Articles 1998
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The Two Faces of Bill Clinton
Is the personal political?
Reason, December 1998
It has been the year's great mystery: How is it that Bill Clinton is holding at about 60 percent support in public opinion polls--a lot better than he has ever done in a presidential election--while the political establishment sees him as an utter disgrace, a problem that needs to be purged from American political life?
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Patchwork of Old and New
Forbes ASAP, November 29, 1998
IF YOU WANT TO SEE what progress really looks like, the best place to start is an 81-year-old telescope.
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Alone but Not Lonely
Forbes ASAP, November 29, 1998
Ann Landers recently published a letter from a woman pregnant with an anencephalic child, which means her baby will be born with only a brain stem and will die shortly after birth. Faced with the same sad circumstances, the overwhelming majority of women would opt for an abortion. But this woman is unusual: "I am proud to say in the U.S.A., a woman has the right to choose between pregnancy and abortion," she writes. "I choose to have my baby."
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Eco-contradictions
Forbes, November 29, 1998
IN OCTOBER ECO-TERRORISTS STRUCK in Colorado. Their target wasn't a traditional bad guy: not a logging operation, an oil rig, a dam or a whaling ship. It was a ski resort.
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Low Fidelity
Russia's pretend capitalism.
Reason, November 1998
Bill Clinton once had hundreds of affairs, he told Monica Lewinsky, but after he turned 40 he resolved to be faithful to his wife. He cut back on his sexual adventures. Yet Clinton still committed adultery, and he still got in trouble
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The acrylic sector
Forbes, November 01, 1998
FEDERAL JOB-COUNTERS have lost a quarter million manicurists.
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Capitalism and Chance
Forbes, October 11, 1998
My mother-in-law is a retired schoolteacher who has been married nearly a half century and raised four responsible children. For many years she cared for her aging mother with great devotion. She is, by any normal measure, a good woman.
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Rising Heat
Forbes ASAP, October 04, 1998
My new thermostat was designed by brilliant morons. It helps to explain why we can see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics: In too many cases, computing power still makes ordinary tasks more complicated than they need to beÜor used to be.
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Feature Creature
Forbes ASAP, October 04, 1998
THE LATEST VERSIONS OF Microsoft Word are so helpful they drive people crazy. Computer columnists curse when they mention the program's animated Office Assistant: "that damned paper clip," "that $#@! paper clip," and so on. One writer calls it "a cheesy gimmick that appeals only to bonehead Teletubbies fans."
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The Claims of Nature
The "can gays change" debate is dodging the main issues.
Reason, October 1998
In 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off its list of mental disorders, this summer's controversy over whether gays can change would have been hard to imagine. Although there were always people understood to be spinsters and "confirmed bachelors" for reasons other than independence or social ineptitude, few heterosexuals knew any out-of-the-closet gays. Same-sex dates certainly weren't likely to show up at family gatherings or business dinner parties--much less White House functions or the Academy Awards. To be openly gay was to stand outside normal society. Bourgeois mores, it was thought, depended on pretending that homosexuality did not exist