But what about the conservatives who don’t care to do either? Theology by U.S. Supreme Court justice and former University of Chicago professor Antonin Scalia (U.S. Catholic, May): Christ’s message “is not the need to eliminate hunger or misery or misfortune, but rather, the need for each individual to love and help the hungry, the miserable, the unfortunate.”
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“Some things deserve to be demolished,” writes Theodore Hild, chief of preservation services for the state Historic Preservation Agency, in Historic Illinois (April). “Remember Jacob Riis’s photos of the dreadful Federal Street slum in turn-of-the-century Chicago? Good thing we didn’t get stuck trying to save those things. Also, I can’t resist the irony that almost every urban or downtown building that preservationists try to save is itself a building built on the bones of an earlier structure….Fifth- or sixth-generation buildings are common in some downtowns. Adler and Sullivan’s Auditorium Theater Building–one of the world’s most famous buildings–rests on the site of a row of elegant mansions.”
Shut up already about the decline of the book! Larissa MacFarquhar in Slate (April 16): “In 1957, 17 percent of people surveyed in a Gallup poll said they were currently reading a book; in 1990, over twice as many did. In 1953, 40 percent of people polled by Gallup could name the author of Huckleberry Finn; in 1990, 51 percent could. In 1950, 8,600 new titles were published; in 1981, almost five times as many. In fact, Americans are buying more books now than ever before–over 2 billion in 1992. . . . People aren’t just buying books as status objects, either. A 1992 survey found that the average adult American reads 11.2 books per year, which means that the country as a whole reads about 2 billion — the number bought.”
Do polls really affect election results? Norman Bradburn of the National Opinion Research Center thinks they probably do in primary elections “where there are many candidates and only a few will emerge as serious candidates,” because “poll results can affect the money raising capabilities of potential candidates. While the effect is not as large as actually winning or losing a primary, it does appear to be sufficiently large to make it difficult (but not impossible) for little known candidates to get very far in the primaries. It also puts a premium on raising a large amount of money well before the primaries” (Chicago Policy Review, Fall).
