In the back of The New Republic this week is a glowing review by Frank Kermode of James Wood's forthcoming book How Fiction Works.

Wood, of course, spent twelve years as The New Republic's chief literary critic before abruptly leaving last summer for a staff job at The New Yorker. And so, while it's not the liveliest piece in the world ("Commentary of the kind here offered will very often give rise to conflicting readings, and I do not often find myself in serious dispute with the author. Wood's book is full of acceptable insights on a long list of novelists and topics..."), Mr. Kermode's review is a compelling one when you consider just how much The New Republic meant to Mr. Wood during those twelve years, and how much he meant to it.

Barry Gewen, one of the editors on the staff of The New York Times Book Review, has written a fierce little post on the NYTBR's Paper Cuts blog, in which he calls out the famously severe New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier for calling Malcolm Gladwell an "idiot" in a recent column.

"Wieseltier has always enjoyed a good literary brawl, most famously perhaps, with his long takedown years ago of the work and career of Cornel West," Mr. Gewen writes. "Wieseltier knows how to spew vitriol, and the smoke that rises from the page can be fun for readers to inhale... But in a column Wieseltier did for the March 12 issue of The New Republic, I think he stepped over the line. "  read more »

For all the clumsiness of the McCain press folks over the past 30 hours since The New York Times published their story about their candidate's ties to a lobbyist, they scored at least one direct hit—a talking point that has appealed to and happily been dispersed by the self-involved press.

But first, the idiocy!  read more »

Observer alumnus Gabe Sherman has a piece in The New Republic today that pins Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to Bill Kristol's hiring and how lots of current and former Times staffers aren't happy about it.  read more »

We once had the pleasure of meeting Ian McEwan, the ever-more popular author of Atonement. (For the record, he Culture Czar will always favor his creepy classic, Enduring Love. A hot air balloon was never so memorable!) Mr. McEwan struck us as outrageously smart and outspoken (he’s been a staunch critic of the war on terror); he also had that impeccable grace the English seem to come by so easily. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Mr. McEwan hates what you’re reading right now: blogs.  read more »

Media reporter--and Observer alumnus--Gabe Sherman is leaving Portfolio and joining The New Republic, WWD reports. He'll be covering the presidential campaign there, and he already has a piece about Mike Huckabee's combative relationship with the Arkansas press corps. While Sherman won't be a staff writer for Conde Nast anymore, he'll stay on as a contributing editor.

As The Observer wrote yesterday, one of the main reasons New Republic editor Franklin Foer decided to end the magazine's effort to verify Scott Beauchamp's "Baghdad Diarist" columns and issue a retraction was Mr. Foer's belief that Mr. Beauchamp—who was stationed in Iraq until last month—was not fully cooperating with TNR's investigation, and sometimes appeared uninterested in defending himself.

In a phone interview with The Observer Friday, Mr. Beauchamp's wife, former TNR reporter-researcher Elspeth Reeve, shed a bit more light on that aspect of the controversy.

In early August, the web site of The Weekly Standard, citing a military source close to the army's internal investigation, reported that Mr. Beauchamp had signed a sworn statement recanting much of what he'd described in his TNR pieces. TNR's editors were understandably troubled by the news, and set about trying to verify it—a task made much more difficult by the fact that, from late July until September, the Army would not allow Mr. Beauchamp to speak to TNR.  read more »

“Yeah, it’s a bummer, but it’s hard to shed any tears over Frank,” Elspeth Reeve was telling The Observer in a phone interview Friday, the day before her husband, U.S. Army Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, joined her at her mother’s house in Missouri for his 30-day leave.

Earlier that week, Ms. Reeve’s former boss, The New Republic’s editor, Franklin Foer, had published a 7000-word piece that concluded by formally retracting three first-person columns that the 24-year-old Mr. Beauchamp had written for the magazine over the summer. Soon after their publication, a chorus of conservative bloggers had raised questions about the veracity of the columns, in which Mr. Beauchamp offered first-person accounts of American troops in Iraq engaging in shocking behavior, such as running over dogs with their Bradleys, and mocking a woman whose face had been disfigured in an explosion. After carrying out a nearly five-month investigation, which involved attempts to corroborate Mr. Beauchamp’s claims with other members of his unit, Mr. Foer had concluded that the stories could not be verified.  read more »

Kindled by Amazon's e-book service and the decline of good book reviewing, The New Republic's first-page editorial attacks The Battle of the Book.  read more »

New Republic editor Frank Foer's nearly 7,000-word retraction of his magazine's Scott Thomas Beauchamp stories has already received plenty of attention since appearing this weekend. But it's not immediately clear what precipitated its publication.

Based on Mr. Foer's account, it does not appear that TNR's four-and-a-half-month investigation turned up any new inconsistencies in Mr. Beauchamp's stories. Nor has Mr. Beauchamp confessed to making anything up.

So why is TNR backing off now?

In an interview this afternoon, Mr. Foer told Media Mob that while there was no evidence to suggest that Mr. Beauchamp had fabricated any of his Iraq dispatches, TNR’s editors had lost confidence in their correspondent over the course of the fall, and had reached a dead-end with their investigation.  read more »