Word: hentoff
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...HENTOFF'S NEW BOOK on education is a gripping narrative, raising many fundamental question. But it fails to fully analyze the problems it puts forward, and offers only a few questionable solutions. After the Supreme Court found corporal punishment constitutional in one case, CBS commentator Eric Sevareid glibly commented that "kid-whacking" is "civilizing" in the proper adult hands. Hentoff springs off that comment to launch his book with a section entitled, "Does Eric Sevareid's Kid Get Hit in School?" Hentoff advocates making corporal punishment flatly illegal in the remaining 48 states where "culturally-sanctioned acts of violence against...
...traveled around the country to collect and verify reports of corporal punishment. One of Hentoff's "most affecting" cases involves a high school senior in Dallas, Texas, which he calls the "corporal punishment capital of the nation," where from November 1971 to May 1972 "there had been reported applications of physical punishment to 24,305 children." The Dallas senior "had a good academic record, an A in conduct all the way through high school, and the kind of self-discipline that enabled him to hold down a job while going to school so that he could...
...smut magazine which manages to offend more people than all its competitors combined. But more interesting than any of the legal issues raised by the conviction is the ambivalent nature of the anger which surrounds it. Everyone who has voiced public disapproval of the court decision, from Nat Hentoff and Nora Ephron to the New York Times, has prefaced his comments with a strong statement deploring the "offensiveness" of Hustler. Journalists are rushing to protect not the odious Larry Flynt but rather the principle of the first amendment, in other words, themselves. This ruffled condemnation and self-consciously fierce separation...
...more a reflection on the sorry state of American magazine writing than on the two magazines' brilliance, New York provided an outlet for talented writers like Richard Reeves. The Voice, besides press critic Cockburn, probably the best of his ilk since A. J. Liebling, printed Nat Hentoff, Ken Auletta, and Robert Christgau, probably the best pop music critic around. Andrew Sarris is arguably the best film critic in America. And "The Greasy Pole," a political column co-written by Cockburn and James Ridgeway, provides some of the best leftist commentary on American politics today. It's hard to see these...
...Hentoff, however, is a First Amendment absolutist. Many would consider censoring a movie if harm could be proved, either to the user, or to the larger society. Though the two main concerns about pornography?its effect on the user, its impingement on the rest of society?often merge, they need to be considered separately...