In light of recent research into the workings of the mind, personal responsibility is threatening to become a casualty of science, and free will is looking like a frighteningly fragile construct. Our carefully considered decisions often turn out to be rationalizations for conclusions we have already come to on an unconscious, emotion driven level. Renowned brain researcher Antonio Damasio and veteran science writer Wray Herbert each address this accountability issue in their newly published books, and both come to the same conclusion: We're not off the hook. Herbert insists "we are capable ... Read More
Book Seeks True Justice for Crime Victims
December 20, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Susan Herman has nothing against victim-offender dialogue or other restorative-justice techniques. She just wants to start a broader — much, much broader — national conversation about true justice for victims because, she says, "our collective failure to respond to their needs is a national disgrace." Herman, a criminal justice professor at Pace University, lays out her ideas in the new book Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime, an outgrowth of her work as executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime. In the book, the veteran victims' rights advocate asks: What would ... Read More
Throwing the Book at China
December 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
"Sweetie, are you having nightmares about the Chinese again?" — Cartman's mother to her son, in an October 2008 episode of South Park that begins with Cartman frightened by a dream featuring the drummers from the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. A funny thing happened on the way to the close of the 21st century's first decade. We started to hear less and less about the "post-Cold War era" from brand-name columnists, high-profile pundits and Foreign Affairs contributors (hardly mutually exclusive groups, of course), and more and more about a new period taking shape. There isn't ... Read More
Welfare Reform Failing Poor Single Mothers
October 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The women at the bottom in America, single mothers on public assistance, are sometimes called "drawer people," the subjects of case files that stay in the welfare manager's drawer, year after year. They are mothers who quit work or can't work because they are ill or disabled, or illiterate, or victims of abuse, or the sole caregivers for an elderly parent or chronically sick child. These so-called hard-to-serve single mothers may include women who fail to apply for the 70 jobs in one month required to qualify for a federal cash grant. They may want to go to school full time, which is ... Read More
Testing College Applicants’ Wisdom, Common Sense
September 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
As a small boy he was ignored and passed over by his teachers — he scored poorly on IQ tests and was obviously going nowhere. Ever since, Robert Sternberg, the new provost and senior vice president of Oklahoma State University, former dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, former professor of psychology at Yale University and summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale, has been on a mission: He doesn't want it to happen to anyone else. "In the 1950s, when I was growing up," Sternberg said in his new book, College Admissions for the 21st Century, "the elementary ... Read More
The Scientist and the Journalist Can Be Friends
September 2, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
"With high certainty” isn’t going to top anyone’s list of favorite three-word phrases, but as Nancy Baron notes in her important new book Escape from the Ivory Tower, it could serve as a useful linguistic bridge between scientists, journalists and policymakers. Researchers, she notes, are hesitant to make definitive statements. Aware that knowledge is gained incrementally and always subject to revision, they tend to hedge their answers even to the most direct questions. This can frustrate both reporters, who are looking for facts, and politicians, who want solid information that can ... Read More
The Poverty Solution: Cash
July 2, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Who's responsible for the poor? Back in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, English lawmakers said it was the government and taxpayers. They introduced the compulsory "poor tax" of 1572 to provide peasants with cash and a "parish loaf." The world's first-ever public relief system did more than feed the poor: It helped fuel economic growth because peasants could risk leaving the land to look for work in town. By the early 19th century, though, a backlash had set in. English spending on the poor was slashed from 2 percent to 1 percent of national income, and indigent families were ... Read More
Prisoners of the States
July 1, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In March 2004, the Abu Ghraib scandal seared unsightly images of prisoner abuse into the consciousness of a new generation of Americans. The allegations blindsided citizens who — galvanized by the specter of a nuclear Saddam — had been mostly supportive of the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. Not since the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam 42 years earlier had so many questioned whether the nation held higher moral ground than its enemies. Despite the courts-martial of the guards involved, the ensuing media frenzy only muddled the policy debate regarding the status of "unlawful combatants." The ... Read More
‘Courts and Kids’ Argues for Equal School Funding
June 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
More than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, the nation's schools are still plagued by inequalities, yet the High Court today declines to intervene on behalf of equal educational opportunity for all children. In the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, "... this Court does not sit to ... solve the problems of 'troubled inner city schooling.' ... We are not social engineers." The Supreme Court began its long withdrawal from the civil rights fray in the early 1970s, after two decades of activism on racial integration. Now, ... Read More
I See a Quake in Your Future. Sometime.
February 16, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Science is messy. For every step forward on the road to truth, there are two steps in some other direction. And the way toward earthquake prediction, the Holy Grail of seismology, is littered with the dashed hopes of those who have failed. "Even well-trained scientists, even brilliant scientists, can fool themselves in their quest to prove something they believe or want to be true," says Susan Hough in her engaging new book, Predicting the Unpredictable: The Tumultuous Science of Earthquake Prediction. "... It is a hard thing for any scientist to do, to admit they have been on a path that ... Read More
