01/13/2015
I wrote some weeks ago about the demise of The New Republic, our culture of “juvenescence,” and the difficulty of faking cultural heft. At least William Deresiewicz is on the same wave-length. Kind of. In case you missed it, the aptly named Michael Schulson has recently published a Salon Q&A with Deresiewicz – he indirectly called Chris Hughes, the youngster whose mismanagement trashed the century-old institution, an “entitled little sh*t,” so naturally that phrase made it into the headline. Deresiewicz was a contributing editor to the ill-fated magazine, and says that Hughes missed the point: that The New Republic has never made money. “The Nation loses money now, Harper’s loses money now, and they’ve been reliant on benevolent plutocrats who recognize that there are more important things than the market and are willing to run them not as profit-making institutions but as institutions that have value for other reasons.”