Reason articles from October 2002

Reason archives from October 2002

Life after 9/11. (Editor's Note).(Editorial)
October 1, 2002... I GREW UP in the giant shadow of the World Trade Center. Born in Brooklyn, I was raised in Middletown, New Jersey--a commuter town that lost almost 50 people on 9/II. My father worked for a shipping company that was one of the center's original...

'The greatest historical work in our language.
October 1, 2002... I can think of no more enjoyable way of reading it than in The Folio Society's elegant volumes.' Hugh Trevor-Roper, Professor Emeritus of History, Oxford University. As your introduction to The Folio Society, we are offering you a...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2002... The Amazing Ashcroft Brian Doherty's "Ashcroft's Power Grab" (June) seemed more like an assault on the attorney general's character than an examination of whether he has compromised civil rights. I agree that the USA PATRIOT Act and the...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
October 1, 2002... R.J. Pliskow, M.D., photographed author Tevi Troy for "POTUS and the Brain" (August).

Illegal education? Intimidating homeschoolers. (Citings).
October 1, 2002... SANDRA AND DAVID Sorensen, were recently threatened with prosecution by the San Juan Unified School District under California truancy statutes for home-schooling their 10-year-old son. But as often happens in such cases, the case was dropped...

Persistent protesters: slamming Noriega's alma mater. (Citings).(School of the Americas, renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... THE SCHOOL OF the Americas (SOA), recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is infamous for training dictators such as Manuel Noriega. But it may as well be regarded as an ongoing internship program for...

Conventional wisdom: municipal money pits. (Citings).(economic aspects of convention centers )
October 1, 2002... THE 516,000-SQUARE-foot Boston Convention & Exhibition Center cost almost $1 billion to build--and will likely end up a bust. Consultants had predicted the new center, scheduled to open in late 2004, would host 38 conventions in its first...

Party poopers: anti-rave legislation.(Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act of 2002 )
October 1, 2002... YOU THOUGHT IT was bad when you heard that you could lose your house if your son planted a few marijuana seeds in the corner of your yard. That was nothing. Under a Senate bill introduced last summer, you could go to prison for letting him hold...

Sources.(Websites with suggestions for replacements for World Trade Center)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... What should replace the World Trade Center? To help answer that question, New York officials convened 5,000 Americans last July in what was billed as the world's "largest town meeting." But a much larger referendum on the issue was already...

Stephen Laing bought a cabin on five wooded acres near Leyden, Massachusetts. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... Stephen Laing bought a cabin on five wooded acres near Leyden, Massachusetts. It didn't bother him that the cabin didn't have running water or electricity; he wanted to live like Henry David Thoreau. But the Leyden Board of Health apparently...

The 3,000 delegates attending the U.N. World Food Summit, dedicated to fighting global hunger. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... The 3,000 delegates attending the U.N. World Food Summit, dedicated to fighting global hunger, launched their conference with a lunch of foie gras, lobster, and goose stuffed with olives, followed by fruit compote.

Residents of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, would be wise to register their bicycles. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... Residents of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, would be wise to register their bicycles. City officials say the registration helps reduce bicycle thefts and makes it easier to return stolen bikes. In case that doesn't convince bikers, the city has added...

Norway's Labor Market Administration has been looking for a few good women--10 to be exact. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... Norway's Labor Market Administration has been looking for a few good women--10 to be exact. There's just one catch: They must be willing to work nude. The government employment agency has been listing ads on behalf of a firm seeking strippers...

Christine Vetter is looking at five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... Christine Vetter is looking at five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Her crime? Mailing dirty underwear. The 21-year-old Clemson University student ran a Web site where she hawked her used undies. She made about $9,000 over a 16-month...

Henri Dunoyer, mayor of the post resort town of La Grand-Motte in Southern France, has ordered police to stop people leaving the beach in swimwear for an odor check. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... Henri Dunoyer, mayor of the post resort town of La Grand-Motte in southern France, has ordered police to stop people leaving the beach in swimwear for an odor check. Anyone found to be too smelly will be ordered to cover up or pay a fine. He...

