Editor's Notes

We continue to be pleased with the growing press coverage of REASON articles. The winner in recent weeks seems to be our exposé of NASA's attempt to put one over on Congress (Aug.). The Zodiac News Service sent out a story based on the article, which has resulted in radio interviews thus far on eight stations—in New York, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Fayetteville (Arkansas), Anaheim, San Francisco, and Alberta (Canada). A national TV network has also made inquiries and may do a story as well. Meanwhile, our old faithful Love Canal exposé (Feb.) received a half-page write-up in the July 27 issue of Fortune.

Our July cover story on privatizing Wilderness lands was the lead item in Business Week's "Economic Diary" section in its July 13 issue. It was also the subject of a syndicated column by Jenkin Lloyd Jones. And Morgan Norval's exposé of the intervenor funding program at the Federal Trade Commission (July) was inserted in the Congressional Record by Sen. James McClure (R-Idaho). It's being reprinted in Consumers' Research magazine. Finally, my editorial "Straight Thinking About Guns" (June), besides being reprinted in the Manchester Union Leader (June 9) has been given a James Madison Award by the Second Amendment Foundation.

Our August cover story on private streets has made a big hit in Washington—specifically, at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. At the weekly top-level staff meeting the last week in July, Undersecretary Donald Hovde read excerpts from the article and discussed HUD's intention to stimulate street-closing projects in cities across the country. Now if only they would remember the article's point that full-fledged privatization offers incentives that don't come with simply closing the street to through traffic.…But it's a start!

Our resident philosopher, Senior Editor Tibor Machan, continues a hectic schedule of speaking and writing. Hard at work on two books (one on human rights, another on science and society), he found time to give a paper on victims of crime at a Pace University conference and to organize the Reason Foundation/Liberty Fund colloquium on private property in May. June found him welcoming a dozen scholars from law, economics, political science, and philosophy for the Reason Foundation's summer research seminar on the welfare state. Machan's Summer 1981 Policy Review article, Wronging Rights, has been excerpted in several newspapers. He and Associate Editor Marty Zupan coauthored "On Sexism in Language," which appeared in the June 27 issue of The News World. And in July Machan had an op-ed page article on abortion in the Los Angeles Times.

Your editor, meanwhile, keeps up a hectic pace, as well. In June I spent a week at a conference on natural resources issues for journalists at the Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources of Montana State University. In July I addressed the Libertarian Party of Hawaii, the Honolulu Press Club, and the Honolulu Rotary Club on the subject of privatization of local government services (and appeared on several talk shows, as well). August found me on three panels at the Libertarian Party national convention, and in September I addressed the American Economic Council's Survival Conference in San Francisco. Assistant Editor Christine Dorffi was also a speaker at one LP convention panel.

REASON people are being published at a record pace. Advisory Board member William R. Allen's book, Midnight Economist, was due out by the end of September from Playboy Press. Containing scripts from Professor Allen's witty and informative radio commentaries of the same name, the book carries an introduction by Milton Friedman. Trustee M. Bruce Johnson is the editor of a new book from the Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research, Resolving the Housing Crisis. It's a collection of essays resulting from a conference held last fall in Los Angeles. Johnson also serves as research director of the Pacific Institute.

Three REASON authors have articles in Reader's Digest: Randy Fitzgerald on union violence in the August issue, Tom Hazlett on the effects of California's Proposition 13 in the October issue, and my own piece on federal aid to cities in the November issue. Watch for them.