The Brain
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iews of articles from periodicals and specialized journals here and abroad
POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
7
RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
24
FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE
10
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
26
ECONOMICS. LABOR & BUSINESS
14
RESOURCES & ENVIRONMENT
30
SOCIETY
17
ARTS & LETTERS
33
PRESS & TELEVISION
21
Josiah Lee Auspitz, in The Public Interest (Spring 1982), P.O. Box 542, Old Chelsea,
N.Y. 10014.
America's two major political parties are busy reforming themselves -again. A committee of 60 Democrats headed North Carolina Gov- ernor James B. Hunt has been working to change the way the party nominates presidential candidates and allocates convention delegates. Two Republican reform committees are also at work. But Auspitz, a project director for the Washington-based Sabre Foundation, worries that...
shortening the pri-
mary season and creating regional primaries-may favor established
politicians too much. "Parties were once used to make sure that citizen
pressures did not get out of hand," he concludes. "Now we may need
them to make sure they are felt at all."
Congressional "Voluntary Retirement From the U.S.
House: The Costs of Congressional Ser-
Dropouts vice" John R. ~ibbing,in Legislative
Studies Quarterly (February 1982), Com-
parative Legislative...
time- consuming quorum calls and votes on meaningless issues (such as choosing the National Dance), a new breed of Congressman intent on posturing for the media, and by a fragmented subcommittee system. The congressional reforms of the 1970s are partly to blame. Now that committee chairmanships are not awarded by seniority, there is less incentive to stay in office.
Older retirees (over age 60) were more likely to cite the diminished advantages of seniority or the desire to try something new "before...
the Europeans themselves during the '70s, made Europe's predicament even more apparent: Theoretically, the United States could survive a nuclear war unscathed limiting the conflict to an exchange of missiles in Europe and western Russia.
Should they choose to shed their "dependence" on America, the Europeans have three options, says Draper. They can follow the French "nuclear" path; eschew nuclear weapons but build up their con- ventional defenses to maintain an anti-Soviet...
the possible costs. In a nuclear exchange, even the winner would be severely punished. A small deterrent force is sufficient, since an attacker can never be certain of destroying all of the defender's nuclear weapons.
The danger of "irrationality" may be exaggerated. In the past, even "irrational" Third World rulers, notably Uganda's Amin or Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi, have backed down when faced with the threat of superior conventional enemy force; there is no reason to think...
PERIODICALS
What Budget "Is the Federal Budget Out of Control?" bv Richard W. Kopcke, in New England Deficit? ~>onomicReview (NOV.-D~C.
1981), Re- search Dept., Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 600 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Mass. 02106.
A federal budget deficit simply reflects the government's irresponsible penchant for spending more than it earns; right? Wrong, says Kopcke, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The federal budget is not even a conventional budget. Its...
"Image and Reality: The Railway Corporate-State Metaphor" bv James A. ward, in Business ist tor^ R~V& (Winter 19811, 216 Cotting House, Soldiers Field,
Boston, Mass. 02 163.
Mark Twain first used the phrase "robber barons" to describe the rail- road moguls of 19th-century America. The name stuck because it cap- tured the public's view of the new tycoons-more arrogant, greedy, unscrupulous than the businessmen of old. But, argues Ward, a...
"a less obtrusive set of men more attuned to the paths of compromise and stability."
Pension Power "Pension Power" A. H. Raskin, in The Journal of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies (Winter 198 1 /82), The Institute for Socioeconomic Studies, Airport Road, White Plains, N.Y. 10604.
The "fiercest labor-management battles of the 1980s" probably will be over control of more than $650 billion in employee pension funds, ac- cording to Raskin, a former New York Times...
the federal government.
Some unionists say it is possible to do good and still do well; they
point to the Dreyfus Third Century Fund, a money market fund that
weighs companies' environmental, consumer protection, and
minority-hiring records, in addition to profits. In 1980-81, Dreyfus
bettered the average stock-market performance a wide margin.
SOCIETY
"Freud and the Soul" by Bruno Bet- telheim, in The New Yorker (Mar. 1, 1982), 25 West 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036,
"A cure...
Charles
P. Roland, in TheJournal ofsouthern His-
the 'New South' tory (Feb. 1982), % ~ennetiH.Wall, Dept. of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602.
Since World War 11, the Old Confederacy has undergone striking changes: In place of agricultural poverty, it has seen growth in industry and prosperity; in place of Democratic solidity, there have been Repub- lican sweeps; in place of Jim Crow, there have been integration and black political power.
But, notes Roland, a University of Kentucky...
James Q. Wilson
Law vs. Order and George L. Kelling, in The Atlantic
Monthly (Mar. 1982), P.O. Box 2544,
Boulder. Colo. 80321.
