Features

Viewers who stayed tuned to network television immediately following the first Kennedy-Nixon debate on September 26, 1960, saw the Original Amateur Hour on ABC, Jackpot Bowling Starring Milton Berle on NBC, or a prerecorded interview with Lyndon Johnson on CBS. In that unenlightened time when the network news broadcasts lasted only 15 minutes, people had […]

I t’s hard to imagine the nation’s students profiting from the latest fad in education policy, the new mania for high-stakes testing; but commercial businesses already are. Consider what’s happening in Massachusetts. In 1993 the state enacted a sweeping education reform plan whose centerpiece is the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), a series of grueling […]

Like many administrators, Edward Blakely doesn’t need to be convinced of the Internet’s importance to the future of his university. As the new dean of the Graduate School of Management and Public Policy at the New School University in New York, he seems primed to capitalize on it. Blakely’s school was among the first to […]

N ot long ago my wife, Ilene, and I journeyed to Auschwitz, which I had been reading about, it seemed, for much the greater part of my life. As it turned out, I had a good deal yet to learn. My teacher was Alicja, the pleasant and scholarly camp researcher with whom we spent the […]

L ike Claude Rains in Casablanca, Al Gore is shocked!, shocked! that the entertainment industry is marketing violent material to minors. Countering Hollywood’s macho entertainments with some macho rhetoric of his own, he gave the industry six months to “clean up its act” and declare a “ceasefire” in what he apparently sees as the media’s […]

“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” George Orwell once warned in an essay, but many have disregarded that advice in judging Orwell himself. John Morris, who worked with Orwell during World War II at the BBC, said, “Orwell always reminded me of one of those figures on the front of […]

The Jewish legal concept of pe’ah requires landowners to leave a meaningful portion of their field unharvested so that the poor can gather food for themselves. The basis for the concept comes from the Book of Leviticus, which states, “And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners […]

P ay It Forward is the kind of film I approach with dread. Hollywood strikes many discordant notes, but self-satisfied celebrations of communal uplift land with an especially abrasive clang. Frame a public injustice as a mystery and let a flawed crusader clean things up–an Erin Brockovich, a Lowell Bergman, or even that violin teacher […]

P ast summer the George family traveled to the nation’s capital from their northern California reservation with a clear agenda: to raise awareness of the Hupas’ battle to protect their land and culture from environmental threats. “America has been educated from a colonial, oppressive perspective, and then Disney has come along and colored who we […]

T he morning after the first televised debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush, I awoke to the voice of an earnestly boyish reporter on National Public Radio proclaiming that at long last America has been allowed to hear its candidates “without the filter of the news media.” At which, in wearied frustration, I […]