Features

The California energy crisis isn’t over: it’s only in remission, thanks to a massive statewide commitment to conservation, a mild summer, and the judicious retreat by energy conglomerates from their extortionist pricing tactics. But the state’s electricity consumers have been left with permanently higher utility bills, and the state’s taxpayers have been slapped with a […]

If California’s misbegotten electricity deregulation scheme is ever reduced to canvas or film, the artist would have to be some cross between Hieronymus Bosch and Federico Fellini. At one level, it’s a surreal story of grossly compounded economic errors; at another, a gruesome morality tale–not only about corporate greed and political stupidity, but about the […]

A t Clifton High School, a mostly white, working-class institution in suburban New Jersey, it’s time for second period–and for Channel One, a public-affairs TV broadcast available exclusively for school viewing. Mounted high in a corner of every classroom–as omnipresent an icon as the American flag–is a large-screen television set, provided by Channel One. The […]

There’s no longer any countervailing power in Washington. Business is incomplete control of the machinery of government. If corporate America understoodits long-term interest, it would use this unique moment to establish in thepublic’s mind the principle that business can be trusted. But it’s doing justthe opposite. Every industry and every major company is cashing in […]

I knew something was odd when Microsoft’s spelling checker corrected my typing of Bertelsmann, the German corporation that controls most of the world’s English-language trade publishing. It’s not your average English word. Neither are Westvaco, Enron, and Supervalu; nor Chevron, Costco, and Ameritech. But all of those semi-words are among the corporate monikers Microsoft has […]

Global oil production will probably reach a peak sometime during this decade. After the peak, the world’s production of crude oil will fall, never to rise again. The world will not run out of energy, but developing alternative energy sources on a large scale will take at least 10 years. In the meantime, there will […]

H ow is the new economy affecting our lives and what should be done about its excesses and injustices? This debate is emerging all over the world, but it surfaces only sporadically and partially, like the tip of a giant iceberg into which other things crash. French workers strike in pursuit of a 35-hour maximum […]

Americans pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Drug expenditures in the United States have doubled since 1993 and are expected to double again by 2004, according to a study by the Health Insurance Association of America. Elderly people now spend more on medicine than on doctor bills. Many health plans have […]

In Virginia, fresh-faced, environmentally minded schoolchildren gather biological samples and test water quality in rivers and waterways, part of the Izaak Walton League’s Save Our Streams initiative. In Chicago, amid Tai Chi classes and body massages, families with young children enjoy performance art and teenagers flock to an all-night “rave,” all part of the Museum […]

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 […]