"Whatever Happened to New Math?" Jeffrey W. Miller, in American Heritage (Dec. 1990), 60 5th Ave., New York, N.Y.
In the mid-1950s a radical new way of teaching math to America's reluctant stu- dents was born, and was soon hailed as the greatest advance since Pythagoras's the- ory. A little more than three decades later, however, the term "new math" is virtually a profanity.
New math was born after World War I1 as a modest attempt to improve math edu- cation. Math classes...
the mid-1970s, new math was dead.
If the space race hadn't pushed new math along so quickly, Miller writes, it might have been a success. Instead, "its most lasting impact might be that of a cau- tionary tale." Today's curriculum reform- ers, he concludes, would do well to work "from the teachers up, not from the uni- versities down."
"The Economics of Legalizing Drugs" Richard J. Dennis, in
Drug Bust The Atlantic (Nov. 1990), 745 Boylston St., Boston, Mass. 021...
Randall K. Hornelessness Filer, in NY (Autumn 1990), 42 E. 71 St.,New York, N.Y. 10021.
To many New Yorkers, daily encounters ways, roaming Central Park, or panhan- with homeless people sleeping in door- dling suggest a problem of crisis propor-
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tions. And it is, says Filer, an economist at residents in New York-one third the rate Hunter College, but not of the kind or for of 20 other large American cities. Curi- the reasons most people think. ously, though, New...
25 percent and the supply of cheap apart- ments was as great as in other cities, yet the number of homeless families rose steadily. New York families are more vul- nerable. Filer concedes. But while there are 30 to 50 percent more poor, female- headed families in New York than in other large cities, the city's family homeless rate is 250 percent higher.
Filer suggests a third, perverse possibil- ity: New York's generous homeless and housing policies encourage families to be- come homeless.
Since...
the same company. In- side the magazine were full-page ads for two Guerlain products. The woman on the cover, it turned out, was Guerlain's public relations director.
Food and cosmetic companies regularly advertise in magazines such as People and the New Yorker without demanding reci- pes or beauty columns, Steinem
en, [ellectsthosechanges
Today's Ms covers the mild as il attwlsadds. So where does the habit of men In all its diversity,wthout l~m~tat~ons
controlling the content of wom- From politics,...
a lack of non-crime-related news reporting on blacks. "Reports invariably will give mi- nority legislators ample coverage when the subject is a so-called minority issue," notes one black state legislator, "but when minority legislators become involved in the mainstream of economic, political, government, and social matters," they are "either ignored or very lightly reported."
The small number of black reporters is one reason for the media's poor coverage of blacks,...
the messiness of life," and Quine sought to construct a fluid philoso- phy of belief, Wittgenstein said that each person's truth is revealed in the way he perceives his life's experiences. Ultimately, the philosopher cannot hope to discern universal truths.
Not all Anglo-American philosophy of the past half century has been concerned with language, Ross continues. In his ele- gant Theory of Justice (1971), Harvard phi- losopher John Rawls set out explicitly to construct a set of "just...
George A. Keyworth I1 and Bruce R. Abell, in Technology Review (Oct. 1990), Build-Shuttle ing W59, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. 02139.
The U.S. space shuttle was supposed to open the door to routine, affordable space flight. Needless to say, it hasn't. Keyworth and Abell, both researchers at the Hudson Institute, argue that it was "doomed from the start. The shuttle is too costly, too com- plex, and too inflexible to support today's space access needs." Scrap it, they urge, and instead pump...
the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which is wary of any program that threatens the shuttle's future. Partly because of such bu- reaucratic indifference, Congress cut the NASP's 1990 budget from $427 million to $254 million, pushing back the first sched- uled flight test from 1994 to 1997. Keyworth and Abell worry that the NASP will be killed. "Only when travel into orbit ceases to be a newsworthy event," they conclude, "can we claim to have truly en- tered...
Peter W. Huber, in Daeda-lus (Fall 1990), 136 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
Scientists have no patience for colleagues who cook numbers and gloss over errors. So it is ironic, says Huber, a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, that half-baked scien- tific theories and unproven hypotheses have found a home in, of all places, the American courtroom. During the last dec- ade, he writes, "courts have become steadily more willing to decide factual is- sues that mainstream scientists still c...