The aging of American society is almost always seen as a problem, but the elderly may be our only growing natural resource — provided we create new ways to mobilize their civic energies.
Books, Culture & the Arts
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Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files
UNSOLVED MYSTERIESThe Tocqueville Files “What If Civic Life Didn’t Die?” by Michael Schudson“Unravelling From Above,” by Theda Skocpol“Couch-Potato Democracy?” by Richard M. Valelly Robert Putnam Responds
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Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files II
UNSOLVED MYSTERIESThe Tocqueville Files II “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” by William A. Galston“The Downside of Social Capital,” by Alejandro Portes and Patricia Landolt
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How We Lost the Peace Dividend
After every previous war, we sent troops home and cut defense spending. The Col War is over, but real spending still runs 85 percent of the Cold War average.
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State of the Debate: Indelible Colors
A book by two political theorists argues that new, cultural definitions of race can be as insidious as the old, biological ones.
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State of the Debate: The Rise and Fall of Racialized Liberalism
Liberalism took a fateful turn in the 1960s by redefining reform in racial terms. Two new books on urban politics sometimes overstate their case against recent liberal policies, but they help clarify what went wrong.
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What’s Wrong with This Picture?
A dissenting opinion on American Beauty.
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Consuming Passions
How the successors to Love Connection and The Dating Game reduce love to a consumer choice.
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Should Journalists Do Community Service?
T he Philadelphia Inquirer should not have been embarrassed last May when the Wall Street Journal uncovered a scandal in a Philadelphia charity. Even Pulitzer magnets like the Inky sometimes miss big stories right under their noses. But this was no ordinary case of being scooped by out-of-town competition. The foundation that the Journal exposed […]
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Do Ask, Do Tell: Freak Talk on TV
Daytime television has become a “freak show,” but it’s also an opportunity (and not an entirely bad one) for gays and others with nonconforming lives to talk directly with the public.