new republic or christian science monitor

CSM.

plus TNR you have to pay for. f that.

On Oct. 18, New Republic editor Franklin Foer fired associate editor Spencer Ackerman. It was Mr. Foer’s first firing since taking over in February; Mr. Ackerman, in fact, is only the second New Republic staffer to be fired since the Hollywood-worthy fall of fabulist Stephen Glass in 1998.

Before anyone calls up Hayden Christensen this time, the principals need to do some more work on the narrative line. Mr. Foer described the dismissal as a matter of serial “insubordination”; Mr. Ackerman, 26, wrote on a personal blog that it was the result of “irreconcilable ideological differences” with the magazine’s upper editors.

In what Mr. Foer called the “proximate cause,” Mr. Ackerman had been using that personal blog—titled “Too Hot for TNR”—to disparage the magazine.

Again with the Web logs: On Sept. 1, senior editor Lee Siegel was suspended and had his culture blog removed from the magazine’s Web site. Mr. Siegel had been caught posting flattering comments about his own wit and wisdom in the third person under the pseudonym “sprezzatura”—a “sock puppet,” in blog parlance.

Mr. Siegel is still suspended, but he remains on the masthead. Then again, Mr. Siegel hadn’t previously sent Mr. Foer an e-mail offering to “make a niche in your skull” with a baseball bat, as Mr. Ackerman did during a dispute about whether the magazine should have a blog about the Major League Baseball playoffs.

“The Siegel thing was a first-time offense,” Mr. Foer said. “Ackerman involved repeated offenses.”

Mr. Ackerman said he had clashed with Mr. Foer over various editorial matters. But he said that he had fallen from favor after growing disenchanted with the invasion of Iraq, which he and the magazine had both supported in the beginning.

“I definitely, for lack of a better term, drifted leftward,” Mr. Ackerman said. “The Iraq war will do that to you. The Bush administration will do that to you.”

Mr. Ackerman had been acting out, by his own account: telling a colleague it “wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world” to get fired “for being too left-wing”; declaring in an editorial meeting that he would “skullfuck” the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides. And there was the baseball-bat remark, which Mr. Ackerman said was meant as a joke. After chewing him out for that, Mr. Foer agreed to let him edit the baseball blog.

Both agreed that, whatever the politics, Mr. Ackerman’s taste in stories was wonkier and more bureaucratic than Mr. Foer’s.

The CSM knows where things are going:

After a century of continuous publication, The Christian Science Monitor will abandon its weekday print edition and appear online only, its publisher announced Tuesday. The cost-cutting measure makes The Monitor the first national newspaper to essentially give up on print.

The paper is currently published Monday through Friday, and will move to online only in April, although it will also introduce a Sunday magazine. John Yemma, The Monitor’s editor, said that moving to the Web only will mean it can keep its eight foreign bureaus open while still lowering costs.

“We have the luxury — the opportunity — of making a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years,” Mr. Yemma said.

Wow.

pretty new website:
http://www.newrepublic.com/#

A couple of months ago, I mentioned on the politics thread that I had a falling out with a friend in 2008 triggered by, of all things, Obama (more precisely, something I said about Republicans making a virtue of stupidity). It's his cover shot of Obama in the revamped TNR, so I guess he either had a change of heart or managed to suppress his feelings long enough to snap a photo.

aw, that's a very appealing photo of Obama

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/12/05/dear-very-serious-journalists/

The New Republic was never anything but a warmongering racist antileft trashpile and I hope the whole enterprise burns to the ground and if you are nostalgic about it you’re nostalgic for The Bell Curve, the war on Iraq, and Marty Peretz’s Muslim Hating Neo-Fascist Jamboree. The whole enterprise was corrupt right down to its colonialist bones and if some Facebook billionaire wants to turn it into Tinder For Politico Jagbags it could not possibly suffer in comparison. Shedding tears for Leon Wiseltier’s job is like worrying about what became of Stalin’s cat. I only pray for the day that your twisted obsession with Village bric-a-brac is performed by the unpaid interns that are the inevitable future of Big Media, which will be celebrated by you neoliberal clowns right up until some 17 year old earning nothing but 3 $9,000-a-credit-hour credits literally unplugs the keyboard from your workstation. Tell Stephen Glass I said hey and shut out the lights on your way out.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/mass-resignations-hit-the-new-republic.html

that whole slam is p great but

Shedding tears for Leon Wiseltier’s job is like worrying about what became of Stalin’s cat.

that is magnificent

Hello.

https://twitter.com/JamilSmith/status/560818967787229186

jeet heer is awesome and telling the TNR nostalgists to go choke on it is awesome too

The essay is live:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120884/new-republics-legacy-race

leon wieseltier

legendary leon wieseltier

legendary intellectual leon wieseltier