lations of New York, Boston, Chicago, and other Northern industrial cities. Fully 20 percent of American adults age 20 to 24 had been born abroad. Then, World War I and restrictive legislation dramatically slowed the influx. Today, the wave of pre-1914 immigrants accounts for the record growth in the number of "old old" Americans (age 75 and over).
The disappearance of the pre-1914 immigrants will move the elderly much closer to the mainstream of American life, writes Newitt. From 1970...
12.1
and 11.8 percent, respectively. In California during 1979, Baptist and
Episcopal schools both educated higher percentages of black students
(12.5 and 17 percent, respectively) than did public schools (10.1 per-
cent). And while 1975 U.S. Census data from the Northeast showed
public schools trailing private schools in their share of students drawn
from families earning $30,000 or more, the difference was surprisingly
small (10.4 versus 16.7 percent). As one researcher put it, America's...
media conglomerates such as the Rizzoli publishing house. Collectively, they have lured away one-third of the state network's viewers and prompted wholesale state programming changes this fall.
Meanwhile, local and regional cable outfits are sprouting all over Eu- rope. (Residents of Brussels may already choose from among 13 cable channels.) In three years, European broadcast satellites will be able to relay alternative programming to rooftop antennae. Eventually, they will give European viewers...
James A. Michcner, in US. News and World Report (May 4, 1981), P.O. Box 2624, Boulder, Colo. 80302.
How could her editors have printed it? How could they have pushed it for a Pulitzer Prize? How could the Pulitzer advisory board have hon- ored it? These questions have dogged journalists since April 15, 1981, when Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke resigned after admitting that she had fabricated her Pulitzer Prize-winning article on "Jimmy," an eight-year-old heroin addict. Michener,...
Ronald worki in, in~hiloso-
Equality uhv and Public Affairs (Summer and Fall
i 2
198 1, respectively), princeton University Press, P.O. Box 231, Princeton, N.J. 08540.
Efficiency, wealth, liberty-the free market has been hailed for promot- ing many worthy goals, but equality is not one of them. Yet Dworkin, an Oxford philosopher, maintains that a form of free market is needed to achieve a coherent, fair system for equally distributing resources.
Dworkin examines in detail the pros and cons...
John Dart, in Theology Today and the Tepee (July 198 l), Princeton Theological Semi-
nary, P.O. Box 29, Princeton, N.J. 08540.
Assailed missionaries, long stifled by "humanitarian" laws, and eroded by modern ideas, many of the North American Indians' reli- gious traditions have faded. A recent law, the American Indian Reli- gious Freedom Act of 1978, attempts to protect what survives.
Until the mid-20th century, Washington assumed that its duty was to "civilize and Christianize"...
licensing their profession. And many tribes whose own reli- gious rites have vanished with their old priests are now adopting the symbols of the Plains Indians-e.g., the sacred pipe and Sun Dance. Forty percent of all Indians are Christian, at least nominally. Many Protestant and Catholic church workers are trying to fit Indian rites into the framework of Christianity. Episcopalians, for instance, have accepted Navajo medicine men into their congregations and permitted them to offer prayers.
The...
Hero in the second
century B.C. But the
ancients had little
interest in finding
practical uses for
their scientific
knowledge.
cal projects or applying their knowledge only to tools of war (Archi- medes' catapults and cranes, for instance).
Moreover, the Greeks and Romans believed that honorable wealth came from the land. Men who made money by other means-trading or industry-invested their profits in land rather than "research and de- velopment." And farmers, who enjoyed...
a few individuals-the ones who make the major finds, get the research grants, and stay in the public limelight.
But some of the most important research into man's past has been taking place in laboratories, not in the field. X-rays of cross sections of bone can reveal areas of stress and strength and tell us much about our ancestors' physical activities and capabilities. Paleoneurologists such as Ralph Holloway of Columbia are analyzing casts of the insides of early skulls, hoping to determine...
the sun's pull at different points along the moon's path-takes 173.3 days to complete. This perturba- tion is in turn part of an 18.6 year "in-out" lunar oscillation perpendic- ular to the moon's orbit. England's chronically cloudy weather, argues EllegArd, would have prevented enough sightings to firmly establish the wobble's regularity. The region, although dryer and 2OC warmer 5,000 years ago, probably enjoyed only one clear day out of every two or three. Further, roughly one-third...