CONDITIONAL INEVITABILITY

Often, in this space, we share with readers messages of support that arrive -- especially those that remind us that we are not alone, that our work is being noted and appreciated around the globe. I offer my assurance that the following text, like those quoted in previous issues, is genuine, and was not solicited, or altered! -- although, if anyone else out there is taking the hint, we can always use such statements in building our circulation and reaching new readers.

The message comes from a reader and contributor, economist Yanis Varoufakis, and arrives by email from Australia, or from Athens by way of Australia:

Day after day, my departmental pigeonhole brims with correspondence, journals and memos which bore me usually and depress me frequently. So when an issue of S&S arrives, this monotonous stress is interrupted and the veil of intellectual isolation is lifted (albeit for a few hours only), revealing a vista of concerns brighter and fundamentally more puzzling than those a "respectable" economist is trained to suffer quietly. Often by the time I have walked back to my office, I have devoured the "Editorial Perspectives" in search of a quick whiff of the issue's contents and spirit. What I value above all else in S&S is that its contents fuel my commitment to the subversion of the dominant, bourgeois paradigm. Without S&S it would be harder to remain similarly committed within an academe in which to speak of capitalism as a system (let alone an irrational one) is to risk being classified perpetually as the "village idiot."

May we use these kind words to suggest a small project? SCIENCE & SOCIETY is, we think, inspiring and supportive in the way our correspondent suggests; but it is also often demanding in its insistence on theory, rigorous research, and critical probing of fundamentals. S&S is not for everyone; perhaps not even for all of the millions of people with left sympathies. But it is definitely for people like yourself, including hundreds and thousands who should know of us, but who do not.

The project: if you send us a list of names, with addresses, we will send a free sample copy to each person on your list, together with a letter (we will identify you as the person making the recommendation, unless you instruct us otherwise), and an invitation to subscribe. We are glad you are a reader of S&S, but would like you to become a builder also.