Ross Douthat effectively discusses what we should all be reading, mostly in periodicals, in 2013. He calls it “How to Read in 2013″ and is suggesting we could all effectively read more of what the rest of the political spectrum has to say. That necessitates what to read, and First Things is on his list. He has suggestions I have never heard of and perhaps some you haven’t read, either. “And whenever you’re tempted to hurl away an article in disgust, that’s exactly when you should turn the page or swipe the screen and keep on reading, to see what else the other side might have to say.”
I do read many of Douthat’s suggestions, though the reading of the far Left I had never heard of before. Maybe if I dug a little further into what the Left says I could understand things like how eating the rich would enrich us all, or why Obama is a great statesman, or any of the other political stands of liberals that I find incomprehensible.
How would you expand Douthat’s list? What is required reading for 2013?
December 30th, 2012 | 12:37 pm
[...] Ross Douthat effectively discusses what we should all be reading, mostly in periodicals, in 2013. He calls it “How to Read in 2013″ and is suggesting we could all effectively Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
December 30th, 2012 | 1:27 pm
Nothing having anything to do with day-to-day politics is required reading for anyone, anywhere, ever. Reading anything by James Schall for even the 100th time would serve anyone better than anything published in National Review, New Republic, etc.
Anyone would be better off reading newspaper columns by Chesterton from 100 years ago than anything produced by today’s pitiful MSM. Witness the “fiscal cliff” idiocy, or the fact that nobodies like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias are bright and shining lights in today’s media establishment.
I do love magazines, but my taste runs to stuff like Paris Review, Monocle, Cabinet, Lapham’s Quarterly, etc. I wish there was a decent cooking magazine anymore.
December 30th, 2012 | 8:58 pm
No required reading. His suggestions stink. Better suggestions for periodical matter are as follows:
Portside:
New York Review of Books [with care]
Boston Review
UTNE Reader
The New Yorker
Monthly Review
Starboard:
City Journal
Policy Review
Chronicles [skip Frank, Rockwell]
Claremont Review
The Freeman
National Affairs
Christian:
Touchstone
First Things
Books & Culture
Christianity Today
World
Our Sunday Visitor
—
divers:
The Chesterton Review
American Art Review
Granta
–
Business: [skim & browse, bar the first]
Region Focus [Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas]
Business Week
Forbes
Fortune
Euromoney
–
Foreign Policy:
World Affairs
Foreign Affairs [very selectively]
–
Regrettably, The Wilson Quarterly is no longer issued in paper as of this month. Crisis expired in paper a number of years ago, sad to say.
December 30th, 2012 | 8:59 pm
Master Drawings. Musn’t forget that.
December 30th, 2012 | 9:03 pm
Ach:
Also:
Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Paris Review
Geographical
National Geographic
December 30th, 2012 | 10:11 pm
Sorry, the “Required Reading” title was a bit tongue in cheek, but the principle of reading outside of what we normally read is not a bad one. The wider the better, yes? Though with discretion, yes, also.
AD, Douthat mentions some of those, but you are certainly expanding his list. You are broadening my scope. Thanks.
Brian, reading anything listed through understanding James Schall would mean reading through a few others, really. Wouldn’t he prefer our reading the Bible, Aristotle — oh, what the heck, just say gaining a background in what used to be considered a basic liberal education prior to reading anything with current information and opinion? Wouldn’t he prefer our reading those to our reading him?
(A great cooking magazine would be nice.)
December 31st, 2012 | 1:14 am
Musn’t forget The Economist. It is the one newsmagazine one ought to read, although one might call World a newsmagazine.
Blow my brains out, I forgot The Atlantic.
Newspapers worth considering would be the Wall Street Journal.
Barron’s, a tabloid, would be another business publication to skim.
You might have a look at TLS, the Times Literary Supplement, which is an analogue to the New York Review of Books. In general, the British press ought to be avoided.
BookForum and American Book Review one might consider as well.
Do not know of any cooking magazines.
