James Q. Wilson
Law vs. Order and George L. Kelling, in The Atlantic
Monthly (Mar. 1982), P.O. Box 2544,
Boulder. Colo. 80321.
Communities, not just individuals, need police protection-and not just from crime. Rowdy teenagers, drunks, and panhandlers need commit no crime to make decent citizens fearful and put a neighborhood on the skids. Police should maintain public order, not just solve crimes. And until recent decades, they did. So argue Wilson and Kelling, a Harvard government professor...
rules developed to control police relations with suspected criminals."
Law enforcement alone is no solution. "A gang can weaken or destroy a community," say the authors, "standing about in a menacing fashion and speaking rudely to passersby without breaking the law." Police need to enforce community standards of "order"-but without becoming agents of neighborhood bigotry.
Citizens' patrols can be useful. And putting more policemen on foot patrol instead of in...
the early
14th century. Resulting economic hardships may have spurred con-
traception's spread. As Peter de Palude wrote, the married man,
through coitus interruptus, sought to avoid having children "quos nu-
trire non possit (whom he cannot feed)."
PRESS & TELEVISION
"The Virtuous Journalist: An Exploratory Dusting Off Essay" Michael J. Kirkhorn, in The Journalistic virtues ~uili(~eb.1982)' Society of Professional
Journalists Suite 801 W. 840 North
Lakeshore D;.,C...
PERIODICALS
PRESS & TELEVISION
Romance "Covering the Sandinistas: The Foregone Conclusions of the Fourth Estate" by
in Nicaragua Shirley Christian, in Washington Jour- nalism Review (Mar. 1982), 2233 Wiscon-sin Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007.
American reporters covering the civil war in Nicaragua during 1978-79 focused on the misdeeds of one side, the rightist government of strongman Anastasio Somoza Debayle. They saw the other side, the Sandinista National Liberation Front...
non-Marxist moderates (al- though, and large, they were not the ones with the guns).
Most important, many American journalists were "on a guilt trip," atoning for what they saw as the United States' past mistakes in Nicaragua and its debacle in Vietnam. Jumping on the Sandinistas' bandwagon, much of the press was all too willing to show how the United States, in backing Somoza, was wrong again.
"Archie Bunker and the Liberal Mind" by
Christopher Lasch, in Channels of Com-
as...
Martin E. Marty, in Daedalus (Winter R&piOUSAmerica 1982)-1172 Commonwealth Ave., Boston,
Mass. 02134.
Over the past three decades, scholars have had difficulty deciding if America is becoming less~or more-religious. So writes Marty, a his- torian at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
During the 1950s and early '60s, sociologists believed that industrial societies, in the long run, were bound to become increasingly secular. Many discounted the religious revival evident in public opinion...
Jan Nowak, in
Problems of Communism (Jan.-Feb. 1982).
in Poland superintendent of ~ocuments,~overn-
ment Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
20402.
In an age when the Catholic Church faces growing indifference, espe- cially in the world's urban and industrial precincts, the Polish Catholic Church stands out sharply. During the Solidarity sit-ins of 1980, for instance, one of the workers' demands was that Sunday mass be broad- cast government-run radio. Nowak, former director of Radio Free Europe's...
Archbishop Jozef Glemp, strongly opposes all violence. Christ forgave his oppressors, Glemp observed in January 1982; "this is our Christian way, our difficult way."
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
TheFuture "Fusion Energy: Still an Elusive Target" William Metz, in High Technology
ofFusion (Jan.-Feb. 19821,P.O. Box 2810, Boulder, Colo.80322.
Despite talk of scientific "breakthroughs" and despite genuine prog- ress, fusion power-energy produced by fusing nuclei of light...
Paul Bernard, in Scientific American
(Jan. 1982), P.O. Box 5969, New York,
N.Y. 10017.
Scholars have long suspected that a Greek colonial state flourished in what is now Soviet Tadzhikistan and Afghanistan, in the second and third centuries B.C. But aside from some coins, no traces of the rumored "1,000 cities" of Hellenic Bactriana could be found. Now, in northwest- ern Afghanistan, close to the Soviet border, a French archaeological team reports it has unearthed the ruins of Ai Khanum,...
a conservative President, once again ponder the role they want government to play in their lives. Here, Alan Brinkley looks at the various American reform traditions that influenced FDR as he fashioned, willy-nilly, the New Deal; Bradford Lee supplies a " report card" on the Roosevelt administration's economic policies; and William Leuchtenburg examines FDR's lingering impact on the men who succeeded him in the White House.
Alan Brinkley
A century of political tradition was shattered i...