The real problem with The New Republic

Beg to disagree (as a TNR subscriber for most of 40+ years).
A magazine with a mission soon becomes a b-o-r-i-n-g magazine.
At it’s best, TNR had a variety of interesting and even surprising takes on issues of the day. (Alas, Glass was indeed interesting.) That will be a loss.

I used to have real difficulty remembering the difference between the New Republic and the National Review. Eventually I got it straight: one was written by a group of racist warmongers that hated hippies and the other was written by a group of racist warmongers that hated all Liberals.

A magazine that publishes the racist filth of The Spine wasn’t worth my time reading. The only times I ever visited was when Atrios posted a link to some inanity.

One of the major problems with online publishing is that even if your magazine is only 5% racist, those are the articles that are going to be seen most widely. I don’t see it as being worth my time to distinguish between magazines that are a little bit racist and Stormfront mag. So having Marty Peretz on the masthead was always a liability for them.

Since I didn’t read the magazine in the print era, I neither know nor care what it was like twenty or thirty years ago. It was a magazine whose journalists were willing to work for an overt racist long after racism ceased being fashionable. Either they didn’t mind working for a racist or they couldn’t get a job elsewhere. Neither suggests to me that they are likely to be worth reading.

For some mourning the magazine’s passing, the racism was the main attraction. Although they call it ‘diversity of thought’. If I want to know what the racists are thinking then I can read it first hand easily enough.

What the New Republic really stood for was telling people that the beltway consensus represented true liberalism and anyone who objected their war mongering or their racism was a dirty, smelly hippie.

I used to eat with grad students in college (they had a better cafeteria), and I don’t know how many told me they read The New Republic. One or two told me the only magazines they read were TNR and the Economist. This was in, about 1986 or 1987. That’s how I think of it: as the opposite pole of a continuum that defines a certain “centrist” safe zone.

I loved the book reviews in the back. As I was musing earlier, the mag’s deviations from liberal thought were forgivable to me, because I’m from the South & not used to ideological purity of the left variety.

Here of late I’ve been subscribing, because I appreciated Julia Ioffe’s Russia coverage so much. But I agree with Corey that the mag lacked a soul. (Love that Gay Science bit btw.)

“The only times I ever visited was when Atrios posted a link to some inanity.”

Atrios does not get nearly the attention he deserves around here. The man is a genius. He says more with less then anybody writing about current events.

/can you tell I am a fan!

Remember the Bell Curve the first excerpts of which were published in the New Republic then edited by Andrew Sullivan? I would rather have a boring magazine such as the American Prospect.

Andrew Sullivan has much to answer for, and The New Republic did great harm to this country in the ’90s-00s. Still, in the last few years, with the departure of Martin Peretz and the improvements brought about by Foer, I had almost convinced myself to renew my long lapsed subscription. I feel that there was potentially a great magazine here that was on the cusp of realizing its potential. Shame.

Have to disagree on both counts:

1.) TNR has been engaged in hippie bashing and “even the liberal TNR” goal post shifting continuously for a long, long time. cf Eric Altermann:

http://prospect.org/article/my-marty-peretz-problem-and-ours

2.) I don’t want a political magazine to pursue a project, unless that project is relentlessly analyzing and criticizing power and the corruption that invariably comes with it.

When Stanley Kaufman died last year, that was the end of TNR. As a film critic he was, of course, at the back of the book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kauffmann

Thank you 15 for the Altermann link; it’s a great read and a very good summary of a sad history.

I’m suspicious of grand projects by magazines that require charity. But surely it is important that TNR’s grand projects failed.

Iraq war: disaster
Opposing Clinton health care plan: disaster
Bell Curve: disaster
Peretz’s Spine column: disaster
9-11 response by Beinart: disaster
Elevating Sullivan, Kaus, Krauthammer, Barnes to national prominence: disaster

The literary section was good, but it was only allowed to exist because Wieseltier fully agreed with Peretz’s extreme positions on Israel.

I don’t think we are losing anything. On politics, TNR hasn’t been a positive force for decades. It just took people a while to notice.

Stephen Cohen of the Nation is an interesting case. He still mourns the breakup of the Soviet Union, an extremely unpopular position in the US. He doesn’t think the Soviet republics should have gained independence and wanted NATO disbanded. Since Putin believes the same things, he seems to believe in a commonality of attitudes and ideas between him and Putin’s Russia. It isn’t there, but it leads him to say ridiculous things about Ukraine invading and occupying parts of its own country.

His imperialist attitudes toward non-Russians and beliefs in the reform ability of the Soviet Union are common in Russia but weird in the US.

Peretz has fairly unusual views for the US as well. He’s basically a neoconservative who still has some liberal social views while being a Israeli nationalist and 19th century racist. Both of these guys have unusual or very unusual views in the American context that make them hard to pigeonhole.

But that doesn’t mean they add value. Supporting Russian imperialism and combining some liberal social values with aggressive foreign policy and stupid ethnic nationalism aren’t particularly useful positions in the US. They don’t add much to the discourse.

I am rather mystified by the claim that the problem with TNR was the lack of a grand project. Peretz certainly had grand projects, the problem was that they were all despicable and ultimately failures.

While we can debate whether Zionism is intrinsically racist or not, it is clear that Peretz is the kind of Zionism whose Zionism stems from his racism rather than the other way round. He wasn’t just an anti-Arab bigot, he was willing to go bat for folk peddling the notion that the white man is more intelligent than the black man.

Oh and that ‘diverse range of views’ didn’t exactly extend to criticism of Israel. Which was of course the whole point.

Anyone who listens to the BBC World Service carefully will quickly realize that it is a propaganda station (it is funded by the UK foreign office) and a very, very good one. The propaganda lies in what news is presented, not the distortion of facts. It also spends a huge amount of time broadcasting programs on football and cricket. Now you might want to tink about the reason why the UK Foreign Office is so keen to inform people living in West Africa about the politics of the African football cup or the prospects of Chelsea winning the league. And the answer is they don’t give a damn but their audience do. And the millions who tune in for the football also listen to the World Service news bulletins.

