Alan Ehrenhalt, in Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report (Sept. 3,1983), 1414 22nd St. N.W., Wash-

the Statehouses ington, 0.020037.
Being a member of the state legislature may seem about as glamorous as running a laundry. Yet the statehouses are currently in ferment, re- ports Ehrenhalt, a Congressional Quarterly editor.
Unobtrusively, state governments have extended their reach in re- cent years, as Washington has delegated more responsibility for federal-state programs-e.g., health, welfare, e...

public opinion surveys. [For evidence of a possible recent turnabout, see WQ Autumn 1983,
p.10.1 Between 1958 and 1964, for example, the percentage of respon- dents who believed that Washington could not be trusted "to do what is right" remained steady at about 22 percent. 1970, amid America's Vietnam involvement, the percentage had doubled. It was up to 63 per- cent in 1976 and 73 percent by 1980.
Such attitudes do not stem from political apathy, the authors argue. If anything, Americans...

Stephen Gillers, in The Nation (Sept. 17, 1983), P.O. Box 1953, Marion, Ohio 43305.
The nine-member U.S. Supreme Court is now dominated-at least, nu- merically-the appointees of conservative Republican presidents. Yet, for years now, the Court has confounded predictions that it would take a sharp Right turn.
The days of the liberal Warren Court nominally ended when Chief Justice Earl Warren retired in 1969 and was replaced by Warren Bur- ger, a Nixon appointee. President Nixon later named three...

William C. Adams, in Public Opinion (Aug.-Sept. 1983), American En- And the Public terprise Institute for Public Policy Re- search, 1150 17th St. N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036.
For all his talents as a "Great Communicator," Ronald Reagan has had difficulty rallying support for his stoutly anticommunist foreign policy.
Conservatives blame the lukewarm popular response on the influ- ence of the liberal national news media or the public's "post-Vietnam syndrome." Actually, writes...

John Lewis Gaddis, in Diplomatic History Cold War Ashes (Summer 1983), Scholarly Resources
Inc., 104 Greenhill Ave., ~ilmin~ton,
Del. 19805.
Among American historians, the debate over the causes of the Cold War is still a hot topic.
Until the late 1960s, the orthodox view was that Josef Stalin's aggres- sive stance forced America into the Cold War during the late 1940s. Then, New Left "revisionist" historians, such as Oregon State's Wil- liam Appleman Williams and York University's...

Kenneth Adelman and Marc Seriously Plattner, in Atlantic Quarterly (Spring1983), Longman Group Limited, Sub-
scriptions Dept., Fourth Ave., Harlow, Es-
sex CM19 5AA England.
To many Americans, the glass-walled United Nations headquarters in New York is both a symbol of hope for international cooperation and a source of chronic irritation.
Simple arithmetic makes a certain amount of U.S. frustration inevi- table, note Adelman and Plattner, former member of the U.S. delega- tion at the UN (now...

failing to work together. In 1981, for example, America's NATO allies sided with the United States in only 75 percent of the votes in the General Assembly. Most of the NAM's members, contrast, voted for the group's official position more than 90 percent of the time.
Western disunity, the authors argue, stems from the cynical view in some Western European capitals that what the UN does matters very little. Europeans cast General Assembly votes with an eye to winning the Third World's goodwill "on...

Bob Kuttner, in The Atlantic ~onthly(~uly1983), P.O. Box 2547, Boulder, Colo. 80322.
New technology often takes jobs away with one hand and gives them back with the other. But Kuttner, former editor of Working Papers mag-azine, argues that the overwhelming majority of jobs created during the 1980s will be routine and poorly paid. The result, he fears, will be a shrinking middle class and an increasingly stratified U.S. society.
The decline of America's "smokestack" industries-machine...

10-20 percent, and government, which now provides entry level slots for well over half the nation's black and female college grad- uates. Both, he notes, are now in relative decline-which augurs ill for the "high-tech" society of the future.
"Quality on the Line" David A. Garvin,
Japan's in The �£a�£�£Business Revieiu (Sept.-
Oct. 1983), P.O. Box 3000, Woburn, Mass.

ualitative Edge 01888.
Japanese manufacturers p...

10 percent") workers and foremen in shop floor quality control circles. Detailed reports on defects discovered on the assembly line and by field repair- men allowed the Japanese to pinpoint problems; top management met daily to discuss the reports.
Some U.S. air conditioner makers, by contrast, kept virtually no rec- ords on product failures, and none collected data as precise as the Japa- nese did. In the factory, quality almost invariably came second to meeting production schedules, and...

