the year 2020 and to 17.8 million 2040. By then, there will be more than a million Americans aged 100 or older.
Simple demographic projections show with stark clarity what may be in store for the United States. In 1985, for example, the budget for Medicare (federal health in- surance for the aged) was $72 billion. But Medicare outlays increase "substantially" with age, from $2,017 annually for those aged 65 to 74 to $3,215 for those aged 85 and above. By 2040, therefore, Medicare could...
"Prosperous Blacks in the South, 1790-1880" Loren Schweninger, in The American Historical Review (Feb. 1990), 400 A St. S.E.,Washington, D.C.20003.
Hard as it may be to believe, the South be- fore the Civil War was home to more than a few well-to-do free blacks. In fact, writes Schweninger, a historian at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, the ante- bellum South gave rise to two fairly dis- tinct black elites.
To compound the irony, the wealthiest blacks lived in the Deep S...
Patrick S. And the Press Washbum, in Journalism Monographs (~pril 1990), 1621 COL . lege St., Univ. of S.C., Columbia, S.C. 29208-0251.
A month after the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Gen. H. H. Arnold of the Army Air Force wrote a glowing letter to the head of the U.S. Office of Censorship thanking him for suppress- ing "any mention" of the new weapon in the press until it was used. Arnold wrote that it "shall go down in history as the best- kept secret...
the time Smith's blunder was discovered, the story had al- ready gone out over the news wires.
Despite leaks like this, Washburn con-cludes, the story of the atom bomb re-mained "reasonably quiet." He believes that much of the credit belongs to Byron Price, the ex-newsman who directed the Office of Censorshin. Price resisted the army's call to impose a total news black- out on atomic (and other) news, opting in- stead for a voluntary approach. Total cen- sorship, he insisted, would have...
Kiku Adatto, who compared television's Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. coverage of the presidential elections of 1968 and 1988. intelligence experts sur- prise, as Tismaneanu does. By 1988 television's tolerance for the languid pace of politi- But he warns that they still cal discourse, never great, had all but vanished. An analysis do not understand that it is of all weekday evening network newscasts (over 280) from the strength of the groups Labor Day to Election Day in 1968 and 1988 reveals that the...
courtroom etiquette.
As for Mrs. Foot, as the authors are care- ful to call her, her fundamental error was in assuming that morality and etiquette are two different things. Both are part of a sin- gle, highly complex system of rules for the governance of social conduct, the authors insist. Without both of them, civilization would disappear.
"Holy Headgear" Harry Steinhauer, in The Antioch ReviewInventing (Winter 1990), P.O. Box 148, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387.
The Yadke
Harry Steinhauer w...
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emeritus of German at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was the as-sumption (which even the Supreme Court made) that the yarmulke is an old and sa- cred part of the Jewish faith.
In the Torah, he notes, nothing is even said about covering the head, much less with a yarmulke. "Neither in the 248 posi- tive, nor in the 365 negative, precepts listed in the Torah (the dos and don'ts), is there any mention of this rite." Through- out the Old Testament, "covering...
many of the Holger Pedersen noted vague similarities same things that bother us, for they took between Indo-European and other proto- the trouble to invent words for fleas. lice. languages, including Semitic (precursor of and in-laws. Arabic and Hebrew) and Al- taic (ancestor of Japanese and Korean). But it was not The Importance of Genes until 1964 that two Soviet scholars, Vladislav Illich- "We cannot continue to think about disease as an outside Svitych and Aaron Dolgo- enemy," geneticist...
a cloud of orbiting elec- trons; when struck sunlight, the mole- cule resonates and one of the electrons is flipped out of orbit "along an electrical cir- cuit to drive the production of storable chemical power." Occasionally, however, there is a malfunction, and the electron es- capes and attaches itself to an oxygen mol- ecule. The result is an "oxygen radical," one of which, the hydroxyl radical (HO), is a kind of terrorist of the natural world. It "almost instantly abstracts...
"Reinventing the Wheels" Marcia D. Lowe, in Technology Review (May-June 1990), Building W59, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. 02 139.
America's first bicycle craze began in 1876. In 1884, a California steps: Bicycle parking
man even set off to cycle around the world; it took nearly three towers dot the cities of Ja-
years. Here, cyclists take a break near Tallahassee, Florida. pan; Swiss buses are
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equipped with bike racks to encourage "bike and ride" tra...