Communities, not just individuals, need police protection-and not just from crime. Rowdy teenagers, drunks, and panhandlers need commit no crime to make decent citizens fearful and put a neighborhood on the skids. Police should maintain public order, not just solve crimes. And until recent decades, they did. So argue Wilson and Kelling, a Harvard government professor...
rules developed to control police relations with suspected criminals."
Law enforcement alone is no solution. "A gang can weaken or destroy a community," say the authors, "standing about in a menacing fashion and speaking rudely to passersby without breaking the law." Police need to enforce community standards of "order"-but without becoming agents of neighborhood bigotry.
Citizens' patrols can be useful. And putting more policemen on foot patrol instead of in...
the early
14th century. Resulting economic hardships may have spurred con-
traception's spread. As Peter de Palude wrote, the married man,
through coitus interruptus, sought to avoid having children "quos nu-
trire non possit (whom he cannot feed)."
PRESS & TELEVISION
"The Virtuous Journalist: An Exploratory Dusting Off Essay" Michael J. Kirkhorn, in The Journalistic virtues ~uili(~eb.1982)' Society of Professional
Journalists Suite 801 W. 840 North
Lakeshore D;.,C...
PERIODICALS
PRESS & TELEVISION
Romance "Covering the Sandinistas: The Foregone Conclusions of the Fourth Estate" by
in Nicaragua Shirley Christian, in Washington Jour- nalism Review (Mar. 1982), 2233 Wiscon-sin Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007.
American reporters covering the civil war in Nicaragua during 1978-79 focused on the misdeeds of one side, the rightist government of strongman Anastasio Somoza Debayle. They saw the other side, the Sandinista National Liberation Front...
non-Marxist moderates (al- though, and large, they were not the ones with the guns).
Most important, many American journalists were "on a guilt trip," atoning for what they saw as the United States' past mistakes in Nicaragua and its debacle in Vietnam. Jumping on the Sandinistas' bandwagon, much of the press was all too willing to show how the United States, in backing Somoza, was wrong again.
"Archie Bunker and the Liberal Mind" by
Christopher Lasch, in Channels of Com-
as...
Martin E. Marty, in Daedalus (Winter R&piOUSAmerica 1982)-1172 Commonwealth Ave., Boston,
Mass. 02134.
Over the past three decades, scholars have had difficulty deciding if America is becoming less~or more-religious. So writes Marty, a his- torian at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
During the 1950s and early '60s, sociologists believed that industrial societies, in the long run, were bound to become increasingly secular. Many discounted the religious revival evident in public opinion...
Jan Nowak, in
Problems of Communism (Jan.-Feb. 1982).
in Poland superintendent of ~ocuments,~overn-
ment Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
20402.
In an age when the Catholic Church faces growing indifference, espe- cially in the world's urban and industrial precincts, the Polish Catholic Church stands out sharply. During the Solidarity sit-ins of 1980, for instance, one of the workers' demands was that Sunday mass be broad- cast government-run radio. Nowak, former director of Radio Free Europe's...
Archbishop Jozef Glemp, strongly opposes all violence. Christ forgave his oppressors, Glemp observed in January 1982; "this is our Christian way, our difficult way."
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
TheFuture "Fusion Energy: Still an Elusive Target" William Metz, in High Technology
ofFusion (Jan.-Feb. 19821,P.O. Box 2810, Boulder, Colo.80322.
Despite talk of scientific "breakthroughs" and despite genuine prog- ress, fusion power-energy produced by fusing nuclei of light...
Paul Bernard, in Scientific American
(Jan. 1982), P.O. Box 5969, New York,
N.Y. 10017.
Scholars have long suspected that a Greek colonial state flourished in what is now Soviet Tadzhikistan and Afghanistan, in the second and third centuries B.C. But aside from some coins, no traces of the rumored "1,000 cities" of Hellenic Bactriana could be found. Now, in northwest- ern Afghanistan, close to the Soviet border, a French archaeological team reports it has unearthed the ruins of Ai Khanum,...
Alexander the Great (356-323 B.c.) -sits high above the juncture of two rivers, an ideal site for a military outpost. It is surrounded a mud-brick wall 33 feet high and 20 to 27 feet thick. The city's grand palace, a complex of monumental adminis- trative and residential buildings, covers more than 20 acres. There is nothing like it in Greece; the model for the plan was probably Persian, and the flat roofs are "characteristically Eastern." But columns in the classical styles-Doric, Ionic,...
contrast, parallel processing starts with a network or grid containing a processor at each node. Writes Hiatt: "Elements in a grid trade off information, then pass a processed array of new information through further grids or layers of parallel processors . . . until a suitable level of representation or deci- sion making is reached." Human vision probably works this way, but at speeds no machine can match. A rudimentary parallel processor is due to be completed at the University of Maryland...