In truth, your most consequential reading will be of monographs unless you are doing academic research in a discipline which favors professional journals as loci. You need to develop selection criteria and husband your time. Mortimer Adler once said a great many books do not merit a careful line-by-line reading, an ‘inspectional reading’ or rapid plough-through is what they merit. The same is true in a more qualified way with periodical matter. You ought to develop a list with a variety of perspectives, missions, and formats, but adapted to your purposes and your mode of engaging with the public sphere.
Douthat loses sight of all that and in so doing recommends bird-cage liner like The Nation, which would primarily serve for a meatball anthropological inquiry (observing how lefty tools think). The American Conservative is an assemblage of the hobby horses of its contributors. It is not serious. And so forth.
December 31st, 2012 | 1:18 am
Two other portside publications worth considering: Irving Howe’s Dissent and Economic & Political Weekly, which is published in India.
December 31st, 2012 | 7:49 am
I find The Atlantic very uneven in quality and stopped subscribing. About every other issue there is something very much worth reading and then I kick myself for dropping the subscription. I suppose I feel the same way about The New Yorker and a few of the other publications mentioned. Again, Douthat mentions some of the publications you mention. Can’t we assume he has a word limit and cannot discuss everything? Maybe this will be a theme of his and future columns will develop the idea.
Isn’t the, or at least a point of blog reading to see what is good or interesting to read? I cannot afford to subscribe to all of these publications (BTW, I have been enjoying City Journal) and need someone to tell me when there is something worth reading at The Atlantic or The New York Times or Paris Review. We need compendiums and have many options for that among bloggers who consider the suggestions a public service. At least I do.
As for cooking, my favorite articles in recent years have been in the Wall Street Journal.
December 31st, 2012 | 7:57 am
I would suggest Paul Krugman, if this is too much then glance at the blogroll and select Brad DeLong.
In more important matters I like Cook’s Illustrated as a cook book, but I have no real skill in this area. I wish there was a cook book involving Braai. Different barbeque traditions and techniques seem good. Hanibal Lecter I suppose is quite verboten.
While some members of OWS still dispute the vote on quorum grounds, a vote of the people properly assembled in Chicago determined once and for all that as a matter of public policy, binding upon all liberals properly so authenticated all could agree that from behind a veil of ignorance in the ideal society no human being should ever eat another human being.
When I asked for precedent, to a man they cited The Queen vs. Dudley and Stevens(1884). This didn’t quite seem satisfactory to me so I pressed on and reminded them that this was a case in admiralty, and a mercantilist british one at that.
This case is just another example of how K properly assembled and gambling like fools in Wall Street predecessor Lloyds ensured the ship but did not care for its labor. While Lloyds stood tall juggling K on Lime street, “mere” L died of scurvy for lack of a lime! L enslaved L off the coast of africa, while the names(K) chilling in London, worked out the costs of the risks so they couldn’t loose.
But if K forced L to enslave L and to even eat L, shouldn’t it be okay for L to make up for history and eat K? Just a small bite?
No, corporations are not people, you can’t eat them, K is just K, plus you are trying to make us conservatives with your history. We all know that we must cut off the chain of causation, focus on present problems, move foward!
But isn’t that a rule made by K to escape liability? Didn’t Lloyds of London commoditize/build that? Isn’t that just RITC?
Yes, but modern admiralty law does require the ship owner to take responsibility for L. We are just fighting to ensure K lives up to its obligations to L in all relevant areas of public policy.
Alright, maybe eating people is always wrong. But what if I can show you that eating some people will put you on a higher indifference curve?
Who cares? It is unethical, plus technology puts us on a higher indifferences curve but it hurts labor! Higher indifference curves are K’s historical schemes to steal bread from the mouth of L.
Hold up a second, not all technological shifts that puts us on a higher indifference curve hurt L. Some technological shifts that put us on a higher indifference curve are Hicks neutral, that is they do not hurt L or K.
