Editor's Notes

This is our first attempt to coordinate an issue around a single topic and, while congratulations are in order for those who helped make it possible, an apology must be made to readers for some overlapping of material and a certain lack of continuity between articles, as well as at least one important omission, ecotactics. Our planning sessions, finances, and resources just weren't what they should have been. I promise to make the next team effort—education—better. Meanwhile, as additional material on ecology arrives, we will run it. Certainly I expect a barrage of letters, judging from the reactions on the telephone of readers when I told them what we were planning. Several late manuscripts including one by Leon Kapersky, publisher of Protos, on recycling are expected. And we'd be happy to see formal rebuttals to anything published here.

What is planned for the next few months in Reason? A special issue on education with an interview with John Holt, material on and by Minsky and Papert of MIT's artificial intelligence lab, and much more. An editorial on the ethics of advertising; the ethics of transplant; Rosalee Nichols on Indian rights; Lynn Kinsky on drugs and federal regulation; an interview with Jay Forrester (tentative); Roy Childs on Big Business (tentative); myself on press objectivity and police efficiency; Don Franzen on the New Left; Robert Poole on comparative political trends in America and Eastern Europe and the need for anthropological approach to social change.

I've been asked to contribute to the Libertarian Forum (not the magazine), a series of tapes slated for distribution throughout the Pacifica network.

Small school groups may find of use cassettes I am recording on a variety of subjects. Generally, the material on the cassettes has not yet appeared in Reason. Some topics: police brutality, efficiency, authoritarianism; press objectivity. I haven't decided on a price for use or purchase, although it won't be very high.

Add to our staff, Rod Manis, who begins this month as advisor in ecoeconomics.

When I was at the California conference this winter, I heard a method of fighting the draft that I've neglected to pass on: a draft card bank, along the lines of Census Resistance 70. A large number of kids, say 25 thousand, would mail their draft card to preselected address or box number. When a specified number had arrived, they would be crated and shipped air freight to the Justice Dept. The theory is that the Justice Dept, couldn't possibly prosecute 25,000 draft resisters, only a small number. If donations were included with the draft cards, there would be plenty of money for legal defense or escape to Canada. Once the publicity began, you could expect a great flood of additional cards. Pretty soon, the only ones who will have not shipped their cards back to Mitchell will be William Buckley and the directors of National YAF.

Virginia Heinlein informs us that her husband's next book, I Will Fear No Evil, will be released this fall by Putnam and serialized by Galaxy. I have no idea what the book is about. No matter what, though, it should be interesting.