Steve Reads

I’m normally happy that the New Yorker exists. It has exactly a week’s worth of perspective, which is a substantial improvement on the 24-hour news cycle and is even an improvement on Time and Newsweek, which should both ostensibly also have a week’s perspective. (My favorite headline from one of those two — I wanna say Newsweek — was “Why she outed him,” next to a photo of Dumbledore. If there could be a less interesting subject for an article, I would like to know what it is.)

Something is wrong with this week’s issue, though. The perspective is still wider than that of most blogs, but I also get the distinct feeling that more knowledgeable folks will be calling The New Yorker out for peddling errors. For instance, I’m pretty sure that the Balkinization folks would call bullshit on Lawrence Wright’s interview with Mitch McConnell. If most newspapers are guilty of playing “he said, she said,” that interview is guilty of only playing “he said”: they interview McConell, Robert Gates, and a few others similarly positioned; that’s it. Lawrence Wright seems like a well-seasoned sort of guy, but it’s not clear that he’s the guy I want explaining the finer points of FISA. I’d like a lawyer to do that. Barring that, I’d like a lawyer to explain FISA to Lawrence Wright.

This week’s issue is also peculiar in that it talks superciliously about the media, which calls all the more attention to whatever The New Yorker itself might be saying. See in particular their article on “the MySpace suicide”. The premise is that the media are about to leave and The New Yorker come around to clean up the mess and clarify things. Which only makes me pay more attention to The New Yorker‘s own failings. Not only is the emperor unclothed, but he’s begging me to observe his nakedness.

In the world of the 24-hour news cycle, The New Yorker‘s perspective is valuable, but as time goes on I want even longer perspectives. I want the kind of scope that only (the right kind of) books can provide. I want peer review; whether that peer review is formally a part of the magazine itself (say, “The Spymaster”, followed by “The Spymaster: A Reply” and finally “The Spymaster: A Rejoinder”), or is just part of the informal structure around the magazine isn’t especially important; what is important is that people feel no particular rush to publish. Take the time necessary to get the whole story out and interview everyone who might be able to help sketch a clearer picture. And wait a while. If you can publish something profound that takes two months, or something weak that takes a couple weeks, wait the two months.

Of course that’s idealistic and naïve. It’s pretty clear to me, though, that it would improve the quality of discourse in this country.

(Extensions to Ph.D. theses that will be read by a handful of people in the world, then sit unread for decades gathering dust on a library shelf somewhere, are left to those with more experience in graduate education.)