Laura's got about the fairest, most interesting analysis of TNR I've ever read; would that Marty pasted her post on his shoulder as a "Good Angel's" guiding vision! Reading her made me yearn for a TNR I occasionally see glimpses of, but rarely find sustained throughout a whole issue. And to answer the next question, I don't know how Frank Foer ascending to the top slot will affect that. I do know that it'll reduce his involvement in producing the content, which'll be a shame. His pieces routinely shine through the magazine's occasionally self-parodic counter-intuitivism with a quirky intelligence and merry humor that political rags across the spectrum lack.
Whatever the mag's evolution, though, the blogosphere specifically and the left generally is a bit too quick to stereotype the whole thing as a product of Peretz's zionistic eccentricities. The young writers at the place are some of the most talented on the planet, and its to the left's benefit that such a stable exists. My friend Spencer Ackerman, their lead Iraq writer, is arguably the most eloquent, insistent voice for withdrawal in any of the publications I read, while Jon Chait and Jon Cohn are the best domestic policy writers in the business (tell Cohn, the paper's health policy wonk, that I'm coming for him, though). And while that's where the list starts (I've not even mentioned Scheiber, or Crowley, or the national treasure named Lizza), it's not where it ends. Now, granted, the magazine could do with a lot more John Judis and a lot less Lawrence Kaplan, but that's the price you pay. This is the pad, after all, that launched Hendrik Hertzberg, and you need to produce a lot of Fred Barnes to outweigh the karmic backlog that hire amassed.
