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Books to snack on
The author of "Wonder Boys" selects a literary menu for blocked writers.
By Michael Chabon
[11/22/99]

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"Rich Media, Poor Democracy" by Robert McChesney
A communications authority eyeballs the current media merger mania and offers some hard and fast suggestions for doing better.
By Dustin Beilke
[11/22/99]

Creature of the night
If you like Harry Potter and love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, then we've got a writer for you.
By Polly Shulman
[11/19/99]

Ivory Tower
Experimental lesson
I've always tried to make my teaching like an art, but as I've grown more successful, have I become a hack?
By David Alford
[11/19/99]

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"Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask" by Jim Munroe
A weird and wonderful first novel comes up with a couple of unlikely superheroes.
By David Bowman
[11/19/99]

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While the press corps has been clucking over George W. Bush's inability to name the general behind the coup in Pakistan, a potentially bigger story has gone unnoticed: Many Americans barely know who the leaders of their own country are. One of the dirty little secrets of public-opinion research is the jaw-dropping apathy and general boneheadedness of the electorate.

A poll by the nonprofit Pew Research Center, released in September, gently touched on this issue. The poll showed that 56 percent of Americans could not name a single Democratic candidate for president. Things weren't better for the Republicans: Only 63 percent could recall the name "Bush." (It's a fair bet, moreover, that some of the people who came up with George W.'s name were thinking of his father.)

Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post media critic, declared the Pew results "stunning." He and others suggested, however, that there was something special about this year's race that was boring voters. (Insert your own Gore joke here.)

Yet one of the most consistent findings of public-opinion research is that the majority of Americans have long found politics about as exciting as a PBS documentary on the great crested grebe -- and they pay a corresponding amount of attention to it. Consider the following, drawn from an almost endless number of examples that political scientists have turned up over the years: One month after the Republican revolution in 1994, in which conservatives, led by Newt Gingrich, finally took control of the House of Representatives, 57 percent of the electorate did not know who Gingrich was. Despite massive coverage in every newspaper in the country, and on every news program, the vast majority had never heard of the Contract with America. On a typical election day, 56 percent of Americans can't name a single candidate in their own district, for any office.

Nor is this a new development or the product of young minds warped by MTV. In 1964, at the height of the Cold War, only 38 percent of Americans could say for sure whether the Soviet Union was a member of NATO. Most had no idea that the United States was pledged to go to war if West Germany was invaded. It's not just the people who don't vote who are uninformed, either -- not that that would exactly be reassuring. Only a tiny sliver of active voters show even passing familiarity with the kinds of policy debates that elites take for granted.

Next page | The people want more government but less of it. Huh?