For Peretz the liberal articles in TNR were simply a way to get an audience for his odious propaganda. Running as a liberal on issues that he didn’t care for allowed him to provide his real allies on the right with an ‘even the liberal TNR’ on the issues he really cared about.

I don’t know. It seems to me that a magazine written by racist, warmongering hippie-punchers ought to be very popular. Look at the leadership of our government and great institutions. Maybe there’s too much competition.

Anarcissie: And the competition was and is willing to be more thorough about it. I’ve seen acquaintances a-plenty make the trip from “vital center” hippie-punching to full-bore Tea Party anti-morality. There’s more success in going all the way and beckoning others along than trying to stop partway and claim that you’re sufficiently fare along.

It’s like the line about voters preferring real Republicans to Democrats trying to act like them.

PHB: perfect!

@28, believe me, there are many. Do you know that they created Ministry of Information Policy a few days ago? Google it.

But this is a wrong thread for this stuff.

Okay, the last one from me in this thread, I swear.
Associated Press: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/ukraine-rebel-residential-areas-cover-27366957
Title: Ukraine Rebel: Residential Areas Used as Cover
Direct quote – the only relevant direct quote from the rebel in the title, Mr. Khodakovsky: “If there are one-off instances, believe me when I say that we will tackle this very strongly”.

#30 Barry

“it always seemed to me that TNR’s main sin is that it had writers that didn’t necessarily believe the same thing that other liberals did at certain key times in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sometimes this was very bad, like in promoting the Bell Curve or being really wrong about Iraq II, and other times it was more neutral or even a good thing depending on your point of view on a particular subject.”

People are not complaining about lack of liberal purity; they are complaining that it repeatedly, consistently and deliberately published a large volume of right-wing lies.

You and he do not really disagree, though.

Depending on your point of view, if your point of view was right-wing and you believed the large volume of lies or believed that they should be spread, then it would seem like a good thing to you that they spread them.

From my own point of view, I prefer to see new ideas that might be useful, and not just the same old ideas from the same old right-wing camp.

TNR dropped off my radar 40 years ago, give or take. If its masthead will now float above the Facebook version of USA Today, I’ll be thinking karma, or poetic justice, if I think about it at all. Then again, I gave up on The Atlantic too — for good, I thought — when in the early oughts it published an article, the gist of which was that in times of great danger to the nation, it is perhaps wise to overcome our privileged squeamishness and reconsider the utility of torture. Then, a decade or so later, kaboom, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Nothing is ever as simple as we’d like it to be.

Don’t say nothing but good about the dead. The New Republic is dead. Good.

The era makes the magazine pretty much as much as the magazine makes an era. The Reagan years were tough for the TNR since it lost its spirit to rising tide of neo-conservativsm. Mind you the TNR was saturated in conventional wisdom and insider elitism. What the kids call The Village nowadays.But the 1990s defined the TNR as the leading lights of neo-liberalism were finally able to become neo-conservatives too. The TNR made white bigotry respectable again.

No, the real problem with The New Republic is that for the last three decades, it has had no energy. It has had no real project. The last time The New Republic had a project was in the late 1970s/early 1980s, when it was in the journalistic vanguard of what was then called neoliberalism (not what we now call neoliberalism). That is what a great magazine of politics and culture does: it creates a project, it fashions a sensibility.

Couldn’t that be a prescription for articles and essays that are monotonous, inflexible, and predictable? A strategy for a magazine which I need not read to know what the articles will say?

From my perspective, a great magazine of politics and culture provides surprising insights, expert and objective analysis of issues and events, and an obstinate refusal to act exclusively as the literary ally of any particular political faction.

“it always seemed to me that TNR’s main sin is that it had writers that didn’t necessarily believe the same thing that other liberals did at certain key times in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sometimes this was very bad, like in promoting the Bell Curve or being really wrong about Iraq II, and other times it was more neutral or even a good thing depending on your point of view on a particular subject.”

I see this sort of comment a lot. But I note that the issues on which TNR took a rancid bigoted line are described with detail and specificity while the cases where TNR bravely took a stand against conventional liberal wisdom are not identified with any additional specificity.

The most likely explanation for this inconsistency is that there wasn’t actually a difference between the two and what people are remembering is their reaction to reading an article in a ‘liberal’ rag peddling some rather illiberal views that pandered to their unexamined prejudices.

One vote here for monotony, inflexibility, and predictability. The great truths of politics are truisms: the rich grind the faces of the poor; the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must; in every age, the ideas of the rulers are the ruling ideas. And the great ideals are simple and enduring: no man is good enough to be another man’s master; one law for all; from each according to her abilities, to each according to her needs. In every epoch, much effort and ingenuity are expended to obscure or discredit these ideas and ideals, and so much effort and ingenuity must be expended to vindicate them. Tedious but necessary.

Christopher Hitchens, of blessed memory, knew what to think of contrarians before he became one: “In the charmed circle of neoliberal and neoconservative journalism, ‘unpredictability’ is the special emblem and certificate of self-congratulation. To be able to bray that ‘as a liberal, I say bomb the shit out of them’ is to have achieved that eye-catching, versatile marketability that is so beloved of editors and talk-show hosts.” Ditto for: “As a liberal, I say end welfare now” or “As a liberal, I say let’s shrink government.”

Martin Peretz once boasted during the New Republic’s fifteen minutes of fame: “The one sure thing about this unpredictable magazine is that we will go on being unpredictable.” And look where it got them.

I wish the Coen brothers would do a film about The New Republic.

Great idea, but the Coens usually need a hapless, somewhat sympathetic anti-hero to be maltreated by outrageous fortune – who would that be?

yeah, all the liberals who are defending the Bell Curve, the “If a young black man hit my buzzer, should I let him in” or (my personal favorite) the “Case for the Contras” by saying that TNR published opposing views to those are puzzling to me. Presumably (hopefully!) they see through the “Teach the controversy” bullshit of creationists and “debating the controversy” about scientific racism or right-wing terrorism is arguably much worse than creationism.
“Sure we published that cover story about the virtues of craniology, but we also gave a lot of space to its opponents!”

‘The one sure thing about this unpredictable magazine is that we will go on being unpredictable.’

What a complete dick. Sounds like a middle manager having a mid-life crisis.

bianca,

though I did remember there being something about homosexuality

Ha! What I remember–I hope this is correct–is that Alcibiades rued the “uneventful night” he spent under the blankets with Socrates.

So the literatii are upset because an incoming CEO says that he is going to “break stuff” … Is that it ?!!! Heh.
Welcome to Silicon Valley, Mr. TNR.

Nine 12.07.14 at 3:37 am
“So the literatii are upset because an incoming CEO says that he is going to “break stuff” … Is that it ?!!! Heh.
Welcome to Silicon Valley, Mr. TNR.”

Welcome to the USA of the past 40 years, Mr. Content Producer for TnrEnterpriseContentSpace.com.

“By not actually engaging with the argument and the evidence, the Left ceded the national debate to Herrnstein and Murray. Because of this impotent response, several colleagues and I undertook a project that resulted in Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (Princeton, 1996), the first researched rejoinder to both the data analysis and the conceptual frame of The Bell Curve. I would like to think that it contributed a bit to turning back that surge of neo-eugenics.”

That’s odd. I had roughly a half-dozen books on my shelf about that, including yours, and ‘The Bell Curve Wars’ and ‘The Mismeasure of Man’.

A lot of liberals were engaging with Murray.

And I’ll call ‘liar’ on this statement ‘By not actually engaging with the argument and the evidence, …’

Claude Fischer said better what I was trying to get at above. Again though, I never read the TNR issue (being as I was only a young lad with no conception of race-IQ ‘science’ at the time) so a lot depends on how TNR pulled it off, was the synposium biased towards Murray etc ? Were the responses effective ?
I do find a two decade long grudge over the situation odd, though, but I really dont fully understand some aspects of US political culture.
On the argument that TNR gave it legitimacy ..well, perhaps. I dont know. I would have guessed that the authors reputations and affiliations (whatever people might think of them) gave it legitimacy. In that context I do think you need to account for their argument and find flaws in it. (It wasn’t, in other words, Pastor Dave from the Ohio Baptist Church writing about creationism, to use an example offered above. There are different seasons of this stuff.)

Prof. Fischer @ 60

I appreciate your work, which I do think is the best approach in addressing something like Murray’s work (up to the point, possibly, where it’s absolutely obvious that someone pretending to use scientific arguments is doing nothing of the sort), and I mean this respectfully (and I’m sorry it’s coming after the remark by Barry, who I know doesn’t like my approach any more than they like yours).

But the rhetoric you use is exactly what people are objecting to in the classic TNR style, and the impact it has on civil discussion. Apparently, everything “the left” says to discredit the book is wrong, and anything that can be accused of “ranting” is wrong. Your own book is fine, okay. Presumably people citing your book are also fine? Or do they still count as “[w]orking off news reports rather than the book”? (What would be the solution to that dilemma? Refuse to discuss it unless they can work off the book to the same level of expertise as yourself?) After all the people who are reacting “wrong” to the issue are eliminated from the debate, who’s still in? Anyone who can’t be accused of being on the left, can’t be accused of attacking the authors themselves, and can’t be accused of dismissing the book’s arguments without engaging them (whatever those individuals think “engaging” means).

What I take from all this is that academic scientists are frequently unaware of (or unconcerned about) how their approach plays out among the broad spectrum of educated people who can read their books.

@Claude Fischer 62

Stephen Jay Gould did anticipate that racists like Hernstein and Murray would rehash old claims in the future in the original edition of The Mismeasure of Man. And his publishers spotted the opportunity to reissue the book shortly after the bell curve appeared.

The final chapter of the new edition does address the claims made and shows how they are not only fraudulent, they aren’t even new. Racists had been misrepresenting data in the way Hernstein and Murray did since IQ tests first appeared.

If you really think that the reason the Bell Curve was successful was that its critics didn’t provide enough facts then you weren’t paying attention. The establishment media made clear that the facts didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how many people demonstrated that Murray was a fraud, they would only use the ‘controversy’ to invite him to rehash his rancid racist nonsense.

A political book that provides the appearance of academic credibility for some popularly held prejudice will often sell very well. Joan Peters did very well with From Time Immemorial and the central claims the book made are still held as fact despite the fact that Finkelstein produced a very thorough debunking with abundant evidence that the ‘evidence’ was cherry picked. The book was published to glowing reviews in the US and completely demolished by UK reviewers.

Facts really don’t matter to the right. They are obstacles to be overcome, not the basis for making conclusions.

#67. Good catch on the re-issue of Mismeasure; I’ll concede the point, though, if I recall correctly, it was an abstract critique.
“If you really think that the reason the Bell Curve was successful was that its critics didn’t provide enough facts then you weren’t paying attention. The establishment media made clear that the facts didn’t matter.” — Here we get into subtler interpretations. Yes, the media love to have things stirred up, one way or the other; there are plenty of distortions to go around, left and right. But as I was tracking the arguments in the fall of 1994, there was imbalance with one side pointing to “hard data” — and, by the way, prima facia the BC analysis is serious and plausible — and the other side largely saying “You can’t say that.” Maybe someone can do a dissertation on TBC as a media event.
Anyway, we have drifted — my fault — from trashing vs. un-trashing TNR. So, I’ll get off this train. (Finally, why do I get called “Professor”? Not even my students call me that, though it’s better than “liar.”)

Oh and forgot to mention that the reason I mentioned Joan Peters is that she was a journalist whose fraudulent theories were given currency by Peretz in TNR.

oops a few typos
in which NO new evidence is presented
gets caught UP in the distortion

What was the new hard data?
that IQ could now be shown to account for more of the variance in income than parental SES?
Yet wasn’t Gould’s point (recently referred to on the econ thread by TM) that IQ was actually now shown to account for much of the variance at all (R2 was surprisingly small). I don’t remember now, but I think TM is right here. The book was not hot due to whatever new empirical findings it contained, but to the racial pornography that it included.
I also don’t think parental wealth (as opposed to income) was taken into account in measuring SES.
And there were surely no similar media events about the findings in racial wealth disparity
(Oliver and Shapiro). My sense is that reminding parents in mixed schools about what the family disparities in wealth are is a very uncomfortable topic. My sense is that the real underachievement in America is among white middle class kids, given what their opportunities are; not among the minority poor who are much poorer than conventional SES measures say they are.
Here is an uncomfortable topic. Did Andrew Sullivan feature it?

Correct me if I’m wrong as I haven’t read every comment, but I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned, just as a pt of info, that TNR, founded 1914 or thereabouts I believe, was a remarkable magazine in its first years. Or so I infer from the fact that the young Walter Lippmann was on its staff and that it published reviews by V. Woolf and, I think, a lot of other excellent writers. There is a recently published anthology of pieces from TNR’s history, edited by the editor who just resigned.

I surmise TNR started to go rather downhill when Peretz bought it and Gilbert I-forget-his-last-name left as the editor. (As people have already mentioned, some of the bk reviews were still worth reading, and an occasional other piece, perhaps e.g. by John Judis, was ok. But I never was a regular reader of TNR and barely at all in recent yrs.)

Rich P.: Just as with the recent thread on economics, it’s not supposed to be up to the public in a democracy to familiarize itself with the latest research within a topic before chiming in on a matter of political importance that someone has done research on. We don’t live in a technocracy.

Presumably it is, in at least some cases–whether or not we live in a technocracy, which is irrelevant–up to readers to figure out what a book is saying and to what extent its argument makes sense. At some point, rather than “engaging,” yes, it does make sense to label a book and dismiss it, instead of considering it seriously. But supposedly we are interested in educating readers so they can understand the issues–supposedly that’s the opposite of a technocracy–so (while I’m sympathetic to the point about legislating away politics altogether) surely it should not amount to “politics” to make a criticism of an argument.

Andrew @78: But how far do such truisms get us?

Quite a way, I’d say. But as I noted in the rest of the comment, there are always rationalizations for class rule that need to be countered, which furnishes us truism-believers a more or less honest day’s work.

International relations turns out to be more complicated than the Athenian perspective in the Melian dialogue, no?

I’m afraid I don’t see it. Judging from the review you link to, the Ikenberry book seems to accept the standard explanation of the Cold War, which I don’t think much of. (See Chomsky’s “The Cold War Reconsidered” in World Orders Old and New and “The Cold War: Fact and Fancy” in Deterring Democracy.)

I think that without some degree of open argument, and surprising perspectives, a community’s truisms can often become dogmatic blinders.

I join you in warmly embracing this truism.

Apropos of not very much, it’s Chomsky’s birthday today (or is still in US).

#84- they were consistent, though – when Wilson decided to take the U.S. into WWI in 1917 – after winning reelection on the slogan “he kept us out of war” – The New Republic was full-throated in its support.

mattski @82: That’s not quite how I remember the controversy. Chomsky was trying to refute the notion (popularized by the Oliver Stone film JFK) that Kennedy would have wound up the Vietnam intervention after his re-election, and that this may have been one reason he was assassinated. He argued that on the contrary, “basic policy remained constant in essentials: disentanglement from an unpopular and costly venture as soon as possible, but only after the virus [ie, the national-independence movement] was destroyed and victory assured … Changes of administration, including the Kennedy assassination, had no large-scale effect on policy” (Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture, p. 35). I read some of the subsequent debate, though not enough to decide who was right. But I don’t remember any bungling or vaporizing — or did you just mean to say that you disagreed with him?

Anyway, it is off-topic, and I’m on deadline, so I’ll leave you the last word.

**An enormous trove of classified documents was released by the ARRB starting in ’94. So much new information has come to light.

Thank you, Js. I agree with you about TNR. Another problem was that its archive was behind a pay wall so you couldn’t reread their few good articles. I am thinking of Tony Judt’s elegant evisceration of Norman Davies History of Poland, the hard copy of which I sent to my father-in-law — whose eyes it opened — back in the day. Rest his soul and Tony Judt’s, too. We are none of us getting any younger.

I had this exact same thought. Jacobin is openly socialist and believers in the Enlightment, for example. They believe wholeheartedly in public housing and critique neoliberalism completely. Yet, they are not scared to post conflicting views either. This is what is means to be part of a project. TNR claims they were part of and underscored Liberalism with a capital-T. However, they are quite neoliberal and as everyone so aptly pointed out: racist, puts on ideological blinders regarding Israel, and believes in the U.S. State in a way that most liberals would criticize.

Rakesh 84 / Bloix 85

TNR was opposed to the Vietnam War, if I recall correctly, under the editor whose last name is escaping me (see my previous comment) and whom apparently no one here, I guess incl. me, cares enough about to look up…

Back in the 80s my roommate got TNR as a gift from an Uncle who advised that it’s always good to know what the enemy is thinking.

I recall that the articles made the best sense after a long night out at the bars as something to simultaneously put you to sleep but keep you from getting the spins.

To this day I find it useful to read heavily slanted commentary (either left or right) since it tends to help bookend the issue at hand (Particular CT commentators occasionally being a case in point).

I’m sure I won’t miss it, but the memory lane trip was o.k.

js 90 and others: “I still don’t really get the argument… it still seems to me like the “real problem” with TNR was its racism, not its lack of a project.”

Wholeheartedly agree. Does Corey really think that a fascist publication with a “real project” and lots of energy is something to be wished for? His stance seems to me an attempt at inserting a bit of contrarianism. And also agree with geo’s truisms.

Rakesh 75: The Bell Curve consists mostly of a series of regression analyses purporting to show that American inequality is driven not by privilege but by (supposedly) inherent differences in IQ. The authors used these regressions to make up bizarre as-if scenarios: ‘if average IQ were only a few points higher, incomes would be so much higher, unemployment, criminality and teen pregnancy so much lower’ etc. By the book’s telling, all societal ills could be traced to (people with) low IQs. It isn’t hard to see how silly the argument is (for example, even if it were true that job opportunities go to the applicants with the highest cognitive ability irrespective of their SES, it doesn’t follow that there would be more jobs if the applicants had higher IQs) but no amount of careful scientific scrutiny can negate the appeal of these extremely manipulative diagrams telling a simple story that so many people want to hear: that America is a meritocracy where everybody gets exactly what they deserve.

I was recently, in a rather different context (as explained on the other thread) reminded of Gould’s (link at 100) critique of the Bell Curve’s manipulative data presentation, pointing out that even if the regressions were taken at face value, the actual relationship with IQ was always very weak:

“Their numerous graphs present only the form of the relationships; that is, they draw the regression curves of their variables against IQ and parental socioeconomic status. But, in violation of all statistical norms that I’ve ever learned, they plot only the regression curve and do not show the scatter of variation around the curve, so their graphs do not show anything about the strength of the relationships.” (…) “In Appendix 4, then, one discovers that the vast majority of the conventional measures of R2, excluded from the main body of the text, are less than 0.1. These very low values of R2 expose the true weakness, in any meaningful vernacular sense, of nearly all the relationships that form the meat of The Bell Curve.”

Has anyone read Gregory Clarkes book

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/kaufmann_04_14.php

on intergenerational inequality (with numerous studies, not US-centric) Ive only read bits, but his argument (afaict) is that mobility is rare and genes are a plausible reason (though he doesnt find racial differences, and Im not really saying his argument is convincing)

Roger Gathman 102
What is happening at TNR is happening at the Washington Post too

I’m not sure this is quite right. WaPo under Bezos remains recognizably a newspaper; WaPo has even been hiring additional journalists lately (or so I gather). TNR under Hughes’s new appointee Vidra, however, will become, in the latter’s words, “a vertically integrated digital media company.” Whatever that means, it evidently convinced a great deal of the TNR staff, incl the top editors, that TNR wd no longer remain mainly a magazine of the sort it has been — structurally, I mean (I’m not talking about the substance of its politics). So I think the two cases are at least somewhat different, albeit similar in that the two owners (Bezos and Hughes) are v. wealthy from Amazon and Facebook, respectively.

Indeed, glancing at the WaPo home page, I see Dana Milbank has a column headlined “TNR is dead, thanks to its owner” — haven’t read the piece, but not the sort of thing Milbank wd feel comfortable writing, probably, if the two concerns were going in exactly the same direction…

If you all want to debate The Bell Curve or whatever, have at it. But I thought this thread was about TNR not one specific thing it ran X years ago.

Very few people on this thread have acknowledged, and Corey’s OP acknowledged only indirectly, that TNR, over the course of its history, was an important journal of opinion in terms of the influence it wielded and the quality of the writers it published.

Not only that, but inaccuracies have been posted here — e.g., that TNR supported the Vietnam War — and I when corrected this, no one even bothered to retract the inaccuracy.

I’m beginning to understand why Corey often finds CT comment threads exasperating “clusterfucks,” to use his word.

I too am interested in hearing more actual facts about TNR’s development, such as where TNR stood on foreign policy/imperialism before the 1990s. Ronan 103 you were completely off-topic and I suggest we (meaning everybody) leave it there.

p.s. Clearly the Bell Curve thing was a significant moment in TNR’s history and I don’t mean to say it wasn’t. Just to say it perhaps shd be put in context of the 100-year history (1914-2014) of the magazine.

LFC: “Very few people on this thread have acknowledged, and Corey’s OP acknowledged only indirectly, that TNR, over the course of its history, was an important journal of opinion in terms of the influence it wielded and the quality of the writers it published.”

This is one of the weirdest statements I’ve read in some time. Why would the entire thread exist if TNR wasn’t “an important journal of opinion in terms of the influence it wielded”? Nearly everyone seems to agree that it had influence, including the people who think that it had malign influence. As for “the quality of the writers if published”, I refer you to the OP: “It’s sponsored solid journalism, smart criticism, bad policy and bloody wars. God knows, it has not suffered for talent or intelligence.”

R. P.:
As for “the quality of the writers if published”, I refer you to the OP: “It’s sponsored solid journalism, smart criticism, bad policy and bloody wars. God knows, it has not suffered for talent or intelligence.”

Yes, Corey did say that. I’ll retract my “only indirectly” remark about the OP.

The sad thing to me is that Chris Hughes’s getting the magazine away from Peretz seemed like an opportunity for TNR to turn around and be a proudly liberal magazine.

My vague recollection is The New Republic took the lead in promoting gay marriage, starting with a 1989 Andrew Sullivan piece on the injustice of one individual losing the rent control on his apartment when his boyfriend, who held the lease, died:

http://sullivanarchives.theatlantic.com/homosexuality.php

The Linker piece gianni links to suggests one of the problems, even with the back pages (and I would argue that James Wood, whom I’d forgotten about though he has his virtues, more than once “broke things” in his blundering attempts to be “traditional,” and contributed to the narrowing of the acceptable range of “good” fiction): the right was politicizing ideas, and TNR refused either to distinguish “ideas shouldn’t be in poetry” from “ideas shouldn’t be in philosophy,” or to acknowledge that refusing to accept the politicization of ideas had a different meaning than it had when Stalinism was a danger. They published too many glowing reviews of and by writers whose set task was to try to prove, against conservative values, that liberalism ought to just maybe be given a chance.

@112 I’d recommend pretty much anything Andy Seal writes.

for another helping of schadenfreude – Z Jilani pokes fun at tnr authors for cheering neoliberalism up until it is at their doorstep

http://www.alternet.org/media/new-republic-gets-dose-its-own-neoliberal-medicine

someone above mentioned that they would miss tnr for the book reviews – i hope that they were not thinking of the J Chait review of N Klein’s Shock Doctrine when they said this (linked in above article). were all these supposedly invaluable book reviews just hippie punching masquerading as literary review? or is that just a special talent of Chait’s ?

Now see what you foolish people have done?

It’s like that Candyman movie.

If you type “The Bell Curve” into a thread five times, Steve Sailer appears.

For example, 26 years ago my wife and I were standing on Chicago’s North Avenue, a block from the notorious Cabrini Green housing project, whose residents blighted what otherwise would have been some of the most valuable acreage in the Midwest.

The blight on Cabrini Green is people?

Sorry – that quote is from Sailer’s review of dystopian predictions.

gianni @ 125 – In TNR’s defense on that point, they were never really all that pro-business and I don’t remember them being especially rah-rah capitalism, or opposed to regulation. It seems they didn’t love the corporate world–and yet, as in that piece, didn’t have any specific criticisms, but felt that the free market was pretty much good when it worked okay and all that, and it’s too partisan to blame the right for the failings of unregulated markets, I suppose.

@ Roger Gathmann 102

The ‘Liberal Media’ cry was always projection from the right who refused to believe just how skewed to the right that the US media is. Like the majority of the mainstream print media everywhere, they were of the establishment and for the establishment.

The Post did finally expose Nixon as a crook. But after that they tried to make up for it by helping the right with their Clinton fake scandal of the week. And they enthusiastically formed the right wing echo chamber for Fox News.

The only reason the establishment media stopped being in the tank for the right was when they saw their reader numbers decline further and faster than anywhere else in the developed world. By which time it was too late, they had lost the under 30s generation of readers.

And to cap it all, while failing to mention that the Bush administration was telling lie after lie, the establishment media spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about the pernicious influence of ‘bloggers’ whose reporting might fall short of their exacting standards.

Main Street Muse:

The real problem with TNR can be seen in the statement given to HuffPo by those who quit – which includes things like:

“The New Republic cannot be merely a “brand.” It has never been and cannot be a “media company” that markets “content.” Its essays, criticism, reportage, and poetry are not “product.” It is not, or not primarily, a business. It is a voice, even a cause.

“It is a voice, even a cause” is probably a little grandiloquent, but as for the rest of this statement, I say: Right on! A serious magazine is not primarily a “brand”, and its contents are not “product.” The statement is completely right about this.

Main Street Muse:
TNR never exemplified “the promise of American life.”

Fyi, “the promise of American life” is an allusion to a once well-known book by Herbert Croly, one of (iirc) the founders of the magazine, or at least an early contributor. So while the statement does sound a little self-important (I myself wd not describe TNR as “the flagship of liberalism,” or whatever phrase they used, certainly not in recent years), it’s not totally off-the-wall.

Moreover, you are wrong to assert that all magazines are a business. Not all magazines are. The Nation I don’t think really ever makes much money, it’s always in the red. So was TNR for a lot of its history. The aim of such magazines (and others that I cd mention) is not to make money. If they do, great, but for these sorts of magazines that’s not the main goal.

Donald Johnson 128

When Peretz bought TNR in ’74 (I think this is the right date, will have to double check), the magazine’s politics, esp. on foreign policy and esp incl the Middle East, changed. Before Peretz, under G. Harrison, it had opposed the Vietnam War, as I’ve had occasion to say now for about the third time in this thread.

b. steele:
On the second, I grew tired of reading article after article about liberalism that seemed intended to win tiny points away from the right, one by one, even points I would have thought had been dealt with long ago–that seemed to assume the only readers and the only critics who matter are conservatives.

This clarifies it; thanks.

@ L.D. B.:
I read Andy Seal’s post, albeit quickly, but I have not yet properly read the comment thread there, incl. your contributions (though I did see that Corey left a comment, and js. @138 mentions it here). I’m a bit behind on my USIH blog reading ;), but I wanted to put the link in here before this thread closed.

It’s probably worth noting that there are a lot more comments here than at the S-USIH blog. And if you have a lot of comments, it’s going cut against having a neat, tight discussion.

Judis speaks: http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/32318

Dirt, background, and good discussion from a couple of TNR purists.

Re: 150. Actually, in the link above at 149, Judis explains that TNR never made money, nor should it be expected to. Judis himself states that print is more or less dead, so Judis at least, is not ‘lamenting…the inevitable changes that come from transformative communication tools.’ He and Robert Wright discuss the viability of political magazines, funding, the need for editorials, and long-form versus short-form analysis in the internet age. Runs about thirty minutes and well worth a listen.

@kidneystones: thanks for the link.

@Main Street Muse: A print magazine, at least a journalistic one, also needs an online presence obvs. But that’s probably all we’ll be able to agree on, as I don’t agree w the rest of yr views on this. Everything in this sphere is not “product,” or at least shdn’t be.

#146 Steve Sailor

Now a team of six physical anthropologists has filled almost half the skulls with pellets and concluded that Morton’s data were generally reliable and not manipulated. …

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001071&representation=PDF
I looked at the paper.

They make a convincing case that Gould made some mistakes.

Morton measured cranial capacity two ways, using seeds and lead shot. He got very different results the two ways and concluded the lead shot was more accurate. There was no good reason for Gould to pay much attention to the seed data except to note that it allowed more bias. No reason to limit his analysis of the later results to just those that were also measured with seeds.

I’m not clear why Gould wanted to throw out all the subpopulation data with less than four skulls. What I think is going on is that Gould thought that each race was made of subpopulations that had different skull sizes, and he thought the collection had too many skulls from subpopulations with small skulls for some races, and too many from subpopulations with large skulls for others. So he wanted to break it down, and he couldn’t do statistics on subpopulations that were too small.

Similarly he thought the collection had too many female skulls from some races and not enough from others. This is important because on average women are smaller than men and so have smaller skulls. But Morton couldn’t reliably tell which skulls were female — size was one of the big criteria. Similarly Morton didn’t know how tall the people were from just skulls so he couldn’t adjust for that.

So those are sources of bias in the collection, that Morton could not have done anything about, all he could do was to measure his collection and report his results from that biased sample. Gould could be right that the sample was biased, and Lewis could be right that there was nothing Morton could have done about it.

