Let’s Talk about Gender, Baby
Feminists have long been ridiculed for their efforts to purge sexism from language by using words like chairperson and avoiding the use of male pronouns as universal signifiers of both sexes. The results have not always been pretty: “He knows what’s good for him” is a far more felicitous phrase than “He/she knows what’s good…
Comment: Sequels Always Bomb
Of all the revelations in The New York Timesinvestigation of partisan favoritism in the counting of Florida’s overseas ballots, none was more galling than the new information on the role played by Gore and Lieberman. At a time when campaign strategists were pressing Florida election officials to disallow military ballots that lacked witness signatures or…
A Believable Politics
Liberal public inspiration is in short supply these days. To be sure, with his environmental, energy, and tax policies, President Bush is doing his best to unify moderates and liberals, and the Democratic Party may emerge stronger as a result. But a believable progressivism that can inspire deep commitment as well as win majority support…
Tribal Warfare
On June 18, in broad daylight, Palestinian gunmen in a yellow taxi overtook Danny Yehuda–the father of three–as he drove on a highway near Homesh, a small Jewish settlement overlooking Nablus, the West Bank’s largest city, and shot him to death at point-blank range. Taking responsibility for Yehuda’s execution was a group calling itself “Battalions…
Standard Shift
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has been gettinghimself dusty in the law library lately. News organizations reported on July 12that Ashcroft, a National Rifle Association member, had reversed the JusticeDepartment’s long-standing constitutional interpretation of the Second Amendment(which reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of afree State, the right of the people…
Restoring the Vote
The disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies is one of the great exclusions of civic life in the United States. The problem’s dimensions are large and growing larger. As of 1998, according to the Sentencing Project’s groundbreaking 1999 report Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States, 3.9 million Americans…
A Quagmire for Our Time
At least since 1996, when voters in california and Arizona approved ballot initiatives legalizing the medical use of marijuana, Americans have been trying to send the same message to Washington, D.C.: The nation’s escalating, $20-billion drug war is a disastrous and costly failure that is stuffing the prisons, ruining thousands of lives both here and…
Frontiers of Free Marketing
After Sony Pictures admitted this June that its marketers had invented a film critic, other movie studios came clean with similar chicanery, such as placing paid workers in commercials and “suggesting” quotations to journalists. But in an age when the Internet has opened whole new worlds to marketing and public relations–realms yet unbound by clear…
Undue Influence
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has long been the target of both industry and ideological forces seeking to scale back regulation. With a Republican now in the White House, conservatives are once again sounding the call. On February 2, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial railing against the FDA’s “costly and archaic system…
