Navigator, January/February, 2004
Editor's Desk
Letters to the Editor
The precautionary principle; and toleration.
Feature Story:
Fortress Americanism by Roger Donway
Foreign ideas—mostly European ideas—are having a growing influence on American judges, lawyers, and political theorists. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this. As a nation of immigrants, America has thrived by importing the fresh perspectives of foreigners. But when the foreign ideas influencing U.S. elites are also alien ideas—alien to the fundamental philosophy of our founding—then they bring danger.
Perspectives:
Essay: Art and Ideals by David Kelley
The earliest known paintings and musical objects are approximately thirty to forty thousand years old, a time when man's life was a struggle for survival. Yet, unlike tools, these art objects have no clear survival value. Why, then, did humans begin creating such objects at that point in time? One hypothesis points to the development of man's conceptual capacity.
The Roundtable: My Choices, My Critics by Robert James Bidinotto
Numerous readers of Navigator wrote to comment on the author's recommendations in "The Top Ten Films—Objectively Speaking" and "One Hundred Film Classics." In this article, the critics have their say, and the author responds.
Cultural Calender:The Victorian Atlas by Roger Donway
Henry Bessemer may have been the first person to make his career as an inventor selling in an open market. As a result of his restless, problem-solving mind, he created the inventions that began the Steel Age. Yet our culture's biographers, who expend decades writing the lives of artistic frauds and power-seeking politicians, have never turned their attention to this Atlas of nineteenth-century industry.