Lewis’s own results look peculiar. He wants to claim that Morton’s results were not biased, so he repeats the measurements to show that they weren’t, and he samples less than half the skulls! Gould said that scientists often unconsciously bias their data, and then Lewis’s data is incomplete. He says only some of the original skulls are still available.

Lewis found that on average, his own measurements differed from Morton’s lead shot results by 4%. (His results differed from Morton’s seed results by 1%. He and everybody else agree that the seed method is less precise, though.) He found a few skulls where the difference was significantly more than usual for the lead shot, and he declared those to be the mismeasures. He finds that the 7 biggest mismeasures were all in the wrong direction, making nonwhite cranial capacities bigger than they really were. This part gets a lot of attention.

He does not say much about all the little errors, showing how they changed the averages. There is considerable discussion about Morton’s numbers, and Gould’s apparent errors analyzing Morton’s numbers, but the analysis that would show whether Morton’s many small errors actually added up to much bias is only mentioned. Assuming that Lewis’s numbers are right, Morton’s were wrong by an average of 4%. Did those many small errors tend to enhance the racial differences Morton claimed? Here is everything in the body of the paper that mentions that.

If Gould’s hypothesis that
Morton physically mismeasured some
skulls due to racial bias were correct, we
would expect the mismeasured crania to
be non-randomly distributed by popula-
tion. Specifically, we would expect Mor-
ton’s overestimates to be concentrated on
‘‘white’’ crania, whereas his underesti-
mates would be mostly ‘‘non-white’’ cra-
nia. We tested this using the binomial
probability on population-quantile tables
(Text S2) and found only one significant
difference: Morton overestimated more
Egyptian crania (3 of 13) than would be
expected by chance. The overmeasured
Egyptian skulls are specimens that Morton
considered clearly ‘‘Negro,’’ so his overes-
timation is obviously at odds with his
predicted bias. Otherwise, Morton’s errors
were random with respect to population.

That’s all. Everything else they say about what they measured is only about the individual skulls that had the biggest errors.

They provided their raw data and their statistical methods in separate documents. My immediate complaints are first that they rounded their cc measurements into cubic inches, going from about three significant digits to two. I see no reason for that. Second, they collected their errors into groups before testing for the groups, completely ignoring small errors. I think it would be better to just use the errors directly. If the small errors average out then fine. If they don’t, they could be part of experimenter bias. Also, I think that their approach of grouping errors makes it harder to get a statistically significant result. Each the things I complain about looks to me like it’s designed to make it harder to reach official significance. But I haven’t done the work to find out whether a better approach would give a different result.

A commenter on the paper pointed out that Morton looked at the skulls people sent him, and sometimes decided that skulls that were supposedly native americans were actually european or african, and he relabeled them if he thought that. This is of course bias. But he could have been correct. Lots of people can tell the race of a skull by looking at it.

Another commenter who is translating Gould into Turkish claimed that Lewis et al misrepresented Gould in various ways. I didn’t follow up on that.

Also, if you can bear a little more jargon: Changing leadership multiple times in a short period is a bad sign for any organization. The chances of pulling out of that are similar to the chances for a miracle. It’s entirely plausible that actual improvements made to TNR in the past five years couldn’t be made into something that worked, for whatever definition of “works” magazines use, and without a lot of trauma.

p.s. I intend to read Dana Milbank’s WaPo column (that I mentioned above) and perhaps listen to the youtube link posted by kidneystones, above, but haven’t had a chance to do so yet.

LFC: It seemed to me the big problem was that someone was hired in between Hughes and Foer, the editor; and that person was a business person, not a publishing person; and Foer then found out he was being fired through some site like Gawker (even worse, through the rumor mill of people who’d already read it on the site); and then there was a meeting where people felt like they were being dissed and anyway hated the new management. Understandable that Foer would resign under those circumstances, also understandable that a lot of people who were loyal to him, and didn’t want to work under the conditions on offer, would also resign.

But the magazine and web site have been reorganized in the past few years; I personally haven’t gotten comfortable with the new site yet, and only rarely find stuff there I think I want to read, and then want to finish; the web site has been terrible for a long time, with unpredictable paywall policies, and no good even for finding out what’s in the print issue. I’ve heard that there were huge improvements in the past couple of years, whatever they were didn’t personally appeal to me, but this already wasn’t the TNR of fifteen years ago. Apparently.

The articles, though, that say the problems arose because journalists lack social graces, while software people are polite and authority-loving, were pretty hilarious.

Brett Bellmore 12.09.14 at 5:58 pm @ 162 — Not all digital media is/are susceptible to that kind of external control. I agree it is reprehensible. Fortunately it can be defeated.

“Not all digital media is/are susceptible to that kind of external control.”

Yes and no. Some forms of digital media, you may have the data under your own control, but as technology progresses, and hardware wears out, suddenly you find that you have data under your control that you can’t access. I’ve got a huge box of videotapes I simply can’t view, and I could easily see my DVDs and Blueray disks going the same way, especially with the Blueray involving encryption. I can’t just copy the data onto a hard drive, and read it, it has deliberately rendered opaque without the viewer.

That isn’t a problem with my books, and it’s not a problem with earlier digital media, either. But it seems to be the trend, to tie things up so that people can’t simply own their copy of your work, and continue to access it, without your continuing aid.

