Weekness and Endurance
By DAVID BROOKS
NYT
Just over a week ago, Newsweek announced that it is going to merge with the online magazine The Daily Beast. Since then, cyberspace has echoed with pessimistic commentary about the future of this new entity. After all, why should anyone think that two money-losing organizations will start making money simply because they have banded together?
It’s a fair question, but I wouldn’t be so gloomy. The pessimists are underestimating how much American culture is changing right now and how these changes will open up fresh opportunities for Newsweek and old-line general-interest print magazines like it. These magazines didn’t thrive for so many decades for no reason. They tapped into a deep strain in American culture.
If you want to get highfalutin about it, this strain started in the 19th century when Ralph Waldo Emerson and other lesser lights offered audiences recipes for self-improvement. The man and woman of character, they said, must possess a well-furnished mind. You may be a salesman or a farmer or a housewife, but you have a responsibility to be familiar with the best that has been thought and said.
To be respectable, it is necessary to spend your leisure time sampling the great masterworks of culture. To fight off the grubby materialism of American culture, it is necessary to be conversant in philosophy, theology and the great political events of the wider world.
(More here.)
NYT
Just over a week ago, Newsweek announced that it is going to merge with the online magazine The Daily Beast. Since then, cyberspace has echoed with pessimistic commentary about the future of this new entity. After all, why should anyone think that two money-losing organizations will start making money simply because they have banded together?
It’s a fair question, but I wouldn’t be so gloomy. The pessimists are underestimating how much American culture is changing right now and how these changes will open up fresh opportunities for Newsweek and old-line general-interest print magazines like it. These magazines didn’t thrive for so many decades for no reason. They tapped into a deep strain in American culture.
If you want to get highfalutin about it, this strain started in the 19th century when Ralph Waldo Emerson and other lesser lights offered audiences recipes for self-improvement. The man and woman of character, they said, must possess a well-furnished mind. You may be a salesman or a farmer or a housewife, but you have a responsibility to be familiar with the best that has been thought and said.
To be respectable, it is necessary to spend your leisure time sampling the great masterworks of culture. To fight off the grubby materialism of American culture, it is necessary to be conversant in philosophy, theology and the great political events of the wider world.
(More here.)
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