I don’t know what to do with TNR anymore. Maybe McCormick will make a difference and make it relevant again. Although I find Jeet Heer’s writings very interesting, I find myself reading The Atlantic more and more the past few years.
17 whole months? Damn, that’s loyalty and fortitude!
And what the fuck does, “We demonstrated how digital fluency can amplify our best literary traditions rather than compete with them” mean?
Got a subscription to TNR for my bar mitzvah 55 years ago from my socialist aunt. Kept up my subscription off and on for maybe 1/3 of those years. Haven’t actually paid, but they’ve kept me as a subscriber since Hughes bought it. While there’s a couple of good writers, its gone through at least three complete redesigns. I can’t make any sense of it. Though I look a couple of times a week at the site, I very rarely read more than an article. They had great insightful writers, even during Peretz’s worst anti-Obama days, people like Chait and Judis. They had some excellent female writers as well: Eve Fairbanks and Michelle Cottle among others. TNR was best when it was provocative and clearly but not stereotypically left. I just can’t for the life of me figure out what TNR is about any more. Too bad.
I think you will find that Win McCormack will be a worthy custodian of the New Republic’s historic legacy. I covered Oregon politics for nearly 40 years and this guy has been a major behind-the-scenes player. He is also an agile adapter to the changing media environment. I’m resubscribing after giving the magazine up a decade ago.
He’s not very good at business-gibberish – he completely forgot to include “shifting the accepted paradigm,” “redefining economies of scale,” and “molding the zeitgeist.”
I like the idea of Win McCormack. Tin House is a cutting edge lit mag. Maybe TNR can be resuscitated.
I means he still had a few vocabulary words in his desk that he was not able to use in 17 months.
I think it means that they can read their old issues aloud in binary instead of using them as ping pong paddles.
In other news, The New Republic is something somebody still publishes. Who knew?
I read it for Brian Beutler (former TPM writer), one of the smartest and clearest writers commenting anywhere today.