It is our 30th birthday, and we are celebrating past accomplishments. The excerpts that follow provide some of the cause for celebration and exemplify Boston Review's mission. We are a magazine of ideas, animated by hope, committed to equality and reason, convinced that the imagination eludes political categories. Our ambition is neither to present the news nor to persuade you that we are right, still less to provide another venue for the smart insight that politics is hopelessly corrupt, personal revelation all that really matters, and justice yet another move in the power game. We aim instead to establish a public space in which people can loosen the hold of conventional preconceptions, develop a common vocabulary for a richer language of public discourse, and start to reason together across the lines others are so busily drawing. We take pride in the excerpts that follow because they have become part of the open public debate that lies at the heart of democracy's great promise.