Half Past the Month: Government Theatre
by Craig Ladwig To be sure, government as entertainment is an acquired taste. But if you can imagine a ballet with the dancers drafted from a personal-injury law firm and the Amalgamated Plumbers Union you can appreciate it. For the connoisseur, there is the planning and zoning meeting. David Mamet, the playwright, famously described this Read the full article…
Backgrounder: Don’t Cry for the Iceman
by Norman Van Cott, Ph.D. One of my earliest memories is the iceman delivering large blocks of ice to my parents’ small triplex apartment in southern California. The ice was deposited in our “ice box” and kept food cool. Frozen? Nope; just cool. Of course, the ice didn’t last forever. It melted and drained into Read the full article…
From the South Wall: Ben-Hur Rides Again
by Andrea Neal In 1959, a best-selling book by Hoosier Lew Wallace became a blockbuster movie, sealing Charlton Heston’s reputation as Hollywood’s leading man and winning a record 11 Academy Awards. Paramount Pictures hopes to repeat the phenomenon in 2016 with Timur Bekmambetov’s adaptation of Ben-Hur starring Jack Huston and Morgan Freeman. It opens in Read the full article…
Schansberg: Eugenics at Indiana University
by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. As we observe Indiana’s bicentennial, here’s something from our history that we can’t celebrate: In 1907, Indiana became the first state in America to pass a eugenics law. Eugenics is the study of the hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled, selective breeding. The word derives from its Latin components Read the full article…
Indiana at 200 (83): The Evansville Flood of 1937
by Andrea Neal A walk along Evansville’s Riverfront Esplanade – even on the most beautiful of days – evokes memories of the worst natural disaster in the history of the Ohio River: the Great Flood of 1937. The levee is the most visible reminder – built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect Read the full article…
The Outstater: Saving the World one Parking Space at a Time
by Craig Ladwig The summer doldrums, with so many officials out of officialdom, is a good time to put forward some pet public policy positions that, in my opinion, would save the world. One would abolish parking meters as we know them and the other government finance committees. They loosely follow the “Perlini Rule.” My Read the full article…
