The New York Review of Books turns 50 | Hacker News Reader

The New York Review of Books turns 50

washingtonpost.com

36 pointsgruseom5 comments

"The 50th anniversary issue is gaudy with intellectual firepower. Four Nobel Laureates have bylines. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer muses on reading Proust. There’s the transcript of a long-lost lecture by T.S. Eliot. British novelist Zadie Smith writes about her dad and their walks in public gardens."

It has its quirks and limitations -- Anglophilia, Isaiah Berlin, clubby-ness ("the New York review of each other's books), East-coast myopia. But it is consistently interesting, smart, confident, and deep.

I feel I have to promote the Times Literary Supplement. I personally have always gotten somewhat more out of it. The NYRB feels a tad parochial (inward-looking) at times, its subject matter a tad more restricted than the TLS. But it's great they got Zadie Smith to write a piece for the anniversary issue, I love her voice. Actually a bit ashamed to say I haven't been keeping tabs on the both the TLS and the NYRB - I used to spend hours with stacks of them to pass the time and discover new pastures in uni - in a while.

Zadie Smith is a frequent contributor to the NY Review: http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/zadie-smith-2/

I don't agree about NYRB being parochial and restricted. If anything, it's one of the more expansive magazines in terms of subject matter covered. While I don't know the Times, I can't think of a literary magazine more dedicated to covering the entire world (geographically, politically, intellectually) as NYRB.

For example, NYRB has a lot of foreign reporting and analysis; this last year they have had a ton on Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Libya and a wealth of other countries. Many of the subjects covered — books, art, people — are not American.

And while their stable of writers certainly lean in a specific political direction, NYRB tends to favour just quietly reporting the facts, as opposed to bombastically trumpeting political opinions the way that, say, The Economist (which recently insisted that western leaders must bomb Syria) frequently does.

There are admittedly exceptions. NYRB has traditionally been critical of Israel, for example. But they are generally critical of war-mongering, persecution and nationalism, so it's hard to argue that they are being one-sided in that sense.

I'll offer my congratulations as well - it feels like it's just been able to freshly tap the nerve of what lies beneath cosmopolitan America, and for that alone it won't go stale for a bit. The LRB, even through the same means, has ended up sounding like it fights a rear-guard action.

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