Volume 9, No. 9 - December/January 2000
FIELD NOTES
Sticking your neck out / New Russia's old profs / Cult crackdown, and more
BREAKTHROUGH BOOKS
Beautiful Books
INSIDE PUBLISHING
Rock and Roll Watergate / The anti-abstractionist / Morbid monographs, and more
IS BAD WRITING NECESSARY?
Fifty years ago, two icons of the independent left came to radically different conclusions on the relationship between politics and writing. Today's heated debates over academic prose only seem new. In fact, they repeat the powerful arguments George Orwell and Theodor Adorno once set forth.
by James Miller
THE POSTMODERN MISSION
With their frank indebtedness to Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, postmodernist theologians are troubling the waters of the evangelical academy. Is deconstruction the last best hope of traditional Protestantism? Or, as its critics charge, just one more sign that evangelical colleges have become too liberal, too secular, and too worldly?
by Charlotte Allen
GAMES PEOPLE PLAY
Who says that rational choice theory is only for the cold of heart? Dissatisfied with accepted theories of decision making, the "revisionist rationalist" believe that human cooperation, commitment, and rule following can be shown to obey the iron laws of the instrumental calculus. Have they solved reason's most intractable riddles? Or have they merely changed the rules of the game?
by James Ryerson
PROJECT ÜBERMENSCH
Last July, the iconoclastic German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk suggested that only genetic engineering could realize the idealisitic aspirations of humanism. After a pause, the German press erupted in controversy this fall as intellectuals rushed to take seides on Slotterdijk's "dangerous thinking." Was there really something else at stake?
by Andrew Piper
HYPOTHESES
Jim Holt on the reasons of rebirth.
