Kristol Clear #151: It's Spring

Editor's note: An earlier version of this newsletter was sent mistakenly to some readers with an incorrect subject line. It has been corrected.

It's Spring

Yesterday was Opening Day. What more need I say? Well, I will say that there's a lot of good writing about baseball--some it really good, some of it a bit precious. But if you want something short and sweet to get you in the mood for the season, I recommend a 1977 essay by Bart Giamatti, the Yale literature professor turned baseball commissioner who died young, over a quarter century ago. It's called "The Green Fields of the Mind," and begins this way:

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."

Read the whole thing.

I doubt the colorful baseball owner and promoter, Bill Veeck, would have spent much time reading Giamatti. But Giamatti would have appreciated this from Veeck: "There are only two seasons--winter and baseball."

Of course the rest of the world tends to believe in spring and fall as well as winter and baseball. And spring, as I note in this week's editorial, is normally "a time of good cheer and rebirth." It did inspire in me a perhaps unusually downbeat editorial, as several correspondents have remarked. But not too downbeat. For I take solace in a kind of hard-headed American moral realism that may yet stand us in good stead, one that's captured in the doggerel I quote in my piece:

"It's spring, it's spring

The bird is on the wing--

My word, absurd!

The wing is on the bird."

"The wing is on the bird." Nature and politics remain what they have always been. There are reasons to worry. But there are also reasons to hope.

For example: Harvard could win the Frozen Four--the college men's ice hockey championship--this week, for the first time in 23 years! Also, how about the women's basketball tournament, with Mississippi State's semifinal upset of Connecticut, which had an 111-game winning streak and beat Mississippi State by 60 points last year? As I tweeted: "Friends of human liberty root for underdogs and upsets." And it's reassuring that sometimes they happen. (Of course, Mississippi State was beaten in the final game by South Carolina. Go figure...)

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NYT on TWS

Meanwhile, you might have been so wrapped up in basketball (or preparing for baseball!) that you could have missed a piece on TWS in last Monday's New York Times. The headline was "TWS's Arsenal to Fight Falsehoods: 'Facts, Logic and Reason.'" Here's a link, and a few graphs:

With Mr. Kristol moving to an at-large role in December, it fell to Mr. Hayes to navigate Trumpian politics as editor in chief while leading the magazine into the next era. When he looked around the conservative news media landscape and assessed The Weekly Standard’s place in it, he made a determination.

The movement he joined had succeeded in breaking the mainstream news media’s informational hegemony (something the mainstream media had a hand in, too, he said). But as it evolved, grew and splintered, something else broke: any universal sense of truth.

“That’s a problem for our democracy,” he told me last week.

He determined to make The Weekly Standard part of the solution. The solution was more real journalism.

And The Weekly Standard was going to need a bigger newsroom.

When I caught up with Mr. Hayes last week he was in the process of staffing up. He had poached The Wall Street Journal’s books editor, Robert Messenger, to be an executive editor alongside Mr. Barnes. He had hired Rachael Larimore, a former managing editor of the left-leaning Slate (though her politics lean to the right), and recruited a former deputy business editor of The Charlotte Observer, Tony Mecia.

He said he was on the verge of hiring five additional journalists, having gotten the go-ahead from The Weekly Standard’s billionaire owner, Philip Anschutz, to grow his team by a third.

Mr. Hayes said he made a simple case to Mr. Anschutz, who bought The Weekly Standard from Mr. Murdoch in 2009: “Let’s add more resources and make sure that we’re basing our arguments on facts, logic and reason.”

"Facts, logic and reason." Just to be clear—that's the print magazine and the website. Not the newsletters.

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Podcasts Galore

Nor the podcasts. But we're proud of them nonetheless. Indeed our prodigal podcast, the Weekly Substandard, is (inexplicably) finding popularity among tons of people, some of whom—how to say this gently?—may not be your average Weekly Standard readers. Last week Jonathan Last, Sonny Bunch, and Vic Matus discussed The Gong Show. The week before that, Beauty and the Beast. This week? I don't want to know because I'd rather have plausible deniability.

And yet...over the weekend the Substandard popped up to #10 on the iTunes list of pop culture podcasts. Which is pretty incredible, as we've done no promotion of it to speak of (not that they deserve any). So you may want to give the Substandard a try. In fact, you can subscribe here on iTunes. But don't say you weren't warned.

And speaking of podcasts, as you probably know, on the eve of the 2012 election, we launched the Weekly Standard podcast: several times a week our writers would offer analysis of breaking news.

11,158,381 downloads later (yeah, we're surprised, too!), we're re-launching it as The Daily Standard podcast. Every day Michael Graham will be hosting a podcast updating the key stories of the day, culminating with (or declining to) the "Kristol Clear" episode every Friday. You can listen online. Or you can subscribe on iTunes.

And while you're at it, I'll remind you of the Conversations I do every couple of weeks. The most recent is with my colleague Chris Caldwell, discussing Europe. So feel free to take a look or a listen here as Chris reflects on the difficult situation in Europe today, given its “demographic, economic, and military weakness.” Chris and I discuss demographic decline, stagnant economies, the migrant crisis, the failure to integrate immigrants, and the rise of Islamism as major challenges facing the continent. And Chris analyzes the populist movements and parties in Britain and various European countries and considers how they might shape Europe’s future.

You're used to reading Chris's excellent reporting on Europe. Here's a chance to see him in action. In between baseball games.

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Onward.

Bill Kristol

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