Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Hendrik Hertzberg: Reviewing "An American Life": "We knew about Reagan and war movies...

...What Cannon adds is that Reagan loved peace movies, too.

I confess that I am still annoyed at the strange persistence of the narrative of decline around the Gabriel Snyder New Republic. People forget just how awful the Old New Republic was how much of the time. Here, to remind us, is Heather Hurlburt from 2012:

Heather Hurlburt: Leon Wieseltier Thinks You Can Never Have Enough War : "I haven’t read Rachel Maddow’s new book, Drift...

...Unlike The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, I am not a book critic. I am a national security professional.  This means that--also unlike Wieseltier--I spend my days immersed in the thinking and writing of defense experts and policymakers--in the U.S. government, in the military, in other nations, in the non-governmental sector.

Let us remember the days when the Old New Republic, under the ownership of Marty Peretz and the editorship of Franklin Foer put forward people who are, shall we say, not very quantitative to make "the case against Keynes... [and] Krugman", and for austerity.

Good riddance:

William Galston (June 2010): The Case Against Keynes (With Some Questions for Krugman, Too): "As President Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission gets set to convene...

Over on the Twitter Device the very sharp Tim Noah trolls me by writing 33 tweets about how "things went sour" for The Old New Republic when Richard Just got fired:

1.) This @VanityFair profile of Chris Hughes compels me to correct the record. http://t.co/CMckyAx3ht

— Timothy Noah (@TimothyNoah1) June 8, 2015

And following up with:

@delong @tnr the most part a good magazine, one that I'll wager you paid more attention to then than now.

— Timothy Noah (@TimothyNoah1) June 8, 2015

@delong @tnr It was a good magazine committed to hearing out the debate among liberals. It had its ups and downs and sometimes it defined

— Timothy Noah (@TimothyNoah1) June 8, 2015

Hoisted from the Archives: I understand that the Old New Republic was at times (save for firing him) very good to the very sharp Timothy Noah. But he says some things he shouldn't in and ancillary to a very nice tweetstorm:

2.) Things didn't go sour for @tnr when @FranklinFoer got fired. To whatever extent there was an abrupt break from past glories ...

— Timothy Noah (@TimothyNoah1) June 8, 2015

For example:

@delong @tnr the most part a good magazine, one that I'll wager you paid more attention to then than now.

— Timothy Noah (@TimothyNoah1) June 8, 2015

It was not a good magazine.