W arning: The editorial comment you are about to listen to has not been endorsed by the management of the College of Law. Most academic commentators have arrived at contrary opinions. But–darn it–I’m right.” Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah, often flashes this message to his students on an overhead projector. […]
Edward Cohn
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Are Men’s Fingers Faster?
“Can anyone explain this to me?” Regis Philbin asked his Who Wants to Be a Millionaire audience of 30 million one evening in February. “Why is it that nearly all of our contestants are white men? I’m a white man, so you know I have nothing against them, but come on… . We would really […]
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Perot, Revised
Pat Buchanan’s recent defection to the Reform Party has led to a lot of soul-searching within the Republican Party. Spurred in part by fears that “Pitchfork Pat” could siphon off votes from the next GOP nominee, Republicans of all stripes have been harshly critical of their onetime ally. That’s understandable. What’s more surprising, however, is […]
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eBay’s Hate Sale
Web-savvy readers know that one can buy almost anything on the web these days, but one recent auction on the Internet site eBay marked a new low. The item in question was a set of “controversial” domain names, most of them related to the Ku Klux Klan. For a minimum bid of $500,000, would-be buyers […]
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A Conversation with Louis Dubose
Louis Dubose [“El Gobernador” TAP Vol. 11 Issue 1] is the editor of The Texas Observer and the co-author (with Molly Ivins) of a forthcoming book on George W. Bush. He recently spoke with Edward Cohn, a staff writer at The American Prospect, about his article on Bush and the Hispanic vote and on Texas […]
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The Resurrection of Michael Milken
Late last summer, the organizers of an annual convention called TechLearn ’99 announced that two of the most famous icons of the 1980s would keynote the event. The first was Bill Cosby, one of the decade’s most popular entertainers; the second was Michael R. Milken, the “junk bond king” who became a symbol of the […]
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Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong
Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, by James W. Loewen. The New Press, 480 pages, $26.95. In Lies Across America, James Loewen offers 100 short essays, each one discussing an individual monument or historic site and the inaccuracies in its portrayal of the past. He criticizes the way the birthplace of Helen […]
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Selling Higher Test Scores
I t’s hard to imagine the nation’s students profiting from the latest fad in education policy, the new mania for high-stakes testing; but commercial businesses already are. Consider what’s happening in Massachusetts. In 1993 the state enacted a sweeping education reform plan whose centerpiece is the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), a series of grueling […]