Interesting comments at National Review Online from John O'Sullivan and David Pryce-Jones. I like P-J's closing line: "The British monarchy survives by representing everything the nation once was, and what the British people would plainly wish it still to be." Do they really? A great many do, perhaps.
I think the years when O'Sullivan edited National Review were the years I liked it best. At any rate, it was before the current youngsters came in.
I think the years when O’Sullivan edited National Review were the years I liked it best. At any rate, it was before the current youngsters came in.
The youngsters in question would be
Richard Lowry (age 44)
Jonah Goldberg (age 43)
K.J. Lopez (age 36)
Lawrence Kudlow (age 65)
Kate O’Beirne (age 63)
John J. Miller (age 42)
Richard Brookhiser (age 57)
That is their salaried editorial staff. I think their contributors tend toward the same age range.
Exactly!
To me (52) those people are young whipper snappers.
And not necessarily that they’re young in years, but they’re a younger generation of conservatives. They’re ok, but… O’Bierne and Brookhiser are of the old guard. And Kudlow is all economics, I think.
well, I like Jonah Goldberg very much – he’s highly amusing. but I still think of him as a young whippersnapper
I like Goldberg, too, for the most part. I’m actually interested in reading Liberal Fascism, though I don’t know that it will ever get to the top of my stack.
And I was being flip in referring to them as youngsters, with the implication that that’s the source of the problem. But it is true that I don’t like the magazine as much as I once did, which led me to drop my subscription several years ago. And obviously the personnel involved must have something to do with that. I’ve always had mixed feelings about the mag, and quarrels with it, but I seemed to be agreeing with it less, and, more importantly, it seemed somehow less substantial than it did in the ’80s and ’90s.
If you are looking at secular periodicals concerned with public affairs, the best are as follows:
Portside:
New York Review of Books
UTNE Reader
Boston Review
Dissent
The Atlantic
The New Yorker
Starboard:
Policy Review
The New Criterion
City Journal
Commentary
Claremont Review of Books
Non-aligned:
Wilson Quarterly
American Heritage (what’s left of it)
If you are looking for something of a more literary bent, Granta is engaging. I have been meaning to have a look at the Paris Review, as it seems interesting. Never get around to it.
Both the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute used to issue a magazine for general audiences, but both have ceased this practice. American Heritage used to be a commercially viable publication issued 10x a year or 12x a year. They are now a much reduced publication issued quarterly, and part of the philanthropic sector, alas.
Musn’t forget National Geographic.
I subscribe to The Atlantic and The New Criterion. That’s really as much as I have time for. I see occasional pieces from some of the others online.
Thanks for the list, Art. If I subscribed to any of those, it would be City Journal. I used to read the New York Review of Books quite frequently, but I am afraid my political arteries have hardened. Perhaps it will not be permanent.
Well, I wrote off NYRB a long time ago, and now it’s in the ranks of, “okay, even if it’s not all bad, at this point in my life I’ll never spare the time to sort it out.”
Btw, re Granta: I subscribed to that once many years ago (ca. 1985) and didn’t like it at all. But then I don’t care much for the contemporary literary scene in general.
Musn’t forget Smithsonian.
The trouble with the New York Review of Books is that it is quite well-crafted with articles commissioned from academics. You need fine skills to detect any scamming around, and often specialists’ knowledge.
You can subscribe to some, but library browsing will often do. The thing is, some publications often have penetrated very little the library market.
National Review is not the best investment of time. The problem you get on the port side is that behind the front rank are publications which are not merely suboptimal uses of time but obnoxious and often gross.
Wm. F. Buckley was a singular character. No one was going to approach his standard. This fellow Lowry is rather bland, suited to filtering others’ contributions but not producing much of his own.
I remember reading National Review when I lived in the States in the early 80s. It was a lot of fun. I bought it once from a bookstore here, in the past 18 months, and it was thin and dull. Of course, the change could be in me as well. When inclined to criticise my beloved (English) Spectator, I always remind myself of the proverb “Punch was never as funny as it used to be”
It’s definitely thinner and I don’t think the quality is what it was. I agree with Art that Lowry seems to be a significant part of the problem, considering that he’s the editor–“rather bland” is right. Great line about Punch.
I’ve occasionally planned to write something longish (for a blog) about my relationship to NR over the years, but haven’t gotten to it yet. I do enjoy and read regularly their blog, The Corner. They’re having a fundraiser for NR Online right now and I really should give them a bit, considering how often I read it.
I’d forgotten about Smithsonian. We get that, too–I say we because my wife subscribed us–and it is very good, but I end up missing most of it for lack of time.
I don’t read NRonline because I try not to be politicized, meaning politically oriented in my thinking. Or any more than the too politicized I am already. It’s fine for people who, say, teach political science to be politicized. I’m out here teaching theology, and it’s not my job. From when I do look at it, I enjoy the video interviews, called ‘Common Knowledge’. I don’t read The Corner – I’m sure it’s enjoyable.
Buckley was just a really cool, interesting conservative. He was so to say the Cary Grant of conservatives.
Richard Lowry’s writings are uninteresting. I think if you look at it, the portfolio of contributors might be as impressive as was the case thirty years ago. The publication lacks the humor it once had. As recently as a decade ago it had a stable of humor writers (Florence King, Meghan Cox Gurdon, Cathy Seipp and Christopher Buckley) of which one might argue the last representative was the cloddish Mr. Derbyshire. Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg are frequently amusing, but Steyn’s main beats are elsewhere.
What is more disconcerting is that (Stanley Kurtz excepted), the magazine’s heavyweights (M. T. Owens, Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson, &c) tend to be old. You see the same deal in the Catholic press.
