AND FURTHERMORE: New York mag’s Jesse Green on limited liberals and the trans kids who changed him

In 2012, The Slant interviewed Jesse Green about a story he wrote about trans youth in New York magazine.

In May, New York magazine published a thought-provoking and enlightening piece by writer Jesse Green about transgender kids and their families. Green’s sensitive and nuanced reporting portrayed parents’ struggle to accept and help their children with gender dysmorphia, a condition in which one’s “biological gender” does not match one’s self perception or “brain gender.”

The award-winning journalist asked brave questions about the advantages and consequences of taking “puberty blockers,” medication that stalls the onset of puberty and buys more time for gender-questioning youths to decide whether or not they want to “transition.”

His piece also clarified the differences between a gender dysmorphic child and, say, a militant tomboy. Most surprisingly, his story revealed how the idea of transgenderism challenges even the most liberal and progressive among us.

Green, a contributing writer at New York magazine and former contributor to The New York Times, spoke with The Slant about the inspiring lessons he drew from his young subjects, his own misperceptions about transgenderism, and why the experience of growing up gay may, ironically, limit one’s ability to understand and sympathize with trans people.

We were floored to read about kids as young as three who were questioning their gender. How did you go about finding them?

I began with experts–psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers in New York–who deal with kids and gender. The advantage to that was they were able to give me tips on how I might find the families. One of them was willing to discuss with his clients that I was looking for subjects. I had to kind of audition for him and for them, meaning I had long talks to explain where I was coming from and that I didn’t have any particular agenda. I also had to send them copies of previous stories I’d written, just as one does when trying to get a celebrity interview. In some ways, these families, with more justification, were pickier than top press agents for Hollywood stars. I ended up getting most of the people I dealt with through the practitioners I spoke to.

Were you well versed in transgender issues and politics before pursuing this story?

I knew what any gay person kind of knows. I came to realize that what any gay person kind of knows is probably less helpful to understanding the situation than what someone who is totally unfamiliar with any gender issues might know. There are a lot of prejudices that get in your way because you’ve been through your own gender situation of one sort or another. I had to be talked out of certain prejudices by some of the practitioners I spoke with.

If your kid was struggling with gender dysmorphia and wanted–needed–puberty blockers, what would you have done?

I have two sons–18 and 16–and I imagined if one of them came to me with this situation. My response would have been just as bad as old movies about how people responded to gay kids. “Not in my house missy....or mister!” I’ll admit to you that when I began [this journey] I had a very strong reaction against puberty blockers. That is where I started: I’m not putting hormones, drugs into a nine-year old’s body who doesn’t need them. But then, of course, what does “need” mean? In the end, I did change my mind. That is not something that’s typical in a story like this, but when it does happen, that’s when I know I have a story that might change people.

So now you support the use of puberty blockers?

I can’t judge every single kid I saw, but there were some I focused on in the piece and others I didn’t. I wasn’t privy to all of the psychiatric work-ups, but as a concept I feel comfortable saying that for some kids, yes, I do.

What changed you?

Originally, I was coming at this from a stereotyped and generic point of view, where you’re not thinking of individuals but of social groups and thinking about things that you personally find fetishistic or annoying, like somebody saying, “OK, my name today is this, or my pronoun today is that.” I don’t deny anyone the right to call themselves whatever they want, but I came at this with a little bit of “Oh reaaalllly?” And that’s a prejudice.

One of the practitioners told me that I was really thinking about stereotypes derived a lot from the portrait of transgendered people in the media and that he predicted that when I met these kids I would feel very differently and I did. What I realized is that this wasn’t a kind of game that the kids were playing. It wasn’t a way of trying to annoy or trick their parents. They weren’t having teen rebellions. They were too young for that. They were on their changing tables in some cases. It was clearly not the same as a kid who likes to play with different ways of expressing gender in terms of hairstyle or clothing or sports.

But how does one differentiate between a gender dysmorphic child and a run of the mill tomboy?

