Articles 2024
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Interview with the Vamp: An Interview with Camille Paglia
Keeping up with a rapid-fire radical
Reason, August/September 1995
Hurricane Camille swept into American culture five years ago with the publication of Sexual Personae, a learned 800-page treatise on sex, art, and literature through the ages. After two decades of rejection and obscurity, Camille Paglia was famous. Her demanding master work wasn't exactly accessible to the educated lay reader, but it became a bestseller--as have her subsequent reader-friendly essay collections Sex, Art, and American Culture and Vamps & Tramps.
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Fighting Words
Blurring the distinctions between criticizing big government and blowing up innocent people.
Reason, July 1995
"Most greens can still consider themselves nonviolent for one reason: Their victims don't fight back. So far no one has taken up arms to defend his logging equipment against Earth First! sabotage or his factory against EPA closure....The 'debased human protoplasm' that [environmentalist writer Stephanie] Mills holds in contempt...will not go down non-violently....And many ordinary human beings will not give up the right to own land without a fight, complete with guns."
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Knowledge at a Cost
Forbes ASAP, June 04, 1995
"Information wants to be free" is more than a hacker motto. In many discussions of information technology, it's an unwritten assumption. Once we're all hooked up to the Internet, or e-mail, or Lotus Notes, the story goes, everyone will know everything about every job. Hierarchy and specialization will vanish. We'll get all the information we needÜall the knowledge we need -- via the Net.
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Food Fight
The unreality of the school lunch debate.
Reason, June 1995
I will admit a certain prejudice against the school lunch program. It all started in 1966 when, as a first grader, I paid my $1.00 a week and got in return the worst food ever concocted outside of a prison camp--a diet heavy on collard greens and fish sticks. Even the spaghetti was inedible, a congealed mass of nearly sauceless pasta that bore no resemblance to my mother's specialty
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Curb Your Dog!
Washington insiders don't understand that government actions are dangerous.
Reason, May 1995
You're jogging down your neighborhood street, as your large Labrador retriever bounds along beside you, occasionally heading into a front yard to sniff out things of interest to dogs, occasionally leaving an unwelcome calling card for the neighbors to clean up. You round a corner and there, playing happily in the grass, is a little girl, maybe 4 years old, whose mother is watching her from a lawn chair
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So Long, Organization Man
Review of White-Collar Blues: Management Loyalties in an Age of Corporate Restructuring, by Charles Heckscher
The Wall Street Journal, April 11, 1995
White-Collar Blues: Management Loyalties in an Age of Corporate Restructuring (Basic Books, 224 pages, $23) is a good book in bad packaging. From the downbeat title to the blurbs from such economic doomsayers as Barry Bluestone and Clyde Prestowitz, the cover promises another screed on the evils of corporate downsizing.
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Illogical Deductions
The tax credit trap.
Reason, April 1995
When the Republicans announced their Contract with America, Rep. Dick Armey attacked the old Democrat-dominated House for having "adopted as its central philosophy the belief that ordinary people cannot be trusted to spend their own money and make their own decisions."
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Future Tense
Gingrich's circuits sometimes misfire, but at least he's wired into the future.
Reason, March 1995
I first met Newt Gingrich in 1983 at the World Science Fiction Convention in Baltimore. He was the only member of Congress who thought the WorldCon worth addressing. I was the only representative of the national media, specifically of The Wall Street Journal, who thought his speech worth covering
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Fatal Fallacies
The deadly consequences of misunderstanding race and violence.
Reason, February 1995
Fall 1994 marked the defeat not only of the Democratic Party in Congress but of two central ideas--or clusters of ideas--that have animated it since the early 1970s. Those ideas lost not just a popularity contest in America but, far more tragically, a reality test in Bosnia
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Washington Traps
Republican upstarts have to avoid being co-opted into the culture of Washington.
Reason, January 1995
I knew things had changed when I saw Al D'Amato on Nightline and he started talking about privatizing air traffic control. Al D'Amato, heretofore a hack extraordinaire, had latched on to an esoteric free-market policy idea developed by...my boss