At The New Criterion, our season runs from September to June. Our June issue, Volume 30, Number 10, has just rolled of the press and is winging its way to mailboxes throughout the civilized world. At midnight tonight, it will also be available at our web site www.newcriterion.com. Thirty years, three decades! It’s a venerable age for any cultural review. For one that has forthrightly challenged the academic, politically correct pieties that determine the course of so much of our cultural life it is well nigh astonishing.
T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, for which we are named, made it less than twenty years (1922-1939). At it’s peak, The Criterion had fewer than 700 subscribers. But it was the right 700. “A fit audience, though few,” as Milton said of Paradise Lost. The New Criterion enjoys a larger circulation than The Criterion ever did, but it too is small. Small, that is, in numbers. Like The Criterion, its influence is much larger than its circulation might suggest, and for the same reasons: the quality of its offerings and the quality of its readership.
As we conclude our thirtieth anniversary, I invite you to join that august circle of readers by subscribing. I also invite you to consider helping us embark lustily on our next thirty years. We have just started out spring expedition in search of sustenance. I hope you’ll consider making a gift to the magazine that The Wall Street Journal described as offering “a civilizing element in short supply in contemporary America: honest criticism. Click here to learn more and donate to The New Criterion.
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