An Iranian court has barred Mohammad Khordadian from leaving Iran for 10 years. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... An Iranian court has barred Mohammad Khordadian from leaving Iran for 10 years, preventing him from returning to his life as a Los Angeles-based dance instructor. He had been visiting his ailing father. The court has also barred Khordadian, who...

The Kelowna Heat, a Canadian teenage girls' softball team, had everything it needed to play at a tournament in Spokane, Washington--everything except government-issued photo IDS. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... The Kelowna Heat, a Canadian teenage girls' softball team, had everything it needed to play at a tournament in Spokane, Washington--everything except government-issued photo IDS. When U.S. border officials found the team had only school photo...

History's dustbin: recycling cutbacks. (Citings).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... To HELP NARROW an ever-widening budget deficit, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as scaled back his city's curbside recycling program. On July 1 the city stopped collecting plastics and glass. Bloomberg says those collections won't resume until...

I spy: nosy neighbours. (Citings).(Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or Operation T1PS program )
October 1, 2002... THIS SUMMER THE public learned of the latest wrinkle in President Bush's Citizen Corps: a program known as the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or Operation T1PS. The initial plan was, in essence, to deputize I million Americans as...

Balance sheet.(current laws and cases)
October 1, 2002... Lap Land Clark County, Nevada, has decided not to outlaw lap dances at local strip clubs. Local officials started with a rule that dancers could get no closer than six feet to their fans. But they reversed their position after hearing that...

Taxing smokes. (Data).(cigarette tax)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... In July, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a bill raising New York City's cigarette tax to $1.50 a pack, he said he didn't really want the money. He just wanted to "save people's lives." "If it were totally up to me," he said, "I would...

Privacy test: medical records and the police. (Citings).(judge requisitions medical information from women's health clinic)
October 1, 2002... IN A SMALL town, they say, everyone knows your business. A county judge in Iowa is pushing that tendency to an extreme by requisitioning medical information from a local women's health clinic. The trouble in Storm Lake, a town of about...

Trashy dream houses: home and garbage. (Citings).(Dan Phillips plans to build homes of odd designs from recycled materials)
October 1, 2002... IN HUNTSVILLE, TEXAS, someone may soon be living in a house built to look like a boot. Or a mushroom. Or tap dance legend Gregory Hines. And the house will be made out of trash. Literally. These odd designs are just two of the homes Dan...

Bashing lawyers. (Soundbite).(Court TV host Catherine Crier's new book)(Interview)
October 1, 2002... Catherine Crier, host of Court TV's engaging Catherine Crier Live, may be glamming it up now on the small screen, but she spent years in real courts without a makeup crew in sight. Before her TV career, Crier was a civil litigation attorney, an...

Making a killing in business: when crime pays, there will be plenty of criminals. (Columns).
October 1, 2002... THE REASON THERE are so many murders in Washington, D.C., is that people can get away with it. In the 1990s D.C. police caught fewer than four people for every 10 murders in the District. At the end of 2000, two in three individuals who killed...

One nation, many gods: vouchers, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the separation of church and state. (Columns).
October 1, 2002... IN LATE JUNE two controversial legal rulings, one far more notorious than the other, considered the separation of church and state. On June 26 a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that reciting the Pledge...

Laughter in the ruins: what hasn't changed since 9/11. (Rant).
October 1, 2002... LAST SUMMER SOMEONE e-mailed me an item from angryfinger.com, a satire site that sells T-shirts bearing the slogan "jihad: my anti-drug." According to the article, the authorities had finally settled on a plan for rebailding Lower Manhattan:...

Freedom for safety: an old trade--and a useless one.(privacy and freedom swapped for security and safety following September 11 terrorists attacks )
October 1, 2002... AMID THE MAD, horrific carnage of 9/11--amid the planes screaming into office buildings and cornfields; amid the last-minute phone calls by doomed innocents to loved ones; amid the victims so desperate that they dove from the heights of the...

