What I Read and Why

This is the best weekly news magazine the world has to offer. Its announced mission is to take part in "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress." The Economist has done away with the false distinction between reporting and editorializing in favor of highly analytical pieces served up with verve and wit. Despite the paper's conservatism, I generally regard their assessments as inassailable. I have recently begun to falter on The Economist as it has been becoming ever more conservative. It endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2000, though it was apparent even then that Bush was not what he represented himself as being, and late into the yellow cake controversy credulously said, "George Bush's reputation as a man of integrity easily outweighs doubts about his administration's judgment. Unless evidence of deliberate deceit is forthcoming (and so far, there is no sign of it), that is likely to stay true." (Lexington: St George and the Dragon's Hoard. June 12, 2003. subscription required.)

A truly international paper, the Financial Times has what must be the most wide ranging coverage of any news paper in print. They have at least one article on everyplace in every issue. The problem is that the articles are so short. Perhaps depth of understanding is achieved longitudinally, but I wouldn't know since I only read it on an occasional basis. Their most notable promotional device is that their recognizable pink paper is so often folded under the arm of Alan Greenspan as he hurries from his car to come Congressional committee hearing. Their editorial page is highly variable. They have a couple of very insightful economy and Europe watchers and frequently feature important guests such as Joseph Stiglitz or Robert Rubin.

The American media is tiresomely narrow in its admissible range of political opinion. To see what the is happening outside of the intellectual gulag of American debate I turn regularly to the Guardian. It is sometimes a little hysterical, but more often than not, gives the lie to the "liberal" media saw.

BusinessWeek is a great United States news magazine. It is what Newsweek, Time and others ought to aspire to. It is not as global, but nearly as analytical as The Economist. They run a lot of investment advice and CEO profiles, which are of little interest to me, but their economic reporting — and even their political reporting — are highly insightful.

The media are so bad in the United States that it is necessary to call out a self-declared watchdog as a news source. Fair! is a bi-monthly publication of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, an organization that tracks media bias and – imagine this – the data shows that it is overwhelmingly right-wing.

All the news that is fit to print. The national journal of record. Republicans love to hate it and, after the Jason Blair / Howell Raines imbroglio, have done their darndest to dethrone it, but it remains the most important paper in the nation. I always start either here or with The Economist. Their coverage of international issues is unmatched in a domestic paper and their editorial staff is excellent. Thomas L. Friedman is his generation's Walter Lippman, Paul Krugman is the most important liberal voice in America and William Saphire has a red phone to Ariel Sharon's office. They have recently added the savvy and endlessly witty David Brooks.

The Big Three

Okay, okay, yes, I sometimes read Time and Newsweek. Sometimes I even read US News and World Reports and USA Today. They all leave a lot to be desired: facts are doled out like they can't make any more once their stock is depleted; analysis, oh! where art thou?; the articles are padded out with all those graphics, the ratio of splash to information all out of whack. But often enough they do have a fact or two that no one else has. Joe Klein at Time is worth reading. Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek is probably on the way to becoming my favorite commentator. Come on Fareed, can't you go work for The New Republic?

The Wall Street Journal provides the absolute best coverage of the United States economy of any periodical that I know. As economic insight is somewhat of a black art, the paper is always running these highly empirical pieces that profile some entrepreneur, discuss a micro-trend, investigate transformations underway in an industry and so on: real nuts-and-bolts sort of stuff. Their long analytical pieces are matched only by The Economist in depth and theoretical mastery. I desperately hope that their macroeconomic correspondent, Gerg Ip, will write a book in the near future. The Journal has a reputation for being a right wing paper, but it is only the editorial page that is Republican – "the Pravda of the right," as Alan Dershowitz has called it. A careful reading of its journalism would launch any sensitive republican on one of their "liberal media bias" tirades. For instance, on January 15, 2003 the paper ran a column one story about the admissions policies that favor whites ("Preference for Alumni Children In College Admission Draws Fire"), suspiciously on the very same day that the Bush Administration filed its amica curiae brief against the University of Michigan Law School's admissions policy. The only thing that smacks of a bit of right bias is a seeming pleasure at slighting European stories, no matter how momentous. Their coverage of the international economy is good too, but one would want to supplement it with The Economist or The Financial Times.

The other national journal of record. I find the Washington Post to be a little more concise than The New York Times and their articles more topical, but their editorial page is comparatively weak.

