Forty years of disagreement
What should one generation pass to the next?
The magazine has returned to inheritance for four decades, but never in one voice. This edited trail places confidence beside doubt, prescription beside rebuttal, and the latest essay beside the premise it quietly revises.
Each line names the editor's relationship between one entry and the next.
Brackets mark the point where the rights-cleared archive would become a member benefit.
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1986
A Lesson in Inheritance
A culture survives when its habits can be explained, criticised and chosen again — not merely repeated.
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1994
Tradition Is Not a Curriculum
What adults call inheritance may be only their preferred arrangement of the past, presented to children as necessity.
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See Digital + archive
The archive boundary
Continue the complete argument.
Read the open samples, then use a reconciled Digital + archive membership to continue through the rights-cleared historical record.
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2003
Institutions After Authority
Schools cannot transmit what their governing institutions are no longer prepared to name or defend.
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2012
The Uses of Cultural Memory
Memory earns authority only when the present is allowed to question the terms on which it was preserved.
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2020
A Reply from the Classroom
Young readers are not protected from ideology when a syllabus hides its choices; they are only denied the language with which to dispute them.
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2024
The Public Square After the Algorithm
The question of inheritance becomes a question of attention: can a claim survive long enough to meet an unselected opponent?
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2026
What an Archive Is For
An archive should reveal a publication changing its mind, not flatten decades of conflict into a search result.
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2026
A Small Defence of Difficult Magazines
The magazine does not resolve the argument. It gives disagreement enough shape and duration to become useful.