December 1994
In This Issue
Explore the December 1994 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Bored
Jefferson and Religious Freedom
In recent years the United States has witnessed growing acrimony over issues involving religion, politics, and government. In this essay a distinguished Jefferson scholar describes how Jefferson fought to build a wall of separation between the religious and civic spheresand reminds us of the reasons why
Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959
End of the Migration Era-Time for a Moratorium
Horizon
The New-Old Bourbons: Southern Distillers Are Reviving and Refining Spirituous Crafts
Lustily Vigilant
The Father
A Year in the Maine Woods
Lost Moon
African Warriors
Borderliners
My Life With Noël Coward
Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise O'Brien/Conor Cruise O'Brien Anthology
The Puzzler
Word Improvisation
The December Almanac
Did You Have a Good Week? The New Unit of Political Significance
The Great Debate Revisited
Contention between proponents of the “meaning first” and the “phonics first" approaches to literacy goes back more than a century. That the former is now in the ascendant, the author argues, should be cause for concern
Lives and Loves of Wits and Poets
Whose Child Is This?
Teen Spirits
Suite Celebration
At the Still Point, Where the Dance Movies
All's Well That Ends
Bergman Sings
The Glass Men Agerie
New Sounds of Centuries Past
A Composer's Touch
More Than a Beach
Itineraries that immerse you in Mexico’s history and culture as well as its surf
745 Boylston Street
Contributors
Must It Be the Rest Against the West?
“Now, stretching over that empty sea, aground some fifty yards out, [lay] the incredible fleet from the other side of the globe, the rusty, creaking fleet that the old professor had been eyeing since morning. . . . He pressed his eye to the glass, and the first things he saw were arms. . . . Then he started to count. Calm and unhurried. But it was like trying to count all the trees in the forest, those arms raised high in the air, waving and shaking together, all outstretched toward the nearby shore. Scraggy branches, brown and black, quickened by a breath of hope. All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms. . . . thirty thousand creatures on a single ship!”
Long Point Light
Optimism and Overpopulation
Well, yes, the West must pay attention to the population problems of the Third World. But what sort of attention? The conventional wisdom holds that economic development —and thus economic aid from the West—is the key to curbing population growth in poor nations. Not true, says VIRGINIA ABERNETHY
Somebody Up There Likes Me
Some people say that when a woman moves 1,500 miles from her mate to get a Ph.D. in women’s studies, it’s the beginning of the end