PERIODICALS
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Moreover, when a court reviews the decision of a federal regulatory agency, it need not determine the "right" answers to such questions, anyway-only "the substantive and procedural adequacy of the rec- ord" that supports the decision.
Giving the courts more expertise might help them somewhat to grapple with scientific and technological litigation, Jasanoff and Nel- kin say. But it might also "divert attention from the public respo...
far the most promising application, say Wolsky and Gaines, is to take ground scrap or reclaimed rubber and mix it with asphalt. The result is a pavement that lasts up to three times longer than regular asphalt. This means big savings from decreased road maintenance-for a net energy savings of about 90,000 Btullb. This use could absorb all available discarded tires. However, the authors say, the method is un- likely to be widely adopted soon. The initial cost of reclaimed rubber is relatively high....
PERIODICALS
RESOURCES & ENVIRONMENT
and avoid strong Soviet competition for oil from OPEC, Mexico, and other noncommunist sources, Meyerhoff suggests, they should make it easier for the Soviets to get the advanced technology they need to solve their "energy crisis."
'Decline of Materials Intensiveness: The
U.S. Pulo and Paoer Industrv" bv Marc
2 2
Slows Down Ross and Arthur H. Purcell, in Resources Policv (Dec. 1981), IPC Science and Technology Press Ltd., P.O. Box 63, W...
William P.
Libertine Dawson, in ESQ: A Journal of the Ameri-can Renaissance (4th quarter, 1981), De-partment of English, Washington State University, Pullman, Wash. 99164.
When Rip Van Winkle settled down for his long nap, he was the quin- tessential hen-pecked husband, and America was a tidy English colony. When he awoke 20 years later, on Election Day, Rip found his shrewish wife had died, and his peaceful, patriarchal village had been changed America's independence into a confused and quarrelsome...
incapacity, his "gun" having grown rusty.
In "Rip Van Winkle," Dawson concludes, Irving was subtly trying to remind his readers of "the connection between liberty and libertine." Still, Rip's life did end happily, as he settled back into the village without Dame Van Winkle. This, says Dawson, may reflect Irving's growing affection for independent America, despite his fears.
Lost in "'The Great Dark': Invisible Spheres, Formed in Fright" James C. Wilson,...
Dick (1851)-all searchers after knowledge of the world.
In "The Great Dark," Mark Twain suggests the inability of reason to comprehend the universe. We humans, Henry Edwards somberly re- flects, take great pride in our powerful "mental equipment," but, in lucid moments, "we see that intellectually we are no great things" and that "our best-built certainties are but sand-houses."
canvasCon "Gilbert Stuart's Portraits of Thomas Jef- ferson" bv David...
Charles
Maechling, Jr., in Foreign Policy (Winter
Ailments 1981/82), P.O. Box 984, Farmingdale,
N.Y. 11737.
Argentina's military leaders have promised a return to civilian rule in a few years, but the road back to constitutional government will be diffi- cult, says Maechling, a Washington-based international lawyer. Three decades of "political chaos and economic mismanagement" and four years of urban terrorism and Army counterterror have brought chronic instability and conflict.
Early...
the party itself. At its First Congress in 1921, the party called for a purely working-class revolution-at a time when there were only a million and a half industrial workers in China.
Later in that decade, when the Kremlin played mentor to the Chinese party, Stalin vastly underestimated the peasantry's potential; he imag- ined that the Chinese revolution need only triumph in a few cities, as happened in Russia when the Bolsheviks seized power in Moscow and Petrograd. Stalin's dream turned into...
"encircling the cities from the countryside." The heretical vision worked. But Mao's "realistic utopianism" turned into fantasy with the Great Leap Forward, which produced not abun- dance but hunger.
Yet, Schram argues, any effective national movement must have a vision of what should be. And new goals are under discussion in China today: "democracy" (variously defined) and "modernization." What China needs, he says, is a "new, realistic utopia . . ....
excluding Brussels from the plan.
Today, the plan is being only gradually implemented, and most policymaking power still remains with the central government; hence, says Covell, although there is relative quiet for the moment, the "re- gionalization" debate-and ethnic discord-are likely to continue.
Did French Reds "The French Communist Party and the
Beginnings of Resistance: September h&Nazis? 1939-June 1941" J. C. Simmonds, in
European Studies Review (Oct. 1981), 275
south...
by Joseph Needham
Harvard, 1981
134 pp. $12.50
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Oxford, 1981
349 pp. $19.95
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Univ. Of Notre Dame,1981
258 pp. $15.95
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Univ. of Calif., 1982
265 pp. $24.50
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Government Printing Office
1981,647 pp. $17
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Viking, 1982
326 pp. $22.50
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Oxford, 1982
432 pp. $25
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Univ. of Calif., 1981
178 pp. $19.50
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Harvard, 1981
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Yale, 1982
224 pp. $29.95
by Vladimir Nabokov
edited by Fredson Bowers
Harcourt , 1981
324 pp. $19.95
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Dial, 1982
380 pp. $15.95
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Cornell, 1981
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272 pp. $12.95
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By Peter Brown.
