The Public Interest articles from March 2005

The Public Interest archives from March 2005

Notice to our readers.
March 22, 2005... The issue you hold in your hands will be The Public Interest's last. No journal is meant to last forever, and this one won't try to. We have decided, after forty years, to call it a day. "The aim of The Public Interest," we remarked in our...

Forty good years.(LOOKING BACK)
March 22, 2005... BACK in 1965, in New York, my old friend Daniel Bell, then a professor of sociology at Columbia University, and I, then vice-president of the publishing firm Basic Books, were deeply troubled. The source of our discomfort was the mode of...

Neoconservative from the start.(LOOKING BACK)
March 22, 2005... WHEN Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol were discussing founding a new journal, The Public Interest, I was teaching at the University of California in Berkeley, after having worked for a year in the Kennedy administration in the Housing and Home...

About the public interest.(LOOKING BACK)
March 22, 2005... I ARRIVED at The Public Interest in the spring of 1994. Irving Kristol would soon, in an excess of modesty, declare neoconservatism a generational phenomenon, now absorbed into a larger conservative whole. Yet less than a decade later, I was...

Spies and bureaucrats: getting intel right.(United States intelligence community)
March 22, 2005... THE American intelligence community has suffered two blows to its credibility in the past three and a half years. First, intelligence agencies failed to detect al Qaeda's terrorist plans for September 11, 2001. Then, estimates of Iraq's weapons...

Character and culture.
March 22, 2005... IN The Public Interest's twentieth anniversary issue, an essay appeared suggesting that Americans were increasingly concerned about the question of character. After many years of worrying about economic cycles, industrial management, and the...

Public art for the public.(Art in Public Places Program)(Art in Architecture Program)
March 22, 2005... THERE used to be two federal programs dedicated to funding public art. Now there is one. This isn't an accident--a bureaucratic trick of fate or yet another example of congressional budgetary perfidy. It is easy to imagine circumstances in...

Love and marriage--and family law.
March 22, 2005... FAMILY law is in turmoil. It is on the front pages of our newspapers and is implicated in some of our deepest cultural dilemmas and conflicts, from no-fault divorce to the legal status of unmarried cohabiters to, most recently, same-sex...

Assimilation, past and present.(waves of immigration)(Hispanic population in United States)
March 22, 2005... IS AMERICA'S Anglo-Protestant-African-Catholic-Indian-German-Irish-Jewish-Italian-Slavic-Asian society in danger of "Hispanicization?" The obvious answer is "no." Every major new addition to American society has been viewed in its time as a...

What ails health care.
March 22, 2005... NOW are we ready to talk about health care?" asked Senator Hillary Clinton in the title of her New York Times op-ed last year. In fact, have we ever stopped talking about it? Medicare reform, prescription drug costs, the uninsured--these issues...

The media we deserve.(responsible journalism)
March 22, 2005... The media in the United States have been under close scrutiny since at least the Vietnam War. People began to notice that journalists did not merely report events, but shaped them and our attitude toward them. Television was especially praised...

Rethinking the population problem.(SECOND THOUGHTS)
March 22, 2005... I FIRST met Lord Peter Tamas Bauer (1917-2002) in October 1977, five years before the already eminent professor was made a life peer for his pioneering contributions to the field of development economics. For me, this was a fateful encounter, a...

Enlightenments, modest and otherwise.(REVIEW)(The Roads to Modernity)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after the 2004 election, Garry Wills, who has been known to write sensible things on occasion, came apart at the seams. In a New York Times op-ed titled "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out," Wills bemoaned an America in which...

Missing moms, kids in crisis.(REVIEW)(Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... MARY EBERSTADT'S pull-no-punches book Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes [dagger] is bound to stir memories for those of us who have been on the front lines of the family debates. In...

Bradley Prizes: congratulations to the 2005 Bradley Prize recipients.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2005... GEORGE F. WILL Author; Columnist; Contributing Analyst with ABC News; Pulitzer Prize Winner [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] HEATHER MAC DONALD John M. Olin Fellow, Manhattan Institute; Contributing Editor to City Journal ...

Liberals by any other name.(REVIEW)(The Communitarian Reader: Beyond the Essentials)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... LIBERALISM began as an attack on traditional communities. Abstracting from all the lived differences that mattered to those communities, like religion, breeding, caste, and trade, and replacing them with the universal right to liberty to...

Where have all the children gone?(REVIEW)(Fewer)(The Empty Cradle)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... PROGRESSIVES have long worried that world population is rising too much and too fast, and that poor nations will never modernize if they continue to procreate without limits. But in reality, concerns about overpopulation are wholly misplaced,...