The library of my junior high carried this journal and being a kid interested in physics, I was greatly disappointed to find that it was about arms control, not science. It was started in 1945 by two former Manhattan Project scientists and at my junior high encounter, it was about ten pages of tan paper with black and red printing stapled together. At some point between then and now, it has gone through a serious upgrade. It is now all glossy, but the articles are very serious. There are a few pages of news (arms control negotiations happen way too far down the government hierarchy to warrant any news coverage in the major media, so one would be surprised to learn the level of U.S. antipathy to international anti-proliferation efforts in an age of terrorism), a half-dozen essays with at least one being historical, book reviews, and a technical section describing either a class of nuclear weapon or the arsenal of a particular nation. The paper is pro-arms-control, anti-proliferation and actually frets about the continuing possibility of nuclear annihilation. I guess that makes it liberal. The clock currently stands at seven minutes to midnight.

This is the queen of international relations journals. It is stately and prominent, a publication of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations. If Condoleeza Rice or Madeleine Albright have something to say that won't fit on the editorial page of the New York Times or the Washington Post, this is where they will say it. Its major drawbacks are that it is not very academic (there are no footnotes and it can frequently be more persuasive than analytical) and it is a little too status quo – there is not going to be that much immaginative material between its covers. Read this if you want to know the established wisdom, what those who might actually shape policy, are thinking.

This is the flashy international affairs journal. It is published on a monthly basis, in full color, in the 8½ x 11 format instead of quarterly or bimonthly in a smaller format as is the tradition for international relations journals. It is trying to eek out a niche position as the innovative one. Its editorial policy includes, under the heading "12 Easy Steps to Becoming a Foreign Policy Contributor," the following sentences: "Don't send us any article or pitch letter that opens with 'Since the end of the cold war...' Really. Please don't." and, despite claiming "a global magazine with a global readership", the flippant sentence, "Throw a few sacred cows on the barbecue and you'll get our attention fast." I have had a little fun at their expense, but I think they are succeeding at their aim. It is a magazine that includes many unique articles and has attracted some high profile thinking. It is well postured for the era of globalization and it is also an excellent beginners magazine, including at the end of each article a "further reading" section with brief surveys of the relevant literature.

The National Interest is probably the second most widely read international affairs journal (after Foreign Policy). It is every bit as prestigious, having published Francis Fukuyama's famous essay, "The End of History" (no. 16. Summer 1989. p. 3-35) as well as essays by Paul Wolfowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski and so on. It is more right leaning than most of its competition – at least those which don't stake out an explicit ideology. Writing in Foreign Affairs John B. Judis claims that the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted, among neoconservatives, in a "shift away from Commentary toward Owen Harries' The National Interest" (Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution. July/August 1995.). Robert D. Kaplan, says, it "is doing for classical realism what the New York Review of Books does for liberal humanism."

A publication of the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research, this is the first foreign policy journal to capture my imagination. I don't read it as avidly as I used to, but it is worth a frequent dip because compared to the rest of the foreign policy field, it is imaginative and fresh, more historically conscious, going at problems from unorthodox angles.

I started reading The American Prospect when I was a teenager when it was being published as a quarterly of long essays like Dissent or a left version of The Public Interest. At that time I thought it was a great liberal publication – probably in part because one of its founders is Robert B. Reich, a long-standing favorite thinker of mine. It has recently switched to a ten issue per year schedule and a more glossy format with much shorter pieces – part of the general dumbing down of the United States (on the other hand, I didn't finish too many articles in the original format). The main disadvantage of the new format is that there is never a new issue out and it is entirely unpredictable when one will arrive (to the point where I sometimes wonder if they are in financial trouble). That aside, this remains an excellent magazine. Slightly more centrist than The Nation, it is, as J. Bradford DeLong has characterized it, "trying hard (and largely successfully) to become what the New Republic used to be: the central meeting place of American liberalism."

Under the editorship of Lewis H. Lapham this has quickly become one of the most leftist magazines in the nation. Leftist political commentary aside, this is a fun magazine. The first twenty or so pages are usually hilarious reprints of all manner of linguistic chachkas. Harper's Index makes this magazine worth it all by itself.

Subtitled "An Independent Socialist Magazine," I read this as an ameliorative to the tragic narrowness of U.S. political debate (at least from the left - on the right they are free to say things that would make the Ayatollah Khomeini blush) and as a source of intel. I try to know what is going on in as many political factions as possible. But it is more than just that: the best analysis of what went on with the economy in the late 1990's has come – surprisingly – from the socialist and new left, namely this magazine and The New Left Review.

