The New York Review of Books

I hope that this journal thrives after Barbara Epstein's death. It has been a splendid addition.

Two years ago, a lengthy piece in The Nation heralded “The Rebirth of The NYRB.” Written by a young journalist named Scott Sherman, it argued that the Review had once again become “a powerful and combative actor on the political scene.” Week after week, it carried dispatches from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Guantánamo Bay. Mark Danner and Orville Schell reported from Iraq. That courageous warhorse Norman Mailer, still contributing to the Review 40 years after his appearance in the first issue, wrote a piece denouncing the United States under Bush as “a monumental banana republic.”

But what is the Review’s place in that republic? Is it read beyond the confines of New York—by which I mean Manhattan and its cosmopolitan outposts Berkeley, Cambridge, and the university-dominated villages of Ann Arbor and Madison, New Haven, and Hyde Park? How much influence does it have in the Real World? Silvers points to the article by Mark Danner on the “dodgy dossier” that justified Tony Blair in joining the invasion of Iraq. “We were the only publication to run the full text of the Downing Street memo!” he says. Elizabeth Drew’s piece on the Bush administration’s pursuit of unchecked executive power “had an amazing effect. People in Congress read it.” Whether this constitutes influence is hard to say. “I have no great confidence that anything is influential,” says Silvers. “If it is, great.” But he values influence far less than independence—both ideological and financial.

It is a sad fact of life in America that the general audience for so-called intellectual publications, both left and right, is so small that most of them require subsidies in order to survive. Rupert Murdoch owns the neocon Weekly Standard; a consortium of prominent liberals, including Paul Newman, owns The Nation; and a consortium of no fixed ideology that includes Harvard associate professor Martin Peretz and Roger Hertog, a major donor to the conservative Manhattan Institute, owns The New Republic. The Review, too, now has a wealthy owner, Rea Hederman, whose family owned the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger.

The New York Review of Books After Barbara Epstein -- New York Magazine