Maybe, but even here you can see how K has stacked the deck, as all rational schemes for eating people must in the end be Swiftian, and thus sow discord among L(too unsophisticated to recognize satire). Even if we wanted to eat the rich(K), we must admit that most of them are old, slender and stringy. How would you even cook Alan Greenspan and his cronies? It can’t be done, the taste alone would put us on a lower indifference curve. Even with Aerosmith’s eat the rich as copyright grounding for commodity fetishism, you would have a hard time swallowing it. If a policy puts you on a lower indifference curve then even if it was Hicks Neutral labor would be worse off.
The poor it must be admited tend to be fater, a meat well marbled and corn syrup fed, honey boo boo in a ragout shows more promise..
Only in an insane “Republican” world could this could put us on a higher indifference curve, but supposing we play along with your mad tea party ways! Suppose we have a new invention for grilling meat, and we go to K and say here is our business plan for eating the rich, it would never receive funding because it would be impractal to develop and commercialize. Of all human beings that might be good to eat, the greater part that could be alienated as food are poor, and K being a sophisticated party would certainly point out these impracticalities, while also pointing out that broadening the sphere of our patent makes it more valuable! A patent that only covers a grilling device enabling one to eat the rich is worthless!
So the super rich (K) as a class tend to fall outside the circle that encompasses those human beings young enough and fat enough such that they could be marketed as tasty. In addition a new technological innovation for grilling meat, or for changing perceptions(commodity fetishism) about the proper jurisdiction of the USDA, that as a result allowed for the consumption of (K) would due to the step up in basis in the IRC simply result in greater wealth for K as long term assets could be sold off escaping capital gains. The idea of eating the rich is thus just another scheme for tax evasion, leading to an even greater concentration of wealth.
The greater burden of considering human beings edible would as an incidence invariably fall upon the poor. So as an idea we can see that it is not Hicks Neutral.
December 31st, 2012 | 8:34 am
My recommendation would be to join the Friends of the Library at a local university and browse the library subscriptions. Subscriptions mailed to your home should be few and consist of things you would like to read at leisure at various times of the day. Granta is good for a home subscription. You might also get a home subscription to one thing or another faux de mieux. Richard John Neuhaus once offered that he had been fairly unsuccessful at selling subscriptions to libraries, even though his publication had a readership that was ample (29,000 paper subscriptions at that time) given the challenge of its content.
I am recommending a Chinese menu approach adapted to the preferences and purposes of each prospective reader. Consider: New York Review of Books, TLS, American Book Review, BookForum, Books & Culture, and the Claremont Review all consist of book reviews. Which is the best fit for you? Do you wish to read it cover-to-cover or browse the contents and read an article here or there?
I agree with you about The Atlantic. Read it selectively at the library or take it off your queue and read something else. Keep in mind, though, that it is near on the best of the portside publications in quality. The New York Review of Books you have to be very careful with. The rhetorical skills of their contributors and editors well exceed their judgment; with the Boston Review or Dissent this is less of a problem.
What you assuredly should not do is read something merely because it manifests a particular perspective in the realm of social thought. The Nation has long been bird-cage liner, as has been the The New Republic in the last dozen years. National Review and Commentary are satisfactory, but you can do other and better things with your time. As for the output of British journalists: there is a reason C.S. Lewis thought reading newspapers was a waste of time; same deal with opinion magazines produced across the pond.
Tell me what are your purposes and I will put together a sample list for you. What do you not understand that you wish to understand better? Through what conduits do you wish to learn about it?
