Word: elmer-dewitt
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...incidents that might spark a national panic in the U.S. are unlikely to alter Japan?s pattern of energy use. "The U.S. nuclear industry basically self-destructed under political and economic pressure because it couldn?t run plants safely enough to satisfy the public," says TIME science editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt. "But Japan is unlikely to change course because they?re economically dependent on nuclear power. Generally they?ve made it work for them, but nuclear fuel is dangerous and the price of using it is that there will be accidents every now and again." But a government that plans...
Preparing a special issue of TIME like the one you're holding takes careful planning. The biggest problem, says PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT, the assistant managing editor who supervised the project, is the issue's sheer size. "I realized straight off that if I had to edit 92 pages all at once, I'd burst," he says. So he, deputy chief of reporters ANDREA DORFMAN, and TIME's science staff began working on it nearly a year ago; by last fall their list of the greatest minds of the century had been boiled down to a few dozen names. In November...
Deciding who got those assignments took some creative thought. Elmer-DeWitt was determined to find writers who brought a special expertise to their subject and could also produce graceful prose. NEIL POSTMAN for example, who wrote on TV pioneer Philo Farnsworth, is the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, an acclaimed study of the impact of television on society. RICHARD RHODES, who profiled nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, wrote a Pulitzer-prizewinning tome on the making of the atom bomb. Paleoanthropologist DONALD JOHANSON, who discovered the fossil called Lucy, had a long and bumpy relationship with the Leakey family and used...
...75th-anniversary party last year, BILL GATES said his career was particularly influenced by the Wright brothers--so he was chosen to write about them. And though TIME senior writer PAUL GRAY is no computer expert, he was picked to tell the tragic tale of Alan Turing. Says Elmer-DeWitt: "I needed someone who could break the readers' hearts...
...private sector has all the incentive to get the job done right, but the government has none of those incentives. Bureaucrats get paid whether the government works or not, " says TIME assistant managing editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Nor is the government so red-faced with shame over its Y2K slip-up that it has resolved to turn over a new leaf -- or even name another self-imposed deadline. Still, don't let visions of muddled air traffic controllers dampen your New Year 2000 celebration plans yet. Cars will still run on highways, and planes -- knock on wood -- will still take...