From: Jesse Lemisch <jesse.lemisch at verizon.net>
Doug is completely right. The Nation has succeeded in finding a black woman who sounds just like Katha Pollitt and Todd Gitlin, continuing to lead people down the bad road of Obamaism.
And the Nation 's back of the book has long been inferior to the the b-o-b of the otherwise hideous New Republic.
Jesse
> The Nation isn't at all interested in ideas - the opposite of NR back in
> the day. (NR today is risible, but that's another story.) So it turns out
> that one of the reasons that Katrina gave MHL a column is that she
> allegedly speaks to an audience far broader than The Nation's usual
> readership. The magazine shouldn't be some sort of massification device -
> it should be a thing where people think seriously. Instead, the editor is
> dumbing the thing down. It's doing more than passively genuflecting to
> brain-dead tropes - it's actively disseminating them.
>
> Doug