September 1995
In This Issue
George McKenna, “On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position”; Nicholas Lemann, “The Great Sorting”; Cait Murphy, “Ulysses in Chinese”; Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, “The Moral State of Marriage”; and much more.
Articles
Bone Key
On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position
Principled yet pragmatic, Lincoln's stand on slavery offers a basis for a new politics of civility that is at once anti-abortion and pro-choice
Cover Art
The Great Sorting
The first mass administrations of a scholastic -aptitude test led with surprising speed to the idea that the nation's leaders would be the people who did well on tests
The Structure of Success in America
In America perhaps only race is a more sensitive subject than the way we sort ourselves out in the struggle for success. At the center of that struggle are higher education and ETS, the Educational Testing Service. Herewith an inside look at the history and workings of one of the most familiar yet least public of American institutions
Raiding Nation
Notes and comments on Matthew Arnold's "The Last Word"
'Ulysses' in Chinese
The story of an elderly pair of translators and their unusual bestseller
The Struggle to Govern Johannesburg
The transition to nonracial rule is proceeding more slowly--and more viciously--than expected
The Lather
Two Poems
A Display of Mackerel
Green-Hearted Italy
In autumn the mystic landscape of Umbria is at its best
Unreconstructed Modernist
How does one account for the fall of Pierre Boulez the composer and the rise of Pierre Boulez the conductor?
Slavery and the Jews
A review of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: Volume One
745 Boylston Street
Letters
The Almanac
Word Watch
The Moral State of Marriage
Are We Alone?
Red Earth and Pouring Rain
Peculiar People: The Story of My Life
Hunters and Gatherers
The Puzzler
Writing Home
The September Almanac
Contributors
Henry Miller and George Orwell
Colonel Roebling's Friend
Howard watched men go into the caisson’s air lock at the beginning of the day and exit diminished — coated with mud, their skin a pale gray, so exhausted they stretched out on the ground as soon as they hit the open air. They looked shrunken, wrung dry
