Conflicting reactions to the mass editorial exodus at the New Republic continue to emerge. At Slate, Seth Stevenson describes the backlash against TNR owner Chris Hughes, as well as the backlash against the backlash. At Vox, Ezra Klein suggests that the TNR, though long important, needs some kind of change: Under the leadership of new editor Gabriel Snyder, the revamped TNR, he points out, “won’t be what The New Republic was. And that’s because the thing The New Republic was has already died.” Max Fisher considers TNR’s “race problem,” and points out that “to my knowledge, not one of
On Friday, following an investigative report in the Washington Post, Rolling Stone published a letter to readers acknowledging weaknesses in its much discussed story “A Rape on Campus,” which told the story of Jackie, a student who claimed that she was gang raped at a University of Virginia frat house. Most significantly, the reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, failed to get in touch with the young men whom Jackie had accused. Rolling Stone scrambled to apologize, first saying that its trust in Jackie had been “misplaced,” then emending their apology to take the blame from Jackie’s shoulders. Now the prefatory note to the article says that they were “mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters.” Many have commented on the story as it unfolded, including Chris Hayes, Matt Taibbi, and Hanna Rosin.
David Graeber—a professor at the London School of Economics, an Occupy Wall Street organizer, and the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years—has sold his latest book, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, to Melville House. The book will be published in February 2015.
After writing more than 3,000 reviews in the past three decades, Jonathan Yardley has retired from the Washington Post.