Daedalus articles from January 2002

Daedalus archives from January 2002

Daedalus.(editorial changes)(Brief Article)(Editorial)
January 1, 2002... With this issue Daedalus enters a new era. Founded in 1955 and launched as a quarterly in 1958, the journal took shape under the pioneering leadership of Walter Muir Whitehill, Gerald Holton, and Philip Rieff -- and then flourished for nearly...

Evil & Politics.
January 1, 2002... In the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, it was hard to know what to say. We seemed bereft of "a terminology," as Madame de Stael observed after the Jacobin Terror, in a situation "beyond the common measure." In the days...

A perfect crime: Inequality in the age of globalization.
January 1, 2002... Most of the world's political leaders have embraced economic globalization on two grounds: that open markets and transnational production networks are unstoppable; and that the benefits will surely flow out to all the world's people, rich and...

Beyond compassion: Selfish reasons for being unselfish.(Column)
January 1, 2002... America has developed an unusual class system. It is a highly competitive society in which the majority of players are winners, but in which the winners to an increasing degree take all, or nearly all. This is the best of all possible worlds...

Against redress.(Column)
January 1, 2002... One of the hardy perennials of political theory asks how, if at all, one might justify the inequality of wealth and opportunity that is so manifest in society. The issue has been with us from the earliest times, but it seems to have gained...

Does inequality matter?(Column)
January 1, 2002... The economic gap between rich and poor has grown dramatically in the United States over the past generation and is now considerably wider than in any other affluent nation. This increase in economic inequality has no recent precedent, at least...

America's lost egalitarian tradition.(Column)
January 1, 2002... Egalitarianism assumes many shapes in contemporary America: equality of opportunity, equality of rights, racial equality, sexual equality, equal justice, equal pay for equal work, and more. One egalitarian ideal is, however, conspicuously...

Unequal by nature: A geneticist's perspective on human differences.
January 1, 2002... In February of 2001, Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics, commenting on the near-completion of the human genome project, said that "we are all essentially identical twins." A news headline at the time made a similar point: Are We All One...

The biology of race and the concept of equality.
January 1, 2002... There are words in our language that seem to lead inevitably to controversy. This is surely true for the words "equality" and "race." And yet among well-informed people, there is little disagreement as to what these words should mean, in part...

Sex, laws, and inequality: What India can teach the United States.(Column)
January 1, 2002... In every house there is fear. Let's do away with that fear. Let's build a women's organization. - "Mahila Samiti" ("A Women's Organization"), song sung all over India in women s groups Hanuffa Khatoon, a citizen of Bangladesh...

Who gets health care?(Column)
January 1, 2002... Around the world, as in the United States, concern is growing about who gets health care. (1) Individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds face distressingly different prospects of living a healthy life. As numerous studies confirm, the...

Why the poor don't soak the rich.(Column)
January 1, 2002... To ask why there is so much inequality in modern-day democracies is to ask a loaded question.' Why should we expect there to be less? Such an expectation was nevertheless widely shared in the nineteenth century, both among conservatives who...

Young Marx.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... That man's own life is an object for him. That animals build nests, build dwellings, whereas man contemplates himself in the world that he has created: That you cannot find yourself in your labor because it does not belong...

A wedding. (Fiction).(Short Story)
January 1, 2002... In the mind's eye, a one-way procession of flickering oil lamps sways along the muddy shanko between rice paddies and flooded ponds, and finally disappears into a distant wall of impenetrable jungle. Banks of fog rise from warmer waters, mingle...

On the three faces of intelligence.
January 1, 2002... Once, at a Renaissance Weekend, I found myself on a panel with a U.S. senator, a congressman, and a policy wonk. As a cognitive psychologist with an interest in education, I was nonpiussed to be surrounded by this distinguished but (to me)...

on the world's numerical recipe.(an ode to physics)
January 1, 2002... Twentieth-century physics began around 600 B.C. when Pythagoras of Samos proclaimed an awesome vision. By studying the notes sounded by plucked strings, Pythagoras discovered that the human perception of harmony is connected to numerical...

On clinical research & the future of medicine.
January 1, 2002... Biomedical inquiry as it is practiced in America today is an amalgam of three different kinds of research: basic research, population research, and clinical research. While all three are of critical importance, it is clinical research that...

On compiling a new encyclopedia.
January 1, 2002... In late 2001, a new International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences was published by Elsevier Science. Almost six years in the making, the twenty-four volumes are meant to cover all relevant disciplines under the heading...

On Miles Davis, Vince Lombardi, & the crisis of masculinity in mid-century America.
January 1, 2002... Early, Gerald Miles Davis achieved fame as a jazz musician and cultural icon in the 1950S and 1960s - the era of the civil rights movement and the first stirrings of the women's movement, and the era, too, of Playboy bunnies and the first...