Editor’s note: Four years ago, Forbes ASAP published its first issue with a stunning prophecy by contributing editor George Gilder. Fiber optics, said George, had the potential to carry 25 trillion bits per second down a single strand. This represented a ten-thousandfold leap in carrying capacity over the 2.5 billion bits “barrier” long assumed by most experts in the field. Read More ›
Hollywood once produced many technically mediocre movies that were redeemed by morally upbeat messages. Today the craft of film-making is awe inspiring, but the sensibility is often pernicious. Take three leading contenders for Oscars, “The English Patient,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “Evita.” All three films display adroit writing, acting and editing. And all three use the bedazzling tricks Read More ›
This is a review of a women-in-the-military novel that, given probably will never be published. It ought to be. “Placeholder,” written by Karen Dahbly, a former Air Force lieutenant, is a somber, no-nonsense assessment of the price-the military pays for having women, and the price women pay for serving in the military. It’s both a political statement by one who’s Read More ›
He retired from the Seattle City Council three years ago and sold the family’s pharmacy on Capitol Hill soon afterwards, but he has not retired from his work with streetcars. At least one early morning a week, you will find George Benson, 78, down on the waterfront picking up trash along the tracks or over at the car barn shining Read More ›
There is only one way to avoid future brawls over ethics in Congress like the ones going on now, and it is not–as GOP Congresswoman Sue Myrick from North Carolina has proposed–to make it a crime to “lie” in campaign ads or on the floor of Congress. When such a law is passed, Congressmen will be arresting each other literally Read More ›
A London music hall ditty of some years past goes,Shakespeare Sidebar —“Shakespeare dead? Poor old Will! Why, I never knew the old fellow was ill!” But he is ill, at least in a majority of the universities of America, where a new report shows that even English majors no longer are required to take a course on one of the Read More ›
The imminent often takes precedence over the important in life, but especially now in our politics. Instead of coming up with a list of New Year’s Resolutions for 1997, it appears that our public leaders are putting together a list of New Year’s Irresolutions. At the top of the list is Social Security reform. The advisory council on Social Security Read More ›
The Temptations of Evolutionary EthicsPaul Lawrence FarberBerkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994, 210 pp. The Secret Chain: Evolution and EthicsMichael BradieNew York, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, 198 pp. The ethical implications of evolution are receiving a remarkable amount of attention today, despite the death sentence that was pronounced on it by “nurture” enthusiasts in the Read More ›
T.H. Huxley’s Ambivalence Sherrie L. Lyons, “Thomas Huxley: Fossils, Persistence, and the Argument from Design,” Journal of the History of Biology 26 (1993): pp. 545-569. Sherrie L. Lyons, “The Origins of T.H. Huxley’s Saltationism: History in Darwin’s Shadow,” Journal of the History of Biology 28 (1995): pp. 463-494. Since completing her doctorate on T.H. Huxley with historian Robert Richards at Read More ›
Individuals, not governments, should shape Internet’s future The two traits that have always distinguished the American character are a fierce insistence on personal liberty and “Yankee ingenuity.” Both live on brightly in the Internet, the winning future of communications and commerce. Forget Al Gore’s industrial era image of “the information superhighway,” conjuring up visions of interactive televisions and a big Read More ›