New York Magazine

Albert Arthur · December 26, 2012 at 3:02pm

I got a kick out of reading the New York Magazine article that Mollie Hemingway linked to yesterday. If I hadn't gotten a first hand account of the voyage from my friends, Ricochet members Captain & Mrs. Spaulding, I might almost have believed the article's author, Joe Hagan, that the cruise was attended almost entirely by racist old white people. OK, not really, but Mr. Hagan's obsession with race was somewhat glaring to me. First of all, the article's lede paragraph is this:

The whole thing was white, and broken, that much was clear. A week after the presidential election, when the dreams of Republicans were dashed with President Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney, we were snorkeling in the blue waters of the Caribbean. In the distance was a shipwreck. “You could make out the pieces of it,” said Ralph Reed, the right-wing political operator who had bolstered the Evangelical Christian vote for Romney. “It was deep and murky.”

Got that? The shipwreck is a metaphor for...THE GOP!

In case his readership is dense, Hagan includes several other clues that the GOP is white, and old, and rich. I won't recount them here, since you can all go and read the article for yourself, if you haven't already. Here's my favorite, though (emphasis added by me):

The last event before cocktails and dinner was a lecture by Deroy Murdock, the only black National Review speaker. It was a curious outlier on the agenda, titled “How the Music of Memphis and Motown Helped Bury Jim Crow,” and set in a smaller, more intimate venue midship. Murdock was wearing a red satin dinner jacket and a black bow tie, presumably to look like a Motown singer. About 50 people attended, sitting on white leather lounge chairs, and there was a Rolling Stones tongue logo on a screen behind him as he cued up “Brown Sugar” on the sound system.
Murdock got the all-white crowd clapping along, including the venerable neoconservative intellectuals Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, who smiled broadly.
“Brown Sugar! / How come it tastes so good?”
When the music faded, Murdock, in a studious tone, read from his prepared notes: “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it!”

Got that? There was only one black guy. And the audience was all white. And the black guy needed notes.

Hagan sure is obsessed with the racial composition of National Review (in my opinion).

By the way this is Joe Hagan:

Since Joe kept talking about National Review and who was white and who wasn't, it got me pondering, who works for New York Magazine? So I found their masthead and did some quick googling.

First of all, here is Larry Burstein (on the right), the publisher of New York Magazine:

New York Magazine Staff

Editorial

Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss

Executive Editor John Homans (on the left)
Editorial Director Jared Hohlt
Managing Editor Ann Clarke (couldn't find a picture)
Deputy Editor Jon Gluck (on the left) (Adam Moss again on the right)
Design Director Thomas Alberty (couldn't find a picture)
Photography Director Jody Quon

Culture Editor Lane Brown (on the left) (Tracy Morgan, who doesn't work for New York Magazine, is on the right)
Strategist Editor Ashlea Halpern
News Editor James Burnett (Couldn't find a picture)
Features Editor David Haskell
Senior Editors
Christopher Bonanos

Rebecca Milzoff

Raha Naddaf (Couldn't find a picture)
Carl Rosen (Couldn't find a picture)
Alexis Swerdloff
Food Editors Robert Patronite, Robin Raisfeld (Couldn't find pictures)
Fashion Director Amy Larocca
Associate Editor Patti Greco
Editor-at-Large Carl Swanson
Shopping Editor Jessica Silvester (I'm pretty sure she's the one on the right)