The Continuing Crisis
man, 74, a vicar in London, England, was convicted of clubbing to death his 85-year-old wife, Clarinda, after she was unable to find his favorite program on the radio. The program is "Desert...
...but disconcerting to those of us raised in the Western tradition of noncontradiction...
...Hawking may or may not be fault-ed for not defining his terms precisely, the reader can't blame the author for using the words of his subject...
...In fact, Officer Tippit was shot on a Dallas street—nowhere near the theater where his murderer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was later arrested...
...and the an-cient view that happiness results from a whole life well-lived...
...The move de-lighted homosexuals, though it might not go over equally well with animal rights militants and domestic pet-lovers...
...RET in the phone business finds Hawking's prose "crystal clear...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain Vanderbilt University Nashville, Tennessee Queenan Quarked Most people are familiar with the adage, "It is better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt...
...Mr...
...I also have some problems with Mr...
...Although I am not in political agreement with Carlson much of the time, he is always thoughtful and thorough in his research...
...All of Gross's comments only serve to recon-firm the point I was trying to make: that Hawking's book is useless and in-comprehensible to the audience it is aimed at, namely, the general reader...
...Oliver North...
...For exam-ple, he's upset over the fact that Mr...
...The Full Muth About the Assassination of Presi-dent Kennedy incorrectly reports that Officer...
...Queenan also cites some text from the book as examples of incom-prehensibility...
...These women fmd it almost impossible to sustain their families on one full-time wage...
...Fred Hankins, 66, a double ampu-tee passenger whom Pan Am employ-ees verbally abused while carrying him onto a plane on a baggage dolly "like-a sack of potatoes"--to use his daughCORRESPONDENCE destructively on single-parent female headed households...
...It was my opponent who assumed that I called for a recall of all wives from the labor market...
...Queenan, any student of basic astronomy or physics will tell you that much of the time the best one can do is calculate the order of magnitude of a number...
...Not so...
...Sadly, people like Mr...
...Queenan would prob-ably be shocked if his readers had no familiarity with terms like infinitives, clauses, and punctuation, and names like Shakespeare, Shelley, and Tom Wolfe...
...I know that many con-sonants in a row is a problem, but the "h" should really be there (2) The story Thcker repeats of the chagrin my casual endorsement of a family wage elicited from a socialist (not a radical) feminist is misleading...
...The program is "Desert Island Disc," a popular music show...
...He knows as much, at this point, about historic and contemporary feminism as do many feminists...
...I had been wondering why we hadn't heard from you in some time, Steve...
...Minogue endorses and attributes to Murray elements of both views—a feat to be admired by an Oriental mind, perhaps...
...Rather, I sug-gested that one or the other parent working full time or each working part time should be sufficient to keep peo-ple well above the subsistence level and to give them time to be family and community members as well as wage-earners...
...Pan Am authorities are offering compensation...
...However, the beauty of science is that defining and understanding terms allows for great compactness of writing...
...Hawking's figures are (1) "too round" and (2) unsupported by calculations...
...Secondly, the job of a good writer is to spare the reader the calculations and present the results...
...Queenan liked James Gleick's book Chaos, because the author is a journalist...
...It worries me that someone who works ter's formulation...
...But it is my view that parents of young children should be free not to work full time as well as free to work...
...As to Gross's comments about the "widening chasm" between the two cultures, I think he means the widening chasm between the three cultures: peo-ple who understand physics, people who don't understand physics, and people who still quote C. P. Snow...
...Many years ago, C. P. Snow wrote of the widening chasm between what he called "the two cultures...
...It is enough to know, for example, that the distance to something is 10, which means greater than 1 and less than 100...
...We apolo-gize to our readers and Dr...
...Unquestionably, this book is not easy reading...
...That system could not be put back together even if we wanted it...
...O'Lessker...
...Freeman bludgeoned his wife with vari-ous objects over a two-hour period after her failure...
...I'd like to extend this for Joe Queenan, author of the review of Stephen Hawk-ing's book A Brief History of Time ["Quark Bites" J, in the March 1989 issue of The American Spectator "It is better to open your mouth and let people think you are a fool than to loudly proclaim to the world...
