Besides, the article employs none of the resources available to a cybermagazine. I've seen this as a general criticism of SLATE, which I've dismissed up until now, having a fairly linear (and as you can see, literal) mind. Something like this article, though, has to work on more than one level, or else it is just corny.

By teaching children they must not use words their parents and older peers use, we are sending a clear message: It is adult-like to say one thing and do another, and your behavior should conform to the situation, not to any fundamental moral principles.

Without this kind of "amoral" training, kids might grow up to be far less tolerant of the double standards and self-righteousness at the center of their society.

I am a great fan of Michael Kinsley's, but have to disagree with his article criticizing Justice Thomas' opinion on campaign-finance reform ("Money Talks").

While contributions aren't in and of themselves expression or speech, surely the First Amendment protects our right to speech and expression by banding together to support the opinions of our candidate. I am most troubled about the corrupting influence of money in Washington. I do agree that the opinion of the Supreme Court in Buckley vs. Valeo is consistent with the First Amendment, because the candidate voluntarily restricts his right to collect and spend in order to receive huge government subsidies in the form of federal matching funds.

More important, it will prevail because--as Aretino, Chaucer, Rabelais, and George Carlin can attest--it's fun and it's funny.

But what Americanism is "goo-goo"? ("The official goo-goo position for 20 years has been that Buckley vs. Valeo is wrong.")

But there are some interesting aspects to this story, especially Mark Steyn's attempts to do what the music industry has been doing for years, reassigning the black creative spark to white roots. The misleading claim that "in [rap's] willingness to pass off individual pain as mass entertainment, it returns us to the 1890s, to the whitest popular music we've known in this country," is a critic's way of saying rap is bullshit and that blacks have forsaken what it is black music is meant to be.

That's the interesting question isn't it? Who is cultural arbiter of what is "black" and what is not? How far can blacks exploit the industry and cultural markets for the sake of their music (therefore turning white?) and still retain the title "a black artist."

London is a different world from the USA. That doesn't mean that the larger-than-life shoot-em-ups and misogyny that appear conspicuously in gangsta rap reflect a daily social condition in its most realistic form. But is it minstrelsy? Has Steyn taken the time to review the cross section of rap available on the market from its basest to its most elevated forms? There is a tendency for American (and obviously English) society to judge the actions of a minority group based on the actions of the "one representative Negro." This paradigm of social confrontation is unfortunately easily accommodated to social and cultural critiques where a few pieces of gangsta rap become the entirety of rap music.

To list three black artists and say that you will hear nothing of them in rap is completely bogus. What about A Tribe Called Quest, Guru, Digable Planets, Fugees, Big Daddy Kane, De La Soul, etc. Black music is also James Brown and P-Funk and Marvin Gaye and--a million other groups and heritages, including Jamaican influences whose importance in laying the groundwork for rap music cannot be denigrated or discarded.

Basically, this article suffers from what almost every article on rap suffers from. Either the author attempts to show how gangsta rap is dangerous (e.g. hidden message, black music, black youth are dangerous) or attempts to compare the forces motivating the art form are brought out of context (e.g. 1890s ballads) to prove some point (like calling rap "the debasement of lyric-writing to a formless laundry list of half-baked hoodlum exhibitionism." Translation: Its a useless art form and ultimately, nothing that whites haven't already done).

But to be so obviously pessimistic about what Clinton would do in a second term is to grossly underestimate the man.

I agree that Clinton has been at times frustrating and hard to follow. But I hardly think that damns him to a useless and wasted second term. I think that it is just as possible ... and I believe more probable ... that Clinton's second term will break the mold Beschloss describes.

Nearly 47 years ago, when I was one year old, my parents performed a ceremony which is very common among South Indians (the Asian Indians from the sub-continent), especially the Brahmins, during which the child is initiated into learning. The child is guided by the father to write the first alphabet with the forefinger on rice spread over a banana leaf. When I started school after a few years, I remember that we used a slate (with wooden edges)! Notebooks and pen came much later.

I thought that I would share this with you.

Thus, I believe there are two solutions, either of which purists like me believe would be a far better way to go:

A) No limits whatsoever on anybody, with the only requirement being that each and every contribution must be announced publicly and printed in the public media at a time when everyone will look for it. The voters can then judge whether they think a candidate has been "soiled" by the contribution, e.g. when and if the winner supports legislation to benefit the benefactor.

Sadly, your zine is just a rehash of existing liberal-dominated magazines and a vindication of what the conservatives call the "liberal biased media."

Portions of your magazine are nothing more than rehashed stories (and I do mean stories) from the New York Times and the Washington Post. The supposed "in-depth" articles make a pseudo-attempt at being fair, yet save their criticism for conservative viewpoints, and in the end, endorse the same old liberal principles.

I really don't care if you decide to publish a zine with a liberal slant. After all, that is your right. However, I would have far more respect for this experiment if you stated upfront that you were representing a particular point of view. I subscribe to both the New Republic and National Review, and neither pretend to be unbiased. SLATE reminds me of a cyber-version of Time, with all the gushing, suppressed giggling of liberal fanatics thinking they have fooled the public.