Magazines: Middle-Aged Meliorists

"You appear to be publishing a middle-aged magazine for middle-aged readers," scoffed one reader after a look at the advance galleys of a new quarterly, The Public Interest. On thinking it over, Editors Daniel Bell, 46, and Irving Kristol, 45, took the crack as a compliment. "Young people tend to be enchanted by glittering generalities," they wrote in their first issue last fall; "older people are inclined to remember rather than to think; and middle-aged people, seasoned by life but still open to the future, do seem to us—in our middle years—to...