In This Issue

A LOT OF nasty stuff happened in the period that we like to call "the sixties," which, in San Francisco, lasted well into the 1970s. The country was at war, an ugly, bloody war that served no purpose and was based entirely on a lie. The government was spying on, jailing, and sometimes killing dissidents. A whole lot of the populace was seriously paranoid – and for good reason.

Does this scenario sound at all familiar?

We don't even have a name for this decade, but it's starting to get a lot of that bad old feeling – and just to make sure we don't miss the connections, John Ashcroft's Justice Department is launching a witch hunt into political crimes that took place 30 years ago.

As A.C. Thompson reports on page 13, a federal grand jury is secretly investigating two attacks on the San Francisco Police Department from the early 1970s. I suspect this new move by the feds will just lead to more paranoia and more mistrust in the government. (And some people with conspiratorial minds – like me – think the folks in power today would just as soon have everyone on the left-liberal spectrum mistrust the government as a matter of course, because that makes it easier to discredit public-sector solutions to social problems. But that's another story).

Also in this issue, Annalee Newitz takes a look at the dramatic change in the way popular culture has viewed sex over the past several decades. In the 1970s, sex talk was all about repression and liberation. Now it's all about biology and questions like "what is natural?" And Annalee asks: Should we really care?