Expiration Date (Tor, 1996), the latest fantasy novel by Lewis-lover Tim Powers, begins with an 11-year-old boy who breaks into his parents’ plaster bust of Dante and inhales the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison. The book is an adult ghost story set in Los Angeles. According to a review in the Los Angeles Times, it “is a fine melange of Read More ›
Nobody Will be Elected President in 1996by J. Pierpont Pundit* Pundittown, Inside the Beltway–There are great benefits to your reading an insider’s column like this one. Thanks to the wisdom of the pundits, you can now be told the outcome of the 1996 Presidential Election, ten months early. A preliminary hint: You voters are wasting your time. Starting sooner than Read More ›
There they were on C-Span, the Republican Congressional Leadership, all waggish smiles. The atmosphere in the Capitol Rotunda implied champagne and balloons. You would have thought they had just won the World Series, World War III or at least a national election. The “Contract with America” is vindicated, they announced. They were all hugging each other like, well, Democrats. It Read More ›
The Census Bureau projected recently that by the middle of the 21st century “non-Hispanic whites” will constitute only 52.8 percent of the U.S. population, Hispanics will have doubled to 24.5 percent, blacks increased slightly to 13.6 percent and Asians almost trebled to 8.2 percent. Supposedly, the news is that high birth rates among Hispanics and immigration among Asians are changing Read More ›
This time next year, when you think of taking the family up to Canada for a visit, or go on your own trip for business, you could find yourself waiting in lines of seven or eight hours duration at Blaine while totally superfluous paperwork is handled by Immigration and Naturalization (INS) officials. Something nearly as grim could await you at Read More ›
The theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought. It is large, almost entirely useless, and the object of superstitious awe. Richard Dawkins is widely known as the theory’s uncompromising champion. Having made his case in The Blind Watchmaker and River out of Eden, Dawkins proposes to make it yet again in Climbing Mount Improbable. He is Read More ›
He wouldn’t fit in, and maybe he shouldn’t wish to. I was going to tell him that earlier, but didn’t want to seem a killjoy. If Norm Rice had ambitions to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who was I to argue against it? But after some gossip in the White House tried to throw cold water on Read More ›
The historically significant Washington State campaign on school reform is continuing to develop in curious ways. There is an old political adage, “If you can’t win an argument on an issue, argue about something else,” and that is just what opponents of the two school reform initiatives are doing. In the past week, with the election fast approaching, proponents of Read More ›
He was a restless young attorney who was also a frustrated architect and planner. On Sunday afternoons in the late 60’s he used to recruit his wife and a friend (me, on some occasions) to drive around Seattle looking at any new buildings going up. He would complain about the lack of good planning in town and sketch in the Read More ›