate thoughts on the phone pass each other by, unrecognized, on the street. The fear that technology will somehow disconnect us from reality…
Mr. Gates Goes To Washington
When The New York Times revealed in April that Microsoft had hired Ralph Reed, the onetime executive director of the Christian Coalition, to lobby George W. Bush on the company’s behalf, the story that generated all the attention was Reed’s obvious, if bizarre, conflict of interest–he was also a paid adviser to Bush’s presidential campaign.…
Citing the Right
Considering last year’s frenzied coverage of Monicagate and then the sniping coverage of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, one might wonder what has happened to the Great Liberal Media Conspiracy. If the myth is not yet buried, here’s another nail for the coffin: A study released in June by Fairness & Accuracy in…
That Vision Thing
In one of last year’s cheekiest works of social criticism, Russell Jacoby argued that what ails modern politics is a lack of utopian thinking (The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, Norton). Politics has become dull, according to Jacoby. We live in a time of “political exhaustion and retreat,” of…
Mirage of Meritocracy
After years of relative quiet, America’s educational system is coming under renewed pressure over issues of fairness, access, and privilege. As competition intensifies over entry to college, it becomes harder to believe the system’s rhetoric of merit and equity. Some students and their families are litigating over AP courses, high school funding, and affirmative action.…
Mr. Mischief
In his films, underdog-with-a-camera Michael Moore has taken on former GM Chairman Roger Smith (Roger & Me) and Nike CEO Phil Knight (The Big One), but the premiere of Moore’s newest half-hour series on Bravo, The Awful Truth (Wednesday nights, continuing through August 9), went up, appropriately, against Jesus Christ. It didn’t make a dent…
Duel in the Sun
I’d like to write a bit about my father, Philip G. Epstein, and my uncle, Julius J., and the feud that developed between them and their boss, Jack L. Warner–a feud that shines a certain light on larger conflicts in American culture. Julie got to Warner Bros. first. After giving up a career as a…
The Two Tenors
The jazz critics love a horse race, especially when they help create it. The late 1950s saw what is arguably their greatest fabrication. Trumpeter Miles Davis, with his high-profile contract with Columbia Records (not to mention his impeccable style in clothing and Ferarris), was already a star, and the jazz press was on the lookout…
Progress’s Pilgrim
Once upon a time, Henry Wallace was a liberal hero. At the dawn of the New Deal, the brilliant agronomist transformed the stodgy Agriculture Department (which his father, a Republican, headed a decade before) into the savior of the farm economy and a well-funded crusader for the scientific raising of crops and animals. In the…
Changes is Epedemic
By his own definition, Malcolm Gladwell is a “translator,” one of a special class of people who “take ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand.” In his articles for The New Yorker, Gladwell has been a bloodhound for speci-ficity, sniffing around obscure…
Between The Covers
ACROSS: 1 off ice; 4 sh(r)ift; 8 to(te ba)g (abet rev.); 10 refer (palindrome); 11 ad(h)oc (coda rev.); 12 u + pended; 13 treadmill (anag.); 17 termini (anag.); 19 newel (hidden); 21 knell (nell hom.); 22 tizzies (hidden on outside); 23 resume (2 defs.); 24 edit(o)r (tired anag.) DOWN: 1 outla + w (a lout…
