The new very broadband high capacity networks . . . ought to be built by the federal government and then transitioned into private industry.
--Vice President-elect Al Gore, at the December 1992 postelection economic summit in Little Rock
Digital technology is opening up new worlds of potential, few more enticing than the emerging global marketplace....
Longevity alone makes Byzantium remarkable. Lasting almost 1,200 years, it outlived all of the other great empires. More impressive than mere age are the reach and influence of its civilization. Russians, Serbs, Bulgarians, and others owe to Byzantium, in varying degrees, their Christianity, their literacy, and the beginnings of their art, literature, and architecture. Yet for all that, the Byzantine Empire has been slighted or misconstrued, even bysome notable historians. To see the Byzantine recordclearly, our author argues, is to understand not only aonce and great power but a civilizing force thatcontinues to shape the contemporary world.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt's famous explanation of the evil that produced the Holocaust and other 20th-century horrors falls short of adequate.
It is often said that people come to resemble their dogs, and dogs their masters. But we humans do not stop at searching for reflections of our individual qualities in our canine companions. We are also eager to find the representative virtues of entire nations and ethnic groups.
"I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time or having to coordinate activities with an abstract passage of time, because their points of reference are mainly the activities themselves, which are generally of a leisurely character--there being no autonomous points of reference to which activities have to conform with precision."
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the god in whom many women today find comfort. In response to New Age spiritualism or feminist need, such women are inventing goddesses or reclaiming ancient deities to give direction to their spiritual lives. Yet the rejection of the biblical God, and of the Bible itself, might be overly hasty—or so suggests a new generation of biblical scholars.
Fraught with profound questions about the obligations of citizenship, conscription has been a controversial issue at crucial moments in the American past. During the Vietnam War, the draft was almost as much an object of protest as the conflict itself. Then, a quarter-century ago, conscription ceased. Our author takes a look back.
Of the many books that seek to tell Americans about themselves, The Lonely Crowd stands among a small collection of classics. Yet the meaning of this modern classic was largely misunderstood during the decade of its greatest popularity, and its analysis of American society may be more relevant to our time than it was to the 1950s.