given opportunities to write or edit for the magazine: One may also ask if a staff dominated by privileged white males might not have benefited from greater diversity, and not just along racial lines. "Marty [Peretz] doesn't take women seriously for positions of responsibility," staff writer Henry Fairlie told Esquire magazine in 1985. "He's really most comfortable with a room full of Harvard males." In a 1988 article for Vanity Fair, occasional contributor James Wolcott concurred, noting, "The New Republic has a history of shunting women to the sidelines and today injects itself with fresh blood drawn largely from male interns down from Harvard." When Robert Wright succeeded Michael Kinsley in 1988, he joked he was hired as part of an 'affirmative action program' since he went to Princeton, not Harvard." Sexual harassment controversy On October 24, 2017, Leon Wieseltier, a former literary editor at The New Republic (from 1983 until his resignation in 2014), admitted to “offenses against some of my colleagues in the past” after several women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate sexual advances. According to The New York Times: "Several women... said they were humiliated when Mr. Wieseltier sloppily kissed them on the mouth, sometimes in front of other staff members. Others said he discussed his sex life, once describing the breasts of a former girlfriend in detail. Mr. Wieseltier made passes at female staffers, they said, and pressed them for details about their own sexual encounters. "Mr. Wieseltier often commented on what women wore to the office, the former staff members said, telling them that their dresses were not tight enough. One woman said he left a note on her desk thanking her for the miniskirt she wore to the office that day." One woman whom Wieseltier harassed, Sarah Wildman, a former assistant editor of The New Republic, has written that she was fired in retaliation for complaining: "In disclosing this incident to my superiors, the outcome was, in many ways, far worse than the act itself. It’s not exactly that I was disbelieved; it’s that in the end, I was dismissed", she wrote in Vox. Wildman wrote that the sexual harassment went hand in hand with gender discrimination at the magazine during Peretz's tenure: "The women knew we had a far shallower chance of rising up the masthead than our male counterparts; all of us hoped we’d be the exception. To do so,