Digestible liberal opinion without any fluff

If you want to go beyond the watered-down political discourse you'll find in Time or Newsweek, then the New Republic is a good place to start. The writing is concise and thorough (at the risk of sounding like a contradiction), and you don't need to be qualified for the McLaughlin Group to understand it all.

The editors have changed a bit over the past couple of years, but everyone reports to Martin Peretz who is the owner and publisher, and who happens to have had Al Gore as a student at Harvard. This explains the magazine's heavy pro-Al coverage; Charles Lane was fired as editor (allegedly) because he was running too many articles about Gore's shady campaigning methods.

The magazine is left-of-center, liberal without being knee-jerk and screeching like stuff you'd find in the Nation or the Village Voice. Most would find the articles well handled, even if you don't agree with their conclusions.

The front of the book has some brief, one-paragraph pieces, including some media criticism. A usual item is a reprinting of contrasting headlines for the same story from different newspapers on the same day (a Clinton speech will be declared pro-union in the NY Times but anti-union in the Boston Herald, for instance). The arts section of the magazine is almost another magazine entirely. Stanley Kaufmann, who must be 107 years old by now, still writes respectable film reviews, although he can be a little crotchety. There are columns on dance and architecture that I don't read, but the books section is probably my favorite. The critic often reviews several books about the same subject or by the same author in one article and provides a long, scholarly analysis of a body of work. My favorite reviews are the unfavorable ones, such as Lee Siegel's tearing apart of the bestseller The Poisonwood Bible or the deconstruction of Susan Faludi's Stiffed.

The magazine is a no-nonsense, text-heavy, reader's magazine, not for people who buy news magazines to look at the pretty pictures and charts. But I'd say, again, that it's very easy to read and a good way to take that first step beyond your local newspaper or the big weekly magazines to get an idea of what's going on in the world.