One of my favourite periodicals is the New York Review of Books. Scott Sherman has a piece that looks at the rebirth of this publication in a recent issue of The Nation. It's a good article and I didn't realize until I was reading Sherman's assessment of the NYRB that I agreed with most of it. (I first became a subscriber in 1984 while at the University of Guelph.)
"Let it be said that the editors met the challenges of the post-9/11 era in a way that most other leading American publications did not, and that The New York Review of Books--which turned forty last fall--was there when we needed it most," Sherman writes.
Sherman keys in one on contributor as sign of its re-birth: Tony Judt. Judt's essay "Israel: The Alternative" is a great example of the kind of provocative writing the NYRB is running these days:
"The problem with Israel," Judt wrote, "is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism."