Many of the loudest opponents of releasing the report don’t normally think that “violence and deaths” from protests or terrorist attacks can ever be linked to U.S. actions overseas, and even if they accept that there is a link they don’t think that has any implications for what the U.S. should or should not be doing abroad. Changing a particular policy or avoiding an intervention all together in order to minimize the risk of attacks against Americans is normally portrayed by many of the same people as “giving in” to terrorism. Only now that there is minimal accountability for the illegal and abhorrent use of torture by our government are they moved to worry about what people in other countries might do in response.
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archimaps: Rendering of the Chrysler Building during construction, New York City
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American wood type co., South Windham, Conn. [Specimens of wood type, 1885?]Houghton Library, Harvard University
The Twelve Months at Kew Gardens. Print series by Thomas Robert Way (1861–1913).January
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So, some personal news. Today I resign from The New Republic.But I am excited to join Fusion! Which I am also resigning from, effective immediately.
To start a new adventure at BuzzFeed! An adventure, I might add, which ends today.
Because I’ve been hired by Vox! And from which I must summarily tender my resignation.
Thoughts Occasioned by My Staying Home to Crank Through These Papers Because They Simply Have to Be Returned Today
“Just one more cup of coffee to get me fortified.”
“Yes, I posted on the demise of TNR last night, but I think there’s something else I need to get off my chest.”
“Of course, it would be irresponsible to add to the already-voluminous commentary on this subject without first reading much of that voluminous commentary, just in case someone has anticipated my idea.”
“How long has it been since that dog was brushed?”
“If I grade these on the iPad instead of the Mac I’ll be able to lie down while grading.”
“That stylus — where’s my stylus?”
“Not really the best stylus in the world. I wonder if there are some new models I should check out?”
“Did Teri take Malcolm for a walk this morning? Poor guy. He looks like he needs a walk.”
“I probably can’t concentrate because I’m lounging around in sweatpants, as though I’m about to go to sleep. I need to change into some proper clothes.”
“I need coffee.”
“Isn’t there an app with Aeropress recipes?”
“Goodness, this refrigerator needs a very thorough cleaning and reorganization.”
“All this would be a lot easier if I were wearing a really comfy pair of sweatpants.”
“Rolling Stone posted what??”
And isn’t there a place for just that – for a group of writers and thinkers to put out a publication that doesn’t seek to maximize pageviews or generate profits, but which dares to believe it has something to say, a point of view to fight over, and just gets on with it and hopes for the best? That was the formula we followed in the decade I worked there as editor and before. If you build it, they will come … and when I left it, we had over 100,000 subscribers. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t a million, or even 105,000. They were the right 100,000 – and built a shared community of ideas and a heritage to fight over. That’s what’s missing in this era of pageviews and clickbait and sponsored content: a self-confident team that, at some level, doesn’t give a shit what others or even readers believe, as long as the debate itself is rigorous, fair, open and reasoned. I remember Michael Lewis throwing back his head and giving that barking laugh of his as he marveled: ‘The is the first magazine I’ve ever been a part of that never asks what its readers want.” Where is that kind of publication now?
one more thought on TNR
It happens every week in Silicon Valley: a tiny startup working on some interesting technology is “acquired” by one of the bigger fish in the pond, Google or Apple or Facebook. Maybe the owners are hired; maybe it’s just the proprietary tech the big fish wants. If you happen to be a user of the startup’s product, and you’re lucky, the service or device you were using sticks around, just under a new and fancier brand name. But you probably won’t be lucky. Probably that service gets shuttered, or that device goes un-updated and un-supported, and the cool thing you got in on the ground floor of disappears forever.
As I say, it happens every week in Silicon Valley. It also just happened to a 100-year-old magazine. Why did Chris Hughes buy The New Republic if he were just going to turn it into another Buzzfeed? Why not just start something new, from scratch? Apparently he was just buying a domain name and a (pretty shopworn and moldy) brand, and was happy to throw the rest away, per Valley S.O.P.
In a staff meeting in October, the Daily Beast reports,
Presiding at the head of a long conference table, [new TNR CEO Guy] Vidra didn’t acknowledge Foer, who was seated beside him; he didn’t look at him; he didn’t mention him. Instead, as he started to speak, Vidra confided that he liked to stand up and move around the room as he communicated his thoughts, as though he were Steve Jobs unveiling the latest technological marvel. Oddly, he stood up, but he didn’t move.Vidra spoke in what one witness described as “Silicon Valley jargon,” and, using a tech cliché, declared: “We’re going to break shit”–a vow hardly calculated to ingratiate himself with TNR’s veteran belle-lettrists, who feared that he was threatening the magazine’s destruction. Only a few interns dared to ask questions, which Vidra repeatedly dodged. “The senior people were too shocked to speak,” said a witness. “Jaws were dropping to the floor.” Through it all, Chris Hughes nodded approvingly, an unnerving grin on his face.
When I read this something clicked in my mind. It took me a few minutes to figure out what that click meant, but then it came to me: the “technical boy” in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. He’s one of the New Gods, not one of the worn-out, dilapidated deities of the Old World. When someone says a “mighty battle” between the Old and New Gods is coming, he sneers, “It’s not going to be a battle…. All we’re facing here is a fucking paradigm shift. It’s a shakedown. Modalities like battle are so fucking Lao Tzu.” Guy Vidra couldn’t have said it nearly so well. But it’s his thought, and Chris Hughes’s, in a nutshell.
There were some real problems with The New Republic, and it’s quite possible that without an infusion of technocratic cash it would have died before long. But at least it would have died something like a natural death, not like this. The old gods may be bitter and senile, but let’s let them die in their own beds rather than in a shiny new organ-harvesting facility.
At one point late in American Gods, Shadow, the protagonist, pauses to reflect on his preference for the old gods over the new. “It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than their opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in clichés.”
This, I think, is the ground of the strange ‘relatability’ of these globally popular novels: not class, or race, or gender, or school experience or anything like that; and neither because of any quasi-Dickensian textual campaigning against social injustice, creditable though that aspect of the novel-series is. It’s that Rowling says to her child readers, repeatedly and eloquently: you are kings in disguise. You possess magical validity and force. And her child-readers grok it, because kids understand the Scottian insight better than adults do. Maybe that’s because they are closer to the time when all human beings share perfect, imperial elevation and power, when the whole of creation bends its efforts to placating and maintaining them – when we are babies, of course. Or maybe it is a more Chestertonian 'old religious conception’, the same numinous if unconscious awareness that Wordsworth ascribes to childhood in the Immortality Ode. At any rate, it goes some way to explaining (I think) why Harry has to be the central character, rather than Hermione. Hermione is too obviously special: too clever, too multi-talented and self-disciplined and grounded and so on. Potter is the chosen one not despite but because he is so ordinary; because (the novels are saying) mere common ordinariness, like yours, like mine, is the absolute ground of magical royalty. We are all kings in disguise.… The equally popular, equally enduring Narnia books say the same things, for (where Lewis was concerned) equally Chestertonian reasons. Lewis’s ordinary English children are kings and queens of Narnia, not because Lewis thought representative parliamentary democracy delinquent and wicked, but because his faith told him that we are all of us, the entire demos, kings and queens of Narnia.