Archive
More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.
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Articles
Farewell to the Woman Question
A prescient look at the coming postfeminist backlash by Midge Decter , the author of Liberal Parents, Radical Children and The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation....
Comrades in Arms
When I first came to spend my days in the office of the Institute on Religion and Public Life—this was sometime in early 1990—Richard Neuhaus had been a friend...
What to Give a First Things Reader
Seeking ideas for presents this year, we asked several of our well-read friends and contributors for recommendations of a few wise, or fun, or disturbing books that every First...
Notes from Underground
A word in your ear ¯A well-known physicist told me that a popular blogger told him that an unnamed source told her that a distinguished elderly lady told the...
Liberating Germaine Greer
I never met Germaine Greer, but I did see her once in live performance—and a most diverting performance it was. The year, as I remember it, was 1970. Norman...
A Jew in Anti-Christian America
To speak of something called “Christian America,” as both the advocates and the opponents of this idea are nowadays at high levels of passion wont to do, is by...
The Nine Lives of Population Control
The idea of population control”perhaps even the idea of population itself”seems to have come into circulation somewhere around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Western world was in...
National Service as Duty and Perk
I know a man who spends four or five weeks of every year in the army. He is a young man, but not all that young—fortysomething—and has a wife...
An Incredible Lightness of Being
Intellectual Memoirs, 1936–1938 by mary mccarthy harcourt brace jovanovich, 114 pages, $15.95 The novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, who died in 1989, was up to the time of her...