A Nasty Piece of Work
by James Kirchick, Newsweek, February 25, 2013
Perhaps the most serious charge Seymour makes against Hitchens is that of plagiarism, serious not only for what it says about the integrity of the accused, but, at least in Hitchens’s case, significant because of his reputation, attested to even by those who despised what he wrote, as a highly original stylist, wit, and orator. Plagiarism is a grave accusation to level at any journalist, particularly one who is not even here to defend himself, and all the more irresponsible because Seymour provides no evidence to substantiate his scandalous claims. For instance, Seymour writes that “a great deal of his work on Bill Clinton’s betrayal on health care was lifted” from another journalist, yet in the footnotes concedes, “In fairness, Hitchens credited [said journalist’s] work in the chapter in the paperback edition of No One Left to Lie To,” Hitchens’s salvo against the 42nd president.
The next instance of plagiarism Seymour alleges is a 2003 retrospective review Hitchens wrote of the seminal book Orientalism by his former friend and co-author, the Columbia professor and pro-Palestinian activist Edward Said. “Much of the article is actually plagiarized from the book it is allegedly reviewing,” Seymour writes. His source for this claim, an article from Alexander Cockburn’s conspiracy theorist website Counterpunch, cites a single sentence Hitchens supposedly plagiarized from Said, which, upon inspection, reveals no plagiarism whatsoever. Seymour also alleges that “one reviewer has already detected plagiarism in the case of large tranches of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man,” yet the review in question, while certainly negative, actually states that “there is of course no question of plagiarism” by Hitchens. As for other examples of what he claims to be Hitchens’s “many plagiarisms,” Seymour offers nothing.
Longreads of the Year 2012: July-December
“Marie Colvin’s Private War”, by Marie Brenner, Vanity Fair, August 2012
For years in England, with its high tolerance of alcoholism and its reluctance to force confrontation, Colvin’s friends and editors often resorted to evasion—Marie is feeling fragile. Marie does not sound like herself. When they tried to intervene, she would tell them, “I have no intention of not drinking. I never drink when I am covering a war.” Her attempts to find help were always short-lived.
She would wake up drenched in sweat. The desperate reel of horrors that played over and over in her mind kept returning to the refugee camp in Beirut, where she saw the 22-year-old Palestinian woman lying in a heap with half her head blown off. As recently as last year, Colvin was staying with her nieces and nephews in East Norwich when the doorbell suddenly awakened her. The next morning Rosemarie discovered that Marie had gotten up and put a knife in her sleeping bag. When Rosemarie mentioned it, Marie said, “Oh, that,” and changed the subject.
“Scientology Is Not a Religion”, by James Kirchick, Tablet, July 24, 2012
Around the world, a handful of politicians have urged their governments to prosecute Scientology as a criminal conspiracy. Three years ago, a Paris court found the Church guilty of fraud and fined it $900,000. That same year, a member of the Australian Senate, Nick Xenophon, delivered a speech in which he described Scientology as “criminal organization that hides behind its so-called religious beliefs.” After calling for an investigation into the Church’s tax-exempt status during a television interview, he began to receive letters from ex-Scientologists across Australia detailing what he described as “a worldwide pattern of abuse and criminality,” including torture, forced confinement, and coerced abortions. (Xenophon’s call for a parliamentary inquiry into the Church was ultimately rejected by the Australian government.) In 2007, following a 10-year investigation, a Belgian prosecutor called for the Church to be labeled a criminal organization and recommended that up to 12 Church officials face charges for the illegal practice of medicine, violation of privacy, and use of illegal contracts. The State Department criticized the move, stating that the United States would “oppose any effort to stigmatize an entire group based solely upon religious beliefs and would be concerned over infringement of any individual’s rights because of religious affiliation.”
“Obama’s Way”, by Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair, October 2012
As I was still a little groggy and put my question poorly, he answered a question it hadn’t occurred to me to ask: Why doesn’t he show more emotion? He does this on occasion, even when I’ve put the question clearly—see in what I’ve asked some implicit criticism, usually one he’s heard many times before. As he’s not naturally defensive, it’s pretty clearly an acquired trait. “There are some things about being president that I still have difficulty doing,” he said. “For example, faking emotion. Because I feel it is an insult to the people I’m dealing with. For me to feign outrage, for example, feels to me like I’m not taking the American people seriously. I’m absolutely positive that I’m serving the American people better if I’m maintaining my authenticity. And that’s an overused word. And these days people practice being authentic. But I’m at my best when I believe what I am saying.”
