On Symphony Road in Boston’s Fenway district, a contractor is gutting an old building to make apartments for the poor. The renovation is costing $23,000 per unit, and the finished apartments will rent to eligible families for $225 to $375 per month. About a block away, another contractor is fixing up a similar building for […]
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How to End It: Natural Gas
Where do you always find something? In the last place you look. Till you look in that last place, it’s “lost.” Natural gas has been “lost” for years. The best of all possible fuels, clean and cheap, natural gas was supposed to be as lost as the Seven Cities of Gold. No amount of looking […]
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The Most Powerful Nobody in Washington
In Washington, where influence is usually measured in newspaper column inches, few power-seekers shun publicity. William Jordan is something of an anachronism, an echo from a time when Capitol Hill staff members quietly accumulated power while hiding beneath camouflage nets of perfect opacity.
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The Art of Further Study
Just as clerics schooled in mystic orders surround the Pope, consultants abound in their own Vatican City—Washington D.C. They scurry about at all levels of government, jabbering in arcane dialects, mumbling half-heard benedictions. Their hollow language is fast becoming the city’s only means of communication. Hodding Carter, for example, has mastered it entirely. Can’t anybody give a straight—much less infallible—answer anymore?
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Independent Oilmen: Why They Take the Risks
On the southern edge of Amarillo, Texas, on an access road beside a highway, sandwiched between D&B Equipment and Pools by Tenorio, stands a building called the Oil Center, which is home to eleven independent oilmen. The Oil Center is set back behind a parking lot full of potholes, the entrance to which is guarded […]
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Sorting Out the Sixties
This year, the proper length of time having passed, the 1960s are getting totemized. A feeling is in the air that at last that confusing decade can be puzzled out; its social changes, so controversial abirthing, seem to be either generally accepted (like marijuana or the sexual revolution) or by and large forgotten (like LSD […]
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Going Home
A curious fact: geographical mobility in America has been rising steadily since 1900. Americans’ pace of moving gradually slowed in the last decades of the 19th century, as the frontier stopped at the Pacific, until at the turn of the century it reached an all-time low. Then, instead of staying stable, mobility began to rise […]
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Picking Up the TAB
Watching the performance of politicians and the press, the average man might be tempted to conclude that welfare reform is the issue no one wants to touch. Hasn’t President Nixon abandoned his Family Assistance Plan, brushing off the crocodile tears as Congress refuses to pass it? Hasn’t George McGovern found his $1,000-per-person grant a bigger […]
