changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man- made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its mean- ing. Nature's independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.'
The End of Nature caused quite a stir; some suggested that it would have the same galvanic impact on public opinion that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (also first published in the New Yorker) had had 27 years before. But while many were titillated McKibben's violent...
astern Europeans have so of-
ten bemoaned the lack of rec-
ognition of their cultures that
when one of their artists does
achieve world standing, they
are quick to proclaim him a genius who speaks for the entire region. A Yugoslav writer, Dubravka Ugregik, re- cently recalled attending a lecture in Bel- grade by a "world-famous" American au- thor who, when asked if he had ever heard of Ivo Andrik, Miroslav Krleza, or Danilo KiE (all three of them widely translated, and Andrik i...
hy is nobody idle any
more?
I mean openly, to-
tally, cheerfully idle,
and by choice. The in-
dustrial world is no doubt full of people who could work harder, and know it, full of procrastinators and easy riders. But no one seems content to achieve nothing any more, whether at school and college, or in industry or the professions. When I first taught at a uni- versity-in the Midwest during the
1950s-a good fifth of the students, it was widely accepted, did no work, or next to none, and w...
sighed and put paper into the type-
writer. "I'd better start," I said. And
I did. Meaning that, unemployable
since I had less than a year to live, I
had to turn myself into a profes-
sional writer.
It was January of 1960 and, according to the prognosis, I had a winter and a spring and a summer to live through and would die with the fall of the leaf. I felt too well. After the long enervation of the trop- ics, my wife Lynne and I were being stimu- lated by the winter gales of t...
the "literacy environment" of the home, the mother's own level of education, and her educational expectations for the child. (The father's back- ground mattered much less.) The quality of schools also made a difference, but a con- siderably smaller one.
A third facet, reading com- prehension, is more compli-cated. But schools and families seemed to be able to compen- sate for each other's failings. In the 1980-82 study, all chil- dren-including those from the worst homes-who had ex- cellent...
Rich-ard Ellis and Aaron Wildavsky, in Presidential Studies ~uarterl~ (Winter 1991), Center for the Study of the Presidency, 208 E. 75th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Historians have been playing the game of grading the presidents ever since 1948, when Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., asked a panel of colleagues to award them all A's (great), B's (near-great), and so on, down to the ignominious E's (failure). No stand- ards of evaluation were specified, how- ever, and the criteria of later surveys often f...
Dwight Eisenhower. Jackson solved the dilemma justifying presiden- tial activism "in the name of limiting the activities of hierarchical institutions," such as the "monster" National Bank of the United States.
Although Ellis and Wildavsky give the modem presidents no formal grades, they do note that the performances by chief ex- ecutives in recent decades have provided grounds for praise as well as criticism. "Reports of failed presidencies have risen along with egalitarian...
Paul E. Peter-Isn't That Special? son, in Political Science Quarterly (Winter 1990-91), Academy of Political Science, 475 Riverside Dr., Ste. 1274, New York,
N.Y. 10115-0012.
The Tax Reform Act of 1986, which elimi- nated a host of valuable tax loopholes, rep- resented a defeat of the special interests that many analysts thought would never happen. Can it be that special interests have lost much of their renowned influ- ence in Washington? Exactly, argues Pe- terson, a Harvard political scientist....
this standard, for example, retirees are not a special interest.
To estimate the influence of special in- terests, Peterson measures the percentage of the gross national product (GNP) spent the federal government on activities "not of paramount interest" to the two ma- jor political parties. That means all federal outlays not spent on the public debt, de- fense, benefits for the elderly, "safety net" programs for the poor, and agricultural subsidies important to the farm states...
Senator Barry Goldwater (R.-Ariz.), and Representative Bill Nichols (D.-Ala.), the measure was en- acted over opposition from the services. It made the JCS chairman the "principal mil- itary adviser" to the president, the Na- tional Security Council, and the secretary of defense. The other service chiefs were relegated to secondary roles and put di- rectly under the chairman. The military chain of command now runs from the sec- retary of defense through the chairman and then out to the...