T he Book of Revelations does not say whether the apocalypse will be televised. But if it is, WSVN in Miami will not have to interrupt its regular programming. It’s July 18 — the day of a visit by President Clinton to Miami — and WSVN, the nation’s most notorious tabloid station, is leading its […]
Books, Arts and Culture
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Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
The Disengaged
David Hackett Fischer’s new book, Paul Revere’s Ride, is a cautionary tale for Democrats who expect their heroes to produce results overnight. The story of Paul Revere has come down to us as a tale of individual daring. In our national memory, he rides through the night single-handedly spreading the alarm about the redcoats to […]
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Imagesbusters, the Sequel
Can’t we fight televised mayhem and the real thing too?
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Only Connect
The New York Times Book (sic) Review for March 6, 1994 ran a feature piece reviewing a CD-ROM. “Microsoft Art Gallery,” an interactive digitized catalog of Britain’s National Gallery collection, won a rave. Just point and click, and you can pull up paintings by artist, period, or genre; you can also get spoken critical commentaries […]
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Citizen Keynes
Skidelsky’s dazzling biography gets Keynes the man just right, and his economics somewhat wrong.
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Imagebusters
Revulsion against television violence offers cheap indignation. Unfortunately, imagebusting does little about the deeper sources of our violent society.
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Hispanic USA
We are witnessing the Hispanization of the United States, not the Americanization of Hispanics.
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Up Against the Wall Street Journal
O n March 11, 1993, the Wall Street Journal published a long editorial-page article called “The Industrial Policy Hoax.” It was by Karl Zinsmeister, a scholar associated with the American Enterprise Institute who in the past had written mainly about U.S. social policy. The article, which was a summary version of a much longer essay […]
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Can Economists Save Economics?
Economics is what economists do. –Jacob Viner T he trouble with Professor Viner’s delicate evasion is that economists no longer agree about what they do, or even whether it is all worth doing. Critics outside the profession long faulted economists for a host of sins: their deductive method, their formalism, their over-reliance on arcane algebra, […]