December 31st, 2012 | 10:22 am
Ach. Current History
Reading on foreign affairs should be quite selective. A great deal of it consists of politicians and the dependents and hangers on flogging some pet idea or striking poses. Foreign Affairs sometimes seems more like a verbose version of the op-ed page. Since a number of these are quasi-academic journals, what appears in them are translations of or substitutes for professional publication. They are part of intramural discourses in which you have not much stake and which may not be truly valid. I am a lapsed student of international relations and maintain a bias that there is a great deal of unproductive verbiage in the literature of political science. It is difficult to see Daniel Drezner as a scholar in the same sense that Stanley Engerman (an economic historian) or Brian J.L. Berry (an urban geographer) are scholars. Personally, I would not do more than glance at Foreign Affairs, World Affairs, the National Interest (Andrew Bacevich’s favorite venue), or The American Interest. You should add Current History to your browsing queue.
December 31st, 2012 | 1:06 pm
One thing you might do for self education is to look at publications which are pitched to schoolteachers but not fixed on lesson planning. Teaching History, History Today, and Geography are such publications. (They are all British, ironically). There is also a philosophy journal for laymen called Think.
December 31st, 2012 | 5:35 pm
Art Deco, very impressive.
This is one topic that Dan Mahoney should weigh in on! (For those of you who do not not know Daniel J. Mahoney, suffice it to say he is the kanon kai metron, the living eidos, of the bibliophile.)
January 1st, 2013 | 3:50 am
John Smith: eat the rich was by motorhead surely?
January 1st, 2013 | 9:47 am
A.D., I disagree here: “What you assuredly should not do is read something merely because it manifests a particular perspective in the realm of social thought.” That is exactly what I do want to do if I want to know about that particular perspective. That is what Douthat is pitching to his New York Times readership; go find out what the other guys are saying. Most conservatives I have read commenting on Douthat assume he is speaking to liberals, not to them. Conservative political thought might be clearer if it read more discriminately on this side of American politics and less so of the Left.
I ‘ll be picky in my response, because you offer so much. I do read New York Review of Books, though in a very scattered way. By experience I have found too many books that sounded better in those reviews than they are in reading. Is that what you meant? The prevailing politics of the writers is always obvious.
Reading by political persuasion was the original point and we do find that everywhere, even in the arts journals. We have often subscribed to National Geographic for the kids and often have dropped the subscription because the social an political point of view was obvious and exasperating.
Sometimes I think it is a pity that National Review is not what it was. (Nearly the only voice on the Right.) It contained the conservative arguments. Now there are so many other places to read varieties of conservative thought as there wasn’t 30-40 years ago. Conservatives argued then about who was a “true conservative”, as much as now, but the arguments were between the covers and therefore seemed less virulent. I should go discuss this under the latest Peter Lawler post, but the problem of choosing a “true conservative” voice applies to this discussion, as well. A good reminder in the Douthat piece, for me anyway, was the the Left has divergent voices and perspectives, too. They are confused, too, as in embracing Warren Buffet for denouncing crony capitalism and other such lunacies.
January 1st, 2013 | 10:46 am
I have to keep repeating myself here.
Ross Douthat suggests his readers peruse The Nation or the The New Republic for an alternative perspective. There is nothing wrong with alternative perspectives, but go for quality. The Nation has not manifested quality at any time since its purchase by Victor Navasky in 1977. The New Republic was, ca. 1981, among the most engaging of opinion magazines; now it is a cesspool of Ivy League snotnosery, with the humorless Mr. Wieseltier as den mother. Admittedly, those tendencies have long been manifest at that publication, but they have now shoveled everything else out the door.
I cannot understand your disposition toward National Geographic. Do you read things because they manifest alternative perspective or do you avoid them?
With regard to what was available 30 years ago, I think your assessment needs to be qualified. There is masses of blog commentary available now and there was nothing of the sort to be seen as recently as 1995. As for publications in print and their digital analogues, this is not so much the case. The Claremont Review and City Journal were founded after 1976, but the rest of the corps of starboard publications listed above are older (as are the unlisted titles). The American Prospect, Slate, and Salon were founded after 1976, but not the rest of the portside. Slate and Salon are purely digital. Most of the Christian publications are newer, but I think only Books & Culture was founded after 1990. You also have to recall publications which went under. On the starboard side, that would be The Public Interest, Inquiry, Encounter, and the series of house organs issued by AEI over the years. On the portside that would be Saturday Review, The New Leader, Ramparts, Partisan Review, Working Papers, &c. The loss of Saturday Review and The Public Interest were the most serious blows. The loss of U.S. News and World Report was a good deal more injurious than the expiration of Newsweek, which had decayed into a farce.
