The New Yorker, Aug. 1, 2011
Way back when in media time - the ancient days of last week - there was a scandal in Britain involving tabloid journalists, politicians and policemen in a more-than-usually sordid ménage. The fact that it seems more like history than news this week does not diminish transatlantic correspondent Anthony Lane's account of it in the latest number of The New Yorker, however. While reviewing the now well-known details of the major events, Lane places them in a robust tradition going as far back as Winston Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian upstart to whom the author could easily have been referring in his diagnosis of Rupert Murdoch: "Spurned by the British as a colonial, from an uncouth continent, he exacted the perfect revenge: He colonized their imagination." Murdoch's unique success, Lane suggests, was to spread the sleaze both high and low. He cites statistics showing that more of the country's most desirable readers - the best-educated, most affluent - read the now-defunct News of the World than all of the "quality" Sunday papers put together. The highbrow has prostrated itself before the low, he writes, "submission, in the weird wrangling of British class-consciousness, being preferable to condescension." And if history has no more to say on the matter of Murdoch's appearance before a parliamentary committee last week, Lane has the last word: "the greatest impersonation of semi-senility since Harold Pinter performed Krapp's Last Tape."
Interview, August, 2011
As worthy and admirable as it no doubt is, there is also something very sad about Maria Shriver's interview with feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem in the back pages of this month's Interview, buried under 100 pages of the usual frippery. If she remains known at all in the "post-feminist" century, Steinem is remembered as the sexy one who once posed as a Playboy Bunny. ("And you're still asking me about it - almost a half-century later," she complains to Shriver.) As for her interviewer - the glamorous former journalist who graduated to become the deceived wife of the most outlandish caricature of male aggression who ever breathed air - a feminist can only cringe. Now 77 (a fact Shriver decorously declines to include), Steinem has a cleaner record and a characteristically tough analysis of the setbacks, as personified by such contemporary figures as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Every social-justice movement will "make jobs for people who sell that movement out," she says, noting that pioneer suffragettes worked 100 years to win the right to vote. "We're only 40 years into this movement, so this particular wave of change certainly has a long way to go," Steinem insists. "It's not over yet." Even the rampant career of "Strauss whatshisname" gives Steinem heart. "You know, when we started, there was not even a word for sexual harassment," she tells Shriver. "It was just called life."
Scientific American, August, 2011
It is surely worse than ironic to witness the Canadian government deploying sure-to-fail "tough on crime" policies at the very moment the science of criminology has decisively proven the effectiveness of a very different strategy, as demonstrated in "How New York Beat Crime," by Berkeley law professor Franklin E. Zimring in this month's Scientific American. The city's remarkable and continuing success in reducing crime since the early 1990s has captivated 21st-century criminologists and, as they have proved through intensive study, upended both liberal and conservative assumptions about the causes and prevention of urban crime. The New York story shows that neither nature (bad genes) nor nurture (bad neighbourhoods) make criminals, and that no large-scale social interventions are needed to keep that from happening. Simply put, New York beat crime by putting more cops on more of the streets where crimes are most likely to occur. "That result is a fundamental surprise to many students of the American city and is the most hopeful insight of criminological science in a century," Zimring writes.