Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Spring 2008
A Shift In Focus
Joshua Cohen, who until 2007 was a professor of political science and
philosophy at MIT, became involved with Boston Review when Bromell
asked if he might be interested in taking it over. “That sounded
like a nice idea, and I didn’t know enough to say no,” Cohen
says. “I hadn’t even been on my high school newspaper.”
Plunging into the effort, he put together a small advisory board, but
says it soon became clear that it was not going to be a group activity,
and so the editorship shifted into his hands with the September/October
1991 issue. “My idea was to have a political magazine that would
be more devoted to argument and reasoning than the screechiness that I
thought was characteristic of most political magazines. There was a need
for a left-center-of-gravity magazine of ideas that would be different
from other publications with a similar broad political outlook. I didn’t
want everything that appeared in the magazine to be from the same point
of view, but rather to provoke debate in a way that emphasized low rhetoric
and avoided personalizing issues and personalizing attacks on people.
Preserving that editorial style required a lot of effort. There are plenty
of other places where you can get dramatic rhetoric. We are guided by
a philosophical idea of a public reason shared by citizens, and we show
respect to our readers by exploring the complexity of issues. We provide
the serious content for the emerging electronic public sphere.”
Boston Review also shows respect for its writers, and over the years it has drawn an impressive array of authors. One of these is Nir Rosen, who is a New America Foundation Fellow; his article “Al Qaeda in Lebanon: The Iraq War Spreads,” which is part one of a two-part series on the regional fallout of the Iraq war, appeared in the January/February 2008 issue. Although he has written for mainstream magazines such as The New Yorker and The New York Times, Rosen says, “No other publication gives me the freedom that Boston Review does. No other publication gives me the space to realize my vision, allowing me to write in sufficient length and detail to overcome the simplifications that are so often imposed when writing for the general public or when constrained by space. With the Boston Review I also don’t have to worry about my views being restricted.”
MIT provided office space in the political science department for the publishing operations from 1996 to 2006 and also provided indirect financial assistance. Boston Review has received support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the HKH Foundation, the NEA, Lannan Foundation and Rockefeller Family and Associates, and Stanford has provided some assistance in conjunction with Cohen’s move from MIT. Recently, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded the magazine three project grants for issues addressing problems of democracy and of economic development, for a total of $120,000. When Cohen moved to Stanford in 2006, Boston Review offices were relocated to Somerville, Massachusetts. In the fall of 2002, Deborah Chasman joined Boston Review as a co-editor, bringing twenty years of experience in publishing as an editor of Beacon Press. Under her direction, Boston Review completely revamped its web site, computerized subscriber operations, streamlined other business systems, brought in Junot Díaz as fiction editor, added staff members and worked toward greatly improving its visibility. The web site has links with other web sites, and Cohen has become more of a public spokesperson for Boston Review, especially since he formed a partnership with www.bloggingheads.tv. Chasman says, “The impact of print circulation goes beyond our subscribers. Boston Review is being quoted more and more in the media, including in Harper’s, The Washington Post, Utne Reader and on National Public Radio, Slate.com and the Charlie Rose show. The increased visibility has drawn attention from opinion makers and policymakers. For example, the board of the National Science Foundation, Mario Cuomo’s office, and Barack Obama’s campaign have all requested copies of issues that were of special interest to them.”
In addition to politically focused articles, Boston Review introduces its readers to new voices in fiction. “I pick authors by reading a story about five times,” says Junot Díaz, fiction editor of Boston Review and author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Hardcover, 2007). “The story has to stick with me, even when I’m on line at the movies.” Boston Review is also a major national poetry outlet and over the last eight years 14 poems published in the magazine have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry series, making it the fourth largest contributor to that anthology. A regular Boston Review feature is Harvard law professor Alan A. Stone’s “On Films” column that in 2007 featured criticism of In the Valley of Elah, Away from Her, Do the Right Thing and others. In a joint venture with MIT Press, in 2005 the magazine formed Boston Review Books, a series that produces four books a year, two volumes in the spring and two in the fall. These books follow a format of expanding articles that have appeared in the magazine and publishing them as books. The arrangement with MIT Press continues a history of Boston Review book publishing that began in the 1990s with Love of Country by Martha Nussbaum, who is professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago. The book built on an article by her that appeared in Boston Review and included 29 replies from readers, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, Sissela Bok and Robert Pinsky. More than 25 books have appeared now with Boston Review content, from Beacon Press, Princeton University Press and Oxford University Press. Scheduled for publication the spring of 2008 by Boston Review Books are Why Nuclear Disarmament Matters by Hans Blix and The Road to Democracy in Iran by Akbar Ganji (translated by Abbas Milani); both books originated as articles in the magazine.