Follow-Up: The New York Review

A few weeks ago, I posted here about why I value the New York Review of Books, and on an impulse, posted it at Daily Kos. It got only about a dozen comments and fewer than 20 recommendations, but eventually it appeared on the Rescued Diary list.

Then a few days later I got an email from an editorial assistant at the New York Review, which contained a PDF version of a brief note from Robert Silvers, who has edited the Review from its first issue in 1963.

It said: I was touched by what you said about the paper. During 46 years, I’ve never read a piece in which a writer said what was actually in an issue.

Awesome, and yet, I was aghast: nobody, in 46 years, had written about what was actually in an issue? Yet for 46 years, this man kept it going, and kept its quality and voice. That's truly awesome.

Although there were only 14 comments at kos, two of them stand out for what they say about the particular effects of this periodical.

From Dana Houle:

I grew up in a place where nobody went to college. My family also got three newspapers a day, and they bought me books because I was expected to go to college, but you can't say I "grew up around books." Nobody in my family had graduated high school. When I graduated high school, I couldn't write a complete sentence. I went to community college, got caught up on my basics, and then transfered to a pretty good state university. The first term I was there, a historian, a Viennese-Jewish emigre who came to the US as a teen, worked as a skilled craftsman while in grad school, and a man of the working class left, took an interest in me. He could tell I was trying to become educated, that I had many interests, but numerous holes in my knowledge. His suggestion was that I should start reading the New York Review of Books, every article, every edition. It's one of the best things that anyone has ever done for me. And the NYRB is one of the most enjoyable and invigorating things in my life.

and from someone else:

I used to think I was really intelligent until I picked up a friend's copy of the New York Review of Books and tried to read it. I could feel a whooshing gust as the contents went right over my head. Maybe if Jon Stewart did a Comedy Central version, I would catch on?

If you don't know what we're all talking about, the online version is here. But it's the full paper version that means the most. Here's the wikipedia history.