Society articles from May 1998

Society archives from May 1998

Hispanic births hit new high.(Social Science and the Citizen)
May 1, 1998... The number of babies being born to Hispanic women in the United States has reached a record high, increasing to 18 percent of the total number of births, according to a recently released federal report. The study by the National Center for...

Bigger people: a growing problem.(Social Science and the Citizen)
May 1, 1998... The earth supports a wide variety of life forms ranging in size from microscopic bacteria to 100-ton whales. Most of us appreciate this diversity in nature as well as in ourselves. The Japanese love their Sumo wrestlers and Americans love their...

College students value money over mind.(Social Science and the Citizen)
May 1, 1998... A survey of college freshman confirms what professors and administrators said they have been sensing, that students are increasingly disengaged and view higher education less as an opportunity to expand their minds and more as a means to...

Politics, polls, and poltergeists. (interpreting election polls)
May 1, 1998... The presidential election campaign of 2000 was already under way in 1997, with surveys asking people to rate potential candidates. In 1996, polls made note news than anything that Clinton and Dole had to say. How well did they do? Can they do...

Strange bedfellows: ideology, politics, and drug legalization.
May 1, 1998... The political landscape is a maze of contradictions; politics, we are told, make for "strange bedfellows." Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the issue of drug legalization. In a recent letter to the editor to The New York Times,...

Security: the Achilles heel of electronic commerce.
May 1, 1998... Electronic commerce as a mass phenomenon is being touted as a now certain outcome of the successful diffusion of Internet based services in recent years. A survey in 1997 commissioned by consultants KPMG among Britain's top 500 companies...

The nature of civil society.
May 1, 1998... For perhaps a full decade, "civil society" has had about it an air of excitement. This is not surprising. For the concept was taken as a banner by those wishing to be free, in Latin America and in Eastern Europe, and it was further invoked by...

+Making cents: better city services for less.
May 1, 1998... Better municipal services, for less money, are being geared up in many American and Third World cities, as some old ideas are finding new applications. The ideas are competition and privatization, and they are as old as Adam Smith. Under the...

Livable cities for the 21st century.
May 1, 1998... Cities everywhere are makers of wealth, magnets for the industrious, motors of invention. In developing countries, more than half of GDP originates in cities. Urbanization is a companion and stimulus of development. As the process has...

'The Vital Center': 50 years later. (book)
May 1, 1998... The Vital Center, first published in 1949, is now enjoying an unexpected bipartisan revival. In June 1996, Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House of Representatives, surprised R.W. Apple, Jr, of The New York Times (not to mention the book's...

From movable print to pay TV. (media and the development of a democratic society)
May 1, 1998... In every country in the world the development of the media is closely interlinked with national, cultural, economic, and, above all, with the political history of the nation. On the one hand, all forms of media were always important commercial...

The vertical division of the European welfare state.(Society Abroad)
May 1, 1998... There is an important sociological difference between horizontal and vertical social structures. A society is horizontally structured, if there is a variety of associations and institutions in which individual citizens group together in order...

Confronting infectious diseases.
May 1, 1998... The World Health Organization (WHO) recently declared a global state of emergency for a disease thought to be well under control as recently as 1985. More than a third of the people in the world are infected with the bacterium that causes...

Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence.
May 1, 1998... By Sander L. Gilman. University of Nebraska Press, 246 pages, $40.00 ($15.00 paper) Reviewed by Lauren Weiner In Smart Jews, Sander L. Gilman wishes to elucidate, as his subtitle has it, "the construction of the image of Jewish superior...

All that We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way.
May 1, 1998... By Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1996. Pp 198. $24.00, hardcover Reviewed by Malham M. Wakin If scholarly sociological studies can ever be viewed as uplifting, this new study by Moskos and Butler is...

Martin Heidegger: A Political Life.
May 1, 1998... By Hugo Ott. Translated by Allen Blunden. New York: Basic Books, 1993. 407 pp. $30.00 (cloth) Reviewed by Donald Ringelestein Martin Heidegger: A Political Life does just what one would expect of a book bearing this title, provided that...

Demanding Democracy.
May 1, 1998... By Robert Schmuhl. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 149 pages, $22.95 cloth, $10.95 paper Reviewed by Ray C. Rist This is an odd little book. Indeed, it is more like two little books (read long essays) kept together...

The Witness of the Brothers: A History of the Bruderhof.
May 1, 1998... By Yaacov Oved. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1996, Pp. viii + 342. $39.95 Reviewed by Donald F. Durnbaugh With admirable objectivity combined with sensitive empathy, Yaacov Oved presents the first comprehensive and...

Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America.
May 1, 1998... By Thomas G. West. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 218 pages, $22.95 Reviewed by William A. Donohue We've heard it all before. The Founders were racists, sexists, classists, elitists - men who wrote some pretty clever documents...