"The American Family in the Year 2000"
ecycli~gthe Andrew Cherlin and Frank F. Fursten-
berg, Jr., in The Futurist (June 1983),
World Future Society, 4916 St. Elmo
Ave., Bethesda, Md. 20814.
During the past two decades, the American family changed so rapidly that its very future sometimes seemed in doubt.
From 1960 to 1980, the U.S. divorce rate doubled and the birthrate dropped from a 20th-century high to an all-time low. Cherlin and Furs- tenberg, sociologists at Johns Hopkins...

Boom of the 1950s was an aberration. Today's developments actually climax long-term trends: The birthrate has been dropping since the 1820s; di- vorce has been slowly rising since the Civil War.
Despite the travails of the past two decades, there is no evidence that Americans today are turning their backs on marriage per se. Of the chil- dren under age 18 today, the authors estimate, 90 percent will eventu- ally marry; 50 percent will marry and divorce; and 33 percent will marry, divorce, and remarry.
Yet,...

Second Thoughts Robert J. Samuelson, in National Journal (July 9, 1983), Government Research Cor- YL School Mom poration, 1730 M St. N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036.
Behind today's grassroots push for reform of the public schools is "the faith that strong schools represent a fundamental source of the nation's prosperity and international competitiveness," notes Samuelson, a Na-tionalJournal contributing editor. He suggests that such faith may be a prescription for dashed hopes.
The Wilson...

Gilbert Austin of the Univer- sity of Maryland suggests, however, that successful schools share these common features: strong principals, parents actively engaged in their children's education, firm discipline, and high teacher expectations of their pupils' performance.
"To a considerable degree," concludes Samuelson, "education is and must be an act of faith." Schooling cannot be regarded "as a mechani- cal process leading to automatic rewards." Schools, he believes,...

economists Robert B. Pearl and Matilda Frankel to show where the two groups had their assets in 1979. Home ownership absorbed 46 percent of blacks' wealth but only a third of whitesJ-blacks had little money remaining for other "nones- sential" investments. Another 21 percent of black and 15 percent of white assets were in rental housing. Household goods and vehicles ac- counted for 24 percent of black wealth; four percent of blacks' money and 13 percent of whites' was invested in small...

34 reporters. The Pentagon's large staff of press officers strains to be help- ful. Conflict is kept to a minimum because, in military matters, it is far easier for journalists and officials to agree on what is an official secret, and what is merely embarrassing. Perhaps more important is the sheer size of the bureaucracy. As Richard Halloran of the New York Times put it, "If someone is promoting the M-1 tank, there are plenty of people around who will tell you what's wrong with the M-I."
Hess...

Building Fires Martin Linsky, in The Hastings Center Re-
port (June 1983), 360 Broadway,
st'aw Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. 10706.
The TV network news shows and top newspapers and magazines heav- ily influence the nation's political agenda, but newsmen are reluctant to acknowledge their power or to question how they use it.
Too often, says Linsky, a former Boston Globe editorial writer now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, they decide what is news- worthy "on the basis of crasser values...

his triumph in the Iowa caucuses that kicked off the 1976 campaign, began wooing the delegates in earnest. Other candidates, notably Gary Hart and John Glenn, followed suit. The major news media joined in, running daily stories on what had become a Massachusetts horse race.
April 9, 400 reporters and back-up personnel were on hand in Springfield, Mass., including teams from the Big Three TV networks, Time and Newsweek, and every major daily in the country. To its credit, Linsky says, the New York...

the cloisters; many women were attracted the independence and intellectual life not available elsewhere.
Today, more than 200 Roman Catholic cloistered convents in the United States house 3,800 "contemplative" nuns. While their "active" sisters (some 120,000 strong) teach, heal, and do missionary work, says Lieblich, these secluded women seek solitude "to witness the primacy of prayer in the Church, to serve as a reminder of the contemplative di- mension in all lives, and...

reports, "and, eventually, with a cosmic love story . . .with tragic episodes and a happy ending." The mystics also broke down the traditional Judaic separation of mat- ter and spirit, man and transcendent God. For example, says Maccoby, a 16th-century Palestinian Jew named Isaac Luria argued, "In order to create the world, God had had to exile part of Himself from Himself; and this creative withdrawal (tzimtzum)or exile was what was being re-enacted on earth Israel."
The mystics...

PERIODICALS
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Trauma claims most of its victims quickly. Half are "dead on arrival" at a hospital, casualties of highway accidents, homicide, and suicide. The most promising remedies are preventive and nonmedical: handgun control, stiffer penalties for drunk driving, laws requiring motorcy- clists to wear helmets.
Another 30 percent of trauma deaths occur between one and two hours after injury. Here, the critical factor is how fast the victim reaches surgery....

their teammates in the outfield. Major league scouts track the careers of 3,000 U.S. minor league players printout. Such traditional scouting reports as "He's got an arm that can throw a lamb- chop past a wolf" may no longer suffice.
But baseball romantics need not despair, writes Weissman. Discus- sions of America's favorite pastime have always been punctuated by statistics and probabilities-batting averages, earned run averages, strikeout percentages. Now fans will just have more numbers...

