Notes

The Reason Foundation's expertise on free-enterprise urban transportation is increasingly in demand. In recent weeks we've been contacted by a foundation in Wichita, citizens groups in Houston and Fort Worth, the Denver Regional Conference of Governments, and a taxi association in Seattle. Generally, they wanted additional information—studies, articles, etc. For Denver, we recommended a list of qualified speakers for an upcoming conference and for Wichita a consultant (subsequently hired by the foundation to explore private-sector options for local transit).

We also recently assisted the Oklahoma State Auditor's Office with information on privatization of various state and local public services. And an official of the Florida Public Service Commission has requested further information from our files on the subject of telephone competition.

There have also been more articles in other media on Reason Foundation work. Our Local Government Center's privatization efforts were the subject of Owen Moritz's October 31 column in the New York Daily News titled, "Sell the Brooklyn Bridge: Has It Come to That?" (Moritz answered in the affirmative.) My article "Why Not Depoliticize Water?" appeared in the October issue of Water/Engineering & Management, provoking a number of interesting letters. And there have been three more articles on our proposal to privatize the air traffic control system. The first appeared November 9 in the Chamber of Commerce's Washington Report, another a day later in Aviation Daily, and the third article appeared in January in the Kansas City Times.

Two more REASON people have achieved new recognition. Frequent contributor Tom Hazlett is the author of a report from the Media Institute, "TV Coverage of the Oil Crisis: How Well Was the Public Served?" Given the general economic illiteracy of most reporters, it's no surprise that the answer is, "not very well." Contributor P.T. Bauer, expert on Third World development at the London School of Economics, has been named to the House of Lords. Our congratulations.

—R.P.

Our staff grows! Joining us this month as an assistant editor is Eric Martí, under an editorial internship program funded by the Institute for Educational Affairs. In addition to editing and research for the magazine, Eric will be contributing to the Trends column and assisting with the production of REASON and the editing of the Foundation's academic journal, Reason Papers, and other publications. A magna cum laude graduate of Middlebury College, he studied for a year in the philosophy Ph.D. program at Yale University. He has worked for several publications and, on a free-lance assignment, researched and wrote our December cover 1982 story, "Self-Help Housing." Our overworked editorial staff are pleased as punch!

Also added to the masthead this month is Timothy Condon. Over the last few years Tim has contributed several articles to our pages and appears bimonthly with his Taxes column, while working as a tax advisor and earning a law degree (he did it!). So we are pleased to make him a contributing editor and look forward to more of him in the magazine.

Jeff Riggenbach's retrospective on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged has proved to be provocative, just as we thought when we decided to publish it as the concluding piece in our special annual book section in December. We've received what must be a record number of letters to the editor, a sampling of which you'll find in this issue beginning on page 8.

We are happy to report that Eduard Lozansky, introduced to our readers by Patrick Cox in the December 1981 Spotlight, has finally been reunited with his wife, Tatyana. The daughter of a high-level Soviet general, she had for six years been denied permission to emigrate. Eduard, now a professor of mathematics and physics at American University, left the Soviet Union in 1976 after being fired from his prestigious teaching jobs for defending the dissident Andrei Sakharov and distributing underground copies of Solzhenitsyn's works. While he kept the eye of the Western media focused on his wife's plight, it was apparently Tatyana's 33-day hunger strike that finally secured her a visa from the Soviet state.

—M.Z.