Essays

Essays | Autumn 1994
The Immigrant Challenge

ot since the Great Depression has the United States seen a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment to rival today's. So strong is public feeling

that it helped drive President Bill Clinton to re- verse the nation's long-held policy of welcom- ing any refugee who managed to escape from Fidel Castro's Cuba. Instead of a hero's wel- come, the Cuban boat people received inglo- rious confinement in Panama or at the U.S. na- val base in Guantanamo Bay.
Two years earlier, after the 1992Los An- geles riots, Pa...

Essays | Autumn 1994
The Virtual Job

LAURA L. NASH
something very odd is going on in the American corporate workplace. Em-
ployees are being told to prepare for
a radical new condition of perma- nent insecurity, a future full of sporadic lay- offs, endless efforts to upgrade job skills, and perpetually recombining work teams of insiders and "outsourcers." Continuous cor- porate "rightsizing" will dictate a "portfolio career" strategy: Since workers will no longer spend their careers with one or two...

Essays | Autumn 1994
Oppenheimer Investigated

Thirty-eight years old when appointed head of the Los Alamos Laboratory,
7.Robert Oppenlzeimer (1904-67) became one of the more astute strategic
thinkers about the nuclear age he helped to create. After facing charges
of disloyalty-clwrges as groundless as ones recently made in the much-publi-
cized memoirs of a former KGB general-Oppenlzeimer lost influence in the
highest circles of government. But as Robert Erwin shows, this was far less a
tragedy for the brilliant "outsider"...

Essays | Autumn 1994
The Strange Birth of Liberal France

has separated political pliilosopliy in the English-speaking world from that of continental Europe. As is well known, this rift did not open overnight. Its origins can be traced back to the early 19th century, when distinctly national styles of plulosophical reflection first arose in Europein tlie wake of tlie French Revolution. As late as the 17th century, European thinkers shared a common language, Latin, which allowed them to communicate directly witli their con- temporaries and indirectly...

Essays | Summer 1994
WIRED FOR WHAT?
Essays | Summer 1994
Learning from the Net

The end is Nil. That's the National In- formation Infrastructure, of course, the amorphous web-to-be that has become an inkblot test of the na- tional psyche. Some proponents dream of a 24-hour global symposium combining the best of Madame de Stael and Mortimer Adler, while skeptics fear a future of conference calls with the likes of John Wayne Gacy and Joseph Goebbels. Some fear a surveillance machine of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Inter- nal Revenue Service, others a witches' sabbath...

Essays | Summer 1994
The Cultural Consequences Of The Information Superhighway

he coming of the information super-
concerns may be, such a neo-Luddite view of

highway, or, more modestly, the
the NII seems beyond the pale of serious con-

National Information Infrastructure
sideration. As a people we are wont to explore

(Nil), has reanimated America's
the paths along wluc11 our desire leads us, and

running debate about the vices and virtues of
it seems virtually foreordained that our desire...

Essays | Summer 1994
BACKGROUND BOOKS

Eric S. Raymond. There, among the inscrutable definitions of inscrutable terms sucli as "pessimizing compiler" and "sandbender," one learns tliat to gweep is "to liack, usually at night," and tliat to liack is, among otlier things, "to work 011 sometliing (typically a program)." One definition seems to distill tlie essence of liacker existence:

ha ha only serious [from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, 'Ha Ha Only Kid- ding'] A phrase (often seen abbreviated a...

Essays | Summer 1994
THE POPULATION QUESTION REVISITED

GEORGE MOFFETT
Despite su~rising reductions in birth rates in many parts of the world, more than 90 million people are being added to the Earth each year. World popula- tion is now approaching six billion, up from only three billion in 1960. During the next 20 years, it could increase as much as 40 percent, to almost eight billion people, or by less than 30 percent, to about 7.2 billion. The difference will depend in pad upon decisions that are made by the United Nations International Conference...

Essays | Summer 1994
THE POPULATION QUESTION REVISITED

Despite su~rising reductions in birth rates in many parts of the world, more than 90 million people are being added to the Earth each year. World popula- tion is now approaching six billion, up from only three billion in 1960. During the next 20 years, it could increase by as much as 40 percent, to almost eight billion people, or by less than 30 percent, to about 7.2 billion. The difference will depend in pad upon decisions that are made by the United Nations International Conference on Population...

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