Articles 2024
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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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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
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The spirit of play
Forbes, September 20, 1998
IN THE HOLLYWOOD VERSION, Otto Wichterle would be the villain—an obsessed inventor who defied nature and wouldn't listen to reason, who combined technological hubris with political pig-headedness. His creation served vanity, not "vital needs." He pursued it out of pleasure and pride. In the movies, he would come to no good end.
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The Work Ethic, Redefined
The Wall Street Journal, September 04, 1998
Monday is Labor Day, a holiday that harks back to the industrial revolution and honors the struggles of American workers. But the American workplace's downtrodden Everyman is no longer a cog in a machine, fighting to keep up with the inhuman pace of the assembly line. (Think of Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times" or Lucy Ricardo stuffing candies in her mouth.) He's a cartoon cubicle dweller who loves technology and struggles against "time-wasting morons." Dilbert knows more than the boss does, and he craves the chance to use that knowledge. He dreams less of security than of meritocracy.
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The Freedom of Order
Forbes ASAP, August 23, 1998
WHEN I SENT THE manuscript of my book, The Future and Its Enemies, to the publisher, my editor there made a good suggestion: You're trying to do too much in the first chapter, he said. Put the discussion of the book's overall thesis in an introduction and focus Chapter 1 entirely on the "enemies." Then he made a bad suggestion: "You could call the first chapter something like 'The Quest for Order.'"
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Who needs it?
Forbes, August 09, 1998
REPRESENTATIVE Billy Tauzin (RLa.), the chairman of the House telecommunications subcommittee, recently proposed a bill to increase the annual funding for public television by 63%, to $475 million. A friend who has spent decades working in and around PBS sent me a stunned e-mail: "Just as PBS is becoming completely marginalized, a Republican committee chair proposes a major increase in their funding. Amazing."
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Post-Crisis Politics
Why investigative reporters and political activists seem so depressed.
Reason, August/September 1998
At a recent convention for investigative journalists, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd found a lot of unhappy reporters. They're digging up tons of dirt--the Clinton scandals alone can fill several pages of every day's newspaper--but the public just won't get hysterical about it. "We live in this bland yuppified era when people just care about fresh-squeezed orange juice and watching the stock numbers in the paper," complained Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity