A New Newsweek?

If you follow this blog, you'll know that New York Times columnist and writer David Brooks often, uh, frustrates me.  Friends tell me that, no, he really is a conservative, so I look for it, but still find too many of his sympathies and sensibilities suspiciously liberal to be convinced.

I say "too many" because sometimes he manages to prove me wrong despite my wariness and one good example is this column about the death of Newsweek magazine.  Unlike most who think that, because of technology chiefly, the days of a successful, middlebrow, general interest, news magazine are numbered, Brooks makes the case that the country may indeed be ready, hungry even, for the birth, or rebirth, of a good one.  As he sees it, the bursting of  the "bubble" has served to restore a healthy measure of economic and even moral sanity to the country.  Hence, there abides a growing desire for the higher things, for the permanent things, which a good magazine like Newsweek, Time, The Saturday Evening Post, and a host of others used to provide.

I'm not sure he's right about that...yet.  The Great Reckoning continues.  Nevertheless, if you're of a certain age, the column offers as well a pleasant ride down memory lane.  I, for one, can remember as a boy how the presence from time to time of such a magazine in our working class home would excite in me a desire for more.  It was mostly vanity, to be sure, but still I wanted it.  Anyway, give it a look.