February 1968
In This Issue
Explore the February 1968 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
India
A Plane Flight
Author to Editor: Extracts From the Letters of a Young Writer
Paul Tyner was a twenty-seven-year-old technical writer for IBM in Poughkeepsie, and a weekend hippie, when he began his first book and the consequent stream of correspondence with his editor. The book, SHOOT IT,will be published in March by Atlantic Little, Brown. What follows are some of the delights, concerns, and whimsicalities of selfdiscovery that came in the writing of it.
The Shookjong Shakes
The Inter-American Highway
Notwithstanding, Nevertheless
Passion From Poland
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Reader's Choice
New Poetry: The Generation of the Twenties
Potpourri
California
Supernation at Peace and War
u.s. Savings Bonds
Austria
Washington
Where Graduate Schools Fail
Both as a center of scholarship and as a training ground for teachers, the American graduate school appalls its critics and disappoints even its strongest supporters. Its antique and inflexible Ph.D. requirements discourage many able students and warp the attitudes of those who survive them. Its narcissistic professionalism stifles creative and socially relevant scholarship it might produce. That is the disturbing thesis of two prominent educational theorists whose book THE ACADEMIC REVOLUTION will be published this spring by Doubleday. Mr. Jencks, a lecturer in education at Harvard, is on leave from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. Mr. Riesman is Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard.
Advice to a Draftee: "All Just People Must Refuse to Become Soldiers"
The letter by Leo Tolstoy here published for the first time dramatizes the frequent fact that what is past is prologue. Written in 1899 to a desperate young candidate for conscription. Tolstoy’s words will seem to some to bear a relevance to America in 1968. In conjunction ire publish on page 58 a carefully reasoned examination of civil disobedience from a federal judge directly confronted with the issue today.
On Civil Disobedience
The Perversity of Aubrey Beardsley
Beardsley was a precocious child and remained one, said Oscar Wilde, until he died at the early age of twenty-five. In this fascinating examination of a singular artist, the talented British novelist and essayist Brigid Brophy finds that “the genius of Beardsley’s eroticism is precisely the quality Freud ascribed to the sexuality of children Since the publication of her prizewinning novel, HACKENFELLER’S APE, in 1953, Miss Brophy has won honors and praise for seven more books. Her next, a collection entitled THE BURGLAR, will be published in May by Henry Holt.
Four Dream Songs
An American Looks at British Television
It remains to be seen whether the combination of Ford Foundation money and Public Broadcasting Laboratory efforts is going to elevate the bad reputation of American TV. Meanwhile, most Americans who reside in Britain, as did Mrs. Trilling recently, continue to be impressed by the contrasts. The medium which in America is ” dedicated to evading reality ” she found in England to be “a celebration of its endless range and possibility.” Mrs. Trilling writes for several magazines, including PARTISAN REVIEWand COMMENTARY,has edited two volumes of stories of D. H. Lawrence, and is author of the Claremont Essays.
The Trash Dragon of Shensi
The Collector
Manners, Beards, and the Bill of Rights
The Double Helix: The Discovery of the Structure of Dna
