Freedom Summer’s Shrink: Remembering Robert Coles (opens in new tab)

A famous figure who lives a very long life risks outliving his fame. That was the case for Robert Coles, the celebrated child psychiatrist and social critic, who died earlier this week at age 97. From the 1960s through the 1990s, Coles was revered by succeeding generations of young people (including mine) for his empathic writings about everyday experience in an America divided by race and class. Many of these writings first appeared in The New Republic, where Coles was for many years a contr...