The Public Interest articles

Recent articles from The Public Interest

Notice to our readers.
March 22, 2005... The issue you hold in your hands will be The Public Interest's last. No journal is meant to last forever, and this one won't try to. We have decided, after forty years, to call it a day. "The aim of The Public Interest," we remarked in our very first issue, "is to help all of us, when we...

Forty good years.(LOOKING BACK)
March 22, 2005... BACK in 1965, in New York, my old friend Daniel Bell, then a professor of sociology at Columbia University, and I, then vice-president of the publishing firm Basic Books, were deeply troubled. The source of our discomfort was the mode of thought that was beginning to dominate political and...

Neoconservative from the start.(LOOKING BACK)
March 22, 2005... WHEN Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol were discussing founding a new journal, The Public Interest, I was teaching at the University of California in Berkeley, after having worked for a year in the Kennedy administration in the Housing and Home Finance Agency. Very likely I would have been...

About the public interest.(LOOKING BACK)
March 22, 2005... I ARRIVED at The Public Interest in the spring of 1994. Irving Kristol would soon, in an excess of modesty, declare neoconservatism a generational phenomenon, now absorbed into a larger conservative whole. Yet less than a decade later, I was fielding phone calls from curious reporters as far...

Spies and bureaucrats: getting intel right.(United States intelligence community)
March 22, 2005... THE American intelligence community has suffered two blows to its credibility in the past three and a half years. First, intelligence agencies failed to detect al Qaeda's terrorist plans for September 11, 2001. Then, estimates of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs proved to be wildly...