Last November, voters in Ventura, Calif., faced a dilemma common to many midsized communities: What, if anything, can be done about Wal-Mart? There seemed to be no legal way to stop the Arkansas-based behemoth from opening a store in the area, so a coalition of activists and grocery store unions crafted a ballot measure to restrict the size of the store and the types of goods it could sell. Backers argued that the proposal would prevent a Wal-Mart “superstore” from cannibalizing local businesses and undercutting high-wage union jobs at area grocery chains. As the Wal-Mart debate ... Read More
Autumn of the Republic?
December 24, 2009 • By • 9 Comments
Did America slip into a semiliterate, polarized, pre-fascist state over the past decade or so, allowing greedy oligarchs and corporate elites to run the government? Two books I recently read offer reasonably persuasive evidence and arguments that the country did, and a third suggests that dictatorial mindsets could besiege Americans, with an assist from the Internet, if they don't come to their more deliberative senses. Each of the books offers an informed diagnosis of the dangers that widespread ignorance and ideological polarization pose for American democracy, though none offers a ... Read More
Looking Back in Anger
November 3, 2009 • By • 4 Comments
On the first page of the preface to his book, Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, Seth Kalichman describes his initial encounter with an academic colleague who had written a Web-published screed against the "AIDS myth." "I mean I was really angry," he writes, with a sense of frustrated dismay that permeates the book. The dismay is understandable; Denying AIDS is not merely a history of the movement skeptical to widely accepted mainstream science about the disease, but also a detailed account of the author's personal journey, via lecture halls and message ... Read More
Botox for the Brain
August 26, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Here's an innovative way to lower health care costs: Set everyone's biological clock back 20 years. Senior citizens of 75 will enjoy the strength and stamina they had at 55, meaning they will need far less medical attention. The energetic elderly will remain productive members of their community later into life, which could also ease the strain on Social Security. Granted, this sounds like an unusually wonky episode of The Twilight Zone. But three decades ago, Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a landmark experiment that suggested reverse aging needn't be relegated to ... Read More
Mental Problems
August 14, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
In 1994, soon after Timothy Kelly became Virginia's mental health commissioner, he took a trip to one of the state's psychiatric facilities. Staffers rolled out the red carpet: impressive presentations, guided tours, meetings with residents. The whole place seemed so functional — too functional, Kelly thought, suspecting they'd built a Potemkin village for his benefit. A few weeks later, Kelly dropped by unannounced. In a building housing residents with behavioral problems, he detected odors of urine and unwashed clothes. Though such patients require intensive treatment, the commissioner ... Read More
Iran: From Axis to Ally?
June 16, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Tehran-born Iranian-American scholar Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has testified several times in recent years before various U.S. Senate committees, emerging as one of the most vocal proponents of diplomatic engagement with Iran. Released on the eve of Iran's 10th presidential election, his Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs extends and elaborates on this theme, breaking dramatically with the Bush administration's infamous characterization of the regime in Tehran as part of an "axis of evil." Rather, Takeyh provides ... Read More
What If There Was a Class War and Nobody Showed Up?
May 29, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
In the midst of a profound financial challenge for the United States, with debates raging over the role that taxes and governmental regulation should play in rehabilitating the economy, a new book by a pair of political scientists asks a timely question: So where's the class war? While our talking heads and pundits are only too eager to divide Americans into two diametrically opposed camps — either obdurate advocates of unrestrained free markets or unwavering proponents of governmental solutions to economic travails — the evidence, according to this book, is quite the contrary. Indeed, ... Read More
A Government at Risk?
April 19, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
America is in real trouble. Just not for the reasons you think. Two Boston College political science professors, Robert Faulkner and ... Read More
Research Undiscoveries
March 21, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
At the beginning of Ronald R. Gauch's aptly titled It's Great! Oops, No It Isn't, the author juxtaposes two headlines that appeared seven years apart. The first was "Hormones Cut Women's Risk of Heart Disease," from the San Francisco Chronicle in 1994. The second: "Hormones Don't Protect Women From Heart Disease, Study Says," from The Washington Post in 2001. Over the next 26 chapters, Gauch, an associate professor of public administration at Marist College in New York, delves deeply into the factors — from laboratory culture to media hype — that helped write those headlines. The ... Read More
Meet the Real Islam
March 15, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
In the final Republican presidential debate last year, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, speaking about America's adversaries in the so-called "war on terror," told the audience: "This is about Shi'a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate." So many powerful groups, representing hundreds of millions of people, united against freedom and moderation and democratic ideals. Quite a harrowing thought. Lucky ... Read More
