APRIL 2024 MAGAZINE

Welcome 2024! Among our resolutions for the new year, we can choose to become better listeners. Our feature Listen to This explores the idea that there is no greater gift we can give someone than the chance to be heard. Barbara McMichael writes about historic preservation in her article Preserving the Past | Protecting the Future. Thinking about historic preservation makes me remember my small book—The Death of a Library. With war raging in the Ukraine, and in Gaza, it’s a good time to ponder whether there is such a thing as a Good War. Many predict 2024 will be a tumultuous year. We offer the perfect antidotes to stress in Take Comfort in Small Things. This month we present the sixth and final chapter of Dr. Peter Corning’s groundbreaking new book Superorganism. My book review of  Picasso by Gertrude Stein asserts that Stein’s craft and technique does not stand the test of time. 

World War II left behind the dangerous and seemingly indestructible fantasy that our military intervention will naturally produce (an often underappreciated) good. Each succeeding conflict has led to the reprise and reinvention of the Good War’s mythology to justify or otherwise explain uses of American power. - Elizabeth D. Samet, Looking for the Good War

The idea of world government is an enduring dream that has been espoused by many prominent people, including Immanuel Kant to Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, and Martin Luther King.  Both the League of Nations and the United Nations were incremental steps in this direction. Dr. Corning sets forth his argument that the world needs expanded global governance, and an enhanced role for world government.