The long morning after

By Robert Keough 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

One of the challenges in publishing a quarterly magazine is trying to anticipate what’s going to be on readers’ minds three to six months down the line. But the grim drama of September 11 gave new meaning to the term “overtaken by events.” With the issue you hold in your hands three weeks away from(...)

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Bill Bennetts family values

By Alan Wolfe 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American FamilyBy William J. BennettDoubleday, New York, 199 pages William Bennett, perhaps the leading conservative voice in American public life today, turns his attention from Bill Clinton and his misdeeds, the subject of his previous book, The Death of Outrage, to the state of America’s families,(...)

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Farmland returns to the wild

By Jane Brox 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

Without farmers, farmland returns to the wild To live in a town that still counts thousands of undeveloped acres among its assets is to live with a lot of talk about land use, development, and saving open space. When such talk comes up I always think about what a nebulous term “open space” really is,(...)

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Americas Irish Ascendancy

By Neal Dolan 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

Tocqueville coined the word “individualism” to define a new form of life he saw emerging in North America in the 1830s. Here as never before in history it became possible for an individual, as long as he was white and male, to separate himself from his family background and decide his own socioeconomic destiny. In(...)

Uncategorized/ Opinion

Reforming School Funding

By Stephen P. Crosby 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

What is the best way to divide a pie equitably? It’s simple enough when there are only two people involved–one slices, the other chooses. But this is child’s play compared to the division of the $3.2 billion school funding pie in the legislative playground of Massachusetts. We have 328 local and regional school districts operating,(...)

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Making the deans list

By Michael Crowley 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

Capitol Hill is generally considered a den of publicity hounds, free agents, and egomaniacs–folks who mean well, perhaps, but would get low marks in the “plays well with others” category of any grade-school report card. There are clear incentives for this sort of behavior, thanks to a celebrity-worshipping media, but it’s not always the best(...)

Politics

Lani Guinier on merit opportunity and redistricting

By Robert Keough 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

As much as she might wish otherwise, Lani Guinier will probably always be best known as roadkill on the Washington, DC, Beltway. Nominated in 1993 to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, Guinier was savaged by conservatives as “Clinton’s Quota Queen,” a “dangerous radical” who would overturn democracy in favor of a system of(...)

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Zoning dispute turns ugly in Freetown

By Teri Borseti 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

For more than three centuries, Freetown’s attitude toward land and development was pretty much described by its name. The 38-square-mile town next to New Bedford had no zoning restrictions at all until 1995. Before then, Selectman Mark Holland says, “a nuclear plant could be built alongside a house.” Freetown has finally caught up to the(...)

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Gerrymandering is alive and well

By Richard A. Hogarty 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

All summer and into the fall, politics junkies have been treated to an unexpected sideshow: a battle of insiders over congressional redistricting. That the redrawing of district lines gives rise to political gamesmanship should surprise no one. The federal census that takes place at the start of every new decade is always followed by a(...)

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Counterpoints

By Jane Swift 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

Changes in technology have opened up amazing new frontiers in business and commerce over the past several years. Advances in biotechnology and science are changing the course of our daily lives. But of all the developments we have seen in the past decade, none really compares with the emergence of the Internet. This new technology(...)

Fall 2001