Michael Schudson, in
HOW Clark Kent
Columbia Journalism Review (May-June 1992), 700 Journalism Learned to Fly ~ldg.,Columbia Univ., New York, N.Y. 10027.
The American news media emerged from the Watergate scandals with unprecedented power-founded, some press critics say, on il- lusions. As Edward Jay Epstein noted back in 1973, "What the press did between the break-in in June [I9721 and the trial in January was to leak the case developed the federal and Flor- ida prosecutors to the public."...
the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, etc., the hostile net- work commentators, the gen-
erally hostile White House The Nixon administration portrayed the news media as an inde- press corps, the hostile Con- pendent and hostile power, and many Americans were persuaded.
gress, etc."
-
As a result of the administration's attacks, Schudson argues, many Americans came to perceive the news media-whether admired or feared-as an independent source of power. And the perception of...
Michael M. J. Fischer, in New Perspectives Quarterly, (Spring 1992), 10951 W. Pico Blvd., 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, Calif. 90064.
Often depicted as medieval, patriarchal, and
unchanging, the Islamic world is beginning to
experience dramatic cultural shifts.
Less than two decades ago, notes Fischer, di- rector of Rice University's Center for Cultural Studies, music and sculpture and even chess were forbidden for Shi'ite believers in Iran; ra- dio, television, and movies were considered in- struments...
John Terborgh, in Scientific American (May 1992), 415 Madison Ave., New Of the Birds York, N.Y. 10017.
The trills and calls of thrushes, warblers, tana- gers, and other favorite American songbirds are heard less frequently in many cities and sub- urbs. A decline of the songbird population has been under way for decades. the 1970s, for example, the number of breeding birds in Rock Creek Park, in Washington, D.C., was only about one-third what it was in the 1940s, and species that bred there but w...
John Terborgh, in Scientific American (May 1992), 415 Madison Ave., New Of the Birds York, N.Y. 10017.
The trills and calls of thrushes, warblers, tana- gers, and other favorite American songbirds are heard less frequently in many cities and sub- urbs. A decline of the songbird population has been under way for decades. the 1970s, for example, the number of breeding birds in Rock Creek Park, in Washington, D.C., was only about one-third what it was in the 1940s, and species that bred there but...
the Infrared Astronomical Satellite. "Telltale streaks in the images," Cowen writes, "revealed the presence of giant, never-before- seen trails of dust particles associated with three comets that visit the inner solar system every three to seven years." The trails' pebble- sized debris was larger than the extremely tiny particles in the dust tails visible when comets move near the sun. That same year, the Euro- pean Space Agency's Giotto spacecraft flew within 605 kilometers...
acknowledging their sexual assertiveness," Small writes, "but we often stop short of ac- cepting that sexually assertive behavior might result in less than choosy behavior." Could it be that evolutionary biology is about to enter a postfeminist era?
Defeating "Revision, Rewriting, Rereading; or, 'An Error [Not] in The Am-
bassadors"' Jerome McGann, in American Literature (Mar.
The Master 1992), 304E Allen Building, Duke Univ., Durham, N.C. 27706.
"A curious error...
avoiding the English text altogether, which alone contained the 'reversed' chapters 28-29." But the Master, it appears, did not foresee what modern schol- arship can do.
Mapplethorpe "Art, Morals, and Politics" Robert Hughes, in The New York Review of Books (Apr. 23, 1992), 250 West 57th St., New York, And the Museums N.Y. 10107.
The Robert Mapplethorpe affair-the fierce controversy over the museum exhibition of his photographs of sadomasochistic homosexual acts-did much more than...
Berkeley spectacu- lar, since both, after all, are example[s] of Art Deco choreography."
Other writers, such as Ingrid Sischy and Kay Larson, took the therapeutic tack, and claimed that the Mapplethorpe images "teach us moral lessons, stripping away the veils of prudery and ignorance and thus promoting gay rights confronting us with the outer limits of human sexual behavior." Similar images of women be- ing degraded, Hughes observes, would not likely be greeted so calmly.
It is...
super- natural means), who uses magic to transform New York City into what seems like a utopia. But this Paradise, like the original, is flawed: The golem's sexual awakening unleashes chaos on the city and Puttermesser finally must bury her creation in the earth. "Too much Paradise is greed," Puttermesser concludes.
Ozick "wants to have it both ways," Krupnick says. "She gives and then she takes away, imag- ining the story and then destroying it before our eyes. Before...