The Believer

Will,
The Rick Moody thing was a long letter to the editor in (I believe it was the) October issue. I have a bunch of boxes in transit to this coast and the issue should be among the contents. I'll bring it in to the Cato when it arrives.
Jeremy

I have a subscription but have not read that particular article yet. For the most part I like the normal articles but don't read the interviews. The few I have read lead me to agree with Matt above. I'm also not much impressed with either Nick Hornby's reviews nor the One-Page Reviews, although Hornby's is at least humorous at times; I just think the "short review" thing is done elsewhere and just as well. So in the end, about half of the magazine is "good", which makes it rather expensive for what you get. Those "good" articles are quite nice, however. Whether it is "worth it" probably depends a good deal on how much disposable income you have.

I was pretty smitten with The Believer at first, but I've come to realize that it's basically a fanzine. The interviews range all the way from obsequious to fawning to fellatory. Two of the worst are those with Sylvia Benso and Slavoj Žižek. Imagine an academic equivalent to Sean Hannity interviewing President Bush.

As I recall, the response to the Checkpoint review was a letter to the editors, and it basically stomped all around, calling Wieseltier's review a politically-motivated hatchet job that took no account for the book's artistic value.