Well, I would not trust myself to make those decisions, but I can tell you what the professionals look for: an early onset identification with the opposite sex, unwavering persistence and torment at the approach of adolescence–not just generic adolescent issues, but to the development of secondary sex characteristics of the biological gender. When you have those three things, the evidence seems to show that you almost certainly have a transgender child. In the cases where these kids went on to take puberty blockers, their gender dysmorphic feelings had been unchanging since earliest youth. And there’s the question of torment–and that’s what really did it for me.

The father of one of the kids, a biological boy who had transitioned at age seven in terms of gender presentation to the world (not medically), told me that people said it was abusive when he and his wife allowed their son to present as a girl. And he said, “You know what’s abuse? Suicide” When I began to look at the seriousness, not the supposed flippancy of what these kids were feeling, I thought: if my kid was in torment and was looking to me to save his life in some way, would I refuse to deal with it because of a generic supposition about a class of people? Or would I–even with grave doubts and even worried that I might be doing a very wrong thing– try to help him? And I knew what the answer was. That was my journey.

Did you interview any trans people who regretted transitioning?

Yes, I interviewed some people who’d transitioned and then either were not sure they were content or were sort of moving back toward their original gender or were trying to find some new middle ground that felt good to them.

Why didn’t you include them in your story?

For two reasons. One, it wasn’t really a very common situation as far as I was able to tell. I locate what is the consensus and try to point out the outliers, but I’m not going to go to the ends of the earth to present a point of view that is not shared. Secondly, they were people whose initial transition had happened as adults, so it felt like it was a false comparison. If I had all the room in the world I would have put something in about it just to gin up the tension of the piece. I don’t mean in an artificial news way but because there is another side to this.

This would support the fear that this is a passing phase. And even if it’s a fear that can be addressed, it is out there and it’s something that does inform how people feel about it. I would have liked to have learned enough to have represented that side. But you have to make tough choices.

If gender roles were more fluid and not so inextricably fixed to one’s sex, do you think these kids would feel compelled to change their bodies?

I think some of them might not. But I think the kids who would fall into that category would probably not advance, in any case, to the point of actually having permanent intervention. The puberty blockers might be good for them anyway because it would give them another six years in which to sort out where they stand on those issues. But for the most part, the kids I was dealing with were in families where there was no problem with any form of gender expression. If boys wanted to wear dresses or girls wanted to cut their hair short, the parents, generally, had no issue with that whatsoever. So then it becomes a question of how deeply does society get into these kids’ heads despite their parents? And I really can’t answer that. But my perception was that you could make gender roles so fluid that they don’t even exist and some kids would still feel innately, as I felt myself to be gay, mysteriously, that they were the opposite sex. Sounds like you were dealing with some pretty progressive parents.

Yes, I specifically sought kids who are in the most supportive liberal metropolitan sophisticated situations–parents who explicitly said to me: “If my daughter were a lesbian, I would love it! In fact, I’d prefer it!”–because I wanted to see how this issue pushes the buttons of people who feel they’ve evolved as far as people can evolve and to find that they had to evolve even further.

For the Female-to-Male transgendered youths, is it possible that their desire to alter their bodies is motivated by internalized sexism and homophobia?

I most regret not being able to address at greater length this question you raise. Isaac, the 17 year-old who had the most enlightened liberal downtown artsy parents, spoke very eloquently about the feminist question, but there was no room for those quotes.

Will share one of Isaac’s quotes with us?

Sure. Responding to a feminist critique of FTM transgenderism, he said: “”I have this one friend who asked why can’t I just express my masculinity in a female body. I said that’s what I am doing. She’s a really intense feminist. There’s a weird contradiction because with a lot of feminists it seems like transmen are anti-woman because they chose not to embrace a female identity. But with transwomen one of the reasons it’s so difficult is because you’re denying yourself the privilege of being male. Stepping down privilege-wise. For transmen it would seem easier. But for some feminists that seems kind of gross, that you would want to step up for privilege. As if it were disloyal. I’m not choosing this because of any social agenda – and by the way you don’t gain power. In terms of lack of privilege, black beats trans, trans beats woman.” That last sentence is a bit twisty, but he’s saying that trans people (of any stripe) fall below women on the power scale (and black people below trans). That reminds me of something else I left out.

