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Works Discussed in this Essay: The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World’s Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom, by James W. Stigler and James Hiebert. Free Press, 224 pages, $23.00. Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers’ Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States, by Liping Ma. Lawrence […]

By far the most sensational moment of the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Sensation” exhibit–more exciting than the shark in a tank, the mutant mannequin girls with penises coming out of their foreheads, or the stinky, bloody, maggot-infested cow’s head; more thrilling than Mayor Giuliani’s scripted obscenity attack or the museum’s scripted First Amendment defense–was provided […]

The Red Hook section of Brooklyn is only 20 miles from Manhasset Neck on Long Island, but the places stand worlds apart. Red Hook, as depicted in Arthur Miller’s 1955 play A View from the Bridge, is a sturdy working-class neighborhood that depends on the nearby dockyards for its livelihood. Manhasset Neck, in its incarnation […]

Before enactment of Medicare in 1965, few elderly persons had reliable health insurance. When insurance was available, it was expensive and limited, and its renewal was uncertain. As a consequence, nearly 50 percent of the elderly had no health insurance at all, and faced bankruptcy from the costs of serious illness. Medicare provided all elderly […]

It’s May 13, the day after Florence Nightingale’s birthday, and as part of the annual celebration of Nurses’ Week–established in part to commemorate Nightingale’s role in the development of professional nursing–members of the Massachusetts Nurses Association have asked me to speak to a group of registered nurses (RNs) at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Health […]

How to cure the American health care system depends on what you think ails it. The center and the right identify three basic maladies. First, there is a cost crisis. This view reflects the concerns of “payers”–employers who face rising premiums, federal budget balancers projecting Medicare deficits, and insurance companies whose profits are squeezed by […]

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 […]

The Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia-based foundation, strode into the middle of the culture wars last summer and got mugged. Pew proposed spending some $50 million over the next five years in an effort to answer what seems, at first blush, like a reasonable question: Is the United States doing all it should to foster […]

This last year in the arts seems to have been dominated by dead people. Maybe that isn’t inappropriate when a millennium grinds to a close. For example: One of the most eagerly awaited movies of the year, Eyes Wide Shut, was released soon after the death of its director, Stanley Kubrick. Such were the circumstances […]

“John Brown taught us that the cheapest price to pay for liberty is its cost today.” –W.E.B. Du Bois In his 1928 epic poem John Brown’s Body, Stephen Vincent Benét named the problem of John Brown in America’s historical memory: The law’s our hardstick, and it measures well, Or well enough when there are yards […]