Simon Frank-
lin, in The World Today (April 1988), Royal
Institute of International Affairs, 10 St. James's
Square, London, SW1Y 4LE, United Kingdom.
Last June, the Soviets celebrated the millennium of Christianity in Russia, commemorating Prince Vladimir of Kiev's mass conversion of his subjects, who were baptized in the Dnieper River in 988.
As both The Economist's editors and Franklin, a fellow of Clare Col- lege, Cambridge, point out, most Soviet Christians have had little reason to celebrate...
Znanie ("Knowledge"), a nominally private, but state-sponsored organization.
Church attendance has become more popular since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. Today, the Russian Orthodox Church has 6,800 churches, 6,000 priests, and an estimated 50 million members. (The sec- ond largest Christian denomination in the Soviet Union is the Roman Cath- olic, with 4.5 million members.)
Gorbachev's glasnost policies promise more open discussion of reli- gious issues. Some figures from...
Catherine Wilson, in Journal of the History of Ideas (Jan.-Mar. 1988), Temple Univ., Philadel-phia, Pa. 19122.
In 1691, English physicist Robert Hooke wrote that few scientists were using microscopes in their research. Hooke complained that his colleagues thought nothing more could be discovered with the microscope. Only ama- teurs were using the instrument, Hooke claimed, and then merely "for Diversion and Pastime."
Wilson, a philosopher at the University of Oregon, notes that many...
providing evidence of life unseeable the naked eye, microscopes, in Leibnitz's view, provided evidence of the exis- tence of "monads," the invisible particles that he believed were the basic building blocks of life.
Not until the 19th century were achromatic lenses perfected that could convey images without distortion. By then, however, the instrument's irn-portance was beyond dispute.
and Destiny "Daughters or Sons" by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in Natural History (Apr. 1988), Central...
Robert S. Root-Bernstein, in The Sciences (May-June 1988), New York Academy of Sciences, 2 East 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
A common truism about science is that many great discoveries occur as a result of fortunate accidents. Sir Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), for ex- ample, is said to have discovered the bacteria-killing enzyme lysozyme (present in tears, mucus, and saliva) after drippings from his nose killed germs in a Petri dish Fleming was examining.
Such "accidents" have led...
Daniel
M.Bluestone, in American Quarterly (Winter 19871, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 701 West 40th St., Ste. 275, Baltimore, Md. 21211.
Most scholars have assumed that urban parks were established to satisfy city-dwellers eager to create pastoral oases in the middle of the bustling metropolis. For example, Lewis Murnford, in Sticks and Stones (1924), argued that such parks were designed as a "means of escape" from "the soiled, bedraggled works of man's creation."
Bluestone,...
carriage to produce what Olrn- sted described as a "concourse of animated life." The goal was not Arca- dia, but an attractive and diverting "spectacle."
Nor did the people who flocked to Prospect Park for concerts and ice cream seek unspoiled nature, according to Bluestone. He agrees with ar-chitect Horace Cleveland, who wrote in 1889 that "to the great mass of the so-called cultivated people, nature has no attraction except when aided the merest clap traps of fashionable...
Louis S. Richman, in Fortune (June 6, 1988), Time & Life Building, Rockefeller Center, New York,
N.Y. 10020.
For most of the 20th century, asbestos was known as a "wonder fiber." It could insulate and fireproof buildings and ships' hulls at low cost. But then, during the early 1970s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found asbestos to be carcinogenic.
Faced with some 90,000 lawsuits from workers exposed to the mate- rial, nearly a half-dozen asbestos manufacturers,...
leaving behind dangerous dust, make buildings less safe than they were before the "cleanup" began.
Richman believes that laws making building owners liable for "dubious health risks they had no part in creating" ensure one thing only: that the economic damage caused asbestos will vastly outweigh any health prob- lems it may cause.
ARTS & LETTERS
The of "'News, and New Things': Contemporaneity
and the Early English Novel" by J. Paul Hunter,
the in Critical Inq...
producing scores of journalistic pamphlets. Later writers, such as Sam- uel Richardson (1689-1761), presented their works of fiction, following the old pamphleteering tradition, as if they were "real." Thus Richardson's novel Pamela (1740) is presented as a collection of long-lost letters. Nov- elists also continued, in various ways, to practice journalism. Defoe and Henry Fielding (1707-1754) edited their own journals; Richardson headed the Stationers' Company, a London guild of newspaper,...