Paul D.
A Challenge to Lowman, Jr., in The Sciences (July-Aug.
1983), P.O. Box 356, Martinsville, N.J.

Continental Drift 08836.
The theory of "continental drift" has settled comfortably into the minds of most geologists. But Lowman, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration geologist, believes that while portions of the Earth's crust move, whole continents do not.
Geologist Alfred Wegener first propounded continental drift in 1912. He argued that the seven continents began as...

the Atlantic Ocean are the strongest evidence for continental drift. Yet Lowman points out that when the east coast of North and South America is fitted together with the west coast of Eurasia and Africa, there is no room for a large chunk of southern Mexico. Similarly, the Arctic Ocean coastlines of Canada and the Soviet Union should mesh, but do not. And if all the continents have been moving away from one another, the Earth should have ex- panded over the last few hundred million years. In fact,...

reprocessing it.
Nobody is even sure how long wastes must be stored before they are safe, notes Zurer, a Chemical & Engineering News reporter. The U.S. En- vironmental Protection Agency says 10,000 years; the National Acad- emy of Sciences' estimate is 20,000 years. Until that question is settled, scientists cannot accurately judge the merits of various underground sites: The possibility of earthquakes or volcanic activity, the likelihood of groundwater contamination, and the characteristics...

up to one foot from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia.
Small-scale tidal generators of one to 100 megawatts, Fay contends, could do the same job for about the same cost per megawatt. The idea is already catching on. In Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, an 18-megawatt plant is nearing completion; Maine's Passamaquoddy Indians have in hand a preliminary plan for a 12-megawatt project that would cost $3-4 million per megawatt-roughly the same as a nuclear plant.
The technology of tide-generated electricity is...

machine three or four times every day, may never set foot in a pasture.
The milk, Chasan says, "probably won't see the light of day until you pour it into a glass." From the cow, it travels through tubes to a refrig- erated storage tank and then is trucked to a processing plant. There, it is pasteurized heat to kill bacteria. It is homogenized (to keep the cream from separating) by being forced at high pressure through steel mesh that breaks fat globules into tiny particles.
Since 1960,...

Dale Harris, in Beautiful Trifles Connoisseur (April 1983), P.O. BOX 10120,
Des Moines, Iowa 50350.
Peter Carl Faberge (1 846-1 920) was the jeweler to the Tsars. In a way, his elaborate jeweled Easter eggs symbolized the decadence of Impe- rial Russia.
Most of Fabergk's creations were domestic items-picture frames, parasol handles, cigarette cases. "Playful, tiny, elegant, designed to en- chant, not to dazzle, they must have helped to mitigate the formal splendor of court life," writes...

Dale Harris, in Beautiful Trifles Connoisseur (April 1983), P.O. BOX 10120,
Des Moines, Iowa 50350.
Peter Carl Faberge (1 846-1 920) was the jeweler to the Tsars. In a way, his elaborate jeweled Easter eggs symbolized the decadence of Impe- rial Russia.
Most of Fabergk's creations were domestic items-picture frames, parasol handles, cigarette cases. "Playful, tiny, elegant, designed to en- chant, not to dazzle, they must have helped to mitigate the formal splendor of court life," writes...

Americans and Europeans is being assumed a growing labor force of Pakistanis, Filipinos, and Koreans, whose cus- toms conservative Moslems find less threatening to traditional mores.
Indeed, Islamic fundamentalism is resurgent, Kraft reports. The reli- gious extremists who seized Mecca's Grand Mosque in 1979 accused the Saudi royalty of abandoning the true faith, and the resulting publicity stirred a back-to-basics movement. Public segregation of the sexes is enforced with growing rigor; Saudi...

Ellen Jones and Fred W. Grupp, in Population and Development Review (June 1983), The Population Council, 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017.
To some specialists, the sudden jump in the recorded number of infant deaths in the Soviet Union during the early 1970s was a sign of drastic deterioration in the quality of Soviet life [see "A Different Crisis," Murray Feshbach, WQ, Winter 19811.
Between 1971 and 1974 (the last year Moscow published official data on the subject), the...

the shock of the early 1970s' statistics, the rising rates in European Rus- sia have leveled off, and perhaps reversed. At the very least, they write, the Soviet Union during the 1970s suffered nothing like the "epidemic of infant deaths depicted in . . .the Western popular press."
"The Emergence of Democracy in Spain
Iberia's Fragile and Portugal" Kenneth Maxwell, in
Orbis (Spring 1983), Foreign Policy Re-
Democracies search Institute, 3508 Market St., Suite
350, Philadelphia,...

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397 pp. $29.95

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