A new biography paints Robert F. Kennedy as a Machiavellian monster. Mitchell Duneier's Sidewalk, a new study of street vendors on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue, turns assumptions about race, class, and social values upside down. Charles Davis reviews. That is the dystopian vision of robotics. Genetic engineering will give evil new life, putting the power to loose new plagues on humanity into the hands of terrorists, madmen, and despots.
Nanotechnology promises to achieve huge results through the manipulation of the infinitesimal.
The Chief Scientist is afraid of science. This is incompatible with capitalism as we know it. To ponder questions of this heft in an election year, when no candidate in his right mind will ask any member of the electorate to sacrifice anything, is to despair of democracy. Politics is more and more about disguising problems than about bringing important issues to the fore. The politics of candor can't seem to get traction against the politics of escape.