Articles 2024
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License to Grill
How the Clintons invited Ken Starr into their personal lives.
Reason, April 1998
Like just about everyone else in America, I believe Bill Clinton had a sexual affair--if not dictionary-definition "sexual relations"--with intern Monica Lewinsky. I think it's likely, though by no means a sure thing, that he lied about that affair in a sworn deposition. And I wouldn't put it past him to suborn perjury or obstruct justice, though the evidence at this writing is very murky on those serious charges
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Let's Pretend
The "pageant" masquerading as environmental debate.
Reason, March 1998
There is something weirdly appropriate about beginning the Unabomber trial a few weeks after the Kyoto summit to craft a global-warming treaty.
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Pride and Prejudice
Competition and feedback are the solutions to a gatekeeper's blind spot.
Forbes ASAP, February 22, 1998
A FEW YEARS AGO, three Canadian scientists wrote an article in New Scientist magazine criticizing peer review. The article did a good job of revealing the limits of gatekeepers -- but not in the way it intended.
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Test Case
How relying on "the experts" failed public education.
Reason, February 1998
"The Important Thing Is Education." A slogan from my childhood, it put everyone on notice that in our town court-ordered desegregation would proceed in an orderly and peaceful fashion. Regardless of racial politics, the primacy of education was something everyone could agree on
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Creative Insecurity
The complicated truth behind the rise of Microsoft.
Reason, January 1998
Back in 1983, Forbes ran an article called "If they're so smart, why aren't they rich?" It was about how inventors rarely reap big financial rewards from their creations, and it started like this
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The Croly Ghost
Exorcising the specter haunting American politics.
Reason, December 1997
Herbert Croly is not exactly a household name, but he should be. Seven decades after his death, we are still living in the political world his ideas built--and struggling to escape it
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Fighting Words
Honest discussions of changing sex roles prove too hot for pundits to handle.
Reason, November 1997
Ridley Scott makes movies about the frailties of human flesh and the capacities of human will. His heroes are not especially introspective. They cope in hostile environments. Sometimes, as in Thelma and Louise, they are heroic only in the tragic, Aristotelian sense--done in by fatal flaws. They are not the stuff of romanticism but of earlier, less subjective and emotion-centered art. Indeed, Thelma and Louise die because they cannot master their impulses
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The Lessons Of Email Deceit
Forbes ASAP, October 05, 1997
A weird thing happened to me in July. The Weekly Standard, a prominent conservative magazine with which I clash frequently, published a letter to the editor signed by Virginia Postrel. The letter defended high-tech entrepreneurs, stigmatized in a Standard article as "cosmic capitalists" recapitulating all the errors of modernism and the French Revolution. It was a fine letter--tight, eloquent, and witty.
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The Nail File
Economic insights from an industry too embarassing for talking heads.
Reason, October 1997
Remember the Great Depression of 1995? The New York Times consumed a zillion column inches--the most since the Pentagon Papers--chronicling economic disaster and "unrelenting angst." The Downsizing of America, the book version of that seven-part series, declared America a Dickensian hell, analogous to "when the peasants in England were shunted off the land and left to toil in misery in the slums." Pat Buchanan and Jeremy Rifkin shattered Crossfire's left-right conventions, agreeing that technology was destroying the job hopes of everyone but a few elitist nerds. Once the presidential campaign kicked in, political reporters couldn't get enough of Buchanan's populist economic platform. They knew it would sell--until voters humiliatingly shunned it in Arizona and South Carolina
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The Peters Principles: An Interview with Tom Peters
The management guru as playground director and defender of open societies.
Reason, October 1997
Tom Peters dots his articles with exclamation points, ellipses, and WORDS IN ALL CAPS. He tends toward sweeping, barely supported statements ("Women are smarter than men," he generalized in Forbes ASAP) and uses the word revolution a lot. His official bio describes him as a "gadfly, curmudgeon, champion of bold failures, prince of disorder, maestro of zest, professional loudmouth (as a speaker he's `a spitter,' according to the cartoon strip Dilbert), corporate cheerleader, lover of markets, capitalist pig...and card-carrying member of the ACLU."