This is, I think, the most important leftist magazine in the United States. Though Christopher Hitchens has called it "the voice and the echo chamber" (Minority Report: Taking Sides. The Nation. September 26, 2002), I cannot detect any degridation in the quality of thinking at The Nation. Many excellent center-left writers are at The American Prospect or The New Republic, but this stable is full and it is, again from the Hitchen's piece, the "debating ground between liberals and radicals." More ideas remain in question at The Nation than in some of their competators.

Its Editor, Perry Anderson, is one of the most intelligent writers that I have ever read.

This is the publication to which I consider myself most close. It is liberal on social issues, conservative on government spending and neoconservative in its foreign policy (and has been for years). Its foreign affairs editor, Lawrence F. Kaplan, recently co-authored a book with Weekly Standard editor, William Kristol (

This is the last leftist magazine that I pick up on the shelf at the magazine store, though I am finding that I purchase it more often lately. It has been attracting more high-powered writers and has improved its paper and printing quality.

The founder, Charles Peters, used to advertise the magazine under the slogan, "If you're not afraid of being right too soon."

I don't read Z Magazine that often because I consider it the headquarters for the reactionary, anti-globalization, principle to the grave, efficacy be damned, Lenninist, anti-establishment left. It is the last stop before one starts reading The Weekly World News or considering Lyndon LaRouche as a presidential candidate. Its articles are writen in an exhausting, hysterical tone and are frequently (though not always) thinly researched. However, I am not walking around with blinders on. I will pick it up to see what the perspective of the anarcho-syndicalists is on an issue, what truely foul thing is going on at the behest of the powerful, or to see what Noam Chomsky has to say.

I am frequently skeptical of the importance of having gone to a university with status. As one not so privledged, I might simply dismiss this as class resentment. J. Bradford DeLong is one of the counterarguments. He is a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and if even a good number of professors at such universities are this good then the value of their degrees must be high indeed.

Back when he was Calpundit I just couldn't get into him. I would check his site out every now and then, but it never became habitual. I think there is a bit of excitement that a pure blogger "made it" now that he is front and center at The Washington Monthly. And his is a sound mind with his nose under a lot of rocks. At this point I refresh his page a dozen times a day and make reference to him in all too many of my own posts (e.g. no. 20 and no. 33).

This is not really a blog or a periodical, but the sight mantained by the Hitch himself on which he lists all of his writings, writings on him and writings that quote him. There has been much discussion of Mr. Hitchen's recent ideological realignment. The left has let fly a great deal of venom, including the accusation that Mr. Hitchens is now a republican automaton and too drunk to control himself. There has been some discussion among neoconservatives as to whether he is one of them now (he is even Jewish and a former Trotskyite). Despite praising the right for its "rigor and courage" ("A View From the Left." The Wall Street Journal. January 13, 2003), announcing that he will be voting for Bush in the next election (Tom Ivancie. Q&A With Christopher Hitchens) and making a contribution to the Weekly Standard, he also derides religion ("God and the Man in the White House." Vanity Fair. August 2003. p. 76-81. and Moore's Law: The Immorality of the Ten Commandments. Slate. August 27, 2003.) and has argued that "Lebanese and Palestinian irregulars are, by the way, entitled by international law to resist foreign occupation that has been internationally condemned" (A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. New York: Plume. 2003. p. 24). I will leave him right where he is for now.

He has a regular column in The Hill and is a contributor to The Washington Monthly. This, along with Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, are the most important and well read blogs on the net. And rightly so. Joshua Marshall is incredibly thorough in his reading and analysis. One can frequently find Marshall's research and rhetoric turning up in the writings of certain liberal columnists. I read Talking Points Memo before I read The New York Times. It's strange that his following is so left and his detractors so right as he is primarily a foreign policy commentator and there, a principled, realist-leaning hawk. My only complaints are that Marshall can obsess on one issue for too long and he is narrow in his focus on foreign policy and electoral politics.

Being a liberal interested in national security issues, sadly, makes one somewhat of a missing piece — one has to learn to roll on one's own. The left takes little interest in national security qua national security. So War and Piece is a happy discovery. Rosen is an investigative journalist specialising in such issues who uses her blog as overflow for the copious amounts of information she has gethered in her work. She also seems pretty tightly integrated with most of the other blogs that I read (e.g. Joshua Marshall teamed up with her on an inquiry into the forged Iraq-Niger uranium documents).

Matthew Yglesisa is an editor at The American Prospect, a magazine that I love. This recomends him well, but what really got me reading him is that the D.C. Metro Blogmap shows him as being one of my neighbors, and half the fun of blogs is the stalking aspect. The other factor is that I have recently (July 2004) began reading Kevin Drum's Political Animal quite a bit and he links to Yglesias's sight frequently.

