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Irving Kristol and Prostitution
By Jeff Kisseloff
I bet that grabbed your attention.
I've always wanted to write a headline like that even though the reality is in this case one had nothing to do with the other (at least nothing that I'm aware of). Let me start by saying when Irving Kristol died this weekend, I went digging into the archives to see what the magazine had to say about him. I found quite a few stories and selected two. Both are reviews of his books. The first is Philip Green's 1978 review of Two Cheers for Capitalism. Five years later, Robert Lekachman reviewed Kristol's memoir Reflections of a Neoconservative. What I found so fascinating about it was Lekachman's admission that he Kristol came across as rather likable: "Buried beneath his vulpine neoconservative intellectual garments," Lekachman writes, "beats - perhaps faintly and certainly irregularly - a startlingly enlightened heart."
Who knew?
(0) CommentsSeptember 22, 2009
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(Genetically Modified) Food For Thought
By Jeff Kisseloff
Remember the opening scene in "Oliver" when the poor, starving kids sang "Food, glorious food", sarcastically, of course, about the awful gruel they were being served ("and such small portions," Woody Allen would add)?
As our special food issue demonstrates, today's consumers aren't that much better off than those poor orphans. True, most people don't eat gruel (although if you know a good recipe, feel free to share it here), but kids in Dickens' day didn't eat genetically modified (GM) corn and milk with bovine growth hormone or fast foods that have led to appalling obesity and diabetes rates among the working poor.
If our food issue leaves you hungry for more, check out the documentary Food, Inc. Much of the film focuses on Monsanto, with its private detectives stalking farmers accused of illegally saving seed (yes, thanks in part to Monsanto's former attorney, Clarence Thomas, seeds can be patented, and the company enforces its rights by sending out teams of investigators in the dark of night to intimidate growers -- even those who don't purchase the company's GM products but whose fields are found to have been contaminated by Monsanto seeds).
(0) CommentsSeptember 10, 2009
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The "What if" and Ted Kennedy Question
By Jeff Kisseloff
"What if…?" is a game I occasionally play in my head when writing about crucial moments in our history. "What would have happened if the South had won the Civil War or if the stock market hadn't crashed? What if FDR had decided to send troops to support the Spanish Republic? What if Mr. and Mrs. Lenin (or, for that matter, Mr. and Mrs. Lennon) had decided not to have children?
And what if Ted Kennedy didn't make that unexplained turn as he drove toward the bridge on Chappaquiddick Island with Mary Jo Kopechne sitting in the car (here's The Nation's take on it from 1969)? How would subsequent history have been different? Would he have won the presidency in 1972 or 1976? Would we as a nation be better off today had he done so?
What do you think?
(0) CommentsSeptember 2, 2009
Jeff Kisseloff
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