The Public Interest articles from September 2002

The Public Interest archives from September 2002

Our secularist democratic party.
September 22, 2002... ANYONE who has followed American politics over the past decade cannot help but feel some concern about the supposed fundamentalist Christian threat to democratic civility, pluralism, and tolerance. At the very least, the attentive citizen would...

Do we need the census race question?
September 22, 2002... A FEW years ago, asked to comment on the controversy over the demand of so-called multiracial advocacy groups for a "multiracial" category in the census, I made a brash and wildly unrealistic proposal. I will describe the proposal in a moment,...

The lost sense of honor.
September 22, 2002... HONOR, though it has been in bad shape for most of the last century, has never really gone away. What has more or less vanished out of our culture is much of the language of honor and shame that was familiar to our parents and grandparents, and...

The three faith factors.
September 22, 2002... How, if at all, does religion affect health and social welfare? Under what, if any, conditions does religion help to improve the lives of disadvantaged urban children and families, and how, if at all, can we foster those conditions? Is there...

How the terrorists get in.
September 22, 2002... IN the aftermath of September 11, a host of federal agencies have come under intense scrutiny. The Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency have all been charged with...

Politics after the Internet.
September 22, 2002... IT is no longer in vogue, as it was just a few years ago, to gush breathlessly about politics in the age of the Internet. In the late 1990s, many commentators were convinced that a new day had dawned in the life of our republic. Some said...

Guns in the U.S. and U.K. (Review).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... GUNS and Violence: The English Experience + was clearly intended as a contribution to the ongoing American debate about gun control. Several years ago, Joyce Lee Malcolm, an historian at Bentley College, published a careful study of the English...

What's at stake in biotech? (Review).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... WHILE the fall of the Berlin wall and collapse of the Soviet Union have relegated George Orwell's 1984 to history's dustbin, the other great dystopian tract of the twentieth century, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, is more timely than ever....

Getting over the wall. (Review).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... THIS year is the two hundredth anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist Association that asserted that the Constitution erected a "wall of separation between church and state." So profoundly has that metaphor affected...

The indispensable innovator. (Review).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... IN his latest contribution to our understanding of how firms work in capitalist economies, Princeton economist William Baumol argues that innovation is the force behind the wealth of nations or, as he puts it, "the growth miracle of...

A new feminism? (Review).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... FEMINISM is a little like the local dowager who people say was a great beauty in her day, though to the young she seems only a cranky old lady. Only about a quarter of women are willing to call themselves feminists these days, and those who do...

Capital punishment in America. (Review).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... NOTWITHSTANDING its somber subject matter, Stuart Banner's The Death Penalty: An American History (t) is a joy to read. Besides being lucid and informative, Banner is almost preternaturally even handed in his presentation of the arguments that...

Correction.
September 22, 2002... David L. Kirp, co-author of "Mr. Jefferson's University Breaks Up," issue No. 148, should have been identified as a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley. He is currently writing a book on the...