any other president. He routinely invited them to official banquets, and faithfully attended such Washington press fixtures as the White House Correspondents' Dinner and the annual Gridiron evening. Newsmen felt welcome to form clubs at which they could banter with Roosevelt and his aides: The "J. Russell Young School of Expression" was a yearly gathering, inspired the Civilian Conservation Corps, where White House staffers and reporters met to plant trees, make daisy chains, and sing...
married couples, he also stressed that "the sins of the flesh" were far more venial than "the pleasures of power, of hatred." Unhke some fundamentalists, he emphasized that Christians could learn from other religions, and Jesus could save "those who have not explicitly accepted Him in this life.'
Lewis's Christian apologetics were of two kinds. His essays, among them Mere Christianity (1952) and The Problem of Pain (1940), were a systematic guide to Christian faith and...
Richard
B. Kaner and Alan G. MacDiannid, in Scientific American (Feb. 1988), 415 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y.10017.
During the early 1970s, a student at the Tokyo Institute of Technology erred in an attempt to synthesize a polymer called polyacetylene. He used 1,000 times more catalyst than he was supposed to.
The result was a new land of plastic, a silvery film that looked like aluminum foil, stretched like Saran Wrap, and overturned an idea that had persisted since such synthetics were introduced...
Law-rence Martin, in The Sciences (Mar.-Apr. 1988), New York Academy of Sciences, 2 East 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
In Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin embraced a view, first pro- posed his staunch defender, T. H. Huxley, that the closest relative to man on the evolutionary tree "is either the Chimpanzee or the Gorilla."
For a hundred years, many scientists questioned this closeness. Martin, an anthropologist at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, shows that in recent...
IODICALS
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
But Pilgrim, like all students of evolution in his day, believed that the best way to judge how closely species were related was to consider all their physical similarities. This view changed during the 1960s, when West Germany's Willi Hennig argued that only similarities that linked species to a common ancestor-"shared derived" characteristics-mattered. Horses, zebras, and rhinoceroses all belong to the order Perissodactyla because they have fewer t...
Jonathan Harwood, in Isis (Sept.
1987), Univ. of Pa., 215 South 34th St., Phila-
delphia, Pa. 19104-6303.
Do different nations have different "styles" of conducting scientific re- search? Harwood, a historian at Britain's University of Manchester, be- lieves that "national styles" emerged long ago. His case in point: a com- parison of German and American geneticists.
Characteristically, Harwood says, they used the 1900 rediscovery of the papers of botanist Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)...
David
Vacation ~trauss, in American Quarterly (Summer
1987), 303 College Hall, Univ. of Pa., Philadel-
phia, Pa. 19104-6303.
When vacationing Americans go camping or mountaineering, or otherwise answer the call of the wild, they follow a trail first blazed liberal New England Protestant ministers of the 19th century.
Before the 1850s, the "vacation" was an upper-class indulgence, for Southern planters and Northern merchants who could afford summer ref- uges such as Newport, Rhode...
Daniel Mazmanian and David Morell, in The Public Interest (Winter 1988), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 545, Washington, D.C. 20036.
During the past decade, government controls on the storage and disposal of toxic waste have greatly tightened. Each fresh discovery of an aban- doned hazardous-materials dump brings more stringent regulation the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its state counterparts.
But "few if any" of their remedies have really worked, say Mazmanian, a professor at...
Daniel Mazmanian and David Morell, in The Public Interest (Winter 1988), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 545, Washington, D.C. 20036.
During the past decade, government controls on the storage and disposal of toxic waste have greatly tightened. Each fresh discovery of an aban- doned hazardous-materials dump brings more stringent regulation the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its state counterparts.
But "few if any" of their remedies have really worked, say Mazmanian, a professor at...
processes as wondrous as Houdi- ni's escape from a straitjacket.
The reckless range of Sturges's films, including The Miracle of Mor- gan's Creek (1944) and Unfaithfully Yours (1948), exhausted the screw- ball comedy form. Sturges's great works, Garis observes, "made his ca- reer the [genre's] appropriate finale." Later directors, such as Peter Bogdanovich in What's Up, Doc? (1972) or Ted Kotcheff in Switching Channels (1988), attempted, but failed, to revive the genre.
Ideologies "Infinite...