By the Way…

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If you read other political magazines or a major newspaper, you've probably heard about the Second Thoughts Conference, an October gathering of former New Leftists whose midlife crises were of a decidedly political nature. The panelists were interesting—a good thing, since this teach-in ran 13 hours a day—but so were less-famous audience members. Take erstwhile commune midwife Michael Johnson, now an entrepreneur with a marketing firm in New York. He's turned in his earthy-crunchy ideology for an anticommunism he shares with conference organizers and a live-and-let-live attitude that extends to both personal and economic matters. He regaled dinner-tablemates with a tale of how he got his macrobiotic fellow communards to pig out on hundreds of day-old Dunkin' Donuts. A sure sign of Second Thoughts.