Articles 2024
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Gas Bags
Technocracy is running on fumes.
Reason, July 1996
In 1994 and '95, paper prices skyrocketed. The cost of magazine paper rose by about 10 percent a month, hardly the sort of hike you can simply pass on to subscribers. Most publishers, including REASON, dealt with the increase by printing fewer pages and adding fewer new subscribers than they'd planned. Newspapers were even harder hit: Escalating newsprint prices drove many to lay off hundreds of employees, raise prices, and, in some cases, go out of business. It was not a happy time in the publishing industry
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Tinkerer's Secret
Forbes ASAP, June 02, 1996
Gail Borden was a surveyor, land agent, and newspaperman before he hit it big with condensed milk.Clarence Birdseye was a naturalist and author before he happened on quick-freezing food. King Gillette was a traveling salesman.
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Legacies
One day' s obituaries reveal the blind spots of the opinion establishment.
Reason, June 1996
On the day of the California primary, an all-but-meaningless election with record-low turnout, two famous men died, both in their early 80s. One was Edmund Muskie, former senator, briefly secretary of state, and the candidate wistful Democrats like to imagine might have been their 1972 nominee if not for a dirty trick and tears in the snow. (They forget, conveniently, that McGovernites had engineered the delegate-selection rules.) Muskie's obituary took 82 column inches in The Washington Post, 84 in The New York Times
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Standing Pat
Buchananism's establishment allies.
Reason, May 1996
Pat Buchanan won't be the Republican nominee. He has, however, shaken up "the establishment." Or so he'd have his followers believe.
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Pure Creative Joy
Forbes ASAP, April 07, 1996
It was 1973, and Dan Lynch had recently started a new job as manager of the computer laboratory for the Artificial Intelligence Group at SRI. He was charged with getting all kinds of weird peripherals -- robots, lasers, oddball equipment -- to talk to each other and to the lab's computers.
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Looking Forward
Why Steve Forbes is a serious candidate.
Reason, April 1996
Ordinarily, the last thing I'd choose to write about this month is presidential politics. As I write, the Iowa caucuses are a week away, the New Hampshire primary more than two. As you read, they're history
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Clueless
Most people don't pay much attention to the news--which makes you wonder about all those polls.
Reason, March 1996
During the federal government's first shutdown last fall, CNN sent a reporter out to get the proverbial man-in-the-street's thoughts on the subject. The reporter roamed what's usually referred to as "the affluent Westside" of Los Angeles, asking people why the government was closed and what Congress and the president were arguing about
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Pat Buchanan's South Carolina Problem
The Wall Street Journal, March 01, 1996
Yankee writers tend to think of Southerners as poor, backward souls who wave Confederate flags, worship their ancestors, and secretly long for the return of Jim Crow. Pat Buchanan is a typical Yankee writer.
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It's All in the Head
Forbes ASAP, February 25, 1996
"What is wealth?" the congressman asks the economist, and is unsatisfied with an answer involving gross national product. The congressman, who's spent most of his own career in nonpolitical pursuits, has other things in mind. He worries about an economy too dependent on trade and services. Farming, mining, and manufacturing, he believes, create wealth, transforming raw materials into something more valuable. Pretty much everything else--the work of physicians, for instance--only consumes wealth.
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Bloc Busters
Conservatives' sudden discomfort with markets threatens the GOP coalition.
Reason, February 1996
When he isn't busy defending the Unabomber's message in the pages of The Nation, self-styled "neo-Luddite" Kirkpatrick Sale gives speeches attacking just about every technological improvement since fire. The speeches end with a bang, as Sale hauls out a sledgehammer and smashes a personal computer