Readers, forgive my absence: I spent last week languishing with the flu in a $200/wk motel in Knoxville, Tennessee. (The whys and wherefores are doubtless of little interest, so I’ll just leave it at that.) I have returned to discover not one but two incidences of baseless invective directed at The New Criterion, and I would be no man at all if I let them go unchallenged.
The first insult issued from disgraced buffoon Dinesh D’Souza. Perhaps he’s been driven mad by the creeping realization that his career henceforth will consist entirely of entertaining drunken College Republicans at birthday parties for the Gipper. “I thought The New Criterion went out of business years ago,” wrote D’Souza. Ahem. I suppose when D’Souza was contacted by two New Criterion editors about the production of this book, he thought they were from, you know, some other New Criterion.
Gawker, choosing a different tack, readily admits to the existence of The New Criterion, but regards it as a sort of crumbling antique: The temperature and humidity must be monitored carefully; the magazine must not be exposed to direct sunlight, etc. In a blog post about the Village Voice: “It’s hard enough to edit a weekly with the most calcified staff outside of The New Criterion’s . . .”
Now hold it. This will not stand. The New Criterion is these days crawling with bright young things. Just look at the masthead. What’s more, the magazine gives plenty of ink and inches to some of the brightest young things writing, too. The current issue is the first—and, one hopes, the first of many—to feature Michael Weiss, with a brilliant essay on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Weiss is (see here) twenty-six. There is the Journal’s Joseph Rago, younger still than that, though you might not guess it from his great piece on Ayaan Hirsi Ali—or his pounding of coffin nails into the reputation of Gore Vidal. There is Alex Nazaryan, also a member of the under-thirty set, on Washington Irving.
To put it another way: Sorry, Dinesh, your replacements have arrived.
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