• March 28, 2001
  The Information Revolution is by no means sui generis. It is best viewed as a new chapter in the book that opened with the original Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, says Timothy Taylor of The Public Interest...[more]
  
  
• March 27, 2001
  Manna from heaven or slick con job? A young Internet mogul charms poets and promises millions to college writing programs, but the dollars haven't materialized. Eli Sanders of the Seattle Times reports...[more]
  
  
• March 26, 2001
  Many economists have given up trying to explain to a confused public the complexities of international trade theory. But Jagdish Bhagwati has not shied away from the task, writes Jeffrey Frankel in Foreign Affairs...[more]
  
  ALSO: LF's Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood on Bhagwati and the anti sweatshop activists.
  
  
• March 22, 2001
  Campus speech codes may have been discredited in recent years, but self-righteous intolerance of dissent remains all too common among progressive students on liberal campuses, says Wendy Kaminer in The American Prospect...[more]
  
  
• March 21, 2001
  Stone throwing scholar Edward Said has run afoul of the Freud Society of Vienna, which cancelled a May speaking engagement by the Columbia professor. Tunku Varadarajan stands up for Said in The Wall Street Journal...[more]
  
  
• March 20, 2001
  His canvas is the stuff of life itself. More copies of his work exist than of any artist in history. So why can't the creations of artist Joe Davis been seen in the US? W. Wayt Gibbs of Scientific American reports...[more]
  
  
• March 19, 2001
  Philosophy should get rid of scientistic illusions, and should not try to behave like an extension of the natural sciences. Bernard Williams of The Threepenny Review makes the case for philosophy as a humanistic discipline...[more]
  
  
• March 14, 2001
  Reading Peter Singer, it is easy to be sidetracked by the shocking extremes he goes to reform our ethical view, and to overlook the sheer incompetence of his arguments, says Peter Berkowitz in The New Republic...[more]
  
  
• March 13, 2001
  What distinguishes T.S. Eliot from other modernists, and from nearly all literary figures except Coleridge, was his immersion in philosophy. M A R Habib of The Philosophers' Magazine examines its influence on Eliot's art...[more]
  
  
• March 12, 2001
  James Hynes' new campus satire is as cynical as you can get about life in American academia at the end of the twentieth century, says Eliza Nichols in the Boston Review...[more]
  
  
• March 9, 2001
  The doctrine of states rights provokes much knee-jerk denunciation, especially among those who do not have a clue to its meaning. But those who dismiss the doctrine as merely reactionary have a serious problem, says Eugene Genovese in The Atlantic Monthly...[more]
  
  
• March 8, 2001
  So, you've spent years in musty libraries toiling away on your doctorate, but don't want to become an academic. What will you do? Geoff Berman of The New York Times reports...[more]
  
  
• March 7, 2001
  Simians are our Darwinian doubles, says Mark Dery in theVoice Literary Supplement, fun-house mirror reflections of humanity that caricature our animal nature, droll reminders that Homo sapiens, for all his airs, is only an ape with angel glands...[more]
  
  ALSO: LF's Jennifer Scheussler on monkeys who think
  
  
• March 6, 2001
  When philosophers and scientists get in the ring, many of us hope that the philosophers will strike a few blows for the human part of human nature. Howard Gardner of The Chronicle of Higher Education judges the match...[more]
  
  
• March 5, 2001
  Once staid science journals are now madly scrambling to publish data from the human genome project. But are they compromising editorial standards in the process? Ivan Oransky of Praxis Postreports...[more]
  
  
• March 2, 2001
  Philosopher John Searle is an unrepentant defender of the Englightment's quest for a coherent explanation of the way the world works. He sounds off about free inquiry, relativism and the perils of postmodernism in Reasonmagazine...[more]
  
  
• March 1, 2001
  What if the paranormal is a genuine artifact of our fabulously complex brains rather than statistical hogwash or fraud? Scottish researcher Robert Morris thinks he has the answer. John McCrone interviews him in the New Scientist...[more]
  
  
• February 28, 2001
  The Prague intelligentsia has long played a major role in Czech life. But as an older generation passes, a younger, more footloose and mercenary group is emerging, says Robin Healey of Central Europe Review...[more]
  
  
• February 27, 2001
  Satirist of campus follies and lit crit wiz, he has had great success as both an academic and a novelist. Nicholas Wroe of The Guardian profiles David Lodge...[more]
  
  
• February 26, 2001
  The shooting started ten years ago, but the culture wars are unwinnable. The stakes have to do with ideas and ways of life, not with kill ratios says Michael Bérubé in the Village Voice...[more]
  
  
• February 23, 2001
  A publisher told him "readers like their history straight", but historian Richard Wightman Fox decided to mix things up in his new book: by telling his story in backwards order. He explains why in Common-place...[more]
  
  
• February 22, 2001
  To the dismay of the faculty, the new Hunter College president has few academic credentials. But she is a good friend of Mayor Giuliani. The New York Observer's Elisabeth Franck reports...[more]
  