Face the facts: facial recognition technology's troubled past--and troubling future.
October 1, 2002... WHEN CONSTRUCTION WORKER Rob Milliron sat down to eat his lunch in Tampa's Ybor City entertainment district in July 2001, he didn't expect that it would result in a visit to his workplace by police officers looking to arrest him. His innocent...

The forever war: how long can an emergency last?(war on terrorism)
October 1, 2002... Since 9/11, anyone who has questioned a proposed extension of government power or contraction of individual liberty has had to deal with an intimidating three-word rejoinder: "We're at war." Among other things, "we're at war" has been...

Closing the books: open government after 9/11.(information collected from private industry could be kept secret from public under spcial privilege of Department of Homeland Security)
October 1, 2002... WHEN THE BUSH administration drew up draft legislation to create a new Department of Homeland Security, it included a special privilege for the Office of Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection, a key branch of the new agency....

Fixing foreign policy: how the U.S. should wage the war on terror.
October 1, 2002... FOR MORE THAN half a century, the U.S. military was an instrument of Washington's foreign policy in far-flung regions of the world. The idea of retaliating for an attack on American territory was barely on the radar screen. Not so now....

You've lost your way, baby: how organized feminism has made itself irrelevant.(Ms. magazine)
October 1, 2002... WHAT IF THEY tried to revive feminism's official media mouthpiece and nobody cared? That's what's been happening with Ms. magazine, which says something about the general state of organized feminism today. Last fall Ms. was sold to the Feminist...

Biology vs. the Blank Slate: evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker deconstructs the great myths about how the mind works.
October 1, 2002... STEVEN PINKER HAS BEEN called "science's agent provocateur" by the Guardian, named an "evolutionary pop star" by The Washington Post, as a "wunderkind" by The Washington Post, and acclaimed by the London Times as both a "world-class cognitive...

Hidden country: the secret family tree of country music. (Culture and Reviews).(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Where Dead Voices Gather, by Nick Tosches, New York: Little, Brown, 330 pages, $24.95 Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture, by Barbara Ching New York: Oxford University Press, 186 pages, $22 THE...

Bitch Goddess: Ann Coulter's perverse appeal.
October 1, 2002... On September 13, 2001, columnist Ann Coulter offered up the single most infamous foreign policy suggestion inspired by 9/11. Writing about Muslims, she declared, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to...

Dangerous thinkers: 20th-century philosophers' love affair with totalitarianism.('The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics')(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, by Mark Lila, New York: New York Review of Books, 216 pages, $24.95 IF PHILOSOPHERS WERE ranked like baseball players, you'd wind up with three generally agreed-upon Hall of Famers: Socrates,...

Smash! Pow! Bam! Why superheroes go bankrupt.(investor Ron Perelman)
October 1, 2002... MEGA-INVESTOR RON Perelman has all the traits of a comic book supervillain. He's massively wealthy and powerful More to the point, he exudes enough vanity and overreach to make Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom seem like a couple of Girl Scouts. So it's...

Performance anxiety: the tragedy of Asian success.('Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White')(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, by Frank H. Wu, New York: Basic Books, 399 pages, $26 IN 1999, CONGRESSIONAL Republicans and the Clinton administration revived the old diplomatic game known as "Who Lost China?" This...

No go logo. (Artifact).(logos for Information Awareness Office and the Patent and Trademark Office)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... SUPPOSE YOU'RE DEVISING a logo for a new wing of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an office charged with developing intelligence tools and integrating the government's existing surveillance networks. Suppose it has a vaguely...

The challenges of charter schools.
October 1, 2002... Charter schools are now ten years old, and the movement is still spreading. About 2,400 charter schools have been operating in 2001-2002. A handful of cities now find 15-20 percent of their kids enrolled in charters. Yet some of the wind is...