Aren’t We Forgetting Something Here?
Ezra and Old Matt give their list of favorite magazines – that they don’t work for. These are two smart, well-educated, sophisticated liberals and yet none of them managed to describe the New Yorker as a “must read.” My impression was that you couldn’t be a good, coastal liberal unless you read cover-to-cover every week. It also has the advantage of, well, being the best magazine in the country. This seems indisputable at this point. While the Atlantic can sometimes give it a good run for its money, only the New Yorker can get really good articles on just about anything. Just in the last month, they’ve had Jim Holt on the neurology of mathematics and Calvin Trillin on a racially charged murder. These are the types of pieces that might on occasion show up in the Atlantic or TNR. The New Yorker gets stuff like this weekly.
And from a political standpoint, they have one of the best political beat reporters – Ryan Lizza – writing for them and the best, bar none, liberal opinion writer in the country, Hendrik Hertzberg. And that’s not even mentioning James Surowiecke, Malcolm Gladwell, Elizabeth Kolbert, Rebecca Mead, Alex Ross, Anthony Lane, Seymour Hersh and John McPhee. Quite simply, they have the best writers in the business and they let them write about interesting stuff (let’s just ignore the Tina Brown period). I’ll just assume that either Ezra and Matt know people who work for the New Yorker and thus didn’t want to have an apparent COI or that they just took it for granted that it’s the best.
