As I’ve mentioned before, I always hated Peretz-era TNR. Even when I agreed with the positions, a huge amount of it had this weird, macho, trying-to-be-cool feeling to it. The TNR alums still always posting pictures of themselves from back in the day as if there was something cool and interesting about having worked there, like they’d been hanging out with Hemingway on the Left Bank instead of working for a dim-witted, right-wing adjunct professor in DC. This was my favorite thing in Michelle Cottle’s article about working with Wieseltier:
There, I spent an awkward hour or so with his name-dropping (at one point, he answered the phone, then shared with me that Tina Brown wanted him to come have drinks with her and David Bowie)…
It’s the same thing with Halperin, though his efforts were even more clumsy, all the stupid Springsteen references, describing political operatives at “the horses“, and so on.
The whole thing is, honestly, just pathetic. It feels like a bunch of guys who always wanted to be frat bros but couldn’t be because they were too studious getting to be well-known in some nerdy ridiculous field (I think it’s fair to describe political journalism that way) and just broing it up as hard as they could once they had some staus. Ok, Halperin is also just a straight-up pervert, apparently, but still.
The thing about political bro culture is that it always becomes about punching hippies and putting bros before hos. It’s no accident that a media system dominated by people like Halperin and Wieseltier destroyed Hillary over bullshit emails and gave us Trump.
Because I’ve met you, and you are not coolPost + Comments (74)