I Cogitate

Despite many indications to the contrary, magazine writer William Langewiesche says right now is the golden age of nonfiction
Dorsey Kindler
San Francisco Chronicle
November 25, 2007

..."There is no special club," he said. "It doesn't matter who your friends are. It doesn't matter where you went to school. It only matters what you're capable of providing now. Write well. Period. But of course if they said that there wouldn't be that whole industry."

Magazines, in Langewiesche's opinion, are great beasts that have to be fed, constantly. If they're not fed they die, and so they're desperate for material. But they're usually fed poorly. And people who say that the golden age is in the past are simply making excuses for their inability to write or publish high-quality journalism.

"You have this precious, incredibly privileged thing," he said, "which is the reader's attention for a little while. And you can make the slightest misstep and the reader will put you down. People will say that the reader lives in a busy world. But that's not the reason why. The reason is that the writer blows it, and loses the reader's trust..."

"This is the golden age of nonfiction, now," he said. "It's not in the future sometime. It's not in the past. It's better now. This is the time. This is where the real writing is going on. There are very few good novels being written. But there is quite a bit of good nonfiction being written. It's where the boundaries are being pushed."

It was never about the money, as some newspaper and magazine articles have suggested. Langewiesche's decision to leave the Atlantic, amicable as it was, went deeper than that. He had decided to leave a few times before, but Murphy or other editors had always convinced him to stay. This time he had made up his mind.

The magazine had been purchased by David G. Bradley, owner of the beltway news-focused National Journal Group. And Langewiesche felt it was becoming more Washington-centric over the years. Then in 2005 Bradley announced that the magazine's editorial offices would be moved to the nation's capital.

"I don't like Washington," Langewiesche said. "And I'm very skeptical of Washington's view of the world. I think Washington is a very sick city. And it has become an imperial city that is hemmed in by its power. And carries with it an arrogance, a blindness about its own limitations in the world in which we live..."

Blogosphere not as radical as pundits think
Gene Lyons
November 21, 2007

It’s no exaggeration to say that the establishment media’s initial response to the blogosphere was panic. The idea of mere citizens talking back to the press was unsettling to Washington media celebrities. Pundits who’d exhibited no qualms about the sordid imaginings of, say, American Spectator or The Wall Street Journal editorial page recoiled in horror at online mockery.

It was laugh-out-loud funny to see a Washington Post reporter infamous for treating Kenneth Starr’s backstairs leaks like holy writ make a show of pretending that the now-defunct Web site mediawhoresonline.com had accused her of prostitution.

How the system had always worked was this: They dished it out, everybody else had to take it. Now that many print and broadcast outlets feature Web logs—blogs—of their own, it’s no longer common to hear the word “blogger” pronounced with utter disdain. Even so, competition from the groundlings still provokes unease. The latest high-minded worrier is a University of Chicago law professor and sometime politico, Cass R. Sunstein.

A Justice Department official during the Carter and Reagan administrations, Sunstein has written a book called “Republic. com 2. 0,” essentially arguing that the Internet’s “echo chamber effect” is responsible for increased political polarization and declining civility. In an interview with salon. com, he said that social scientists find that when people talk only to those who agree with them, their views become more extreme...

...Among the blogs I read, there’s no equivalent of the authoritarian impulses, intellectual dishonesty and rote chanting of the GOP party line that characterizes Limbaugh and his imitators on the right. Partly, that’s because most are written by educated individuals who take pride in winning arguments without cheating, and to whom party orthodoxy is anathema. In a saner climate, many wouldn’t be called left-wing at all.

How liberal do you have to be to defend habeas corpus, Fourth Amendment privacy rights and the rule of law, as Glenn Greenwald does on his “Unclaimed Territory” blog at salon. com ? A former constitutional litigator, Greenwald brings rare clarity and passion to political issues with legal overtones.

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