Category Archives: Profiles

Education, Essays, Profiles

Education: ‘The Rise And Fall Of The Campus Left’

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION By Robert S. Huddleston March 21, 2025

“And a soul / if it is to know itself / must look / into its own soul:
The stranger and the enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror.”
—George Seferis, Mythistorema

The crackup of the liberal-left progressive coalition became  undeniable after the 2024 election. But it was a long time coming. Although pro-Palestinian campus protests were at the center of political debate during a pivotal election year, they reflected tensions that predated the dramatic rise in left-wing activism spurred by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Some progressives have blamed former President Joe Biden’s support for Israel for the Democrats’ woes.

But the left’s ambivalent response to October 7 only widened rifts that had already begun to show—not just on Israel–Palestine but a host of issues including “wokeness,” gender identity, and the burgeoning of DEI programs on campuses and elsewhere. Clashes over the war in Gaza reflected the fracturing of the left’s broader coalitional project. To quote Ernest Hemingway, the longstanding post-civil-rights consensus over whose interests should prevail in the eyes of the liberal establishment fell apart in two ways: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

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Robert S. Huddleston teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.

Book Reviews, Journalism, Profiles

Review: Graydon Carter’s Wild Ride Through A Golden Age Of Magazines

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (March 15, 2025):

Style is said to be singular, which makes it difficult to define. It is personal, though its appreciation can be broad, and it is not the same as fashion—many people hold the terms to be opposed. Generally speaking, it rises from confidence in being one thing and not another, and in knowing when to join and when to pull back from the pack. The great promulgator of style, through much of the previous century, was the editor of magazines.

Across the twentieth century, New York magazines were powerful convening spaces—not just for readers but for journalists, artists, photographers, and literary writers. 

Graydon Carter, a former editor of Spy, the New York Observer, and Vanity Fair, has been held up over the years as a force of style, both in his personal life (he dresses well) and in his expansive vision of creative work. At Vanity Fair, Carter gave the movie industry a layer of polish and championed a particular idea of the good life—affluent and lush, yet seriously engaged in the world. As a New York restaurateur, he helped to promote a certain kind of refined dining: intimate, convivial, and bound to specific neighborhoods. And, as a power player, he remains a background impresario, helping to launch movies, shape events, and assemble people. All these activities are exercises in style, and all, in his telling, grew from his editorial work during an especially prosperous and thrilling era in American magazines. That era is the subject of the memoir “When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines” (Penguin Press), which Carter has written with the ghostwriter James Fox.

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Commercial culture and electoral politics share a basic truth: people want to feel a little rich, a little powerful. They want to brush against magic and mystery—rooms within rooms—and to move through a surprising, expansive world. Over the years, so many creative enterprises have been stripped of these qualities, leaving them lustreless and diminished. The paths of people like Carter are a measure of the golden age lost. But their memories are proof of the promise that remains. ♦

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Nathan Heller began contributing to The New Yorker in 2011 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2013.