The Public Interest articles from September 1996

The Public Interest archives from September 1996

A Supreme Court in the culture wars.
September 22, 1996... Justice Antonin Scalia made the point with characteristic bluntness. Dissenting from the Supreme Court's 1996 decision in Evans v. Romer, Scalia protested that the majority ruling "takes sides in the culture wars." Even those who approve the...

Boston's City on a Hill. (City On A Hill Charter School in Boston, Massachusetts)
September 22, 1996... City On A Hill Charter School in Boston, one of the first 14 charter schools in Massachusetts, opened its doors to 65 ninth and tenth graders on September 5, 1995. It is the only charter public high school in Boston, and the only charter school...

School choice in Milwaukee. (school-voucher plan)
September 22, 1996... To object to compromise is to question a great American political craft. The Constitution could not have been written without compromising the differences between the large and small states. The Missouri Compromise postponed the Civil War for 40...

AIDS and the media.
September 22, 1996... A twofold lesson about science and the media emerges from a reading of the scientific and popular literature about AIDS: It's not just that the media can, at times, misinform us about what science says; it's also that science often speaks in an...

New Jersey's experiment in welfare reform.
September 22, 1996... In the wake of the welfare-reform plan passed by its legislature in January of 1992, the state of New Jersey has seen a significant reduction in birth rates and welfare dependency in its poorest cities. And, paradoxically, the new evidence of...

Welfare reform and marriage.
September 22, 1996... Welfare reform has traditionally focused on helping single mothers get jobs, perhaps with the help of government-funded job training and child care. But such efforts are expensive and have shown only modest results. Recently, long-overdue efforts...

The realities of day care. (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care)
September 22, 1996... The most far-reaching and comprehensive study to date has found that using child care does not affect infants' trust in their mothers." Thus began a front-page story in the April 21 edition of the New York Times, summarizing preliminary findings...

New York: the "old city." (The Encyclopedia of New York City)
September 22, 1996... The appearance of The Encyclopedia of New York City,(*) edited by Kenneth T. Jackson, leads one to think of one of Parkinson's laws: When the capital is complete, the empire is ready to fall. Or perhaps, more grandly, of Hegel's owl of Minerva,...

The Encyclopedia of New York City.
September 22, 1996... The appearance of The Encyclopedia of New York City,(*) edited by Kenneth T. Jackson, leads one to think of one of Parkinson's laws: When the capital is complete, the empire is ready to fall. Or perhaps, more grandly, of Hegel's owl of Minerva,...

Left For Dead.
September 22, 1996... Recently, I took part in a series of auditions for a television talk show. I'm a conservative white male so I was put on a panel with a black male liberal and a white Jewish feminist. On the next panel, there was a blond feminist, a white male...

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor.
September 22, 1996... In his new book, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor,(*) William Julius Wilson argues that "the disappearance of work and the consequences of that disappearance for both social and cultural life are the central problems in the...

Migrations and Cultures: A World View.
September 22, 1996... Twenty years ago, Thomas Sowell was one of the first scholars to document and analyze how immigrant blacks outperformed their U.S.-born counterparts. It is no surprise, then, that his latest book, Migrations and Cultures: A World View,(*)...