135 – I think the “liberal media” represented the way the media, by the sixties, had absorbed the changes in the configuration of the elite that had really occurred thirty years previously, in the 30s. In other words, when the Rooseveltian democratic party was the DC establishment, it was what the elite press represented. The change in the structure of the elite in 1980 had already been preceded by the end of the liberal era – as the establishment became conservative, so did the press. But I think the press’s most important thumbsuckers were never comfortable calling themselves conservative, and thus they simply redid the liberal label to make it fit their new positions. One of the things TNR did well is provide covering fire, making anyone clinging to the old liberal label seem “conventional” and “dogmatic” – which is a neat trick that has spread all over the press and tv. Contrarianism became a way of never being contrary to the groupthink of the business and political elites, but in a very clever way. Kinsley, that spawn of Buckley and Peretz, was the absolute master at this, and has not been called on it until recently. But I think the contrarianism is now growing old – when, for instance, his “contrarian” take on Greenwald led to an epic establishmentarian splutter fest, it was something that I don’t think he expected.
It is this ethos that I think became less and less palatable in the 00s with the Iraq war. The old neo-liberals gravitated either to the right altogether, or became suspicious of the whole TNR-istic deal. That is why I think the Washington Post (which served as a sort of career stop for ex TNR people) began to have serious financial troubles in the 00s, failing to attract a young audience that was simply through with that kind of bs. Perhaps this is too optimistic a take, however: nothing has really moved in this, the decade after the 00s, and we are about to have a re-run presidential candidate who has long embodied neo-liberalism in Hilary Clinton. The spirit of TNR, alas, lives on.

js. @164
The Grandin piece (which I just read) is I think a pretty good critique of TNR on f.policy, esp. L. America, in recent decades. (Can’t comment on Gawkerization specifically as I don’t know much of anything about Gawker.)

[aeiou] I’m struck by how in 170 comments, the subject is never broached that some of the ill-feelings among the resigning staff toward the owner acting like he really owns the magazine has something vaguely to do with the owner being not just a gentile but the most extraordinarily gentile-looking owner imaginable, and the magazine having been for the four decades I’ve been familiar with it a de facto Jewish magazine. TNR wasn’t officially a Jewish publication like Commentary was, and gentile journalistic prodigies like Andrew Sullivan could rise to the #2 position, but in my lifetime it was predominantly a magazine for smart Jews and people who like smart Jews. This is not to say that ethnic tensions are central to the magazines financial and strategic controversies, but I do imagine that a Jewish owner would have been able to come to some more amicable agreement with the staff at least until the next economic downturn.

@Anderson

You expected Steve Sailer to say something that wasn’t shockingly racist?

Dude has one setting.

while TNR certainly has a strong element of ‘NY Jewish culture’ to it, it does not at all follow that this is a notable motivation behind the mass exodus of the writers. there is no clear indication that this element of the magazine is especially threatened by the new ownership aside from an extremely simplistic focus on the new owner’s identity, and i have not seen any solid evidence that this concern is a motivating factor for the relevant writers/editors

I thought that Gianni’s implied request for actual evidence might possibly have led to something interesting. Though maybe not in present company, so never mind.

CR: “let’s go back to debating whatever it was we were debating.”

A few of us (e.g. 90, 99, 158) were wondering whether you really think that a fascist magazine energetically pursuing a project is preferable to a less energetic alternative. I’m sure I’m overinterpreting you somewhat but would appreciate your clarification.

Very helpful comment. I guess we’ll just continue to not debate what we were not debating.

didn’t realize this Sailer fellow was a known buffoon; my b, noted.

TM – i think that if there were an active and energetic magazine advocating fascism, that we could all admire the energy while also, potentially, finding other things to criticize it for. just like you can admire the energy with which your pet scratches at the furniture, but advise them that said energy might best be applied to a less destructive outlet

say what you want about fascism, but it oftentimes has a powerful energy to it. this is, if i may be so bold, is one of its principle dangers, especially to the left. i would hazard that the notion of ‘accelerationism’ is an instance of this sort of phenomenon, although with all its roots in high theory it has certainly not hit the mainstream.

my immediate personal relations are given over to such a great deal of apathy that I find political energy of any sort enticing.

precisely ;)

I have completely lost my irony meter at this point, but I might as well note that a very good friend of mine studied fascism for reasons not entirely unrelated to @187/188. In case it needs to be said, their sympathies aligned well along the lines of all the people in this discussion.

Well, if you think of it as a form of corporatism, the attraction is clear: unity and harmony (presumably), as an alternative to liberal atomization and marxist class conflict. What’s not to like?

Perhaps it is because I am not American, but I have never in my life heard anyone say, “did you see that excellent article in TNR?”

[aeiou] Here’s former New Republic editor Peter Beinart writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.630953#.VIhv5GienjA.twitter

“How The New Republic stopped being a Jewish magazine

“When it was born a century ago, Jewish intellectual influence in America was on the rise. Now it’s starting to decline.

“By Peter Beinart | Dec. 10, 2014 | 3:00 PM

“Last week, The New Republic, the magazine I used to edit, fell apart. The owner ousted the top two editors, most of the senior staff resigned, and while something called The New Republic will continue, it is unlikely to bear much relationship to the crusading, literary publication founded by Walter Lippmann and other progressive intellectuals 100 years ago.

“It’s an important moment not only in the history of American journalism, but in the history of American Jews.

“It’s an important moment for American Jews because for the last 40 years, The New Republic has been a culturally Jewish magazine. …

“But even when Peretz stepped down as editor in chief in 2010, TNR’s Jewish identity endured.

“Under literary editor Leon Wieseltier, the magazine remained an indispensable source of commentary on Jewish history and culture. And inside the magazine, yiddishkeit was rarely far away. I remember once hearing Wieseltier explain that he had asked an author to submit his book review by Rosh Hodesh. “That’s how Malcolm Cowley used to do it,” he added wryly. The implication was clear. Cowley had been TNR’s literary editor in the 1930s, when American Jews were still outsiders. Now his successor was a graduate of Yeshivah of Flatbush. American Jews had arrived.

“As a force in American journalism, we certainly have. Jews edit The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Vox, Buzzfeed, Politico, and the opinion pages of The New York Times and Washington Post.”

> Perhaps Judis is right: forget the profit, and simply stay true to a higher purpose.

“Capital” is on the debit side of the ledger for a reason.

Actually, the article in Haaretz (one of at least four about TNR) didn’t exactly say that Jews control the US media. Or at least that’s not how I read it.

#201 Anarcissie

Actually, the article in Haaretz (one of at least four about TNR) didn’t exactly say that Jews control the US media. Or at least that’s not how I read it.

Your reading may well have been right, however you read it.

What do you think the Haaretz article said that was worth disemvowelling?

Corey, thank you for leaving the link to the article written in Haaretz by the former TNR editor. The article itself is directly on-topic, even if the discussion about what it said is not.