What’s that?

I don’t know enough to say it’s a trend, but I’ve known about a kind of transgender contagion among 20-something lesbians, who’ve been through Gender Studies programs. My lesbian friends who are closer to the situation say that they worry that it’s become a trendy thing to do, and that it brings in the whole question of whether it’s prompted internally by genuine gender dysmorphia. Or is it something about some kind of power you perceive you might gain in the process? For reasons you can imagine, it was just way too much for me to get into. But I am extremely curious about it and would love for someone, preferably a woman living right in the middle of things in San Francisco or Portland, to write about it. It would be a hornet’s nest, but I’d love to hear more about it than what I’ve gathered from a group of friends. And again the kids that I was dealing with for my story have not even had geometry, let alone Gender Studies, and I just couldn’t even imagine a way in which any of what they are going through had to do with attaining privilege.

If a publisher offered you the opportunity to expand your article into a full-length book, would you do it?

I’ve done a 100 stories I could spend my life on. People are just so interesting. But when you do the kinds of pieces I do, which tend to be very long and on issues that are big and complicated, you could spend 11 months on a piece as I did with this one. So I’ve already spent a perceptible fraction of my life–presumably more than 1 percent–on this. I’d like someone else to take it from here.

How many words was it?

6,400.

Wow, how many people did you interview?

About 30.

What do you hope a reader will take away from reading your article?

I’d like to encourage anyone thinking about these issues to think about individuals and not in groups. That is my main point. My partner’s mother used to say: “Trust people above groups,” and that comes from a union family! So that really says something.

Green, who grapples with issues of identity and sexuality in his critically acclaimed memoir, The Velveteen Father: An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood, lives in Brooklyn Heights with his partner and two sons.

THE OTHER SLANT: Toni Morrison's friend Claudia Brodsky slams New York mag's profile of the author

In 2012, the Slant interviewed Brodsky about her friendship with two-time Pulitzer-prize winning novelist and takes issue with a New York mag's profile of the late author.

It caught us by (sweet) surprise when the April 29th issue of New York magazine included a full-length profile of Toni Morrison. True, her new novel, Home, was about to drop come May 9th. And true, she’s a literary heavyweight: the recipient of both the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But how often have you read a lengthy profile of an octogenarian black woman novelist in a general interest magazine?

As we read the article, however, it became evident that Boris Kachka’s piece (“Who’s the author of Toni Morrison?”) was no ordinary retrospective. Instead, it was a subtle, but clear challenge to Morrison’s place in literary posterity. After ten novels and numerous accolades, Kachka’s perplexity over Morrison’s true identity, popularity and endurance seemed odd.

The Slant reached out to Claudia Brodsky, Morrison’s close friend and Princeton colleague, who was extensively cited in the story, to get her take. In Brodsky’s view, New York magazine painted an inaccurate and cynical portrait of Morrison, one that made her seem duplicitous, scheming, and unworthy of her success.

So, what’s your beef with Kachka’s article?

For starters, he uses a string of animal adjectives and verbs to portray her, freely dehumanizing her from the very start of the piece. He writes: “The author growls, purrs...and barks.” A whole other host of adjectives could have been used to describe a human and articulate voice: resonant, deep, thoughtful, melodious, mercurial, expressive, soft, laughing–words applicable only to humans. On the other end of the spectrum, she is an inanimate, weathered piece of stone. He writes: “Her face is polished in places and fissured in others, like the weathered stone of Mount Rushmore....” Had Kachka never interviewed or looked in the face of anyone over 80? Yes, they may have wrinkles unlike stones; and yes, their skin can also amazingly enough be smooth, too! Kachka told me that he has a B.A. in English from Columbia University. Hasn’t he read Percy B. Shelley’s “Ozymandias“? Beware the comparison to a talking stone head and what one brings upon oneself in making it! Everything he wrote was so cynical and made Toni seem suspect.