It was always second tier. A generation ago, the publications of choice were The Public Interest, Policy Review, The American Scholar, The New Criterion, and Commentary. Also, the editorial policy of National Geographic made it more congenial to the starboard at that time. Modern Age was always more of an academic journal. American Enterprise and City Journal did not roll out until 1990.
I agree about being politicized, Grumpy, but I can’t resist the pull entirely.
“the cloddish Mr. Derbyshire”–indeed, he often is. But his monthly (?) column called The Straggler was very often quite good, being short on politics his more toxic opinions. It’s one of the things I miss about the mag, actually.
Gotta go, more tomorrow maybe.
I should say that the stable of contributors is as impressive as it once was, bar the Editor.
Mr. Derbyshire writes a certain amount of literary criticism, a genre I cannot evaluate unless it is superlatively bad or strays into a political/sociological realm of which I have a small amount of knowledge. He also did a hilarious piece a number of years ago stomping on the Tate Gallery and the whole meretricious business of contemporary art.
I suspect Mr. Lowry has kept him on to play a part – the boozy and opinionated English misanthrope who says what pops into his head without any sort of internal editor (while quaffing his warm beer sending it over his rotting teeth). He did once provide an interesting and off-center perspective (that of a child of Britain’s working class brought up in the shabby post-war years) that helped him to see and skewer some of the inanities of contemporary political discussion. The thing is, his quantum of wisdom is declining as he grows older and what he says seems less and less amusing and more and more asinine.
“…the stable of contributors is as impressive as it once was, bar the Editor.”
Don’t know if I agree with that or not. I would have to do some comparison.
It sounds like you’re not aware that NR threw Derb over the side a month or so ago. He wrote a racially inflammatory piece for Taki’s mag, and NR severed the relationship almost immediately.
I am aware of that. I meant to say “had kept him on”. He was not salaried staff, so he was not fired, merely cut from the list of contributors. Richard Lowry ceased publishing Steven Sailer’s work about a dozen years ago, one might guess for much the same reason. Joseph Sobran was dismissed from the editorial staff a half-dozen years ‘ere that. The magazine has a brand and they have their priorities and they have manifested no interest in devoting any resources to the task of broadening the field of respectable discourse in this respect. (Sailer et al. fancy that Buckley et al are just chicken or under the thumb of neocon wirepullers and Jedi mind-tricksters).
Some years ago, John Derbyshire wrote an intemperate and asinine attack on the writings of Ramesh Ponnuru in the pages of New English Review. That would have been an appropriate time for Mr. Lowry to hand him his walking papers.
I wasn’t a Derb fan. I can be friends with those non-believing Anglican conservative types in the flesh, but I don’t like them on the page. They tend to be greedy and enjoy my cooking, and I like people who enjoy my cooking. But their pure opinions divorced from their persons I do not relish.
I like Theodore Dalyrmple a lot. I have never read one of his books, but I like his Spectator columns.
Amongst young whipper snapper journalists, I would recommend Ed West, on the Daily Telegraph and Brendan O’Neill, on Spiked.
I remember the Sobran affair. Sad business. Sobran went on to behave as if he wanted to justify the charges. Had forgotten that Steve Sailer wrote for NR. My take on that kind of thing is that it’s a continuation of WFB’s long-standing policy of excommunicating people on the right with views that he considered as reflecting badly on the movement at large.
I may have read the English Review piece. At any rate I recall reading something, not in NR, by Derb on matters related to abortion and euthanasia, which always brought out the anti-Papist in him.
I’m a big fan of Dalyrmple. Don’t know those other two. I should broaden my horizons.
Are you doing the Saint James again?
Yes. I’m at a conference and then I’m going to England for a couple of days to see my stepfather, who is living alone for the 1st time in 39 years, and then to Toulouse on Monday, pay my respec to SS Thomas & Dominic, then off I go to the Pyrannees and the camino. It was depressing to unpack my backpack in an expensive hotel this afternoon, but in two weeks time I know I will kill to be in such luxurious surroundings (though nothing like the Texas one you described). It’s way too late in the summer to be going to Spain to walk, but I had to do this dang dang conference.
Too late in the summer?!? I can understand people who live where I do saying that in mid-June, but I wouldn’t have thought it would be true anywhere in Europe. Summer hasn’t even officially started, astronomically speaking.
Might as well enjoy your luxury while you can.
Yeah, I was in the UK out of radio contact when Sobran was fired, but one time in the US of A picking up a National Review I noticed he was gone. A conservative friend said ‘all’ he done was just criticize Israel and he’d been fired and excommmed. So one time I googled him to find out where he went. I found really nasty dirty stuff about Jews and Israel. Tragic, really, because I remember him as an excellent writer – I remember when King Lear was on TV here in 1984, he wrote brilliantly about it. When he died, they had a thread on all that at FT, and they had to close it, because the argument got out of hand. For all that, I think Buckley was right to try to keep the extremists, the anti-Semites and Birchers out of the ‘conservative movement’
No argument there, although one might not necessarily agree with where he drew the lines or how he handled it.
Yes, it was tragic, because Sobran at his best was extremely good. I remember thinking that the evidence used to convict him of anti-semitism was a little thin, although I’ve long since forgotten any details. So I don’t know if the later nastier stuff was his allowing his real views to emerge, or if it got worse as a result of his feeling that he’d been persecuted by Jews.
I thought his argument, pre-NR-ouster, that the Earl of Oxford was the real Shakespeare sounded pretty plausible, though I never investigated the counter-arguments.
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a reply to grumpy Cancel reply