gardening and rural embellishment" as evidence of America's growing refinement. He also saw it as an antidote to the characteristically American "spirit of unrest": Growing plants in a way encouraged men to put down their own roots.
Between 1818 and 1857, some 40 horticultural societies had sprung up in towns and cities across the youthful republic. It might be said that the gardening movement bloomed-and has never withered.
"Trying Higher Education: An Eight
A Failing Grade...
Daniel C. Hal-lin, in The Journal of Politics (Feb. 1984), Dept. of Political Science, Univ. of Fla., Gainesville, Fla. 32611.
American television journalists turned against the U.S. government during the 1960s, "lost" the war in Vietnam, and have been systemati- cally undermining public trust in American institutions ever since.
That view enjoys wide currency today. But Hallin, a political scien- tist at the University of California at San Diego, found little support for it in a survey...
PERIODICALS
PRESS & TELEVISION
not challenging Washington's policies. And in fact, TV reporters pre- paring stories on the Vietnam War (excluding antiwar protest in the United States) relied just as heavily on government spokesmen after Tet as they had earlier and rarely questioned their reliability.
Beyond mirroring changing events, Hallin contends, newsmen re- flected the dissolution of consensus, particularly among national lead- ers, behind the U.S. war effort. As Max Frankel of the...
Mar-
tin Benjamin, James Muyskens, and Paul
Saenger, in The Hastings Center Report
(Apr. 1984), 360 Broadway, Hastings-on-
Hudson, N.Y. 10706.
Americans routinely turn the latest tools of medicine into instruments of vanity. Indeed, some doctors have become virtual sculptors, per- forming cosmetic face-lifts, hair transplants, and orthodontic work. Soon, thanks to laboratory genetic technology, they will also be able to control children's height.
Human growth hormone (hGH) has long been available...
Mark Lilla, in Partisan Review (no. 2, 1984), 121 Bay State Rd., Boston, Mass. 02215.
Since the turn of the century, philosophers in the United States and Great Britain have been preoccupied with increasingly esoteric studies of language. In the process, they have become "peripheral to American intellectual life," writes Lilla, executive editor of the Public Interest. But he sees signs of a "postmodern" revival in American philosophy.
Anglo-American philosophers first focused...
Mark Lilla, in Partisan Review (no. 2, 1984), 121 Bay State Rd., Boston, Mass. 02215.
Since the turn of the century, philosophers in the United States and Great Britain have been preoccupied with increasingly esoteric studies of language. In the process, they have become "peripheral to American intellectual life," writes Lilla, executive editor of the Public Interest. But he sees signs of a "postmodern" revival in American philosophy.
Anglo-American philosophers first focused...
asexual parthenogenesis:
Each seed will grow, without being fertilized, into an exact genetic
copy of its parent plant.
Sex has some obvious advantages. For a species adapting to a chang-
ing environment, "the myriad natural variations that sex produces can
spell the difference between success and failure, survival and extinc-
tion." The chief disadvantage of sex is uncertainty. Because male and
female each contribute half of their offspring's genes, the result can be
the worst...
Her-man F. Mark, in American Scientist (Mar.-Apr. 1984), P.O. Box 2889, linto on, Iowa 52735.
Nearly everything in the industrialized world seems to be made of plas- tic or at least to contain some of it. Yet it was only a few decades ago that scientists began to understand this remarkable material.
As is so often the case with great discoveries, writes Mark, Dean Emeritus of the Polytechnic Institute of New York, plastic was first cre- ated accident. In 1846, Swiss chemist Christian Schoenbein...
Rochelle L. Stanfield, in National Journal
For Electricity S AD^. 14, 1984). 1730 M St. N.W., Wash- ington, D.C. 20036.
Americans take electricity almost as much for granted as they do the air they breathe. "Flick the switch," says National Journal correspondent Stanfield, "and the lights are sure to go on." But in Washington and at util- ity company headquarters around the country, specialists are debating how to ensure that the lights will still go on during the next century.
The...
Car- lisle Ford Runge, in The Journal of Con- temporary Studies (Winter 1984), Transaction Periodicals Consortium. Dept. 541, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
The Reagan administration's efforts to "privatize" large tracts of feder- ally owned land auctioning it off to individuals and corporations strike some critics as a sellout to "special interests."
In fact, says Runge, a University of Minnesota economist, "privatiza- tion" is chiefly motivated by...