Harvey Blume

Stephen Jay Gould, who died of cancer at the age of 60 this past May, defined a place in American culture likely to remain vacant now that he is gone. He was, of course, the country’s foremost opponent of creationism and champion of Darwinism, with a unique ability to bring the HMS Beagle and baseball […]

Boston’s Big Dig, officially known as the Central Artery/Tunnel Project, is a massive, budget-busting effort to reshape the city’s traffic infrastructure by the year 2005—without generating any more gridlock than Boston drivers are already resigned to. The basic idea is to replace the city’s eyesore of an elevated highway with a multilane tunnel fit for […]

O n June 1993, the prominent Yale computer scientist David Gelernter opened a mail bomb sent by Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who had singled Gelernter out as a leader of the technological revolution he despised. Badly hurt, Gelernter survived, and as a recent piece by him, “The Second Coming–A Manifesto” (www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gelernter/gelernter_index.html), shows, his voice on […]

We associate manifestos with big ideas, combative theses itching tochange the world. While the roar of the manifesto has pretty much fadedfrom the culture at large, it can still be heard loud and clear in thedigital world. Digital culture continues to foster grand ambitions; itnurtures not only the ongoing quest for the killer app but […]

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 […]

Two months after the fact, New York City Mayor Giuliani, purportedly mellowed by prostate cancer, issued an apology of sorts to the family of Patrick Dorismond, the unarmed Haitian-American man killed by New York police in March. The mayor did not apologize for the killing itself or for having personally unsealed Dorismond’s juvenile police record […]

A year and a half after the headline-making Sensation exhibit, the Brooklyn Museum of Art has sparked yet another controversy involving art, religion, freedom of expression, the role of the museum, and, not least of all, the nature of art criticism–which the philosopher Arthur Danto not long ago characterized as “a form of zealous howling.” […]

Peter D. Kramer will always be known as the author of Listening toProzac, his 1993 work that both described a new, psychopharmacologically based “climate of opinion” in our culture and helped bring it about. But if he doesn’t become known, too, for Spectacular Happiness, that will not be the fault of this daring first novel. […]

Reflecting their status in society at large, neurology and neuroscience have in recent years become major forces in American arts and media, charting new narrative pathways. If noted at all, this development has been written off as only another example of our culture’s hunger for varieties of victimhood. But such a judgment trivializes the change. […]