The Atlantic

The most memorable review that Samuel Phillips Huntington, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, ever got was a bad one. "Imagine," Huntington recalled recently, sitting in his home on Boston's Beacon Hill. "The first review of my first book, and the reviewer compares me unfavorably to Mussolini." He blinked and squinted shyly through his eyeglasses. Huntington, seventy-four, speaks in a serene and nasal voice, the East Bronx modified by high Boston. He described how the reviewer, Matthew… more

In the 1980s, when newspapers and magazines first started reporting on parents who had rejected school in favor of teaching their children at home, it seemed that the movement would never last -- or if it lasted, would never grow. More and more mothers were working outside the home. More and more parents, especially in the upper middle class, were fretting about their children's pursuit of academic excellence and healthy socialization, while simultaneously outsourcing the management of both to recognized… more

On May 17 of last year I completed a thousand-mile journey by train, bus, and taxi across Turkey from west to east, and crossed the border into the newly independent ex-Soviet Republic … more

This past April in Quetta, the bleached-gray, drought-stricken capital of the Pakistani border province of Baluchistan, I awoke to explosions and gunfire. In search… more

I'm a pretty Net-savvy guy. I read my morning newspaper online. I buy discount airline tickets online. I participate in animated sports banter online. I even manage … more

In 1988, during the Palestinian intifada, the Israeli Defense Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, referring to Palestinian protesters, reportedly told Israeli soldiers to "go in and break … more

In the fall of 1964 a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley undergraduate named Mario Savio climbed the steps of Sproul Hall and denounced his university for bending over backwards to "serve the need of American industry." Savio, the leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, accused the university of functioning as "a factory that turns out a certain product needed by industry" rather than serving as the conscience and a critic of society. To the modern ear this sixties rhetoric may sound outdated.… more

The best thing about winter is that I can go cross-country skiing from my front door. I live in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the sharp, determined lines of steeples … more

Everett Carll Ladd, a political scientist, once remarked, "Social analysis and commentary has many shortcomings, but few of its chapters are as persistently wrong-headed as those on the generations and generational change. This literature abounds with hyperbole and unsubstantiated leaps from available data." Many of the media's grand pronouncements about America's post-Baby Boom generation -- alternatively called Generation X, Baby Busters, and twentysomethings -- would seem to illustrate this point.

The 1990s opened with a frenzy of negative stereotyping… more