September 1986

In This Issue
Explore the September 1986 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Women in the Work Force
Gender disparity in the workplace might have less to do with discrimination than with women making the choice to stay at home
Sex in Our Time
The Triumph of the Nerds
Alaska: Southeast to McKinley
Impostors
Men's Lives
Velázquez
Velázquez
Portrait of Delmore
The Hiroshima Murals
Acrostic No. 14
The Puzzler
The September Almanac
New Zealand: The Politics of Identity
A pastoral country, threatened by “Americanization,” seeks to find its own voice
Jobs: Women in the Work Force
Most married women work, but only 29 percent of them hold full-time jobs—a fact that may have more to do with choice than with discrimination
The Law: Trust Versus Antitrust
No one wants bad doctors, but procedures for barring them from practice may run afoul of federal law
The Enchanted Glade
The Japanese Are Different From You and Me
Our man in Japan admires the efficiency and social cohesion he sees everywhere around him. But he finds certain Japanese practices and beliefs less admirable
Contributors
John L. Sullivan and Alfred I. Du Pont
"The Target Is Destroyed"
Words Form the Wise
A tale spun from the archives of the BBC, in which a star chamber of eminences sets out to refine, improve, purify, and otherwise put aright the Mother Tongue, with consequences that fall far short of those intended and yet somehow amount to more than meets the ear
Bayswater
My Father's Shirt
Epithalamion
Analogies of the Leaf
Late Loving
“What Christ was saying, what he meant [in the story of Mary and Martha] was that the pleasures of that hair, that ointment, must be taken. Because the accidents of death would deprive us soon enough. We must not deprive ourselves, our loved ones, of the luxury of our extravagant affections. We must not try to second-guess death by refusing to love the ones we loved. . . .”
—Mary Gordon, Final PaymentsA Third-Stream Opera
From a Spark to a Flame
