Wilson Quarterly Magazine

WQ is among the very few publications in America that takes ideas seriously -- across all traditional academic boundaries -- without being polemical or skewed in its approach. The essays are balanced, nuanced and well considered, and the pointers to current items and trends are succinct and informative.

When I meet people who read WQ and get the chance to become acquainted, I discover that, whatever their current position (General of the US Marines, Chairman of the Board of a knowledgeware enterprise, think-tank analyst, professor, fellowship student), they invariably have a pattern of academic excellence and intellectual curiosity.

My last coincidental encounter involved a brilliant staff Captain in the US Air Force. She was somewhat furtive about reading WQ out in the open air and in uniform, but she confessed to me to have been a Rhodes scholar looking forward to an eventual Ph.D. We discussed our mutual interest in currents in American philosophy -- focusing through one of the essays in her issue of the quarterly.

It may be argued that no magazine could keep up with the ferment of we encounter in what I have described as the invisible American Empire of Ideas.

WQ does not pretend to map every idea. What it does, it does quietly. It does not compromise on its intellectual honesty to achieve a mass audience. It appeals to those who find it a delight to think.

So it excels in every way, but not in the same way in each issue. WQ is an intellectual treat, every issue.