  
• February 21, 2001
  Private, for-profit schooling worked well in ancient Greece, the medieval Islamic world, and 19th century England. James E. Bond of The Independent Review argues that the profit motive is the key for a quality education...[more]
  
  
• February 20, 2001
  Economists may have consigned Marx to the dustbin of history, but Jeff Byles of the Voice Education Supplement, reports that a new generation of college students are recycling his ideas...[more]
  
  
• February 16, 2001
  To the Turks, it was a "massacre." To the Armenian people, a "genocide." Mark Mazower of the London Review of Books on how an academic dispute about terminology forced itself into the public domain...[more]
  
  
• February 15, 2001
  "Nobody understands quantum mechanics," lamented Richard Feynman. But a group of Austrian researchers are out to prove him wrong. Hans Christian von Baeyer of the New Scientist checks on their progress...[more]
  
  
• February 14, 2001
  The typical art museum was once a staid and stately place, says Roger Kimball of The New Criterion. Now it's a postmodern funhouse of cheap thrills and banal spectacle...[more]
  
  
• February 13, 2001
  Not everyone is in a panic over falling stocks. For academics armed with theories about investor behavior, a bear market is a perfect laboratory. John Authers of The Financial Timesreports...[more]
  
  
• February 12, 2001
  Do bioethicists promote a culture of death? Gilbert Meilaender of The Weekly Standard examines whether their theoretical maneuverings have compromised patients' rights...[more]
  
  
• February 9, 2001
  A University of New Mexico professor thinks he has discovered why early humans bested their Neanderthal cousins: by using tools with shafts and hafts. The Economistreports on just how the Neanderthals were shafted...[more]
  
  
• February 8, 2001
  Hard times have come to the Columbia English department, home of high fliers like Edward Said and Ann Douglas. Elisabeth Franck of The New York Observer on how a departmental crack-up led to academic receivership...[more]
  
  
• February 7, 2001
  The reputations of the intrepid, larger than life classical scholars and archaeologists of the past are under assault. Peter Green of The Los Angeles Times Book Review on the latest victim, the man who discovered Knossos...[more]
  
  
• February 6, 2001
  The humanities are the Ottoman Empire of the academy, says Wilfred M. McClay of First Things, a declining congeries of disparate communities, each with its own complement of local potentates...[more]
  
  
• February 5, 2001
  The Otpor student movement helped smash Slobodan's Milosevic's regime, but its role in the new Serbia is uncertain. Dusan Kosanovic of Free Serbia reports...[more]
  
  ALSO: LF's Laura Secor on Otpor
  
  
• February 2, 2001
  Are war crimes trials fair? Do truth commissions deliver the truth? When it comes to the injuries of history, writes Tzvetan Todorov in The New Republic, there is seldom a perfect remedy...[more]
  
  
• February 1, 2001
  What does George W. Bush owe to historians of Victorian Britain? Tristram Hunt of the New Statesman on Myron Magnet, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and the formation of "compassionate conservatism"...[more]
  
  
• January 31, 2001
  From ironic put down to memorable rhetorical rubric, "big bang" is today's best-known cosmological phrase. Philip and Phylis Morrison trace the evolution of the term in Scientific American...[more]
  
  
• January 30, 2001
  There is no cause for panic over the fate of human freedom in the digital universe, argues Slavoj Zizek on Britannica.com. It is in cyberspace where we confront the abyss of freedom at its most sublime...[more]
  
  
• January 29, 2001
  Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado triggered an online flurry of charges and counter charges. Clifford Geertz of The New York Review of Books laments the decline of basic academic conventions, such as reading a book before reviewing it...[more]
  
  
• January 26, 2001
  He's revolutionized the study of linguistics, denounced US imperialism, and become one of the most quoted sources in the Academy. But is he a big simplifier? Maya Jaggi of The Guardian profiles Noam Chomsky...[more]
  
  
• January 25, 2001
  The global spread of infectious diseases has never been a more urgent problem, but the great powers are little interested. David Fidler of Foreign Policy urges they rediscover the lessons of Microbialpolitik...[more]
  
  
• January 24, 2001
  Easy to sneer and smirk at, self-published philosophy has a bad rap. Is it merely the product of vain and deluded hacks? Julian Baggini of The Philosophers' Magazine takes a look...[more]
  
  
• January 23, 2001
  Beetles have been regarded as the kings of dung ever since the Egyptians elevated the scarab to divine status. Now, scientists are looking at the dung heap as an amazing evolutionary laboratory. Clive Cookson of the Financial Times investigates...[more]
  
  
• January 22, 2001
  Human genetics and computers threaten to usher in a "posthuman" era. The stakes could not be higher, but both liberals and conservatives have laid out the welcome mat. Adam Wolfson of The Public Interestexamines why...[more]
  
  

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