So too, Ann Beattie, Joan Didion, Gabriel Garcia Marquez." Kenneth S. Lynn is so hard-boiled that he refuses to read even his neo-conservative peers. "I rarely if ever read Bruce Bawer," he informed the New Criterion in 1986, "but my attention has been called to a reference he makes to me...." The progressive deterioration of the New Criterion was almost inevitable given that the editorial project of the magazine was inherently contradictory from the start. Lipman and Kramer sought to create a cultural magazine that would defend the Western tradition from its assailants. Culture, however, is always in a state of flux and new art always finds itself engaged in a creative tension with tradition. A cultural magazine, while it can be enriched by tradition, cannot be vital by merely repeating rote names and formulas. As Marcel Proust, no radical, once observed, "There must in art, as in medicine and fashion, be new names." In creating a conservative cultural magazine, Kramer and Lipman, to their credit, recruited younger writers. For all their lamentations over the lost good-old-days, Kramer and Lipman kept their magazine relatively open to the new and fresh during its first few years of publication. They were especially good at discovering and nurturing young writers. Roger Kimball, Bruce Bawer, Mimi Kramer, Donald Lyons, and Jed Perl are among those who have been given ample space to develop their voices in the pages of the New Criterion. As an incubation ward for baby critics, the magazine has few contemporary