Fall 2025

Professor Kolakowski, originally of Warsaw University and now teaching at All Soul’s, Oxford, first came to the West’s attention in the 1960s as a philosophical spokesman of “revisionism”—the dissident movement of humanist intellectuals inside the Soviet orbit. In his most …

For some time now, the Newsweek columnist George Will has been praised as a civilized conservative. He tries to reason, he doesn’t often rant, he looks good by comparison to William Buckley (a modest enough test). But he remains a …

A challenge to nuclear power requires an assault upon the basic corporate priorities that undergird the entire economy. However, one suspects that many participants in the growing antinuclear movement, including some who consider themselves to be the most militant, have …

Though it is doubtful that the earth, or even the country, shall rise on New Foundations right away, it is certain that the presidential campaign now is on. Our country endures longer campaigns than any other democracy. No sooner does …

This is a tainted review. For one thing, I’ve known H. W. Benson for many years; we have long been colleagues in the same movements and causes. Benson is, to put it plainly, a “nut” about democracy who had the …

Open the Sunday New Y ork Times, and you’ll see three or four pages combine the tactics of advertising with the wisdom of the universities. What will draw you in? Advance at work? Occupying your leisure time? Meeting glamorous people (or professors, politicians, or bureaucrats)? Self-knowledge? …

Discussions of the death penalty have a lot in common with the traditional, tiresome arguments about race. In both instances there is a facade of rationality—some races are demonstrably inferior to others and executions deter homicidal crime. The available evidence on race and achievement clearly contradicts …

Literature is an ironic mask. It knows that’s what it is. A nonironic mask is a lie. The mask is a metaphor for the face; it is at once sharp featured and enigmatic. The faces of others are a few simplified lines; when recalling them, …

Energy policy has customarily been regarded as a highly technical subject requiring expertise in nuclear physics and other recondite disciplines. Accordingly, energy policy was largely restricted to the technical aspects of conversion, transmission, and the arcana of pricing, and was …

Christopher I.asch’s two recent books, Haven in a Heartless World (Basic Books, 1977) and The Culture of Narcissism (W. W. Norton, 1979), amount to an extended moral denunciation of contemporary American life, its frantic hedonism, vulgar opportunism, and pervasive hollow anxiety. Such jeremiads are scarcely in short …

On March 28, the water used to cool a “containment vessel” in the atomic plant at Three Mile Island, in Middletown, Pennsylvania, grew dangerously hot and gave every sign of growing hotter. The consequences were as follows. The company that …