I have assiduously avoided calling most right publications "conservative" because the majority of the existing right in the United States today is radical (in favor of government-run social engineering, a narrow construal of civil rights, a Wilsonian foreign policy, unmindful of economic fundamentals, insincere in its appropriation of state's rights). This magazine was started by Nixon speach writer and occasional presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan to ameliorate this derth of true conservative thought. For numerous reasons, this title should be at the top of any left reader's list. Buchanan is the Ralph Nader of the right and a cover story (March 10, 2003) proposed a truce between the anti-globalization left and conservatives – a large political realignment that could be a defining characteristic of the next few years. This publication was started, it sometimes seems, for the purpose of defaming the neoconservatives and its critiques of the Bush administration's foreign policy would be denounced as treasonous were it comming from the left.

This is the original neoconservative magazine and has the honor of having published many of the most important neoconservative essays such as Jeane J. Kirkpatrick's "Dictatorships and Double Standards" (November 1979) and Norman Podhoretz's "Neoconservatism: A Eulogy" (March 1996). Even when not ideology defining, its essays continue to be some of the most rigorous, thorough and demanding of anything in print. It is a publication of the American Jewish Committee so it is frequently chauvinistically Zionist and when metaphysical issues are the subject (e.g their recent articles on Darwin), it is a downright garbage pedler.

A publication of Hillsdale College, this is where the real "extra chromosome" conservatives congregate. It is difficult to portray the black-is-white-ism that reigns here - real "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength" sort of stuff. I would almost put this on my "do not read list," were it not for the imperative of enemy intelligence gathering.

The National Review is the original movement paper, started by William F. Buckley, the George Plimpton of conservatism, during the Goldwater renaissance. This makes it all the more sad that it has become such a bad paper in recent years. Even The American Conservative has declared it to have reached, "...a low point for a once serious magazine..." (Stooksbury, Clark. Calling Cary Grant: There is More to Being a Man Than Talking Tough. October 20, 2003. p. 10). It is published almost exclusively for those who need the pep ralley, but don't need the logic of the argument any more. Their economic writing is almost totally incompetent. I pick it up on an issue by issue basis because they frequently do publish something that causes a stir (e.g. David Frum's Unpatriotic Conservatives. April 7, 2003) or gives some critical insight into Republican thought.

There are numerous long-format right publications, but this is the one that I chose (an alternative for the more domestically minded might be The Public Interest). I like its regular contributors, its frequently provocative essays and its bias toward foreign policy and national security issues. It also tends toward a more traditionally conservative outlook with which I am more sympathetc.

I don't know what town they are talking about, but I wish they would all relocate there and see just how much they liked having their fellow right-wingers for neighbors. This is the ultimate one-stop shopping for right oppinion. They agglomerate everyone who is anyone and then some and then they dredge real deep for a few half-literate, violence-enthusing wackos. Where do I start? They have Ann Coulter (the only place you can get her since The National Review fired her over her grossly over-heated columns), Charles Krauthammer, Larry Kudlow, Thomas Sowell, Cal Thomas and too many others to list. The left really needs to look into something similar.

As noted above, The Wall Street Journal is a fairly objective news source, but its editorial page is, to quote Alan Dershowitz, "the Pravda of the right." Sometimes one might think that the editorialists never read the front page. Nowhere else will you find such outlandishly partisan statements and party line wip-cracking. They actually ran an editorial suggesting that the government raise taxes on the poor so that they will hate it more and become Republicans ("The Non-Taxpaying Class." November 20, 2002).

The Weekly Standard is the absolute best right publication circulating today. It brims over with fresh thinking, thoroughly researched articles and the best talent the U.S. right has to offer. It makes me jealous, being on the left, to read a magazine this good. It is the place to turn to find out what we are up against. Its founding editor, William Kristol is the son of one of the original neoconservatives, Irving Kristol. He

I feel sorry for Mr. Sullivan: I think he is the most legitimately agravated political commentator working today. He is a former chief editor of The New Republic, a contributor to The Sunday Times and a gay, Catholic Republican. He is constantly harried by the contradiction in his ideology and his identity. He is beside himself over his love of George W. Bush and Bush's barely concealed divisiveness. He writes himself raw over Catholicism's bigotry. I am strongly opposed to anti-homosexual bigotry and consider Sullivan the most eliquent spokesperson on this issue.

