James The Apocalypse H. Moorhead, Journal of American History
(Dec. 19841. Ballantine Hall. Indiana Uni-
versity, ~lkomin~ton, Ind. 47405.
Amid the numerous religious revivals of the early 19th century, Amer- ica's Protestants turned toward a new "postmillennial" theology.
Many earlier Protestants had held that the Apocalypse and Second Coming would be followed the millennium, a 1,000-year-long earthly paradise. The postmillennialists reversed the order: The millen- nium would precede...
the movement of molten iron-itself magnetized billions of years ago the sun or some other celestial body-thousands of miles beneath the planet's surface. As the liquid metal rises, it gradually cools and begins sinking back toward the Earth's core, creating "eddies" some 100 miles in diameter. There may be as many as 50 of them. The rotation of the Earth on its axis makes most (but not all) of the eddies point either north or south. "The net direction of the magnetic field,"...
Haydn Bush, in Science 84 (Sept. 1984), P.O. Box 3207, Harlan, Iowa
To judge press releases and newspaper headlines, the cure rate for cancer has been improving steadily for years. Actually, writes Bush, di- rector of the London Regional Cancer Centre in Canada, "we're not cur- ing much more cancer than we were a generation ago."
Doctors can claim real progress in effecting cures for a few relatively rare cancers (e.g., childhood leukemia, Hodgkin's disease) but for only two of the more...
Haydn Bush, in Science 84 (Sept. 1984), P.O. Box 3207, Harlan, Iowa
To judge press releases and newspaper headlines, the cure rate for cancer has been improving steadily for years. Actually, writes Bush, di- rector of the London Regional Cancer Centre in Canada, "we're not cur- ing much more cancer than we were a generation ago."
Doctors can claim real progress in effecting cures for a few relatively rare cancers (e.g., childhood leukemia, Hodgkin's disease) but for only two of the more...
the year 2100. Ironically, the very fact that the greenhouse effect is a global problem militates against cutbacks in fuel use simply to reduce C02: Individual nations would bear the costs of conservation while all would share in the benefits. And for many poorer nations, such as Bangladesh, there are a number of more press- ing needs than combating the greenhouse effect.
Mankind may be only decades away from being able to engineer a kind of global countercooling, chiefly means of releasing into...
? mdAmiqm (Oct. 1984, PO. Box 20600,
Bergenfield, N.J. 07621.
Jackson Pollock's famed "drip" paintings have hung in museums across the United States for several decades now. Yet, many viewers undoubtedly still ask themselves whether a five-year-old child armed with a few cans of paint might not have done as well as the founder of abstract expressionism. So Arts and Antiques put the question to 23 prominent artists and intellectuals: "Was Jackson Pollock any good?"
There is...
Jackson Pollock, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution.
"Scholarship versus Culture" Jacques
Barzun, in The Atlantic Monthly (Nov.
1984), Box 2547, Boulder, Colo. 80322.
More artifacts of culture are being created, unearthed, collected, classi-
fied, exhibited, and analyzed nowadays than at any time in human his-
tory. Yet, paradoxically, contends Columbia University's Barzun, true
culture itself is in danger of being smothered.
To Barzun, the chief...
virtue of being syntheses of the world," says Barzun. To dissect them "scientifically," trying to pry loose their component parts, is to misunderstand them. Works of art are meant to be regarded whole and to nurture mind and spirit.
Barzun perceives a mood of futility in the academic "kingdom of analysis, criticalness, and theory ." Sooner or later, he believes, the "forces of fatigue and boredom" will bring scholars' dominion over cul- ture to an end.
"Freud...
Dale Harris, in Degas9Ã? Da~cms Ballet News (Nov. 1984), 1865 Broadway,
New York, N.Y. 10023.
The "ballet boom" of recent years has made Edgar Degas's (1834-1917) paintings of ballerinas as familiar as the Mona Lisa and Whistler's Mother. But neither ballet nor the art of Degas was always viewed so fa- vorably, recalls Harris, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
In Degas's late-19th-century Paris, ballerinas stood barely a cut above dance-hall girls in the social pecking order....
PERIODICALS
cheesecake. In a famous incident during the 1861 Paris premiere of Wagner's opera Tannhauser, a group of wealthy young men who ar- rived too late for the "titillating" ballet portion howled the opera down. Degas apparently shared the general low public regard for bal- let: In many of his famous canvases, he lavished as much attention on the spectators and their social doings as on the dancers.
Degas's 1,500 ballet pieces earned him a reputation for misogyny in his own day....