The Pleasures & Politics of Food

Table of Contents

In Essence

Cinderella has been remade to fit the sensibilities of many different times...even our own.

Americans' own patriotism often makes them blind to the nationalism of other nations.

Scientists are discovering new ways to boost the brain's natural abilities, but ethicists are concerned.

Forced sterilization of imbeciles by U.S. states was once affirmed by the Supreme Court, but the science behind the practice has been shown to be flawed.

Scoring doctors' cardiology success seemed like a good idea, until truly sick patients began being turned away.

Was T. S. Eliot anti-Semitic? The question still rages fiercely, as does the debate over its consequences.

Some people get all the breaks when it comes to financial fortune, but is that really fair?

Information Technology was supposed to revolutionize business. It hasn's worked out that way.

Europe's reluctance to join the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq had much to do with its Muslim population.

Government incentives and a move to technology and telecommunications have helped fuel the Irish economy.

Where the 20th century ranks in terms of temperature is a critical point in the ongoing debate over global warming.

The UN Security Council ruptured over Iraq because its legalist structure could not overcome friction among its member nations.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks prompted a debate over security and liberty, but that debate has been wrongly framed and needlessly divisive.

Hierarchical companies were once viewed as the key to America's economic success, but they now seem a relic of the past.

"Issues in Economics" by Katharine Bradbury and Jane Katz, in Regional Review (2002: Qtr. 4), Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 600 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Mass. 02106.

Book Reviews

GULAG: A History. By Anne Applebaum. Doubleday. 677 pp. $35

STALIN’S LOYAL EXECUTIONER: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940. By Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov. Hoover Institution Press. 274 pp. $25

THE DIARY OF GEORGI DIMITROV, 1933–1949. Edited by Ivo Banac. Yale Univ. Press. 495 pp. $39.95

FAITH IN POLITICS. By A. James Reichley. Brookings Institution Press. 429 pp. $52.95 cloth, $20.95 paper

Essays

Cheap food, widely available, would seem to be the promise of new technologies, but it comes with a host of hidden dangers.

Daniel Akst

Farmers today face critical choices about how they will farm--and their decisions affect not only how much they grow but where they can sell their produce.

Blake Hurst

The food industry's aggressive marketers have made gorging a national pastime.

Lis Harris

Will genetically engineered foods eliminate world hunger--or cause problems we can't even predict?

David Appell

Americans like to think of themselves as a pragmatic people, with little use for professors and fancy ideas. Yet they also live and die for abstractions such as freedom and equality. That’s not just some inexplicable paradox but a key to understanding the American intellectual landscape.

Wilfred M. McClay

In Hollywood war movies of the 1940s, American soldiers fought for a sense of national purpose. In subsequent decades, they fought mainly for the sake of their buddies. Now, when the mayhem in war films is more realistic than ever, Hollywood seems unwilling to give the violence a larger context.

Martha Bayles

Two hundred years ago, amid a dramatic clash of great principles and great men in the early Republic, Marbury v. Madison established the doctrine of judicial review. The case and its implications are still hotly debated today.

Michael J. Glennon

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