January 1979
In This Issue
Explore the January 1979 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
The Atlantic Puzzler
Party of One: Purity Is a Pigeonhole
The Mail
Risk-Benefit Analysis: Putting a Price on Life
What’s the value of a human life? According to one government agency, the price is precisely $287,175. The figure is a by-product of the new science of risk-benefit analysis, which attempts to make social policy more rational, but which also poses chilling ethical problems.
The Spirited World of I. B. Singer
“Writers were not born to change the world We cannot even make it worse,”says the modest winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature. For Isaac Bashevis Singer, writing is an act of worship, love, and play.
The Editor's Page
Ole and Trufa: A Story of Two Leaves
Yellow Springs
In a Southern Garden: After Bonnard
Preppies: The Last Upper Class?
Spice Valley, u.s.a.: Marijuana Moonshiners
Growing and selling marijuana is now a $9 billion industry. It is also the backbone of an income redistribution system that is keeping some of the counterculture prosperous while contributing not a dime to the federal treasury.
John Barleycorn Lives
Family Romance
The Art Market: Investors Beware
Buyers are bullish on art as an investment— but the art world is a wild and woolly place, where practices that would land a stockbroker in jail are just business as usual.
Litany for a Later Day
On Feeling Guilty
Is guilt a useless emotion? Not at all, says the author. Guilt is cousin to remorse; it is the emotion that helps us know our frailties; it is “a guardian of our goodness.”
The Unquiet Ones
My Sisters
The Quarrel
The Catch
The Client
Three-Card Monte
New Light on the Dark Satanic Mills
The Sea, the Sea
Rudyard Kipling
The Bunker
The Princes in the Tower
On to Berlin
Asleep in the Sun
Coral Gardens
Letter to a King