Stated another way, in 1977 you could have read Human Events, National Review, Modern Age, The Public Interest, and The American Spectator. Chronicles of Culture was just starting up. Norman Podhoretz was steering Commentary toward the right and Joseph Epstein was beginning to take The American Scholar in that direction. In a more popular vein, the editorial policy of both National Geographic and Reader’s Digest was friendly. Paul Harvey and Avi Nelson were on the radio. It simply is not true that Mr. Buckley’s circle was the only game in town.
There is more commentary, but there are fewer publications.
January 1st, 2013 | 10:51 am
One might also point out the appearance of the op-ed page after 1955, replacing the monochromatic stable of columnists. In 1977, you could read Paul Harvey, James J. Kilpatrick, William F. Buckley, William Rusher, George Will, Smith Hempstone, Emmett Tyrell, Joseph Sobran, Joseph Alsop, and Joseph Kraft, syndicated to your local paper.
January 1st, 2013 | 11:10 am
Yes, the transformation of the op-ed page — good point.
January 1st, 2013 | 11:39 am
In re National Geographic, I am confessing to periodically (!) becoming reactionary. There again, I miss the good old days of the National Geographic of my youth, the 1950s. My grandmother had every copy going back to I don’t even know when and I was allowed to look at the pictures and then read those to heart’s content. Those were kept in the corner of a rarely used room where the adults were happy to leave the child to herself as long as she was quiet. It was a different sort of publication, but then again. liberality was a different sort of politics back then.
I’ll grant you the publications you mention, but I did not know them then. I found National Review in the Columbia University’s Butler Library periodical section one afternoon in about 1972 and liked it. My DSOC/Harrington-besotted husband was shocked at both my ignorance of what I had read and of my sympathy with its politics. That library probably had all of those publications you mention, but I didn’t read them.
Again, liberality was different back then and a stream of it became what we now think of as a part of conservative politics. College experience was different. Lots of things were different. The Internet has both limited paper publications and made other media expression more accessible. The blogging world and the Internet are a cacophony of voices to me; we always have to make choices.
I watched TV last night for the first time in a very long time, only for about 30 minutes, but it left me feeling a little sick. It’s frenetic. Then again, there are probably tasteful choices that can be made by the cognoscenti. I probably ought to watch just to understand modern politics better. It seems like a punishment, but I can always turn it off. Just as we can choose to read or not read and where and how to read.
Thank you for your selections above, A.D.. I have been exploring their online iterations. It’s a new year, after all, and a good time for reading new things.
January 1st, 2013 | 5:34 pm
There are no selections above. That’s the kitchen sink. Your librarians at Lakeland should have a subscription to WorldCat, with or without public access. From this you can get a list of what is to be found at Case Western Reserve’s library. Spend part of an afternoon there. Put the half-dozen or so book review publications side by side and see which works for you. Compare Geographical to National Geographic and see which has the content more conducive to filling the gap in your knowledge you want to fill. Categorize the publications you examine as follows:
1. Insufficient value added to justify time;
2. Library scan and browse
3. Library read
4. Home subscription faux de mieux
5. Home subscription preferred.
Case Western Reserve is likely to be the library with the most comprehensive collection near you, though there may be a central metropolitan library in Cleveland with a good deal. The librarians at Lakeland can help you identify which publications are at convenient local libraries.
January 1st, 2013 | 5:39 pm
I should note, academic libraries often have public access catalogues available to the general public, so you do not need a WorldCat search, though WorldCat can get you proximate holdings list. Not so sure about public libraries. Your reference librarians can help you interpret the serial holdings statements if they confuse you.
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