Although I was very young when these events unfolded, I appreciate the historical perspective your article about LBJ ["The Unmaking of the President"] gave me. More important, at a time when we are so divided over so many issues, the article has shown me that we, as a country, have faced turbulent times before and gotten through them.
Meredith A. Wayant
Chicago, Illinois
LBJ's Agenda
Clay Risen's article is well researched, but I disagree with his thesis that President Johnson was ready to unleash a major new series of domestic initiatives and pulled back only because of the riots that followed the King assassination. The immediate lift to the president's popularity following his withdrawal from the 1968 election allowed LBJ and his aides to dream, momentarily, that they could recreate the heady days of 1964-65, which produced the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, and aid in education. Those triumphs were the most important social legislation since Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days. But by the end of 1966, when the Democrats suffered huge losses in the House of Representatives, the political climate had changed, and the votes in Congress for large, expensive social initiatives were already gone. A conservative backlash against civil rights and social reform brought a counterrevolution against social change that began not in 1968 but as early as 1964 with Barry Goldwater. The circumstances that had created the revolutionary changes of the mid-1960s were unusual: a masterful president, a great civil rights leader, a massive movement, a large Democratic majority in Congress and a national feeling that it was time to end racial discrimination. One wonders what will make the country take another giant step toward progressive reforms.
Nick Kotz
Author, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and The Laws that Changed America
Prurient Journalism
I am glad that Tom Fiedler is pleased with his exposé of Gary Hart [Presence of Mind: "Those Aren't Rumors"]. In the "New Journalism" no person in the public eye has any privacy. Frankly, many of us citizens care little about our politicians' private lives, as long as they do the job we elect them to do. Most of this so-called journalism is done strictly for prurient interests. We no longer can avail ourselves of the best possible candidates because many choose not to be exposed to such reporting, which may or may not be true. Are reporters any purer or more trustworthy than public figures? Reporters such as Tom Fiedler and Jim McGee have helped bring down the political climate.
Marshall H. Cossman
Flint, Michigan
Amazing Adaptations
Wild things proved to me once again the value of this excellent magazine. The unfortunate ant that contributed, willy-nilly, to the propagation of a nematode via an almost incredible natural selection process, and the romantically driven hummingbird that, more happily, tail-chirped his way to a potential mate in a power dive, were a delight. Visions of an ant that took on the appearance of a luscious berry and of the undoubtedly successful courting ritual of a four-gram bird quite haunted me.
James "the amazing" Randi
James Randi Educational Foundation
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Seeing in Reverse
If Ellis Weiner ["Mind Games"] will allow it, I offer craind—that drained feeling in the cranium that comes from trying to create an anagram for rancid.
Buck Pilkenton
Sumpter, Oregon
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Comments (3)
As an evolutionary anthropologist, I have a couple comments to offer on Dunn's evolutionary mistakes article (SI 11/10) Most of it is interesting and on target. But I question three things.
First the crowding/epidemiological explanation for fur loss seems to me very weak. For one thing human aggregrates didn't increase in size until very recently and probably wouldn't have been a factor in epidemiology, as group size and population density very clearly became much later.
Cooling provides a much more convincing reason Fur insulates both ways--not just cold (and heat) out, but also heat in. If the problem is dissipating heat from inside (as from muscle exertion), insulation is bad. This is particularly important because human beings rely very heavily on sweating to cool themselves. And we are exceptionally good at it! Endurance rather than speed is our forte. Sweat must evaporate to work and fur inhibits evaporation. Part of our success is about endurance in the face of prolongued exertion. Losing fur to cool ourselves is a far more probable explanation.
Losing fur would necessitate dark skin to protect against sunburn. All human beings from the tropics now and in the past had to have dark skin for protection. Color is zonal, not about "primitiveness." So a diagram showing people getting lighter in skin as they get more modern is not only wrong it is offensive.
Brains and teeth. Perhaps in part this explanation of tooth crowing works. But the size of jaws has a lot to do with stress on them in development (hence diet.)Part at least of poor fit between teeth and mouths has to do with the softening of the human diet.
Posted by Mark Nathan Cohen on February 2,2011 | 07:21 PM
I nodded in agreement while reading your "Last Page" article by Iva R. Skoch in the September, 2010 issue("So Where You From?"). It was understandable that some emigrants might find the casual inquisitiveness of Americans a bit off-putting. I empathized with her concern about invasion of privacy by strangers asking what building she lived in. Then I read the tag line where it stated that she was "...writing a book about crashing weddings around the world." Astounding! She objects to others asking the general area where she lives, but as either a hobby or profession, she invades what is to most people one of the most personal events in their lives! Sorry, Toots, but your invasion of other people's privacy is much worse.
Posted by Bob McNatt on August 24,2010 | 01:31 AM
With deep family connections to Vermont, and a four-year residency there myself, I enjoyed Jonathan Kandell's article ("Road Taken") from the Destination America series in the May issue. As an English teacher, I appreciated how the writer used the lines from Robert Frost's poem "Out, Out--" to enhance his description of the Vermont mountains. I was struck even more by Kandell's words about the Frost cabin at Ripton (where my uncle has lived for decades). Kandell describes the "forest of 100-foot tall Norwegian pines" and the cabin that "looks out on an apple orchard." This echoes a beautiful metaphor Frost created in his poem "Mending Wall" to describe the differences between two neighbors who meet annually to replace stones fallen from the wall that separates their properties: "He is all pine and I am apple orchard."
Posted by Matt Martin on June 13,2010 | 09:16 AM