local policemen and Cincinnati Bell employees; a Columbus, Ohio, television station re-vealed Representative Donald "Buz" Lukens's (R.-Ohio) alleged sexual miscon- duct; the gambling charges against Pete Rose, manager of baseball's Cincinnati Reds, surfaced in Sports Illustrated and
RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
three Ohio newspapers.
Anonymous sources were vital to the development of all three stories. If every journalist shared Blake's high standards, Winternitz says, these shenanigans wou...
Norman Golb, in The American Scholar (Spring 1989), 1811 Q Street N.W.,
Washington, D.C. 20009.
When Edmund Wilson published
The
culture "than writers have been wont to
Scrolls from the Dead Sea in 1955, he pop- suggest." ularized-and, indeed, helped to ce-But why were documents containing ment-the established scholarly interpre- this important, if only transitional, shift in tation of their origins. Only 8 years before, Jewish thought buried th...
George Weigel, in The Washington QuarterlyFor Democracy (Autumn 1989), 1800 K st. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20006.
It seems entirely natural today to find the Catholic Church in the forefront of the struggle for human rights everywhere from Poland to South Korea. In fact, writes Weigel, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, the Church's "conversion" is relatively re- cent, and it is not without problems.
As late as 1864, Pope Pius IX rejected out of hand i...
George Greenstein, in Astron-omy (Oct. 1989), 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Wau- kesha, Wise. 53187.
Is our universe only one among many? Is it theoretically possible to create a new universe in a laboratory-from 20 pounds of chopped liver?
Not long ago, scientists would have scoffed at such questions. Now, reports Greenstein, an Amherst astronomer, astro- physicists and others have begun taking them seriously because of the work of an MIT physicist named Alan Guth.
In 1981, Guth f...
Rick Weiss, in Science News (Sept.
A New Andromeda
23, 1989), 1719 N St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Strain?
What if the AIDS virus could spread as eas-ily as the common cold?
That horrifying possibility is not ruled out medical researchers, reports Weiss, a Science News correspondent. Viruses have recently been found to possess an alarmingly high propensity to mutation- once in every 10,000 replications. In 1983, Tenn. "There are millions of us 'chickens' just waiting to be infect...
Bhupendra Jasani and Martin Rees, in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Oct. 1989), 6042 S. Kimbark, Chicago, 111. 60637.
Space may be the Final Frontier, but it is also fast becoming the Ultimate Junkyard.
In addition to the roughly 350 active sat- ellites orbiting the Earth in "inner space," there are some 7,000 hefty pieces of space garbage-including upper stages of launchers, booster motors, and dead satel- lites. Far more hazardous are the 30,000- 70,000 pieces of junk, ranging...
Bhupendra Jasani and Martin Rees, in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Oct. 1989), 6042 S. Kimbark, Chicago, 111. 60637.
Space may be the Final Frontier, but it is also fast becoming the Ultimate Junkyard.
In addition to the roughly 350 active sat- ellites orbiting the Earth in "inner space," there are some 7,000 hefty pieces of space garbage-including upper stages of launchers, booster motors, and dead satel- lites. Far more hazardous are the 30,000- 70,000 pieces of junk, ranging...
!genetically engineering "supercucum- bers" to thrive in severe heat or "inject- ing" sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect the sun's rays back into space. But the closer we move toward finding salva- tion in a "macromanaged" world, the more we hasten the end of nature.
But is there any way to quantify this dire forecast?
As it happens, McCloskey and Spalding, chairman and researcher, respectively, at the Sierra Club, recently completed a sur- vey of the...
Frederik ~ohl, in American Heritage
Birth of a Genre
(Sept.-Oct. 1989), 60 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10011.
Americans today are swamped inforrna- tion and speculation about science and technology. It was not always so. Fifty years ago, there was no Carl Sagan, no Nova (indeed, no television), no Discover
,,
magazine. Radio and newspaper coverage of science was skimpy. Pohl, a noted sci- ence fiction writer. speculates that "a ma-
r A
jority of the world's leading scientists to- da...
Richard Schickel, in the Gannett Center Journal (Summer 1989), Columbia Univ., 2950 The Story Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10027.
Consider the life cycle of a Hollywood film today. It begins with the selling of a brief story "concept" over drinks in Los Angeles and ends some years later as "word of mouth," when one moviegoer delivers a plot summary to her neighbor over the backyard fence.
All this talk of stories is a delusion, writes Schickel, a Time film critic. The tra- ditional...