Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Arien Mack (bio) this issue marks the 90th anniversary of social research. the journal was founded in 1934 by the German refugee professors brought the year prior to the New School by its first president, Alvin Johnson, who managed to save them from what would have been their inevitable and dire fate had they remained in Germany. This group constituted the University in Exile and a year later became the New School's Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. This journal was their journal and has published four issues a year since its founding. I have edited this journal since 1970, and this issue also marks my 54 years as editor. Since 1974 almost every issue of the journal has been thematic, and during these past 50 years the themes have ranged widely over a great deal of the social, political, and cultural landscape of the times. Those familiar with the journal would know that, despite its title, Social Research is in no strict sense a social science journal. In its early days it was heavily focused on economic issues, but since then the journal's purview has included the humanities, the arts, and even the sciences. In this anniversary issue we are reprinting articles that appeared in the last 20 years. We have restricted our selections to this period in light of the prior anniversary issues, which have covered earlier years of the journal. During these last two decades we have published issues on Pariah Minorities, Privacy, International War Crimes, Politics and Science, Migration, Loneliness, Algorithms, Free Inquiry, Body and State, Climate Change, to name just a few of the 80 themes we covered, all of which remain relevant to the present. In the next 10 years, as we move to our 100th anniversary, we can look forward to many more issues on the themes most important to our lives today, written about by leading experts from perspectives that cover the entirety of intellectual life. [End Page ix] Arien Mack arien mack, professor emerita of psychology at the New School for Social Research, has authored or coauthored more than 60 articles on visual perception, as well as the book Inattentional Blindness (with Irvin Rock; 1998). She has been the editor of Social Research since 1970.