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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)