Society articles from July 1997

Society archives from July 1997

Online growing pains. (increasing popularity of Internet)(Social Science and the Citizen)
July 1, 1997... A new survey of Americans who use online services and the Internet reveals that cyberspace is evolving from an over-hyped curiosity into a broadly useful communications tool. While the study found that the population of cyberspace continues...

Population prospects. (global population growth)(Social Science and the Citizen)
July 1, 1997... A study by the United Nations exaggerates likely population growth worldwide. The study should not be used as the basis for discussion at the conference that will be held later this year in Japan on global climate change. The United Nations...

The America we seek. (abortion debate)
July 1, 1997... Twenty-three years after the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions, the conscience of the American people remains deeply troubled by the practice of abortion-on-demand. Because of these two decisions, abortion is legal at any...

Finding solutions in no-man's land. (abortion debate)
July 1, 1997... "What we can call gross dichotomizing is a persistent imaginative habit of modern times, traceable, it would seem, to the actualities of the Great War. 'We' are all here on this side; the enemy is over there. 'We' are individuals with names and...

Adolescent abortion.
July 1, 1997... Within the past few months, as a result of President Bill Clinton's veto of the late-term abortion bill, the pro-life/pro-choice debate has once again resurfaced. As it has in the past, the debate focuses on the psychological, social, moral,...

Defending choice. (pro-choice argument in abortion debate)
July 1, 1997... The abortion debate is peculiar: In the case of both the pro-life and pro-choice positions, the persuasive impotence of the side being presented is most obvious when that side is being presented. What neither the pro-choice nor pro-life...

Abortion as single-issue politics.
July 1, 1997... Contributors to this symposium were asked to consider what social scientists have to contribute, as the pro-life statement of principles "The America We Seek" puts it, to a "great national debate about the America we seek, and the relationship...

Partisanship and the abortion controversy.
July 1, 1997... Abortion license is an established reality in the United States - institutionalized in law at all levels and consecrated in the sacred litany of choice. Even more, the very possibility of open opposition has been eliminated through the heavy...

The diversity machine. (workplace diversity)
July 1, 1997... The social policy machine that sought to transform the "white male workplace" to accommodate increasing numbers of culturally different women and minorities is itself being reshaped by rapid cultural, political, and economic changes. From its...

Durable significance of political pilgrimage.
July 1, 1997... By the time the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 few countries remained to inspire a significant volume of political pilgrimages - a topic I first addressed in a book first published in 1981. By 1991 the entire Soviet bloc had disappeared;...

Fascism at the end of the twentieth century.
July 1, 1997... Academicians do not have a particularly good record in anticipating political outcomes or providing interpretations of complex political phenomena. About two decades ago, some of the world's most notable scholars informed us that we could not...

The tragedy of civil rights.
July 1, 1997... In the summer of 1964, despite the intense controversy surrounding the civil rights bill, Congress approved the measure by an overwhelming majority. By passing this legislation, a broad bipartisan and transideological coalition of Democrats and...

War and modernity in Chinese military fiction.
July 1, 1997... The European and American views of war and modernity have been indelibly marked by the traumatic experiences of trench warfare on the Western Front during World War I. The horrors of that war were abundantly described in the literature of the...

Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot.
July 1, 1997... Reviewed by Daniel J. Silver Michael Rogin, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, is an unabashed leftist who has made a career out of puncturing U.S. liberal pieties. Very popular in like-minded...

Jesuits: A Multibiography.
July 1, 1997... Reviewed by Donald J. Dietrich In this popular account of the expansion of the Society of Jesus, Jean Lacouture has offered a panoramic sweep of the issues faced by the Catholic Church during the last five centuries. Among other topics,...

Public Entrepreneurs: Agents for Change in American Government.
July 1, 1997... Reviewed by Robert H. Nelson In traditional neoclassical theory, economic actors are perfectly informed, markets are in complete equilibrium, and the market system performs the economic coordinating function for society with perfect...

The Price of Federalism.
July 1, 1997... Reviewed by Reynolds Farley Twice in late 1995, the federal government was shut as a result of bitter fiscal controversies between a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. Most will view those closures as the outcomes of typical...