Six months after opening, the Getty Center, the $1 billion mountaintop museum that has become Los Angeles’s biggest cultural attraction, started running newspaper ads asking people not to come. Featuring a dozen happy kids from different races, the ads were …
Dennis Wrong presents a laundry list of arguments that have been brought up by critics of tenure. He seems to favor replacing tenure with a more market-driven system that would get rid of all those incompetents in our midst. At …
Why should college and university professors have job security, when so many other Americans are losing theirs? From U.S. News & World Report to the Los Angeles Times to the Washington Post, powerful voices are asking that question, and answering …
This past fall, Hilton Kramer, America’s angriest art critic, began his fifteenth year editing the New Criterion, the neocon journal of art and culture. In Kramer’s lead comment in the journal’s “special anniversary issue,” he rededicated the journal to fighting …
The right dominates talk radio; the left has been singularly unsuccessful in this medium. Does it have to be that way? Rush Limbaugh is on the radio three hours a day (noon to three in the Eastern Time zone), five …
The concept of the ‘official secret’ is the specific invention of bureaucracy,” Max Weber wrote, “and nothing is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy.” Democratic politics requires a public informed about government decisions, policies, and actions; yet government officials everywhere …
“All wars end in tourism,” writes Tom Vanderbilt—even the Cold War. Thus we can visit the Nevada Test Site, the Titan Missile Museum, and the fallout shelter exhibit at the Smithsonian. The most extravagant of all U.S. Cold War tourist …
Political memories are sometimes short. A year before the election, it seemed that it would be easy for any one of several Democrats to defeat the man who pardoned Nixon. What seemed difficult was for any of them to defeat …
Watergate is history. The time has come to seek a theoretical perspective on those tumultuous events, to move away from yesterday’s feverish absorption with “the facts” and confront the significance of Watergate for American politics and society—particularly to consider the …
A footnote appears, at first sight a trivial thing, and easily understood. But in the pages of the new Social Sciences Citation Index, these scholarly creations step forth as independent beings, endowed with a life of their own. The Citation …
