Winter 2024

ANXIETY… ANGER. . . LOSS. . . DISILLUSIONMENT. . . CONFLICT. . . CONFUSION. . . . SHAME. . . . The dark words, in tall letters on a large pad mounted on an easel, were being taken down with …

Democratic Culture is the newsletter of Teachers for a Democratic Culture (TDC), an organization of somewhat under two thousand left academics, primarily from the fields of English and the humanities. Published three times a year, it consists of articles, excerpts …

Heterodoxy is a newish (since 1992) tabloid-sized monthly with an announced narrowness of focus: PC on campus. Its pages, festooned with exploding firecrackers and other crude line drawings, are full of virulent attacks on what it alternately sees as a …

The lengthy tenure of the old New Yorker‘s editors, Harold Ross and William Shawn, has been followed by the quick succession of Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown. Both were installed by Si Newhouse, the media tycoon who bought the magazine …

Reading George Orwell tends to leave most people with an impression of knowing Orwell personally, even intimately. This is something that happens with a very few writers. It is curious that Orwell achieves this effect while disclosing very little of …

Paul Fussell is a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, a specialist in eighteenth century literature who first came to attention outside the academy in 1975 with the publication of The Great War and Modern Memory. That book …

It is a characteristic of ideological groups—on the right as well as on the left—that they feel justified in taking “positions” on everything. In this as in other respects, the neoconservative intellectuals follow in the footsteps of an earlier generation …

Lionel Trilling wrote with a remarkable assurance. Too much assumption of authority can make a critic seem remote or bullying, but Trilling’s essays were never so. His attitude towards his reader was always a genial one, to use a word …

Robert Boyers, a professor of English at Skidmore College and editor of Salmagundi, an intellectual quarterly, offers in the first two chapters of this critical study what he calls a “fluid definition” of the political novel since 1945. He then …

Lionel Abel is a witty and cultivated man who has participated in or observed at close hand many of the past four decades’ important art movements and intellectual currents. His political involvement also goes back a long way: he was …