Dizzying thought of the day, from Paul Farago, writing in the libertarian Heartland Institute’s “Intellectual Ammunition” (May/June): “Money does not corrupt politics, as the reformers claim. Rather, politics corrupts money. When something of great value can be granted by officeholders instead of earned in the competitive marketplace, all roads lead to the Capitol.”
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Where more jobs are. According to a Brookings Institution study based on 1990 census data and 1998-’99 interviews (“Meeting the Demand,” May 2001), suburban Chicago employers are more willing to consider hiring welfare recipients than central-city employers–but less likely to have actually done so. More surprisingly, employers located near public transit were less likely to hire welfare recipients than those away from it.
“Coming from a very different background, I was slightly apprehensive” about teaching at North Park University, writes Joshua Phillips, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago in Tableau (Spring). “To my surprise, however, one of the greatest pleasures of teaching at North Park stemmed from my students’ deep commitment to religion and the Bible. Not only did they recognize allusions and understand the religious conflicts inherent in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature I assigned, but they related to these texts in a profoundly personal way. They reacted to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and especially Donne’s religious poetry very differently than my students at the University of Chicago had done. They did not simply respond to the intellectual content of the ideas.”
