The Public Interest articles from March 2001

The Public Interest archives from March 2001

Thinking about a "New Economy.(the effects of technology on an economy and society)
March 22, 2001... THE Industrial Revolution that began about 200 years ago lives in the collective memory as a cavalcade of inventors and machines: James Watt and the steam engine, Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, Cyrus McCormick and the reaper, Charles Goodyear...

Religion in the 2000 election.(religion in America)
March 22, 2001... A RECENT survey of the role of religion in American life opens: "Few Americans were surprised to find religion a continuing leitmotif in the past year's presidential election." [1] In fact, most Americans were surprised when religion began to...

The trouble with parties.(evaluation of political parties in America)
March 22, 2001... THE presidential election of 2000 presented the United States and the world with a vivid lesson in the power of political partisanship and its potentially damaging effects. Through five long weeks of angry confrontations in the legislature, the...

Is technology a threat to liberal society?
March 22, 2001... To say that I know nothing about science would be the understatement of the century. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, but unhappily, I didn't go to Brooklyn Poly. I went to City College instead. I don't know why, just a family tradition. It...

Courtship today: the view from academia.
March 22, 2001... COURTSHIP charts pathways to marriage. Its customs and rituals help individuals negotiate the complex transition from sexual attraction, through love, to lasting marriage. It provides, for better or worse, the moral and emotional education for...

Media and business elites: still in conflict?(Statistical Data Included)
March 22, 2001... FROM 1979 through 1980, S. Robert Lichter and the senior author of this article surveyed 13 American leadership groups. Two of these groups were businessmen chosen from various Fortune listings and journalists drawn from the country's most...

Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism.
March 22, 2001... OF the major political thinkers of his generation--including Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Michael Oakeshott, and Leo Strauss--Bertrand de Jouvenel suffers from relative neglect. During the 1950s and 1960s, the French philosopher and political...

Community and the social scientist.
March 22, 2001... As most readers of this journal will already know, Robert Putnam's important and massively documented new book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, [+] represents an elaboration of his memorable and enormously...

Men at work.
March 22, 2001... THE Philadelphia neighborhood where I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s was Irish, Italian, and Polish, in that order. Nearly everybody prayed Catholic and voted Democratic. Dads were cops, firemen, bricklayers, or truck drivers. Some moms were...

Can art be defined?
March 22, 2001... CERTAINTY is a marvelous thing. It not only provides a useful carapace against the onslaughts of doubt; it also does wonders for one's self-confidence. It is perhaps the one mental commodity that everyone, admirers and critics alike, will agree...

Compassion gone mad.
March 22, 2001... IF a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality, then Heather Mac Donald may be the most neoconservative person alive, given the many muggings she has put herself through in the last five years. From inner-city schools to law schools, from...