Articles 2024
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The Age of the Editor
Speech delivered at "The State and Fate of Publishing: A Flair Symposium"
Reason, November 11, 1994
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The New, New World: Richard Rodriguez on culture and assimilation
Reason, August/September 1994
Essayist Richard Rodriguez, best known for his 1982 book Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, is usually classified as an iconoclastic Mexican American writer with little patience for political correctness. The description is accurate but incomplete. He is, more broadly, a student of America--a subtle and perceptive observer of the tension between individual and community, self and culture, optimism and pessimism, in contemporary life. He is also deeply ambivalent, especially in his more-recent work, including last year's Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. In that book, Rodriguez struggles with the loss of optimism, both his and California's, since his youth in -the 1 950s--the discovery of what Thomas Sowell might call "the constrained vision," the knowledge that "much in life is failure or compromise," just as his Mexican father said. For Rodriguez, though, this sense of life's limits is wedded to an appreciation for its possibilities. Editor Virginia Postrel and Assistant Editor Nick Gillespie talked with Rodriguez in Los Angeles in late April.
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Choosing Inequality
Barron's, June 1993
By rewarding achievement above other factors, performance-based pay systems create income differences between individuals doing “the same job,” between individuals with the same experience, and between individuals with the same educational credentials. The notion that employees who do the best work should get the highest pay has profound implications for the political debate over fairness in economic policy. -
A Man of Two Heritages (Review of Days of Obligation)
The Wall Street Journal, February 17, 1993
Richard Rodriguez is an American, Sacramento-born. Unlike the many immigrants, foreign and domestic, who people California, "I was born at the destination," he writes in "Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father"
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The Real Story Goes Beyond Black and White
Los Angeles Times, May 08, 1992
L.A. rioters were multiracial, and so were the victims. More polarized versions only feed bigotry. -
Buying a Home For All the Wrong Reasons
Los Angeles Times, February 03, 1992
The first-time home-buyer credit is designed to lure even more money out of savings and into real estate and to entice even more young people into debt.
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Science and Vanity
Implants: Medicine, Feminism and Freedom
The Washington Post, January 26, 1992
The United States has become a society fragmented not only by ethnicity and race but also by a multiplicity of cultural divisions of the sort that the British scientist and writer C.P. Snow once warned could destroy a society's ability to communicate. These cultural divides are especially striking in the current debate over whether to ban silicone breast implants. -
The Ideology Shuffle
The Washington Post, April 01, 1990
Forget Left and Right-Our Politics are Breaking Down Into Growth vs. Green
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Tapping the Shadow Housing Market
The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 1987
Improving American housing by encouraging more efficient use of existing buildings
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Storybook Ending
How an enterprising first-time publisher gave the beloved children's book Mr. Pine a second life.
The Atlantic, June 2007
