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The Wilson Quarterly is the award-winning magazine published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is a United States Presidential Memorial that was established as part of the Smithsonian Institution by an act of Congress in 1968....
 in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C. , formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D.C., is the Capital of the United States, founded on July 16, 1790....
 The magazine was founded in 1976 by Peter Braestrup, a journalist (TIME
Time

Time is a component of the measurement used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects....
, The New York Times
The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper published in New York City. The largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States, "The Gray Lady"?named for its staid appearance and style?is regarded as a national newspaper of record....
, The Washington Post
The Washington Post

The Washington Post is the newspaper with the largest circulation in Washington, D.C., United States and is the city's oldest paper, founded in 1877....
) and author of Big Story, and James H. Billington
James H. Billington

James Hadley Billington is an American librarian and academic. He is the thirteenth Librarian of Congress of the United States Congress....
, then director of the Wilson Center director and now the Librarian of Congress. The Quarterly is noted for its nonpartisan, nonideological approach to current issues, with articles written from various perspectives.






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The Wilson Quarterly is the award-winning magazine published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is a United States Presidential Memorial that was established as part of the Smithsonian Institution by an act of Congress in 1968....
 in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C. , formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D.C., is the Capital of the United States, founded on July 16, 1790....
 The magazine was founded in 1976 by Peter Braestrup, a journalist (TIME
Time

Time is a component of the measurement used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects....
, The New York Times
The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper published in New York City. The largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States, "The Gray Lady"?named for its staid appearance and style?is regarded as a national newspaper of record....
, The Washington Post
The Washington Post

The Washington Post is the newspaper with the largest circulation in Washington, D.C., United States and is the city's oldest paper, founded in 1877....
) and author of Big Story, and James H. Billington
James H. Billington

James Hadley Billington is an American librarian and academic. He is the thirteenth Librarian of Congress of the United States Congress....
, then director of the Wilson Center director and now the Librarian of Congress. The Quarterly is noted for its nonpartisan, nonideological approach to current issues, with articles written from various perspectives. Designed to make the research and debates of scholars and intellectuals accessible to a general audience, it covers a wide range of topics, from science policy and literature to foreign affairs.

History


The debut issue of the Wilson Quarterly in Autumn 1976 established two of the magazine’s signature features. Article “clusters” explore different facets of a subject, often with contrasting points of view. Early subjects ranged from the exploration of space to the new revisionist history of the New Deal, with writers including Walt.W. Rostow
Walt Whitman Rostow

Walt Whitman Rostow was an USA economist and political theorist who served as National Security Advisor to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson....
, Rem Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas

Remment Lucas Koolhaas, , is a Dutch architect, architectural theory, urbanist and "Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design" at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, USA....
, George F. Kennan Jr., John Updike
John Updike

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series ....
, Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes Mac?as is a Mexican writer and one of the best-known living novelists and essayists in the Spanish-speaking world. Fuentes has influenced contemporary Latin American literature, and his works have been widely translated into English and other languages....
, and Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation....
. The magazine also includes individual essays. The Wilson Quarterly's other signature feature is its In Essence section, which distills more than two dozen notable articles selected from hundreds of scholarly journals and specialized publications.

The Wilson Quarterly has gone through various format changes over the years, and between 1983 and 1990 it was published five times a year. Today, as its name suggests, it is published quarterly.

When Peter Braestrup left the Quarterly in 1989 to join Billington at the Library of Congress
Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the de facto national library of the United States and the research arm of the United States Congress. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and holds the largest number of books....
 (where he was instrumental in launching the short-lived but critically acclaimed Civilization magazine), he was succeeded by Jay Tolson, the magazine’s literary editor, subsequently the author of a biography of novelist Walker Percy
Walker Percy

Walker Percy was an American Southern literature whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962....
, Pilgrim in the Ruins. Tolson added a successful poetry section designed to introduce readers to significant poets of the past and present. The section was initially co-edited by Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky

Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Russian poet, essayist, and Nobel Prize in Literature. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1991....
 (who subsequently won the Nobel Prize for Literature) and poet laureate Anthony Hecht
Anthony Hecht

Anthony Evan Hecht was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the World War II, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work....
.

The magazine continued to focus on public questions, exemplified by the 1998 cluster “Is Everything Relative?” with articles by E. O. Wilson
E. O. Wilson

Edward Osborne Wilson is an United States biologist, researcher , theorist , naturalist and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, a branch of entomology....
, Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty

Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse career in Philosophy, Humanities, and Literature departments. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the analytic philosophy tradition in philosophy he would later famously reject....
, and Paul R. Gross
Paul R. Gross

Paul R. Gross is a biologist and author, perhaps best known to the general public for Higher Superstition , written with Norman Levitt. Gross is the University Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Virginia; he previously served the university as Provost and Vice-President....
 debating Wilson’s claim in Consilience
Consilience

Consilience, or the unity of knowledge , has its roots in the ancient Greek philosophy of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos, inherently comprehensible by logical process, a vision at odds with mystical views in many cultures that surrounded the Hellenes....
 that all branches of knowledge will eventually be unified by a biological understanding of human life. In “The Second Coming of the American Small Town” in 1992, Andres Duany
Andrés Duany

Andr?s Duany is an United States architect and urban planner.Duany was born in New York City but grew up in Cuba until 1960. He received his undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University, and after a year of study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, he received a master's degree in architecture from t...
 and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is an United States architect and urban planner based in Miami, Florida. A member of the first class of women to graduate from Princeton University, she received her undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton and her master's degree in architecture from the Yale School of Architecture....
 offered an early in-depth look at the New Urbanism
New urbanism

New Urbanism is an urban design movement that arose in the United States in the early 1980s. Its goal is to reform many aspects of real estate development and urban planning, from urban retrofits to suburban infill....
 and some of the animating ideas behind Smart Growth
Smart growth

Smart growth is an urban urban planning and transportation planning theory that concentrates growth in the center of a city to avoid urban sprawl; and advocates compact, transit-oriented development, pedestrian-friendly, bicycle-friendly land use, including neighborhood schools, complete streets, mixed-use development with a range of housing...
.

