No More Public Interest

The quarterly magazine The Public Interest shuttered last week almost 50 years after its founding by Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Adam Wolfson and others -- in other words today's neocons. David Skinner, who worked for PI in the mid-90s, wrote a homage to PI, starting on his day one:

My first task as assistant editor was to proofread Leon Kass's "The End of Courtship," a 9,000-word requiem for the practice of "wooing" and other traditional forms of gentlemanly conduct toward the fair sex. Not to diminish the many merits of this essay, but to me it was like taking a long car ride with a brilliant man who's definitely got my number (child of divorce, serial monogamist) and spends the whole trip imploring me to change.

Pop music critics nowadays like to praise "songs that changed your life" (in the words of Morrissey of The Smiths, an expert in his way, though not often cited in The Public Interest). I know the feeling, but in my case the songs were essays like Kass's, demanding that the reader face up to man's "shame at our needy incompleteness, unruly self-division, and finitude" and feel "awe before the eternal" and "hope in the self-transcending possibilities of children and a relationship to the divine." This really put a crimp in my plans for an extended and lively bachelorhood. "For a human being to treat sex as a desire like hunger--not to mention as sport--is then to live a deception." Even now that I am a husband and a father, when I reread this essay, I find myself thinking very hard about my responsibilities as a man. At the time, however, my reaction was quite different. I said to the managing editor, "After this, we should go out, find a bar, and meet some liberated chicks."

RIP The Public Interest--good thing there's still a Weekly Standard.