Economic impact studies can demonstrate a return on public investments in the arts. This is a handy tool for arts advocates, but also a dangerous one that reduces art to commercial calculus.
Books, Culture & the Arts
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Essay: Look at Me! Leave Me Alone!
Which is stronger, the craving for publicity or the desire for privacy? The Truman Show demonstrates how tightly married these impulses are.
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The Myth of the Supermayor
A new breed of supermayor is supposed to be revitalizing the nation’s cities. So let’s visit the city and mayor often held up these days as a model for America.
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Rising Tide?
“They almost have a nostalgic quality about them, sort of like the bell bottoms stuck in the back of the closet,” writes Jeffrey M. Berry of today’s quixotic and starry-eyed liberals. “But liberalism is not dead. Indeed, it’s thriving.” In The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups, Berry marshals copious evidence that over […]
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Naked in the Valley
Po Bronson’s The Nudist on the Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley 12.02.99 | reviewed by Nicholas Confessore ‘Tis the season for mainstream magazines-Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek-to finally run cover stories on that newest of old trends, e-commerce. Skip them. You are unlikely to find a more vivid or readable tour of Silicon […]
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The Money Artist
Lawrence Weschler’s Boggs: A Comedy Of Values 12.02.99 | reviewed by James K. Galbraith Modern economists make bad historians, as a rule. The problem is that a simple-minded metaphor-supply and demand-with its deep yet subtle political commitment to laissez-faire, controls their thought. The market is supposed to rule. Therefore it does. Whatever happened, the market […]
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Workers United
Robert Bruno’s Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown 12.02.99 | reviewed by Lisa Burrell Black spots on his father’s lungs convinced Robert Bruno it was time to reconnect with his family and his working-class roots. The result of his journey home is Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown, a well- researched argument that […]
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Rank Class
Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test 12.02.99 | reviewed by Peter Schrag The late Albert Shanker, longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, sometimes made the facetious suggestion that if children were all awarded college diplomas at birth, knowledge would be pursued for its own sake and a great many of the problems of American […]
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Sex, Lies, and The Scarlet Letter
O nce when I was about nine, I wandered into my aunt’s kitchen during Thanksgiving to find all the grown-up women whispering, hugging, and crying. When they explained to me what was going on (Auntie Cookie had just found out she was going to have another baby and they were crying from happiness), they confirmed […]