By Richard Sennett 9/27/99 12:00am

A Multiple-Choice Elite: Scoring the S.A.T. Tyranny

The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy , by Nicholas Lemann. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 406 pages, $27.

Most of us are painfully aware of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the subject of Nicholas Lemann’s new book. We spent a few hours one day filling in little dots on a piece of flimsy Read More

By Michael M. Thomas 1/19/98 12:00am

Vanity Fair Tours Brown, Approves of Shenanigans

The text for the first sermon of the new year:

“Western capitalism (the multinational entertainment oligopoly) will soon accomplish what the century’s more murderous tyrants, with all their poisonous calculations, could only dream of doing: effacing the cultural memory of entire nations.”

This is taken from “Dark Age,” an essay by Thomas Frank (author Read More