The Public Interest articles from March 1997

The Public Interest archives from March 1997

Ritalin: miracle drug of cop-out?
March 22, 1997... Imagine yourself sitting in a classroom - say, a fourth-grade social-studies class. There is a teacher at the front of the room, but a groundskeeper mowing grass outside captures your attention instead. When the mower moves away, however, you...

On patriotism.
March 22, 1997... Patriotism means love of country and implies a readiness to sacrifice for it, to fight for it, perhaps even to give one's life for it. In the traditional or Spartan sense, patriots are those who love their country simply because it is their...

How to mend affirmative action.
March 22, 1997... My scholarly work on the problem of race relations began with a general inquiry into the theory of economic inequality. Specifically, my 1981 paper, "Intergenerational Transfers and the Distribution of Earnings," which appeared in the journal...

Art without beauty.
March 22, 1997... Few things tell us more about a culture - what it esteems, what it disparages - than its art. The plays of Sophocles distill an essence of Periclean Athens just as the paintings of Titian bring us near to the heart of seventeenth-century Venetian...

The new museology.
March 22, 1997... Our relationship with museums is based on trust. But while we expect history museums to know the facts and science museums to understand the math, we demand more from art museums. We go to paintings and sculptures much as we do great novels,...

Black studies revisited.
March 22, 1997... Nearly 30 years after their inception in the campus disorders of the 1960s, black-studies programs continue to be a subject of controversy - at least in those departments that promote Afrocentrism. To be sure, black studies means different things...

Measuring Catholic school performance.
March 22, 1997... In 1980, the late James S. Coleman, a prominent, University of Chicago sociologist, conducted a comprehensive study of student performance in secondary schools. This study was commissioned by the Department of Education, and many expected it...

Vouchers for religious schools.
March 22, 1997... The American public, if opinion polls are to be believed, overwhelmingly prefers private to public schools. A recent poll in USA Today reports that, among respondents with school-age children, 47 percent would use private schools "if they had the...

Litigation's stranglehold on charities.
March 22, 1997... Our civil-justice system is out of control. The research group Tillinghast reports that we spent $132 billion on this system in 1991 alone. That number includes money spent on courts, lawyers, and lost time. It represents two-and-a-half times...

Violent Land.
March 22, 1997... One has always heard that the United States is more violent than other nations, but the statistics still come as a shock. To document American exceptionalism, David T. Courtwright includes comparative homicide figures for a group of 16 developed...

The Divorce Culture.
March 22, 1997... In the late 1970s certain professional responsibilities required my attendance at an annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. At that particular meeting, there were two separate sessions devoted to papers in the then newly...

Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin.
March 22, 1997... Stephen Jay Gould's latest book, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin,(*) is a grab-bag of miscellany - his successful struggle with cancer, the disappearance of the .400 hitter in baseball, Plato's theory of ideas, the...

Assimilation, American Style.
March 22, 1997... Peter Salins's book Assimilation, American Style(*) is a labor of love as much as of scholarship. A child of immigrants who became editor-in-chief of City Journal and later professor of urban affairs and planning at Hunter College, he has lived...