Volume 45, Number 9 · May 28, 1998
2001
By Richard Jenkyns
Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown
by Stephen Jay Gould
Harmony Books, 190 pp., $17.95
Peter Mandelson, Prime Minister Tony Blair's fixer, spin doctor in chief, and Minister for the Millennium, recently appeared before the members of a House of Commons select committee to tell them the purpose of the dome which the British government is currently building at Greenwich at a cost of one and a quarter billion dollars, the most lavish spending on the forthcoming year 2000 anywhere on the planet, although the costs of the Roman Catholic Church for its Jubilee year in Rome may come close to it. 'It's a chance for people to think about their society, and hopefully improve it,' he said. The chief attraction, he added, would be an interactive computer game called surfball.
Review, 5153 words
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