Human Rights And iPhones

From ZZ's Blog:

I have read The New York Review of Books off and on for forty years. Generally, I take it to be an easy way to follow trends in US liberal thinking. It stands as a bridge between prominent academics and a self-conscious educated, elite class. For some, it is the source for the last word in cocktail party discussions. For others, it is a channel to drift arcane, scholarly controversies towards a larger audience.

Throughout the forty years, the publication has sustained a narrow ideological range of centrist liberal thought – one conjures a picture of a reader ready to defend the Volvo, The New York Times, and the travel agency against all threats, foreign and domestic.

Running through those forty years like a thick thread is a relentless, rabid streak of anti-Communism. Early on, Robert Conquest railed against the evils of the Soviet Empire, supported by academics of the same Hoover Institute ilk. This surely didn’t separate the NYRB from the many other publications favored by liberal elites.

Read more here.