The Lonely Crowd  

When David Riesman died this past May at the age of ninety- two, it was something of a surprise to learn that he had still been alive. For an earlier generation of sociologists, such obscurity would have seemed inconceivable. The …



The Meritocracy Trap  

The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999, 368 pp. In respectable American opinion, perhaps the Constitution is the only institution treated with more obligatory reverence than the elite university. …