SOURCE: "Alarms and Issues," in Newsweek, Vol. LXXVI, No. 15, October 12, 1970, pp. 129-30.

In the following excerpt, the critic notes changes in the editorial stance and subject matter of the New Yorker as a possible reaction to the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s.

"We had been hoping to hear from our old friend Ernest M. Frimbo," began the lead article in the only magazine that could begin like that. Some pages on, however, a reader of the Sept. 26 New Yorker came across what seemed to be a radical departure from the sort of urbane, good-humored, politically unprovocative fare that once made the magazine as predictable in its way as a Sears, Roebuck catalogue.

The article in point is "The Greening of America," a 39,000-word essay by Yale University law professor Charles A. Reich. No popular magazine has ever published a more comprehensive and unforgiving indictment of...