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Paterfamilias, Kaput
The August leak of thirty-plus gigabytes of data—customer email addresses and credit card records, company emails, salary and bank information, source code, at least one film treatment—from Ashley Madison, the pro-infidelity dating site, brought the cultural logic of the ...

The Children’s Hour
Amid a slew of golden anniversaries this year marking signature achievements of the civil rights movement, it was easy to overlook the fiftieth birthday of a slim document titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” The 1965 study, which soon became known as the ...

Clans of the Cathode
November 2015
Issue No. 29
Picture the slightly peculiar arrangement of the living-room furniture on almost any vintage sitcom with a primarily domestic setting, from One Day at a Time to Roseanne. Even if you’ve never consciously thought about it, you’ll soon realize which omitted staple of real-life ...

Memoirs of a Revolutionary’s Daughter
November 2015
Issue No. 29
On January 25, 1983, at about nine o’clock in the evening, my father and twenty-one of his friends were led onto a snowy soccer pitch in Amol, a small town by the Caspian Sea. There, the Iranian government executed them by firing squad following a three-week trial, which was ...

Cradle to Grave
Whenever a toddler dies in Los Angeles, if the word “accident” or “drowning” doesn’t immediately appear in the headline, anyone versed in the basics of family trauma will already know the cause of death: the boyfriend. Sometimes it’s the biological father, but more ...

No Such Cuck
A few months ago, the media class became fixated on a vulgar little portmanteau. Talking heads of every political orientation served up their piping hot takes on what Dave Weigel at the Washington Post christened “the conservative insult of the month”: cuckservative. Just as ...

Punk Crock
For a movement that famously proclaimed there was no future, punk rock has had a remarkably durable half-life. Forty years after Television’s legendary residency at CBGB, the world is awash in punk. In the last twenty months, former Village Voice rock critic and punk champion ...

A Not-So-Golden State
The Library of America is to literature what Cooperstown is to baseball—a sort of Valhalla created to immortalize this country’s finest writers. And like the storied traditions of our national pastime, the handsome black-jacketed volumes of the series summon forth a ...

The Dialectic of Love and Authority
If irony alerts had been invented before 1977, they might have saved Christopher Lasch a lot of grief. The title of his controversial book Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged misled many of his critics. Lasch was widely taken to mean that a haven is what the family ...

Marching in Place
November 2015
Issue No. 29
As plans were under way in Washington early this fall for the twentieth anniversary commemoration of the Million Man March—a curious kind of political revival meeting set for the National Mall in October—one could not help but notice: there wasn’t nearly as much chatter ...

Better Management Through Belles Lettres
November 2015
Issue No. 29
At six o’clock on a Wednesday evening last spring, dozens of students at Columbia Business School jostled into William C. Warren Hall to learn how the study of literature might prepare them for executive success. They were there to attend “Leadership Through Fiction,” a ...