Ivory Towers in the Marketplace  

In 1997, Arthur Levine, the president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, concluded a five-year national study of undergraduate attitudes about higher education. The study was like a cold shower, one made all the more jarring by the fact that Levine …



You Were Imperfect Like Us  

Later Auden by Edward Mendelson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, 570 pp., $30 During the 1930s, W. H. Auden populated his poems and plays with heroes struggling to put their shoulders to the wheel of History, and his admirers anointed …



How to Make a Rhyme of a Mystery?  

Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan Random House, 1999, 384 pp., $25 Ralph Ellison’s posthumous novel, Juneteenth, has become a book mired in charges of betrayal, and its editor, John Callahan, has been hounded for overseeing the …



In Transition  

When Transition 51 appeared in 1991, its editors could not have expected many readers to be acquainted with the magazine. Not only had its editorial offices migrated from East Africa to the northeastern United States, but it was emerging from …



Foibles of Abundance  

The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism by Thomas Frank University of Chicago Press, 1997 272 pp $22.95 Over the past decade, cool has become the trademark of American consumerism. The triumph of cool …