Slate Magazine

“Being pop critic at The Times is a dream job—certainly it was mine,” the former occupant of that position, Kelefa Sanneh, wrote in an e-mail to Off the Record this week.

But a little more than two weeks ago, Mr. Sanneh left his dream job for the other dream job: a reporting gig at The New Yorker. Since March 3, when a Times memo went out announcing Mr.  read more »

The New Yorker's classical music reviewer Alex Ross, (whom the Observer's Doree Shafrir considers the best listener in America) and The New York Times' (mostly) jazz writer Ben Ratcliff have been firing off emails about pop, jazz and classical to each other and posting them on Slate for the past few days. They're attempting to "leave their musical islands." Here's a highlight reel:  read more »

The past year has seen the launch of the Fox Business Network and Condé Nast’s Portfolio. Now it looks like there could be another brand-new business journalism start-up to add to the list.  read more »

Noam Chomsky has, on Znet (at zmag.org), now joined the chorus criticizing the Walt-Mearsheimer article in LRB on the power of the Israel lobby. Chomsky gives the authors credit for debating a verboten subject, but says, It's the oil and corporate interests, stupid (that have dictated policy in the Mideast). It's typical of Chomsky, as a materialist, to say this. He has always missed the sociological component of this issue, and he's doing so now. Hitchens does the same thing on Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2138741/) when he shrugs off the pro-Israel advisers in the Administration's war party as just a bunch of passionate Jewish neocons who happened to end up at Bush's elbow. What both men are missing is the transformation of the establishment in the last generation, the growing strength of Jews in our leadership class. I am part of this transformation, and it has largely been a great thing: reflection of diversity, openness and growing sophistication in educational and cultural values. The problem of the Jewish arrival in the leadership class is that we deny we've arrived. To say so goes against Jewish identity, as persecuted outsiders. Or it seems to echo anti-Semitic arguments the Nazis used about conspiratorial Jewish influence. But the result is that we completely fail to recognize our power, and fail, in certain respects, to exercise it responsibly. That failure is evident in the most questionable aspect of U.S. policy in the Middle East: the refusal by anyone in the Establishment to condemn Israel's near-40 year occupation of Arab lands. To his credit, Hitchens, a fellow traveler of the neocons, says as much in his Slate article.

Almost everybody also concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe and has implicated the United States in a sordid and costly morass.

But such statements are rarely heard in the mainstream. Congressmen can't make them, at the risk of their careers. Artists can't make them--witness the censorship of the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie at a progressive New York theater. I know where it comes from. The refusal to condemn the occupation grows out of Jewish existential fears: the sense, born of the Holocaust, that at any minute we're going to be wiped off the map. Hey, we are powerless victims. But (at a time of the fifth largest army in the world and Ivy League presidents who stand up for it) this is an unrealistic fear, and meantime the effect of that fear, the refusal to acknowledge the occupation (the "so-called occupation," Congressman Elliot Engel said on BBC yesterday) means ignoring what most other states see plainly as an ongoing disaster. It's all well and good to condemn radical Islam and suicide bombers. As I do. But what about the religious/nationalist zealots who are colonizing the west bank? Mum's the word. It's like the Catholic hierarchy refusing to admit the church has a pedophilia problem. That is the real strength of the Israel lobby: taking this issue off the table in American public life, whether it's the Congress, The New York Times or the Washington thinktanks. It's not a conspiracy, it's simply the reflection of the fact that people who grew up loving Israel are now an important part of the establishment, and they are inflexible when it comes to this issue. And that is the "stranglehold" Mearsheimer and Walt identified in the paper that couldn't be published in America.

Bill Safire remarked Sunday that the way to run against Hillary is to adopt "the same campaign they used against Henry Clay.... You remember. 'Clay can't win.'"

In case you don't remember, David Wissing explains, with a caveat:

"Now the one difference between Clay and Hillary is that Hillary actually has never lost a national election. Clay's reputation as some who 'couldn't win' was earned over his three defeats whereas the thought that Hillary 'can't win' is only a theory at the moment."

A theory, I'd add, that the New York State Republican Party is doing its best to discredit.  read more »

Kaus, meanwhile, notes the absurdity of the notion that Hillary would write a blog to hit at "Hillary's characterological inhospitability to the bloggerly virtues."

Clicking through a stack of e-mail from readers indignant over something I'd written about President  read more »