Noted already at The Corner, but noteworthy here too: The good folks at Princeton University’s James Madison Program are hosting a conference this Thursday and Friday to recall and discuss the remarkable 40-year record of The Public Interest, the great quarterly that demanded that its readers confront the best of social science, and that its writers produce prose their intelligent readers could respect. (Details here.) Participants include many names familiar to those who frequent NRO, not least among them Ramesh Ponnuru.
Readers of Bench Memos will take an interest in one paper in particular, by Princeton’s Ken Kersch, on “Neoconservatives and the Courts.” The Public Interest ran many great articles on the Constitution, the founding, and the courts. I still remember the impact produced on me as a young college student by Nathan Glazer’s “Towards an Imperial Judiciary?” in the Fall 1975 issue—an article whose signature phrase wound up in the title of my first book 20 years later. That was a great issue of PI, also containing Martin Diamond’s wonderful essay “The Declaration and the Constitution: Liberty, Democracy, and the Founders.”
I can’t be in Princeton for the conference, but I second Jonah’s suggestion that C-SPAN send a camera crew.