The Public Interest articles from January 2000

The Public Interest archives from January 2000

The spirit of capitalism, 2000.(emotional maturity of adults)
January 1, 2000... EACH of us brings his favorite examples to the table when the subject of contemporary adult immaturity is raised. From the multitude of news items that, by turns, offend and amaze, I offer the following two as especially illustrative of our...

Pedophilia and the culture wars.(debating harmful effects of pedophilia)
January 1, 2000... D R. Laura was outraged. The widely syndicated talk radio guru devoted her March 22 radio show, with an estimated audience of 18 million listeners, as well as a May 12 news conference, to an attack on "garbage science" and those who would...

Welfare reform and reducing teen pregnancy.
January 1, 2000... ALMOST no one thinks it's a good idea for unwed teenagers to become parents. It would be the odd parent, indeed, who counseled their own teenage son or daughter to start a family. Most parents hope that their children will finish school, find a...

McLuhan's world--and ours.(cultural critic Marshall McLuhan)
January 1, 2000... A NEW nonliterary culture exists today, of whose existence, not to mention significance, most literary intellectuals are entirely unaware," wrote Susan Sontag in her groundbreaking 1965 essay, "One Culture and the New Sensibility." The new...

Budgeting more, deciding less.(budget politics and social policy)
January 1, 2000... BUDGETING is governing," declares Pete V. Domenici, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. Few would challenge this statement. Budgeting has always been at the heart of policy making. Since the early 1980s, however, the budget has been the...

The bad law of "disparate impact".(discrimination)
January 1, 2000... THE "disparate impact" theory of discrimination is curious, ubiquitous, and mischievous. The theory holds that when an action has a disproportionate effect on some group (racial, ethnic, gender, whatever), it can be challenged as illegal...

To the "disadvantaged" go the spoils?(minority business contracts)
January 1, 2000... IN the summer of 1998, the U.S. Department of Commerce released a controversial study supporting a form of affirmative action for minority-owned businesses. These businesses, when competing to provide goods and services to the federal...

Designing the cityscape.
January 1, 2000... FREDERICK Law Olmsted, who spent much of his life designing places where people could find refuge, never seemed to find refuge for himself. He never settled down and built a private estate where he could retire and retreat from the pressures of...

Madness and Enlightenment.
January 1, 2000... IN his highly influential book, Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault indicted the modern West for its treatment of the "insane." According to Foucault, Western societies, bowing before the Enlightenment idol of Reason, built a theoretical...

Innocence lost.
January 1, 2000... CONSIDERING contemporary society's preoccupation with children, it's quite logical to conclude that ours is a child-centered culture. From "child-directed" curricula, to "child-friendly" restaurants, to "kiddiepalooza" rock concerts, the pace...

Priestess of progress.
January 1, 2000... A DISCUSSION has emerged on the Right of our political spectrum about the future and its prospects. It arises from the concern that our future be one of progress rather than regress, of innovation, both technologically and socially, rather than...

The shadow government.
January 1, 2000... HOW many federal employees work for the government? About half of them, says the old joke. Fewer than when we got in, says the Clinton administration. Now comes Paul Light of the Brookings Institution, with his book The True Size of Government,...

Community action for the 1990s.
January 1, 2000... THANKS to its success and growth, the community-development approach to urban renewal is finally attracting serious scholarly attention. As documented in Urban Problems and Community Development, [+] a volume of essays based on a Brookings...