Great Examples in Selective Memory
For some reason, I've gotten on The New Republic's spam list, so about every week I get an e-mail purporting to be from part-owner Marty Peretz (for whom I used to work). It's a little annoying, but a little amusing at the same time, since anyone who knows Marty would find it hard to reconcile his gruff, provocative voice with the slick sales pitch of these e-mails.
Consider this week's e-mail, highlighting Andrew Sullivan's essay on torture in the current issue:
Dear Reader, By almost everybody's reckoning, Andrew Sullivan is one of the great political and philosophical essayists of our time: controversial, rigorous, sensible. He also writes like a dream, like some of the other extraordinary essayists in this magazine's history: Walter Lippmann, Rebecca West, Edmund Wilson, and Alfred Kazin. Educated at Oxford (where he was president of the Oxford Political Union) and at Harvard (where he earned his PhD in political theory), Andrew served first as an intern, then as an associate editor, and finally for more than five years as editor of The New Republic. Since then he has been a writer of books, his own blog, articles for The Sunday Times of London, and, of course, essays in TNR. No one who has read his last essay in our pages, "The End of Gay Culture," will soon forget either its sweep or its attention to the significant details of his narrative. Subscribe today to read Andrew's past powerful pieces.Very generous words of praise for Andrew, who is indeed immensely talented. It's almost enough to make you forget that Andrew's five years of editing The New Republic came to an abrupt end when the same Marty Peretz unceremoniously, um, fired him....
Obviously the relationship between the two has survived, as it should. It's just that TNR's history is so much more interesting than its promotional materials convey....
