This is the age of endless facts.
Every question is now seemingly answerable; just swipe your finger over the device in your pocket. Want to know every important opinion about the question of the moment? You can consume them in 140-character aphorisms while waiting for the bus. But with this rush of information, or perhaps because of it, few of the words that scroll across our screens stick or really change how we view the world.
The New Republic was launched nearly a century ago in a spirit of high idealism. Its first issue appeared just as war broke out in Europe. The magazine's young editors wanted to shape the course of political movements and to write essays that would alter the opinions of world leaders.1 They might not always have succeeded in their most grandiose ambitions, but they did manage to produce some of the finest writing in the English language, publishing the likes of George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and Walter Lippmann.
With this issue, we relaunch The New Republic. Our goals may be somewhat different from those of the magazine's founding fathers, but we share their unabashed idealism. We believe that our new hyper-information age is thrilling, but not entirely satisfying. We believe that there must remain space for journalism that takes time to produce and demands a longer attention span-writing that is at once nourishing and entertaining. We aim to tell the most important, timely stories about politics, culture, and big ideas that matter to you.
The journalism in these pages will strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias, although it will showcase passionate writing and will continue to wrestle with the primary questions about our society. Our purpose is not simply to tell interesting stories, but to always ask why these stories matter and tie their reporting back to our readers. We hope to discern the hidden patterns, to connect the disparate facts, and to find the deeper meaning, a layer of understanding beyond the daily headlines.
In 2013, The New Republic can no longer be just a magazine. We are a media company that produces live events featuring our staff and other experts, a responsive website designed for social conversations and a mobile life, audio versions of all of our work, a cutting-edge tablet app, and, of course, 20 print issues a year. We provide access to all of our products for one price to make it as simple as possible to subscribe.2
As we move into this new era, we hope to inhabit the best traditions of The New Republic and to provide our readers with the insight they need to leave a mark on the world.
Thank you for your support.
Chris Hughes
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief The New Republic
Herbert Croly said in 1914 that the magazine’s intention “was less to inform or entertain its readers than to start little insurrections in the realm of their convictions.”
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