Features

Is journalism the only industry whose quality is adversely affected by the capitalist drive to increase profit margins? You might think so, judging by the media response to the resignation of Jay T. Harris, publisher of the San Jose Mercury News. Harris abruptly quit his job as chief of the Knight Ridder–owned daily earlier this […]

I was changing planes at the new airport in Jakarta the other day, on the way to Stockholm from Vladivostok. Three young Bangladeshi boys sat in the passenger lounge, watching The Power Rangers on satellite TV. Their mother–garbed in the traditional sari–talked to her cousin, a migrant worker who sold German-designed Walkman knockoffs in Hong […]

Last September AT&T approached the financially struggling First Christian Church in Alexandria, Virginia, with this bargain: In return for letting the company erect a 130-foot-tall cross doubling as a cellular phone tower, the congregation would receive $18,000 annually. Residents were split: Was the money–in the words of the Reverend Tim Mabbott, who supported the idea–a […]

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 […]

Has the Microsoft case helped bring back the term “monopolist” as an insult of choice even in corporate America? When the Walt Disney Company and its ABC television stations tangled early in May with Time Warner Cable, some television viewers were briefly deprived of such vital ABC programming as “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” […]

In Michael Mann’s gripping new movie The Insider, the two central characters uphold the truth through acts of corporate disobedience—the moral equivalent of civil disobedience in an age when the threat to freedom so often comes from corporate rather than state power. Fired as head of research at cigarette-maker Brown & Williamson, Jeffrey Wigand (Russell […]

The rise of the new economy and skyrocketing prices of Internet stocks have caused a certain discomfort and ambivalence among older Americans, which in this case generally means anyone over 26. There is, of course, due acknowledgment of the great promise of e-commerce and even some national pride about the phenomenon (only in America!). But […]

Any time now, government economists will decide whether America Online’s (AOL’s) $165-billion proposed take-over of Time Warner is likely to be good or bad for consumers. If good, the government will sign off. If bad, there’ll be negotiations with AOL and Time Warner until an agreement can be reached on what the new company would […]