Three years from now, on January 1, 1993, Western
Europe will be "born
again." The 12-state Euro-
pean Community (EC) will
turn into the Single Inte- grated Market (SIM). This new creation will unite some 320 million people with a com- bined gross domestic product of about five trillion dollars and will stretch from Cork to Calabria, from the Atlantic to the Ae- gean. As a trading bloc, it will surpass all others in the world. Even today, the (exter- nal) exports of the EC dwarf...
Frank D. McConnell
Apopular joke defines com- professionals-is at the center of a vitu- edy as the second oldest perative debate that has been raging on profession, which, like the American and British campuses for at least first, has been ruined am- a decade. ateurs. The debate may sound like an esoteric I would suggest that the academic squabble. But it has serious im- truly oldest profession is poetry-or plications for the future of humanistic storytelling, or mythmaking, or whatever studies...
For all the academic ink de- voted to the subject of revolu- tion, history is rarely discon- tinuous, rarely an affair of dramatic leaps or breaks. While rhetoric and the emo-tional environment can shift quickly, the actual workings of a society usually change at about the same rate as the pro- verbial freight train. Just the same, there are occasional turning points in any na- tion's life, when the engine crests a hill or enters a deep curve. The train remains a' train-momentum intact-but thanks...
Inever knew anyone quite like my father, but then I never really knew
my father either. He was a man
without a single vice, but with a
hundred foibles. He was a "de-
voted" husband in a miserably un- happy marriage. He was embarrassingly proud of me and advertised my small aca- demic triumphs by stopping fellow Tul- sans on the street to show them newspaper clippings, and he thermofaxed my letters home to give to passing acquaintances. Yet he never once praised me to my face: Wh...
two percent annually through the early 1980s. The
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimates that the So- viet military now consumes a staggering 15 to 17 percent of the Soviet gross national prod- uct. (US. military spending amounts to six percent of GNP.) Yet, Aslund notes, "it is difficult to find any informed Soviet citizen who believes in earnest that it is less than . . .22 to 30 percent."
Looking back at the Soviet's last major attempt at economic reform, in 1965, Aslund says...
It is either celebrated or conceded that ture, matted-down light hair, plain specta- John Dewey is the most influential Amer- cles, drooping mustache, and starched ican philosopher of the 20th century. No collar, Dewey looked more like a Victorian other philosopher in this century, Richard businessman from the Midwest than a theo- Rorty has observed, so freed philosophy retician of metaphysics and a political activ- from its age-old metaphysical concerns and ist. But in habit if not in appearance,...
WQ AUTUMN 1989
Reading is reading is reading, as Gertrude Stein might have said. Medieval monks reading the Bible aloud, a subway commuter scanning the New York Daily News, Mao Zedong perusing Marx's Capital-all, it may seem, are engaged in the same activity. But is it the same? Robert Darnton thinks not. Reading has a history, he argues. Here he examines the act of reading in Europe and Amer- ica as it has changed over four centuries. How people read can be more revealing than what they read....
6 per- cent per year. Researchers at MIT calculate that "the aver-age person would have to take a flight every day for the next 29,000 years before being in- volved in a fatal crash."
True, the authors say, re- ports of "near collisions" have jumped recently (up 26 per- cent between 1986 and 1987).
"Religious Change In America."
Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass. 02138. 133 pp. $25.
Author: Andrew M. Greeley
"When the Social Science Re- search Council i...
Today, China is in grave danger of los- ing its past. Like a snail robbed of its shell, it has nothing to pull back into, little to carry forward with certainty. The mass movement for democracy in the spring of 1989 already did not happen. The govern- ment claims it was nothing but "counter- revolutionary turmoil" instigated by a handful of "hooligans." The students and ordinary citizens killed in Beijing may not be mourned publicly. Remembrance of the dead-long the anchor...
could a present-day Manhattanite of the century, had been more than dou-
somehow be transported back to the bling every 20 years and by 1850 stood at
mid-19th century, he would find little to slightly over half a million. The "Empire
surprise him in the New York City of that City," as some insisted on calling her, al-
-
time. Although its teeming boardinghouses ready had the reputation of being a
and tenements, hotels, pleasure haunts, cosmopolis-of being, owing to the l...