That was not what I had been after. What I had wanted to know was: Where do you put what you actually feel, when there is no place in your job to feel it? When you are president you are not allowed to go numb to protect yourself from whatever news might happen. But it was too late; my time was up; I returned to my seat in the cabin.
“The Disappeared”, by Salman Rushdie, The New Yorker, September 17, 2012
The ironic truth was that, after two novels that engaged directly with the public history of the Indian subcontinent, he saw this new book as a more personal exploration, a first attempt to create a work out of his own experience of migration and metamorphosis. To him, it was the least political of the three books. And the material derived from the origin story of Islam was, he thought, essentially respectful toward the Prophet of Islam, even admiring of him. It treated him as he always said he wanted to be treated, not as a divine figure (like the Christians’ “Son of God”) but as a man (“the Messenger”). It showed him as a man of his time, shaped by that time, and, as a leader, both subject to temptation and capable of overcoming it. “What kind of idea are you?” the novel asked the new religion, and suggested that an idea that refused to bend or compromise would, in all likelihood, be destroyed, but conceded that, in very rare instances, such ideas became the ones that changed the world. His Prophet flirted with compromise, then rejected it, and his unbending idea grew strong enough to bend history to its will.
When he was first accused of being offensive, he was truly perplexed. He thought he had made an artistic engagement with the phenomenon of revelation—an engagement from the point of view of an unbeliever, certainly, but a genuine one nonetheless. How could that be thought offensive? The thin-skinned years of rage-defined identity politics that followed taught him, and everyone else, the answer to that question.
“The Trouble with Valerie Trierweiler”, by Tracy McNicoll, Newsweek, September 17, 2012
But some of the first lady’s old material documented in the new books plainly cheerleads for her champ. Some articles dissect Hollande and Royal as a couple in disturbing detail with hindsight. Cabana and Rosencher excerpt an old four-page Paris Match piece on the pair. “During the campaign, [Hollande] arrived home more than once from a rally on the other end of France after 2 a.m. only to leave again before 7 a.m. To have at least the sentiment of not neglecting the four children,” Trierweiler wrote in 2004. “Their mother sometimes stayed away 10 days without going home.”
“Panic in Jerusalem”, by Menachem Kaiser, Tablet, November 29, 2012
A community in the grips of a moral panic will, as a rule, first target its misfits. All who have been arrested or questioned by police in Nahlaot are very clearly outsiders in the community. They were, a neighbor told me, “atypical, easy to accuse, misfit, single older men.” Many, like Satz and Primashelanu, are mentally handicapped. Noach Friedman, who was institutionalized after being released, would barge into homes and break plates and has had to be rescued from his studio apartment twice after setting his bed on fire. Naftali Zilberman and Yaakov Weissfish, who were both arrested and released, are also mentally handicapped. Zalman Cohen is a belligerent South African immigrant married to a convert who used to interrupt walking tours of the neighborhood. Skippy is a non-Haredi senior citizen with a ponytail who was repeatedly described to me with terms like “obnoxious” or “asshole,” and is an exercise fanatic. (He was originally identified, I was told by a parent, after the kids said they were forced to do calisthenics. “These retarded guys were forcing the kids, as part of the molestation, to do exercise,” the parent told me.) Missionary Christians, of course, are the ultimate “other” in a Haredi community.
For my Longreads picks from January through June — from Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and The New Yorker — click here.
In Conversation: Tina Brown
by Michael Kinsley, New York, November 18, 2012
I think it was a romantic gamble that there was still life to be had for Newsweek. We felt that for the Daily Beast—such a frisky digital brand—to have a print platform as well would be great. And, actually, that proved to be true. But every piece of the Zeitgeist was against Newsweek, combined with an unfixable infrastructure and a set of challenges that really would have required five years in an up economy to solve.
…Well, let’s face it—when I look back on it, taking over Newsweek, it just seems completely insane, actually. Within the first few months, one of the partners dies—before we’d even really gotten the office straight. I came into a situation where pretty much every senior member of management had departed. That was one of the big differences between Newsweek and The New Yorker. When I took over The New Yorker, there was a very, very good, smart staff in place.
Defending Tina Brown
Tina Brown is more than capable of defending herself. But, such has been the glee at Newsweek’s demise – noticeable among the filthiest, bottom-feeding elements of new media to the point, in the case of John Cook of Gawker, of fairly open and visceral misogyny – that it would be most ungallant and unreasonable if someone did not stick up for her.
