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 […]
Books, Culture & the Arts
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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 […]
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State of the Debate: The Sale of a Generation
Generation X is a hot marketing concept, used as a hook to sell everything from condoms to cars. Can right-wingers use it to sell their ideas?
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Incredible News
The rise of infotainment and tabloid TV news reflects popular acceptance of the summons to turn news into play — which people are willing to do when they have given up on public life.
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Diary of the American Nightmare
T he Book of Revelations does not say whether the apocalypse will be televised. But if it is, WSVN in Miami will not have to interrupt its regular programming. It’s July 18 — the day of a visit by President Clinton to Miami — and WSVN, the nation’s most notorious tabloid station, is leading its […]
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The Disengaged
David Hackett Fischer’s new book, Paul Revere’s Ride, is a cautionary tale for Democrats who expect their heroes to produce results overnight. The story of Paul Revere has come down to us as a tale of individual daring. In our national memory, he rides through the night single-handedly spreading the alarm about the redcoats to […]
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Only Connect
The New York Times Book (sic) Review for March 6, 1994 ran a feature piece reviewing a CD-ROM. “Microsoft Art Gallery,” an interactive digitized catalog of Britain’s National Gallery collection, won a rave. Just point and click, and you can pull up paintings by artist, period, or genre; you can also get spoken critical commentaries […]
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Imagebusters
Revulsion against television violence offers cheap indignation. Unfortunately, imagebusting does little about the deeper sources of our violent society.
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Hispanic USA
We are witnessing the Hispanization of the United States, not the Americanization of Hispanics.
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Whose Body Politic?
The boundaries between public and private are murkier than ever.
