A compassionate America has spent more than $5 trillion on welfare programs over three decades, but the poor haven't vanished, and the self-destructive behavior that imprisons many in poverty has become an intergenerational inheritance. Drawing on the City Journal's superlative reporting, What Makes Charity Work? shows in concrete and compelling detail how government assistance to the poor is doomed to failure because it treats them as victims of forces beyond their control, robs them of a sense of personal responsibility, and neglects the virtues they need to escape poverty. Contrasting case...

These beautifully written essays add up to the deepest, most informative appraisal we have of how and why the sexual revolution has failed. Compelling and original.... Highly recommended. Kevin White"

The 1960s sexual revolution made a big promise: if we just let go of our inhibitions, we'll be happy and fulfilled. Yet sexual liberation has made us no happier and, if anything, less fulfilled. Why? These remarkable essays, drawn from the pages of the celebrated quarterly City Journal by its editor Myron Magnet, tackle the question head-on. As Modern Sex's authors show in moving and often eloquent detail, sex today is increasingly mechanical and without commitment a department of plumbing, hygiene, or athletics rather than a private sphere for the creation of human meaning. The result:...

Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare argues that the radical transformation of American culture that took place in the 1960s brought today's underclass-overwhelmingly urban, dismayingly minority-into existence. Lifestyle experimentation among the white middle class produced often catastrophic changes in attitudes toward marriage and parenting, the work ethic and dependency in those at the bottom of the social ladder, and closed down their exits to the middle class.

Texas Governor George W. Bush's presidential campaign has highlighted the continuing importance of The Dream and the...