Turning around Newsweek was an almost impossible task. When Brown inherited the magazine (or when it was thrust upon her, depending on what you read) it was in a condition of neglect and dilapidation. IAC – run by Barry Diller, it half-owns The Newsweek Daily Beast Company alongside the estate of Sidney Harman – took on a publication with a $40 million debt and a circulation which had been cut from 3.1 million in 2008 to 1.5 million in 2010 under the editorship of Jon Meacham and ownership of The Washington Post.
Never let it said, however, that Brown didn’t get it the old college try. She hired a number of heavy hitters to work on her joint venture – Howard Kurtz on the media beat, for example – adding to the stable of talent The Daily Beast already had, including Eli Lake on national security. Andrew Sullivan and David Frum came on board to blog for the Beast and write longer-form pieces for Newsweek. Peter Beinart in the same vein started up Open Zion to facilitate discussion on Israel, Zionism, and the wider Middle East.
Brown also spearheaded a total redesign of a magazine that become somewhat staid and grandfatherly, giving it a modern edge with more white space, a sharper finish, better quality paper, and a more pointed use of photography and graphic design. Central to this attempted revival too were the much discussed and sometimes derided headlines: “THE FIRST GAY PRESIDENT”; “MUSLIM RAGE”; and “HEAVEN IS REAL”. Call them what you will, but for the first time in a good long while, there was actually a buzz surrounding Newsweek. The issue fronted by Niall Ferguson’s polemic, “HIT THE ROAD, BARACK”, doubled sales on newsstands and increased iPad downloads four-fold.
As noted earlier, Newsweek is to cease publication as a print magazine, effective by the beginning of 2013, and will then become a digital-only publication available on Kindle, iPad, and the like. The success of this model as a saviour of the magazine has yet to be determined, but as Tina Brown noted in a statement to The New York Times with regard to the decline of print, “You can not actually change an era of enormous disruptive innovation. No one single person can reverse that trend.”
More from that Times piece:
The all-digital version of the magazine will be called Newsweek Global and operate on a paid subscription model. The name Newsweek, in spite of its trouble in print, still has value in terms of international licensing, as well as several conferences Ms. Brown has created.
Readers and media analysts have been puzzled by some of the covers Ms. Brown had chosen in an effort to distinguish Newsweek from other magazines and make it a talked-about publication again. Last November, she featured a cover story about sex addiction, and in May President Obama was shown wearing a rainbow-colored halo with a headline that read ”The First Gay President.”
But Ms. Brown defends her choice of covers.
“The magazine was incredibly moribund when we came in,” she said in a phone interview Thursday. “It had taken so many knocks. We have been able to bring Newsweek back to relevance. I have always felt that the covers are about a conversation. The covers become a conversation starter.”
My hope is that Newsweek does indeed succeed — though I have my doubts — has a tablet mag, not just because Newsweek remains a good magazine (I have written for The Daily Beast, the online arm, if you will), but because its success or failure may determine what future there is for quality, long-form journalism in the digital age. Another digital outfit of an entirely different sort, Buzzfeed, has compiled a selection of Newsweek covers from down the years, by way of remembrances of things past.
Newsweek: Memo From Tina Brown to All Staff Re: Newsweek's Digital Future
This email from Tina hit staff inboxes a little before 7:00am this morning. Newsweek’s going all digital. Last edition will be the December 31st issue. Ch-ch-changes.
To: All Staff
We are announcing this morning an important development at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the U.S. will be our December 31st issue. Meanwhile, Newsweek will expand its rapidly growing tablet and online presence, as well as its successful global partnerships and events business.
Read the whole memo. In essence, Newsweek will cease its print operations at the end of the year as part of a transition to an electronic format available on Kindle, iPad, and other such devices. I, for one, am most saddened by this development not only as a subscriber and occasional contributor to The Daily Beast, but also as someone deeply and irrationally attached to print media and the joys of the weekly and monthly magazine.
Muslim Rage Is About Politics, Not Religion
by Husain Haqqani, Newsweek, October 1, 2012
Since falling under Western colonial rule, the Muslim world has developed a narrative of grievance. The view is shared by Islamists, who consider Islam a political ideology, and other Muslims who don’t. Like all national and community narratives, it has some elements that are true. It is a historical fact that the Muslim world spent centuries in ascendance before Western influence rose, and Muslim power declined. And there is no question that Western imperialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries was far from benign. It divided Muslims, denigrated them, and used modern technology—from the printing press to electronic media and the moving image—to render a caricature of a once-preeminent civilization and the faith that rests at its heart.
