The Public Interest articles from March 1996

The Public Interest archives from March 1996

All quiet on the (post) Western front? (multiculturalism)
March 22, 1996... Class criticized poem for its lack of a woman's perspective. Note the unconscious gender privileging - his terror, his glory, his phallic monuments. - A student's notes of a class on Yeats's "Meru," from Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater....

Monuments in an age without heroes.
March 22, 1996... It was not much noted, or indeed noted at all, that the Million Man March in Washington last November took place in front of what was described in the 1937 Works Progress Administration (WPA) guide to Washington as the "the largest and most...

The cultural contradictions of conservatism.
March 22, 1996... A poetic episode in our national history occurred July 4, 1826. On that 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the author of that founding document, Thomas Jefferson, died. So did John Adams, who did as much as anyone to produce...

Gambling away our moral capital.
March 22, 1996... DURING the past generation, there has been a dramatic expansion of legalized gambling. Beginning with New Hampshire in 1964, 37 states and the District of Columbia have instituted lotteries. As recently as 1988, only two states allowed casino...

Legalization madness. (legalizing drugs)
March 22, 1996... Frustrated by the government's apparent inability to reduce the supply of illegal drugs on the streets of America, and disquieted by media accounts of innocents victimized by drug-related violence, some policy makers are convinced that the "war...

Doing methadone right.
March 22, 1996... Heroin looks like it is here to stay. Since the 1960s, millions of Americans have used heroin. Most stopped, with or without treatment, at some point. But there are an estimated half-million Americans addicted to heroin and a comparable number...

Medicalizing character.
March 22, 1996... Hailed as "the most far-reaching legislation ever enacted against discrimination of people with disabilities," the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) extends the civil-rights protections of individuals with disabilities to employment, public...

Orphanages: the real story.
March 22, 1996... When the word "orphanage" is used, Americans typically cringe, imagining that the children who grew up in one had the crudest and cruelest of childhoods. Harsh, unrelenting critics of orphanages continue to play on these popular images of...

Whatever happened to the American way of death?
March 22, 1996... A few decades ago, we knew perfectly well what to make of the American way of death. it was overly sentimentalized, highly commercialized, and, above all, excessively expensive. We knew all this be cause our British friends, both visitors and...

Toward a More Perfect Union.
March 22, 1996... Herbert Storing was probably the outstanding scholar of the American Founding of the past generation. Before he died in 1977 - a heart attack at the age of 49 - he had completed most of the work on a fully annotated, seven-volume collection of...

Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California.
March 22, 1996... The aim of Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California[dagger] is to demonstrate "how and why the concerns of the arts communities came to enter into the general culture." Richard Candida Smith, assistant professor of history at...