Modern poetry has a reputation for being difficult. It's hard to follow, harder still to scan, and there's almost no way to memorize it. The last job is so hard it gives you the impression that modem poetry doesn't want to be remembered, doesn't want to be poetry in the traditional sense.
hat a shock it has public facilities threaten the continuation been to Americans of basic community services such as fire to discover that protection, public transportation, water steel and concrete supplies, secure prisons, and flood protec- are not forever, that tion." But it took a series of surprises and the proud bridges disasters to drive home the point. In 1984, a built during the New Deal and the inter- bridge collapse on Interstate 95 in Connect- states laid out in the comfortable...
Years before President Bill
Clinton came to Wash- ington with his campaign pledge to spend an addi- tional $20 billion annu-ally on America's infra-
structure "to develop the world's best com-
munication, transportation, and environ-
mental systems," economists and others
were talking about the need to spend more
on public works. Their debate has been al-
most entirely about one question: How
much more? Usually overlooked in these
discussions is the real infrastructure di-
lemma of...
KGROUND BOOKS
THE SAGA OF AMERICAN
INFRASTRUCTURE
until fairly recently, few historians paid se- rious attention to such seemingly humble matters as sewerage, solid waste, and stormwater management. Today a growing body of public-works history sheds valuable light not only on our contemporary infrastruc- ture problems but on some of the basic forces that have shaped American life.
Much of this new scholarship followed the publication of History of Public Works in the United States, 1776-1976 (...
There was once a professor of law named John Millar. Born
in Scotland in 1735, he went
to Adam Smith's lectures on
moral philosophy and then,
finding his own religious con- victions too weak for a clerical career even by the tolerant standards of the Enlighten- ment, took to the law. In 1761 he became a professor at the University of Glasgow, where he is said to have been among the first to lecture in English rather than Latin, acquiring a reputation as an orator in his university and be...
a 45-year stand- off between lethally armed superpowers cannot help but temper the optimism that came with the ending of the Cold War. As the superpowers turn swords into plowshares, we turn our attention to a matter that looms constant behind the drama of war and peace: the intimate-and some would say hteful-connections between the state and the military. From
An arti.stf.s conception of the ancient Greek polis of Priene. In addition to the walls, promi- nent feature.^ include the stadiuin, the...
At the turn of this century, the Irish-American jour- nalist Finley Peter Dunne wrote a column of politi- cal and social satire for a Chicago newspaper. On
one occasion, he touched on the ancient
world, attributing the following observation
to his character, the sage of Halsted Street,
Mr. Dooley:
I know histhry isn't thrue, Hinnissy, be-
cause it ain't like what I see ivry day in
Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along
with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that'll
show me th' people fightin', g...
Although G. K. Chesterton is among his compatriots. He would have one of the most quoted of been gratified by the remark of an ordinary early-20th-century English policeman who turned up at his funeral: writers, he has yet to find his "We'd all have been here if we could have fair share of late-20th-cen- got off duty. He was a grand man." tury English readers. During Since then, devoted Chestertonians his lifetime he was immensely popular, have continued reading him furiously. more popular...
Many a writer on technol- ogy has been struck in a
moment of pause be-
tween sentences or an
hour of distraction be-
tween paragraphs by the extraordinariness of ordinary things. The push-button telephone, the electronic cal- culator, and the very computer on which these words are being processed are among the more sophisticated things we use, and they awe into silence those of us who are not electrical engineers. By contrast, low- tech objects such as pins, thumb tacks, and paper clips a...
he study of history assumes
time and place, without
which a past event cannot be
understood. Both are neces-
sary, but are they sufficient?
The question arises because there are often inquiries that are clearly not couched, as the physical sciences are, in terms of timeless causes and effects but that we do not consider to be history-inquiries relating to geology, botany, and zoology, in which it is necessary to specify time and place. Such inquiries have indeed been sometimes described as...