Univ. of Chicago, 1982.
186 pp. $5.95
Translated and edited by Edmund Keeley andPhilip Sherard. Princeton, 1981.
203 pp.$5.95
by Fellows, Former Fellows, and Wilson Center Staff
and Great Britain severed their last formal constitutional links in March 1982. Ottawa has taken steps to curb U.S. economic and cultural "imperialism." Quebec separatists have edged closer to secession. Oil-rich Alberta is resisting Ottawa's move to tighten up the world's loosest federal system. Considering everything above the 49th parallel to be like everything below it, most Americans pay little attention to their neighbor "upstairs." Yet Canada is a very different place,...
"Some countries have too much history," Prime Minister Mackenzie King once said; "Canada has too much geography."
The intense cold and forbidding landscape of northern Canada-thick forests, mountains, frozen tundra-have dis-couraged settlement ever since the first permanent colonists, led by Samuel Champlain, stepped ashore in New Brunswick in 1604. Even the Vikings, visiting Newfoundland some 600 years earlier, found ice-bound Greenland more congenial than "Vin- land."...
Robin Winks
Most Canadian intellectuals profess to find their country's history as dull as dishwater. But, in fact, it is a very interesting history, and one of its most intriguing aspects is the obsessive search by Canadians, especially Canadian intellectuals, for a "national identity ."
Apparently, Canadians believe that all other nations have one and, hence, know exactly what they are all about. Canadians sense that they are somehow different. The editors of the Toronto-based news...
bands of outnumbered, outgunned, and outraged Canadian militiamen. ("Ah didn't know you Canadians had that much gumption, but ah sure know it now," a captured American general admits.) As U.S. armored columns race toward the Canadian border, the hotline rings in the Oval Office. Moscow vows nu- clear war if Canada is invaded.
In Richard Rohmer's Exxonera-tion (McClelland, 1974, cloth; Paper- jacks, 1977, paper), the United States loses not only its face but also one of its oil companies....
One of the curious things about creativity is how acciden- tally it can unfold and how its appearance can catch even the creator by surprise. In retrospect, it seems easy to match a per- son's talents to his accomplishments, but that is not always the way people living out their lives perceive it. Hence, the im- portance of a collection of letters. To read 60 years of a person's correspondence is to experience the twists and turns of his fate. Where Frederick Law Olmsted is concerned, we see how...
all odds can not know about the brain.
Richard M.Restak
To Aristotle, the brain was merely a cooling system for the blood as it left the heart. Assyrians favored the liver as the seat of the "soul." The Egyptians who embalmed the pharaohs carefully preserved most major organs in special jars-but not the brain, thinking it inconsequential.
Natural philosophers and physicians in ancient Greece eventually ascertained the true state of affairs-some centuries before the birth of Christ-but enlig...
To Aristotle, the brain was merely a cooling system for the blood as it left the heart. Assyrians favored the liver as the seat of the "soul." The Egyptians who embalmed the pharaohs carefully preserved most major organs in special jars-but not the brain, thinking it inconsequential.
Natural philosophers and physicians in ancient Greece eventually ascertained the true state of affairs-some centuries before the birth of Christ-but enlightenment gave rise to mysteries of a subtler sort....
A survey of literature dealing with the brain.
STECIALTy, IN 1973
RESEARCHREPORTS
tional, write that Soviet education is far more heavily oriented toward sci- entific and technical training.
The Soviet emphasis on science education begins early. Biology in-struction commences in the fifth grade, physics in the sixth grade, and chemistry in the seventh. American students take up such courses later and for shorter periods of time-56 percent of all American students in grades nine through 12 took no science courses at all in 1973. Soviet science...
Last year, despite the new chill between the two superpowers, at least 350 American scholars and students traveled to the Soviet Union to pursue their researches. Their presence is no longer a novelty. But 16 years ago, when Sovietologist Sheila Fitzpatrick, then a graduate student, arrived in Moscow, visiting Western scholars were rare, and the Soviets were unaccustomed to deal- ing with such inquisitive foreigners. Her first sojourn in Moscow produced some enlightening, often comical moments.
Moscow...
Nearly a decade after Lyndon Johnson's death in 1973,the body of literature focusing on his political career and his tumultuous Presidency is surprisingly thin. Compared to work done on his predecessor, there is but a trickle on Johnson -nothing that would compare in influence, sales, or scope with books like Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days or Theodore Sorenson's Kennedy. Many crucial LBJ archives (e.g., those covering delib- erations on Vietnam) have yet to be opened. But some new studies...