When Tolson left to become a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report
U.S. News & World Report

U.S. News & World Report is an influential United States newsmagazine published in Washington, D.C. Along with Time and Newsweek, it was for many years a leading news weekly, although it focused more than its counterparts on political, economic, health and education stories....
 in 1999, Steven Lagerfeld was named editor. Lagerfeld had also worked under founding editor Peter Braestrup, joining the staff in 1981. In keeping with the times and the focus of the parent Woodrow Wilson Center, the magazine looked increasingly overseas, filling the period around the beginning of the Iraq war with distinctive clusters on American empire, foreign writers’ views of the United States, the history of Iraq, and World War IV. Other topics have ranged from the role of competition in American life to the ideas of traffic “guru” Hans Monderman
Hans Monderman

Hans Monderman was a Netherlands road Traffic engineering and innovator. He was recognized forradically challenging the criteria by which engineering solutions for street design are evaluated....
. Recent writers have spanned the spectrum from conservative economist and blogger Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen occupies the Holbert C. Harris Chair of economics as a professor at George Mason University and is co-author, with Alex Tabarrok, of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution ....
 to liberal political thinker Benjamin Barber
Benjamin Barber

Benjamin R. Barber is an American political theory perhaps best known for his 1996 bestseller, Jihad vs. McWorld....
. In 2006, the Wilson Quarterly received Utne Magazine’s Independent Press Award for General Excellence.

Notable Contributors

  • Walt W. Rostow
    Walt Whitman Rostow

    Walt Whitman Rostow was an USA economist and political theorist who served as National Security Advisor to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson....
  • Rem Koolhaas
    Rem Koolhaas

    Remment Lucas Koolhaas, , is a Dutch architect, architectural theory, urbanist and "Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design" at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, USA....
  • John Updike
    John Updike

    John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series ....
  • Carlos Fuentes
    Carlos Fuentes

    Carlos Fuentes Mac?as is a Mexican writer and one of the best-known living novelists and essayists in the Spanish-speaking world. Fuentes has influenced contemporary Latin American literature, and his works have been widely translated into English and other languages....
  • Mario Vargas Llosa
    Mario Vargas Llosa

    Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation....
  • Joseph Brodsky
    Joseph Brodsky

    Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Russian poet, essayist, and Nobel Prize in Literature. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1991....
  • Anthony Hecht
    Anthony Hecht

    Anthony Evan Hecht was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the World War II, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work....
  • Andrew Bacevich
    Andrew Bacevich

    'Andrew J. Bacevich, Sr.' is a professor of international relations at Boston University, former director of its Center for International Relations , and author of several books, including American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy , The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War and The Limits of...
  • Tom Vanderbilt
    Tom Vanderbilt

    Tom Vanderbilt is an American journalist, blogger, and author of the best-selling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do .Born in Oak Forest, Illinois and raised in Wisconsin, he now resides in Brooklyn, New York....
  • E.O. Wilson
  • Richard Rorty
    Richard Rorty

    Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse career in Philosophy, Humanities, and Literature departments. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the analytic philosophy tradition in philosophy he would later famously reject....
  • Paul R. Gross
    Paul R. Gross

    Paul R. Gross is a biologist and author, perhaps best known to the general public for Higher Superstition , written with Norman Levitt. Gross is the University Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Virginia; he previously served the university as Provost and Vice-President....
  • Aaron David Miller
    Aaron David Miller

    Aaron David Miller is a Middle East analyst, author, and negotiator. He is on the U.S. Advisory Council of Israel Policy Forum, is Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and has been an advisor to six Secretaries of State....
  • Andres Duany
    Andrés Duany

    Andr?s Duany is an United States architect and urban planner.Duany was born in New York City but grew up in Cuba until 1960. He received his undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University, and after a year of study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, he received a master's degree in architecture from t...
  • Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
    Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk

    Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is an United States architect and urban planner based in Miami, Florida. A member of the first class of women to graduate from Princeton University, she received her undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton and her master's degree in architecture from the Yale School of Architecture....
  • Benjamin Barber
    Benjamin Barber

    Benjamin R. Barber is an American political theory perhaps best known for his 1996 bestseller, Jihad vs. McWorld....
  • Witold Rybczynski
    Witold Rybczynski

    Witold Rybczynski , is a Canada architecture, professor and writer.Rybczynski was born in Edinburgh of Poland parentage and raised in Surrey, England before moving at a young age to Canada....
  • Tyler Cowen
    Tyler Cowen

    Tyler Cowen occupies the Holbert C. Harris Chair of economics as a professor at George Mason University and is co-author, with Alex Tabarrok, of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution ....


External links