Just 75 years ago, give or take a few days, Aldous Huxley finished writing Brave New World, the story of a hedonist utopia brought about via bio-engineering, and by the abolition of such unnecessary downers as literature, art, religion, etc. (“Finished by late August [1931]” says Sybille Bedford in her biography of the author.) The book was published February 2, 1932. I’ll be leaning hard on the editors of NR to let me do some sort of commemorative piece about then. I would rate BNW as one of those books every thoughful person ought to read. With (as it seems to me) the human sciences really coming into their stride at last, and uncovering things that will change our thinking and our society profoundly, BNW is more than ever a key text.

When I was an earnest sixth-former (=highschool senior), a standard classroom discussion was: Which of the two books Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four presents a more probable view of our future? The question looks pretty absurd now, unless you live in North Korea, I suppose.