The Public Interest articles from January 1997

The Public Interest archives from January 1997

Criminal justice in England and America.
January 1, 1997... Twenty years ago, I discussed in this magazine how England and America dealt with crime.(1) Then, crime in both nations was increasing rapidly. England, of course, had vastly fewer violent offenses than the United States, but even with property...

Increasing inequality of wealth?
January 1, 1997... This article is about the distribution of wealth in the United States, not the distribution of income, about which much has recently been written. I stress this at the outset because the two are often confused in popular discussions of...

Are CEOs overpaid?
January 1, 1997... America's corpocrats can take some solace from recent polls. In a recent Roper Center survey, higher percentages of those polled said that athletes (90 percent), entertainers (86 percent), and lawyers (86 percent) are overpaid than said the same...

The end of courtship. (disappearance of courtship customs in America)
January 1, 1997... In the current wars over the state of American culture, few battlegrounds have seen more action than that of "family values" - sex, marriage, and child-rearing. Passions run high about sexual harassment, condom distribution in schools,...

Inside the teacher's culture. (declining quality of teacher education)
January 1, 1997... One of the clear victories of the Left in its effort to remake American society has been the transformation of the nation's schools. Once charged with the task of transmitting a common culture and imparting the skills required to understand that...

Individualism: new and old.
January 1, 1997... In the beginning it was something only academics talked and wrote about, though it was something most everyone was aware of. I am referring to the disappearance of community or civil society in contemporary American life. If one were to mark when...

Slouching Towards Gomorrah.
January 1, 1997... Robert H. Bork's provocative book on the culture, Slouching Towards Gomorrah,(*) will unsettle, depress, and agitate - and that goes only for conservative readers. Some will find themselves pining for Reaganesque kickers to brighten the bleakness...

The Essential Neoconservative Reader.
January 1, 1997... I still remember the shocked expression on the face of the rabbi who performed my wife's conversion. We were sitting on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and this nice liberal rabbi asked what being Jewish meant to me. I threw out the first thing...

Body Count: Moral Poverty and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs.
January 1, 1997... As concerns about the economy have faded in 1996, crime has emerged as one of the dominant political issues. To some, this may seem puzzling. After years of partisan wrangling, a significant crime bill was enacted in 1994, and more police are now...

Fixing Broken Windows.
January 1, 1997... As concerns about the economy have faded in 1996, crime has emerged as one of the dominant political issues. To some, this may seem puzzling. After years of partisan wrangling, a significant crime bill was enacted in 1994, and more police are now...

Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.
January 1, 1997... Of the many proofs of the existence of God, perhaps the one that makes the most direct appeal to our intuition and common sense is the Argument from Design. Writing in 1840, Macaulay observed: A philosopher of the present day... has before him...

Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth.
January 1, 1997... It is generally easier to attack someone else's thesis than to advance your own. That lesson is borne out in Inequality by Design: Cracking The Bell Curve Myth,(*) a critique of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's study of the importance...

The Irony of Free Speech.
January 1, 1997... The good news about The Irony of Free Speech(*) is that its author rejects the absolutist reading of the First Amendment that, short of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, would prohibit any and all restrictions by government on freedom of...

The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them.
January 1, 1997... Opinion polls routinely find the quality of American education to be a matter of grave concern among the public. For example, a September 1996, Washington Post poll found that over 60 percent of its respondents worried "a great deal" that the...