In February of 1984, I took the train to New York with a young woman named Julie, who would later be my wife. We were both freshmen at Princeton, and we were on our way to Irving Kristol’s Institute for Educational Affairs, where we hoped to find funding to start a conservative student magazine. Once there, we were ushered into an office where a man behind a desk was looking over the paperwork we had sent him. He smiled and said: “It looks like someone has been reading Burke.” We won our first year’s funding at this meeting. The first issue of our magazine, The Princeton Tory, appeared in October and was followed by five more issues during the academic year. The magazine is still being published at Princeton today.
Why found a magazine instead of doing schoolwork? It cannot have been the obvious thing to do. We’d been on the campus for only five months at that time, and our lives were already quite full. Julie and I had met in physics lab a few weeks after arriving on campus. It was the conservation of momentum experiment, in which you used a camera and a strobe to capture a series of images of hockey pucks colliding on an air table. If you did it right, you could measure the velocity of the two pucks before and after the collision, and show that the total velocity times mass remained the same even though the speed of the pucks had changed.
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