...Three state legislators in Florida introduced a bill to proscribe the barroom sport of dwarf-tossing...
...Would Mr...
...Happiness and the West Kenneth Minogue exhibits not the slightest awareness of the major con-ceptions of happiness in Western philosophical thought or of the in-tellectual foundation of this country's constitutional form of government (review of In Pursuit Of Happiness and Good Government, TAS, February 1989...
...Yet he is proud to acknowledge his basic ignorance of science...
...According to a UPI report "dwarfCorrection Because of an editing mistake, Karl O'Lessker's review last month of David W. Belin's Final Disclosure...
...Queenan, on the other hand, a "writer for Barren's," lacks the humility to admit he's treading in waters way too deep for him...
...But I do have two com-plaints: (1) The last name is Elshtain, not Elstain...
...Precisely for that reason I found Chaos a boring, over-stuffed tome of little scientific content...
...But it has become very popular in America among people of average height...
...There are two, and only two, major conceptions of happiness in Western philosophical thought: the modernist view that happiness is a psychological state represented by a feeling of con-tentment produced by the satisfaction of our momentary desires...
...Queenan...
...According to prosecutors, the Rev...
...This socie-ty's move away from an informal fami-ly wage now bears down most tossing, in which a short person straps on a harness with handles and is hurled across a room, is believed to have originated in Australia in 1985...
...On the one hand, he states his own belief that "Happiness depends in part upon the person in question" and implies that Murray views self-respect as a requisite because "To enjoy self-respect means that one must feel that one is a net contributor to the world...
...Queenan cites are crystal clear if one knows the defini-tions of the words in the text...
...Mr...
...It's in-teresting that Mr...
...I never called for "reinstituting the system" in its strong historic form which assumed a male "bread-winner," and a wife and children outside the labor market...
...And the Bar Association of San Francisco, California, voted unanimously to sup-port a change in state law backing homosexual marriage by changing the definition of marriage from a contract between a "man and a woman" to one between "two people...
...Queenan...
...It has been a while since I've seen someone so completely revel in their ignorance as does Mr...
...Stephan Gross AT&T Bell Labs Holmdel New Jersey Joe Queenan replies...
...Thus, the ex-amples that Mr...
...While Mr...
...Well, Mr...
...If he is not capable of following the English of the text, I doubt he would have understood the calculations...
...Queenan, get thee to a physics lecture...
...Queenan really have been satisfied to have the pages of calculations showing how the results were derived...
...On the other hand, he states that government may affect only a person's "enabling conditions" and tells us that Murray is guided by Aristo(continued on page 47) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1989...
...Clarifications William Ilicker's appreciation of Allan Carlson's work is well taken (TAS, March 1989...
...Both statements are to be attributed to the view that happi-ness is a psychological, rather than an ethical, state...
...A New York State appeals court ruled that a former Rochester school-teacher who murdered his supervisor nineteen years ago should receive workers' compensation, owing to job-related psychological problems...
...Pan American Airlines has apologized to Mr...
...The Iran-contra trial took on added interest when the comely Miss Fawn Hall testified on March 22 that she did indeed shred documents for Lt...
...As a result, I find it impossible to discern precisely which of Charles Murray's views are within the Western tradition...
...I get MCI any-way...
...Queenan show that the gap is still there...
...Gross, from AT&T Bell Labs, says, "When I don't know something about a topic, I usually keep quiet...
...Mr...
...If a family-wage norm prevailed, the so-called feminization of poverty would not be so visible a phenomenon...
...The following day Miss Hall nearly brought the trial back to the front page by breaking into tears while under interrogation from the de-fense...
...J. D. Tippit was "killed in a shoot-out at a downtown theater" in Dallas...
...When I don't know something about a topic, I usually keep quiet and try to learn something about it...
...Hawking's book, but my comments ad-dress the style and substance of the book rather than my non-understanding of it, as does Mr...
Vol. 22 • May 1989 • No. 5
