
The New York Review of Books turns 50 - gruseom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-new-york-review-of-books-turns-50/2013/11/06/5e031f64-4703-11e3-a196-3544a03c2351_story.html
======
mturmon
"The 50th anniversary issue is gaudy with intellectual firepower. Four Nobel
Laureates have bylines. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer muses on
reading Proust. There’s the transcript of a long-lost lecture by T.S. Eliot.
British novelist Zadie Smith writes about her dad and their walks in public
gardens."

It has its quirks and limitations -- Anglophilia, Isaiah Berlin, clubby-ness
("the New York review of each other's books), East-coast myopia. But it is
consistently interesting, smart, confident, and deep.

------
igravious
I feel I have to promote the Times Literary Supplement. I personally have
always gotten somewhat more out of it. The NYRB feels a tad parochial (inward-
looking) at times, its subject matter a tad more restricted than the TLS. But
it's great they got Zadie Smith to write a piece for the anniversary issue, I
love her voice. Actually a bit ashamed to say I haven't been keeping tabs on
the both the TLS and the NYRB - I used to spend hours with stacks of them to
pass the time and discover new pastures in uni - in a while.

~~~
lobster_johnson
I don't agree about NYRB being parochial and restricted. If anything, it's one
of the more expansive magazines in terms of subject matter covered. While I
don't know the Times, I can't think of a literary magazine more dedicated to
covering the entire world (geographically, politically, intellectually) as
NYRB.

For example, NYRB has a _lot_ of foreign reporting and analysis; this last
year they have had a ton on Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Libya and a wealth of other
countries. Many of the subjects covered — books, art, people — are not
American.

And while their stable of writers certainly lean in a specific political
direction, NYRB tends to favour just quietly reporting the facts, as opposed
to bombastically trumpeting political opinions the way that, say, The
Economist (which recently insisted that western leaders must bomb Syria)
frequently does.

There are admittedly exceptions. NYRB has traditionally been critical of
Israel, for example. But they are generally critical of war-mongering,
persecution and nationalism, so it's hard to argue that they are being one-
sided in that sense.

------
rplacd
I'll offer my congratulations as well - it feels like it's just been able to
freshly tap the nerve of what lies beneath cosmopolitan America, and for that
alone it won't go stale for a bit. The LRB, even through the same means, has
ended up sounding like it fights a rear-guard action.

