Articles 2024
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Overcoming Merit
The ugly agenda behind the overclass hype.
Reason, October 1995
Jews get into Ivy League schools. So do women. So do Southerners from public high schools and second-generation Italian Americans educated by nuns. -
Unabomber
This terrorist seeks to destroy the notion that human achievement can overcome the tyrannies of nature and chance.
Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1995
Among my husband' souvenirs from graduate school is a memo from Franco Modigliani, who has since won the Nobel prize in economics, telling students and colleagues of a friend's murder by the Red Brigades for the crime of being an economist. It is a reminder that the contemplative life is not without its enemies or its risks. -
Technology = Freedom?
Forbes ASAP, August 27, 1995
Is information technology inherently liberating? Is it true, as George Gilder proclaimed in this magazine in February, that Moore's Law "means that all of the monopolies and hierarchies and pyramids and power grids of industrial society are going to dissolve"? Or, as Tom Peters said in the same issue, that "governments are becoming irrelevant"? -
The Lethal Center
The danger of quick-fix consensus.
Reason, August/September 1995
In 1949, a 32-year-old child of the New Deal wrote a book that sought to establish the limits of respectable political thought--of consensus and common sense--in the conformist post-World War II era. Positioning himself between the "Doughface progressives" who believed in the perfectibility of man and the "plutocratic reactionaries" who supported free markets, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. defined his own position in his book's title: The Vital Center. Summing up the spirit of his age, he wrote, "During most of my political consciousness this has been a New Deal country. I expect it will continue to be a New Deal country." -
Interview with the Vamp: An Interview with Camille Paglia
Keeping up with a rapid-fire radical
Reason, August/September 1995
Hurricane Camille swept into American culture five years ago with the publication of Sexual Personae, a learned 800-page treatise on sex, art, and literature through the ages. After two decades of rejection and obscurity, Camille Paglia was famous. Her demanding master work wasn't exactly accessible to the educated lay reader, but it became a bestseller--as have her subsequent reader-friendly essay collections Sex, Art, and American Culture and Vamps & Tramps. -
Fighting Words
Blurring the distinctions between criticizing big government and blowing up innocent people.
Reason, July 1995
"Most greens can still consider themselves nonviolent for one reason: Their victims don't fight back. So far no one has taken up arms to defend his logging equipment against Earth First! sabotage or his factory against EPA closure....The 'debased human protoplasm' that [environmentalist writer Stephanie] Mills holds in contempt...will not go down non-violently....And many ordinary human beings will not give up the right to own land without a fight, complete with guns." -
Knowledge at a Cost
Forbes ASAP, June 04, 1995
"Information wants to be free" is more than a hacker motto. In many discussions of information technology, it's an unwritten assumption. Once we're all hooked up to the Internet, or e-mail, or Lotus Notes, the story goes, everyone will know everything about every job. Hierarchy and specialization will vanish. We'll get all the information we needÜall the knowledge we need -- via the Net. -
Food Fight
The unreality of the school lunch debate.
Reason, June 1995
I will admit a certain prejudice against the school lunch program. It all started in 1966 when, as a first grader, I paid my $1.00 a week and got in return the worst food ever concocted outside of a prison camp--a diet heavy on collard greens and fish sticks. Even the spaghetti was inedible, a congealed mass of nearly sauceless pasta that bore no resemblance to my mother's specialty -
Curb Your Dog!
Washington insiders don't understand that government actions are dangerous.
Reason, May 1995
You're jogging down your neighborhood street, as your large Labrador retriever bounds along beside you, occasionally heading into a front yard to sniff out things of interest to dogs, occasionally leaving an unwelcome calling card for the neighbors to clean up. You round a corner and there, playing happily in the grass, is a little girl, maybe 4 years old, whose mother is watching her from a lawn chair -
So Long, Organization Man
Review of White-Collar Blues: Management Loyalties in an Age of Corporate Restructuring, by Charles Heckscher
The Wall Street Journal, April 11, 1995
White-Collar Blues: Management Loyalties in an Age of Corporate Restructuring (Basic Books, 224 pages, $23) is a good book in bad packaging. From the downbeat title to the blurbs from such economic doomsayers as Barry Bluestone and Clyde Prestowitz, the cover promises another screed on the evils of corporate downsizing.