Books and Ideas

Voiding Checkbook Politics Voiding Checkbook Politics

Even as campaign finance reformers celebrated the long-awaited passage of the McCain-Feingold bill this spring, they cautioned the public not to assume the fight for reform was ov...

Jun 27, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Jane Manners

Black Unlike Me Black Unlike Me

Historians have made much of the ways that the social protest movements of the 1960s unsettled the morals of the dominant culture, but it is often forgotten that activists themselv...

Jun 27, 2002 / Books & the Arts / John McMillian

The Thrill Is Gone The Thrill Is Gone

It's easy to rephrase Tolstoy's opening to Anna Karenina so it describes junkies, who all share an essential plot line: Who and how to hustle in order to score. But in the world o...

Jun 27, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro

‘The Enemy Within’ ‘The Enemy Within’

There are perfectly respectable reasons to disagree with, dislike or distrust Jesse Jackson. His flaws as a human being are pretty well-known at this point. Some feel his politics...

Jun 27, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Patricia J. Williams

In Cold Type In Cold Type

Southern Exposure, which somehow looks--even in its third decade, in the twenty-first century--as if very advanced high school students had just stapled it together and put it on ...

Jun 27, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Amy Wilentz

Too Much Monkey Business Too Much Monkey Business

I received the news of paleontologist and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould's death, at age 60, in the week I was reading Jonathan Marks's new book on genetics, human evolu...

Jun 20, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Micaela di Leonardo

Riders on the Storm Riders on the Storm

Dread ripples through me as I listen to a phone message from our manager saying that we (The Doors) have another offer of huge amounts of money if we would just allow one of our s...

Jun 20, 2002 / Books & the Arts / John Densmore

DYNASTIES! DYNASTIES!

How their wealth and power threaten democracy

Jun 20, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Kevin Phillips

Islam’s Divided Crescent Islam’s Divided Crescent

On September 23, 2001, midpoint between the horrific events of September 11 and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, the New York Times ran an intriguing headline. "Forget the...

Jun 20, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Anthony Arnove

Jefferson’s Patsy? Jefferson’s Patsy?

No one has contributed more to the United States than James Madison. He was the principal architect of the Constitution, the brilliant theorist who, more than any other single ind...

Jun 20, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Carl T. Bogus

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