Home / General / Thoughts On the Quasi-End of the New Republic

Thoughts On the Quasi-End of the New Republic

/
/
/
1249 Views

Interesting. A few points:

  • Evidently, the magazine’s tradition is a mixed blessing.  Ta-Nehisi Coates has been running through some of the lowlights on his Twitter feed, and you know many of them: The Bell Curve, racist cover defending welfare reform, comprehensively dishonest anti-health care reform cover story, Marty Peretz, etc.  Don Graham’s “TNR … looking for a qualified black since 1914!” retort to Ruth Shalit’s terrible affirmative action story should still sting. It’s particularly worth emphasizing an often-forgotten fact about the Stephen Glass story: the fiction that made him was a grotesquely racist story about made-up African-American cab drivers.  (Glass’s major talent was telling people what they wanted to hear, and what Marty Peretz wanted to hear was white supremacist bullshit.)  I regret what seems to be happening to TNR, but we shouldn’t forget this part of their legacy either.
  • Still, since Beinart was replaced by Foer the first time it has, on balance, been an excellent magazine.  A lot of first-rate journalists write for it — Jon Cohn, Rebecca Traister, Brian Beutler, Julia Ioffe, and I could keep going for a bit. They were good hires given the space to do their best work. There just aren’t a lot of remaining forums that pay for serious political and cultural writing, and the fact that one seems to be undergoing a major shift in direction isn’t good news.
  • The empty corporate buzzwords that the magazine’s owner and CEO have used to describe their new vision for the magazine are…not promising.
  • Leah Finnigan’s retort, I think, is understandable but misses the point. If Foer were being replaced with Snyder and nothing else was changing, the reaction would indeed be overwrought.  But, of course, that’s not the case.  In particular, the issue with Wieseltier resigning isn’t the loss of his atrocious column but the loss of a superb literary review editor.  Even when the politics pages have been uneven or bad, the back pages of TNR have generally been outstanding.  I hope I’m wrong, but it seems pretty likely that to the extent that the new TNR covers culture at all, it will be much closer to the BuzzFeed smarm model.
  • It’s possible that the new Gotham TNR will be good.  Gabriel Snyder is very well-regarded, and he might be able to retain and attract enough talent to produce a worthwhile magazine.  But given the aforementioned vision of Hughes and Vidra, I find it hard to be optimistic.

…a lot of interesting points from Ezra here.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar
Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views :