500 B.c., boat- shaped graves-with tall stones at either end representing prow and stern-were common.
The boats themselves, Hagen notes, were growing sturdier. Around A.D. 600, Norwegians built the first full keel-a single, arched beam, usually oak, which under- girded the hull. Ships now could sur- vive long voyages; Scandinavia had the technology to enter the Viking Age.
Of the many accounts of the Vi- kings' extraordinary outward surge during the ninth, loth, and 11 th cen- turies, the best...
public agencies and private institutions
'The Change in Women's Economic Status."
Paper presented June O'Neill before the Joint Economic Committee of the
U.S. Congress, November 9, 1983.
The first words in most public discus-
sions of why working women earn less
than men are "sex discrimination."
O'Neill, an Urban Institute analyst,
believes that there is more to say.
The male-female "pay gap" is not quite as wide as is commonly as-sumed, she notes. Feminists h...
When Walker Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, appeared in 1961, the initial critical reaction was anything but encouraging-little more, in fact, than a few bland short notices in the New York Times and other major review outlets. It was just the sort of literary debut that has driven fledgling authors into real estate sales or computer software design.
But just as the The Moviegoer was beginning its quiet passage to that special oblivion reserved for unnoticed first novels, the New Yorker writer
A....
In 195 1, Harvard sociologist David Riesman published an essay called "The Nylon War." In it, he sug- gested that the easiest way to van- quish our Soviet adversaries would be to drop consumer goods on them from airplanes.
Deluge those deprived masses with Ansco cameras and Schick shavers, and they would soon forsake their jobs at the Red October Tank Works. Shower them with Camel cigarettes and Ronson lighters, and Karl Marx would quickly fade into the recesses of collective memory.
In f...
Theodore Lowi, in PS (Fall 19831, American Political Science Associ- ation, 1527 New Hampshire Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
For more than a decade, Democrats and Republicans have searched for ways to shore up their party organizations. A vain exercise, declares Lowi, a Cornell political scientist. The best medicine for both would be a third national political party.
Lowi contends that Americans' thinking about third parties is mud- dled political myths. One article of faith, for example,...
don't have many defenders in academe. Yet Tesh, a Yale political scientist, finds it odd that "having a passionate conviction about abortion, disarmament, homosexuality, guns, femi- nism, tax laws, or the environment" is seen as a political vice.
Single-issue groups, she says, are often viewed as just another "spe- cial interest" or "pressure group." But traditional interest groups work for legislation that directly (often economically) benefits their mem- bers; membership...
Do Nonvoters Austin Rannev. in Public Opinion (0ct.-Really Matter? Nov. 1983), American ~nter~rise
Insti-tute for Public Policy Research, 1150 17th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Most political scientists see the steady decline in U.S. voter turnout for presidential and congressional elections since the early 1960s as a sign of failing national political health. Ranney, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, is not so sure.
In 1980, only 53 percent of voting-age Americans...
mail, for example- but doubts that they would boost turnout more than 10 percentage points. Blacks, Hispanics, and poor whites, the main stay-at-homes, won't be lured to the polls, he writes, until they "come to believe that voting is a powerful instrument for getting the government to do what they want it to do."
"The City Council Chamber: From Dis-
tance to Intimacy" by Charles T. Good-
sell, in The public ~n&st (Winter 1984),
Symbolism 20th & Northampton Sts.....
contrast, the contemporary layout of "the pit," as locals call it, where the Fort Worth, Texas, City Council meets, fosters the impression of informal contact between citizen and legislator.
studio" that extends the intimacy to the community at large.
Overall, says Goodsell, the new council chambers suggest that citi- zens and their representatives are equals, "mutually engaged in the work of government." He worries, though, that while the new designs reflect (and perhaps...
the 1972 ABM (antiballistic missile) treaty. But Jastrow contends that Moscow has repeatedly violated the pact. Last summer, for example, U.S. spy satellites discovered a sophis- ticated radar complex located near the Soviets' Siberian ICBM fields. The only possible use for the radar is to direct antimissile rockets. Other evidence suggests that Moscow has tested such ABMs.
Jastrow envisions a three-tier defense of lasers and "mini-missiles.'
If each layer had a 10-percent "leakage rate,"...