The current weakness of the Muslim world, however, is not entirely the fault of Western colonialism and postcolonial machinations. For a century or more, overcoming that weakness has been the driving force behind almost every major political movement in the Muslim world, from pan-Arabism to contemporary Islamism. Nevertheless, Muslims have made practically no serious effort to understand the causes and remedies of their decline over the past 300 years. Outrage and resentment—and the conspiracy theories that inform them—are poor substitutes for comprehending why Islam’s lost glory has proved so difficult to resurrect.
Islamists see the world as polarized between the Ummah (the community of believers, whom they describe as one nation) and the rest. The West’s rise, rather than the Ummah’s decline, receives far greater attention from Islamist scholars and leaders. Their worldview is summarized in the Arabic-language title of a book by the Indian Islamist scholar Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi. Its English-language version is unremarkable enough—Islam and the World: The Rise and Decline of Muslims and Its Effect on Mankind. But the Arabic edition’s title translates literally as: What the World Lost by the Decline of Muslims. The civilizational narcissism is clear. “Our decline is the world’s loss,” it suggests. “We do not need to change anything. The West needs to fix things for us so that it does not lose the benefits of our civilization.”
The outrage industry ensures that Muslims continue to blame others for their condition, raging over their impotence instead of focusing on economic, political, and social issues. At the same time, successive civilian and military governments in Pakistan have chosen to appease the dial-a-riot Islamist hardliners rather than confront them. A multitude of Islamist groups has sprouted, including jihadi militants battle-hardened in Afghanistan and Kashmir, and a competition of sorts now takes place among them over who is the greater champion of the honor of Islam and its prophet. A similar development is evident in the rivalry between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists in Egypt and in other Arab countries.
‘I Pray My Daughters Have A Life Like Mine’
by Karen Elliott House, Newsweek, September 24, 2012
Doing Allah’s will is Lulu’s consuming focus. At age 19, when her husband offered himself to her family, Lulu willingly chose to be a second wife. “I prayed to Allah, ‘let me do this if it is good.’?” Even when her husband and children are out, Lulu almost never leaves home. Asked if she would like to drive, she seems truly puzzled. “Why would I want to drive? In Islam it is a man’s responsibility to drive his wife and children.”
At home, this genuinely devout woman focuses on trying to save me. Converting an infidel to Islam entitles one to paradise, she believes. And just as my conservative Christian father forbade shorts and pants, Lulu tells me that my pants and sweater are not pleasing to God because anything that reveals the human form is forbidden. My floor-length black abaya similarly is gently criticized for its fit and decoration of a blue and orange braid on its long sleeves. Fingering the offending braid, she says, “This is wrong. Your abaya shows the body, and this decoration attracts men to look at you.” Outside the home Lulu and her daughters shroud head to toe in shapeless black abayas that are akin to wrapping oneself in a black bedsheet. They also cover their faces with a separate black niqab that features a slit for the eyes, but these devout ladies cover even that slit with another black cloth, which can be flipped up or lowered depending on the need to see clearly.
To assist her conversion effort, Lulu sits me before her computer to view an hourlong video on YouTube of a fundamentalist Christian preacher from Texas explaining his conversion to Islam. When this doesn’t produce a convert, she issues a stern warning: “It is very bad to die believing Allah had a son,” debunking Jesus as the son of God. When I observe that Christians, like Muslims, believe in one God, she rejects any equation between the two religions. “No,” she says emphatically. “You must believe in Islam. Allah says this.”
President Obama: The Democrats' Ronald Reagan
by Andrew Sullivan, Newsweek, September 24, 2012
If Obama wins, to put it bluntly, he will become the Democrats’ Reagan. The narrative writes itself. He will emerge as an iconic figure who struggled through a recession and a terrorized world, reshaping the economy within it, passing universal health care, strafing the ranks of al -Qaeda, presiding over a civil-rights revolution, and then enjoying the fruits of the recovery. To be sure, the Obama recovery isn’t likely to have the same oomph as the one associated with Reagan—who benefited from a once-in-a-century cut of top income tax rates (from 70 percent to, at first, 50 percent, and then to 28 percent) as well as a huge jump in defense spending at a time when the national debt was much, much less of a burden. But Obama’s potential for Reagan status (maybe minus the airport-naming) is real. Yes, Bill Clinton won two terms and is a brilliant pol bar none, as he showed in Charlotte in the best speech of both conventions. But the crisis Obama faced on his first day—like the one Reagan faced—was far deeper than anything Clinton confronted, and the future upside therefore is much greater. And unlike Clinton’s constant triangulating improvisation, Obama has been playing a long, strategic game from the very start—a long game that will only truly pay off if he gets eight full years to see it through. That game is not only changing America. It may also bring his opposition, the GOP, back to the center, just as Reagan indelibly moved the Democrats away from the far left.
