Long regarded by critics, fans, and various of his colleagues at the New Yorker as America’s finest literary journalist, 85-year-old Joseph Mitchell had not, until recently, published a word since 1965, and people wondered what he was doing in his small cubicle at the New Yorker‘s offices, where he has regularly appeared for over half...
I recently watched a television special about the life and times of Jessica Mitford, and the program took me back fifteen years or so to my first meeting with Jessica. It was mid-December, the beginning of the Christmas recess at San Jose State College, and Jessica had been informed that, at the close of the...
Jacques Barzun, for nearly half a century, has been telling us what is wrong with our schools and what we might do to improve them. This he continues to do in his most recent book, Begin Here. Pointing out that American schools have long been bad and are getting worse; that from grade school through...
Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character, a collection of essays, is mainly an attack on affirmative action, black separatism, and other such programs, policies, and trends that flourish in American universities and that Steele opposes, first of all, because he regards them as racist. By virtue solely of race, these programs reward blacks and...