Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
Ihave always believed that the magazine is the crucial artifact of civilized life. Not the book—though good books are lovely things— for it is too solid an object, neither (as we say these...
...but I doubt that the tactile satisfaction of turning these pages will soon be replaced...
...But the magazine is in decline, people tell me (just like socialism...
...A set of short articles on health care addresses the problems of marginal groups and the possibilities of civic activism...
...they won't go away...
...They are home to an ongoing conversation, in our case, a political argument, in which many people participate, in different voices, in different genres...
...The lead article in Politics Abroad considers the unsuccessful UN peacemaking/ peacekeeping efforts in Somalia and Bosnia...
...Nor the tough-minded realism and the intellectual zest of the arguments they carry, which are not yet matched in cyberspace...
...the young don't read or, if they do, it is the screen, not the page, that holds their attention...
...This will be a regular feature...
...And in the Arguments section we feature an important debate about social policy and the single-mother family...
...Its pages should be open, its range wide, its style accessible, respectful of the average reader, its tone undogmatic and self-critical...
...In this issue, in magazinish fashion (the word is in the dictionary but too rarely used), we open a discussion of Green politics (edited by James Rule) without a standard tour of the horizon—we just plunge in, joining the most interesting arguments...
...Maybe so...
...its authors should always give reasons for their positions...
...M.W...
...Dissent is not a journal," Irving Howe used to say—for journals are only half magazines, half serial anthologies, specialized, monotone...
...Magazines are the place where books are tried out, reviewed, criticized, and, years later perhaps, reconsidered...
...SPRING • 1994 • 165...
...A democratic socialist magazine should exemplify the values it claims to defend...
...We print a talk by Katha Pollitt that deals with one of • the critical disagreements among feminists today...
...Essays, reports, comments, sketches, memoirs, symposia, reviews, polemics, letters (and an occasional poem): we publish all these, planning each issue to emphasize our "magazineness...
...its debates should be comradely but sharp...
...a rough mix of hope and irony should drive the editors...
...its coverage should include the issues most important for people in trouble...
...A good political magazine must orient its readers in the practice of democracy, and it must also, most of the time, be fun to read...
...Though the first of these topics is new to our pages, all of them are perennials...
...In fact, any good magazine ought to measure up to most of these standards, and so we have decided to apply them not only to ourselves, among ourselves, but to others as well...
...Ihave always believed that the magazine is the crucial artifact of civilized life...
...The periodicity of magazines is justified by the way important questions keep coming back—even if their most dramatic returns rarely fit our quarterly deadlines...
...Anyway, we will be magazinish to the end, and we welcome the double test of the forum and the market...
...every resolution is temporary...
...we plan to add our voice to all the conversations...
...Not the book—though good books are lovely things— for it is too solid an object, neither (as we say these days) reflexive nor interactive enough...
...We began in the winter with a piece on the new New Yorker and continue here with a critical essay on our sister magazine Partisan Review...
...Magazines will be superseded by the CDROM...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