He also devotes a few entries to his humorous take on the news, as in this 5 September 2003 entry: "This Is What They Call Fair and Balanced? 'Fox Attacks Girl in Her Bedroom' --headline, (London) Evening Standard, Sept. 4." On the other hand, he has that viscious streak so cultivated in the right, as on 11 September 2003 when he gloated over the murder of Sweedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, calling it "ironic" (a word sophisticates use to mean "not all bad") and leveraging 11 September for partisan purpose, refering to her as a "Terror Apologist."

The Atlantic is an excellent magazine of essays. It is one for which I look most eagerly every month. Its current batch of contributors include the amusing and innovative social observer David Brooks, widely loved (though not by me) satirist P. J. O'Rourke, international affairs writers James Fallows and Robert D. Kaplan, Christopher Hitches writing book reviews and many other notables.

This is the ultimate ivory tower publication and the most significant journal of letters coming out of the United States. They review nearly every book or art show of note. More notable than the material under review are the reviewers. The New York Review of Books employs the most accomplished reviewer in each field. When the book is on anthropology, the reviewer is Clifford Gertz, when military history, Paul Kennedy, if futuristic literature, Margaret Atwood. The reviews are really mini-essays on their subject, with each usually surveying the outstanding writing on the issue. This is simply the best way to keep abrest of the best thinking in each field or to familiarize yourself with the territory if as yet undiscovered.

When I was younger, the New Yorker made me tear my hair out: all that high-brow adult stuff and so god-damn verbose. To this day, I can't subscribe; I don't think I could handle the pressure of that much pulp landing in my mailbox every week. A friend of mine commented that it was like every writer, upon finding that they were going to get a piece published in the New Yorker (the New Yorker!) had to savor the moment by drawing it out for as long as possible. That being said, the magazine is amazing. Their coverage of national security issues is excellent. I parse their stories like they were semi-refined CIA intelligence (despite Seymour M. Hersh's terrible record). Their profiles are timely, unmatched for depth (a place where the verbosity pays off) and subject selection and will frequently substitute for a book length treatment. The Richard Avedon photographs are wonderful and disliking New Yorker cartoons is elimination criteria in my eugenics induced utopia.

Slate is Microsoft's online political magazine. It is notable in that its first chief editor, Michael Kinsley, was the first established journalist to cross over to the online world in 1996. Robert Kagan, Fred Kaplan, Michael Kinsley. It is difficult to believe that this quantity and quality of output can be offered for free and on a daily basis.

I have, every now and then, had an eyebrow raised at my rather large pile of old Vanity Fairs. Apparently many are under the impression that it is like Vouge, Town and Country or some high-brow Entertainment Weekly. Had my mother not had a subscription to it, I might never have known any better either. It is all that and so much more, though. It is the best combination of glamour, who's who, society, obscure corners of history, the shamelessness of an entertainment magazine, political analysis, culture, fashon, gossip and ostentatious decadence available in a single popular publication. It regularly features photographic work by Annie Leibovitz. When Christopher Hitchens makes an appearance, he does so above the title, "Columnist, Vanity Fair." I am dying the first few visits of the month to my local magazine rack to see what will be on the cover of the next issue of Vanity Fair. It is, in this magazine lover's humble opinion, perfect.

Ah, yes, there is one .mil sight whose URL is still good. Among the billion and a half dollars per day that the DOD races through on jet fuel and toilet seats, nobody is going to notice the excessive number of transcriptionists who post on the web every word uttered by a Pentagon official. Unlike, say the Whitehouse, this stuff is worth reading. Donald Rumsfeld's press confrences have become some of the most eagerly attended Washington events, this despite his insultining attitude and ability to refrain from substanative remark. But it the age of reality TV, this is the norm. Keep your eyes pealed for the increasingly frequent breakdowns of doctrinal disciplin.

There is all sorts of stuff here. Pending legislation, committee reports and whatnot. The Congressional Record could be an excellent resource for government watchers, but unluckily its interface is so unhelpful that it would be an upgrade if they just put the speeches in plain text files on an ftp server.

As inane as it can be, I listen to or read most of the President's major speeches. Not to be confused with www.whitehouse.com, which in intern-themed porn.

In addition to this list of my main sources of news and oppinion, I am also compiling a broader lisiting of news. Some of this is mantained as contingency planning – say, a story in a foreign country that is not getting enough domestic coverage or that requires a source closer to the action. It is also a list of sources that are notable, but that I have as yet formed enough of an opinion about for them to make the main list.

Smarties mantains an archive of past news stories available according to the copyright and usage policies of the applicable publications.