Timothy Noah

Glossy magazines, of course, aren’t completely inhospitable to running stories on quirky and/or challenging subjects. But I can’t think of a magazine writer, other than Wolfe, who’s explored so wide a variety of disciplines and subcultures over the last three decades while working, for the most part, outside the rarified precincts of The New Yorker, […]

I also like, though have a few disagreements with, Alterman’s book. What Liberal Media? makes a smart and important point: The widespread assumption that the news media is captive to liberalism simply isn’t true. Alterman makes his strongest case when discussing the “punditocracy,” a term he coined in his 1992 book, Sound and Fury. The […]

Ron Rosenbaum is my favorite practitioner of mass-market, glossy-magazine journalism. He might have a serious rival. If Tom Wolfe were still a frequent writer of magazine nonfictionbut even then Rosenbaum would probably be my favorite. Like Wolfe, Rosenbaum has stretched the boundaries of the form—but at a time when the form is especially resistant to […]

Glossy magazines, of course, aren’t completely inhospitable to running stories on quirky and/or challenging subjects. But I can’t think of a magazine writer, other than Wolfe, who’s explored so wide a variety of disciplines and subcultures over the last three decades while working, for the most part, outside the rarified precincts of The New Yorker, […]

Unfortunately, Citizen McCain is no Politics and Money. Rather than focus on the nuts and bolts of the new campaign-finance law (which bans soft-money contributions to national parties), on the clash of interests and ideologies that shaped it, and on the possible benefits or difficulties it will create, Drew relates the narrative of John McCain’s […]

Two imperatives in contemporary journalism are at war with one another. One imperative says: Be smart! Be analytic! Be like The Washington Monthly or The New Republic or The Weekly Standard! The other imperative says: Don’t say anything that will make your readers – or, more important, your sources – mad! Don’t lose significant leaks […]