(2 of 2)
No longer a rebel flaunting the ways of Greenwich Village in the face of the Philistines uptown, the Voice has become something of an establishment of the Left. Both Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, and his wife Stephanie write for the paper. Occasionally, both of Columnist Murray Kempton's children, Mike and Sally, do also. So does Susan Goodman, daughter of Utopian Anarchist Paul Goodman. Several other writers who got their start with the Voice have moved along to higher-paying jobs on the dailies and television. But despite the meager pay, other writers stay with the Voice because of the freedom it gives them.
Communist Pop. Nothing if not ambitious, the Voice wants to spread the Greenwich Village message to the rest of the world. Already, one-half of its circulation lies outside New York City. It has stepped up its foreign coverage, now has regular columnists in Paris and London. On a tour of Eastern Europe last summer, Pop Expert Richard Goldstein explained how U.S. pop culture was helping to erode youthful allegiance to Communism; on a jazz tour of Russia in September, Columnist Michael Zwerin filed some perceptive accounts of the drabness of Soviet life.
As the Voice goes international, it risks losing its ties to the Village and its unique New York flavor. Indeed, another paper, the East Village Other, has already sprung up to champion all those causes—from LSD to pansexual-ism—that the Voice views with skepticism. But the Voice is unworried. "EVO is for the totally alienated," says Jack Newfield. "We're the paper for the partially alienated."