Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours).įinally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. This was not planned it’s one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. We’d rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole’s tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. A few of SLATE’s are already becoming clear. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index.Ī good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, and some prejudices–even crotchets. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time, Newsweek, etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week’s election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively as possible, the spin they’re getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on.

Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at “meta-news”: the news about the news, a sense of how the week’s big stories are being played and perceived. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE’s editors. The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE.

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