The day that I had my job interview at The Washington Monthly a new issue had just come into the office. In huge type, the cover said, CRIMINALS BELONG IN JAIL. It’s a sign of how much the liberal world has changed that at the time, February 1976, this seemed shocking to me—it was the kind of thing that […]
Nicholas Lemann
Nicholas Lemann is a professor at Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer for The New Yorker. His most recent book is Transaction Man.
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Tilting at Windmills
I’m getting too old to write my-generation pieces anymore and I have one more thing to say, so I’d better say it now. The rap on my generation—people born during the baby boom, but young enough so that the sixties represented an adolescent romance rather than a permanent life commitment—is that we’ve returned to the […]
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America’s Bloomsbury
For anyone who has ever worked on a struggling, high-minded publication, the fate of Partisan Review represents the ultimate Walter Mitty fantasy. Here is a publication with a circulation in the low four figures whose every leading writer and editor seems to have been the subject of a biography, a written memoir, or both, and whose editorial […]
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Missed Moorings: American Novelists Lose Touch
Not long ago the winners of the American Book Awards for 1985 were announced: Don DeLillo’s White Noise in fiction and Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground in nonfiction. Thankfully for the purveyors of the awards, which have been controversial lately, it was a quiet year. Nobody much complained. Both books were by well-known, veteran authors, both were well received, neither wore […]
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Neoliberalism Without A Heart
Politicians almost never allow us a glimpse into what’s really going on in their minds. So when Dick Lamm, Colorado’s “Governor Gloom,” does, it’s hard to resist the urge to perform armchair psychoanalysis. This book is about the major problems facing the United States today, but it is elaborately set up as a work of […]
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The Scars of Busing
Over the years, this magazine has been saying that book-length nonfiction that combines the rich humanity of novels with journalism’s reportorial, and moral zeal can be the very best way to illuminate public affairs—to get discussion of politics and government out of the realm of caution, posturing, and self-interest. With that well-loved Washington Monthly gift for repeating […]
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A Mil-Symp Takes on the Pentagon
Readers with less than fond memories of Edward Luttwak’s tendentious Commentary story of a couple of years back, “Why We Need More Waste, Fraud, and Mismanagement in the Pentagon,” will be surprised by this book, which is first-rate. Luttwak’s great strength is that he really knows what he’s talking about—by virtue of the quality of his sources and the […]
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Values, Personal Choice, and The Failure of Liberalism
Do you remember the 1980 Republican convention? Think back for a minute and you’ll recall that there was a five-word mantra that recurred over and over—it was printed on the platform, repeated by speaker after speaker, even hoisted on banners. The five words were family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom; they were cojoined by a little-known speechwriter named […]
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Community Without Conformity
A couple of years ago I came across a huge set of photographs taken all over the United States in the 1940s. They struck me with great force, mostly because they seemed to direct attention irresistibly toward what might be called the American character. While the pictures showed a country in some ways vastly more heterogeneous than […]
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Today’s Best Journalism: Better Than Fiction
The sensation that Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent caused when it was published in 1959 can be taken as a sign of how hungry the nation was at that moment for some sense of the texture of modern Washington. Today it seems incredible that Advise and Consent could have made the earth move—it’s terribly dated, a routine procession of […]
