State of the Magazines

"I have the impression," magazine consultant Jim Kobak wrote in his classic How to Start a Magazine, "that every man, woman and child in the United States has an idea for a magazine that is 'needed' (which is stronger than 'wanted') by the American people."

I thought of this observation when I was in London recently visiting with David Goodheart, who was celebrating the tenth anniversary of Prospect, which he describes as "a post-grand narrative magazine" (in contrast to its two predecessors, the CIA-funded Encounter and the underfunded Marxism Today, which went out of business in 1991).

Simultaneously, Katrina vanden Heuvel had set off for Cambridge, Massachusetts, to serve on a Kennedy School panel celebrating what would have been the tenth anniversary of George, the monthly magazine conceived, founded and edited by the late John F. Kennedy Jr., who liked to refer to it as a political publication "for 'postpartisan' America." (Alas, Katrina's plane was canceled, but the panel went on.)

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