How so?

Remember these lines from his article? “Brodsky...is never at a loss for words–except when I ask her why Morrison’s difficult novels became so explosively popular. ‘I’m actually gonna think for a minute,’ she says. ‘No one’s asked me that question.’ After more than a minute, she says, ‘If she were not a black woman, then you would say, obviously, the work.'” The deletion of my long measured response following that purposefully prefatory comment — a response designed carefully to follow down and root out every cynical thread woven into its formulation in the first place — made it seem like I was hesitating because facing a “tough” question, from a “tough” interviewer. Instead, the question’s outright bizarreness, to put it nicely, made me pause in considering how best to answer an already openly biased interviewer. Did anyone ask an admirer and acquaintance of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (or Thomas Mann or T. S. Eliot) how he managed to be both difficult and popular, let alone go on to win a Nobel Prize? This was an obvious comparison, among others, to make. But my naive desire to correct rather than dismiss the interviewer’s suspicions, while obviously misplaced, prevented me from responding in such an openly confrontational way — nor would doing so, evidently, have helped. He knew what he thought and I am not sure why the interviews were necessary at all.

When we first spoke, you had a strong reaction to the sentences that read: “...Morrison fought unapologetically for the importance of considering racial politics in literature and of bringing marginalized American forces and shameful American secrets into the cultural mainstream. No one benefited more from her bold stance on the barricades of inclusiveness than Morrison herself.” Why did that last statement set you off?

It sends a chill through my body. It epitomizes the suspicious angle taken throughout his piece. He makes that statement in the declarative tense, as if it were indeed a causally engendered fact, and the quality of Morrison’s writing had nothing to do with her popularity. But the fact is her writing–its burnished craft, continually innovative nature, and fusion of historical experience and imaginative language into fiction in stories about subjects no one had regarded at all, let alone imagined as subjects of imaginative fiction, are the reasons it appeals to readers worldwide regardless of their race, class, gender and nationality. Did anyone dramatically imply in print that Gabriel Garcia Marquez spearheaded magic realist fiction so as most to benefit from it? Also, all that business about her creating a person named Toni Morrison that she, Chloe Wofford [Morrison’s birth name], the real person, is manipulating, is absurd.

But Morrison herself makes the distinction between Chloe and Toni in the interview. She says, “People who call me Chloe are the people who know me best....Chloe writes the books....I still can’t get to the Toni Morrison place yet.”

All that Toni meant is that anyone of any note or fame has a public and a private life. They have to protect themselves. Because she has this widespread cultural valence, she knows she’s especially prone to being misconstrued, misquoted and lied about. Toni never says she has two identities–the very idea of which promotes the idea of duplicity and a double, always partly false, life. And in Kachka’s description, she is both the puppet and the puppet master, which means that ultimately no real person is there! To make that into a double identity is cynical. These are the larger problems with the piece, but he got smaller details wrong too.

Like?

Like the day it was announced that Toni won the Nobel Prize. Kachka said I found Toni dancing alone in her office, but that’s not true. That inaccurate detail was grotesque because it had a minstrel show quality to it and made her seem self-celebratory. When she found out that she’d won, her assistant called me up and asked me to come to Toni’s office. I arrived, passed the throngs of reporters, walked in and said: “I told you so.” For years, I had been telling her that she’d get the Nobel Prize. But she’d say, “Forget about it Claudia, it’s not going to happen.” When I walked in, she cocked her head to the side, threw her arms open as if to say “Who knew?” and we did this really funny slow fox trot for like 30 seconds. It was an adorable, unselfconscious gesture of spontaneous joy. But the way Kachka wrote it plays into his suspicions about Toni: that she was celebrating because she’d fooled everyone, like it was a gotcha-jig. It fed into the idea that she was scheming. You have to understand that the moment she won, she didn’t call someone of notoriety or someone interested in milking the publicity. She called a friend. Afterwards, I walked her to class. She actually taught her writing course moments after winning the Nobel Prize like it was just another ordinary day. Who does that? I told New York magazine all of this and it didn’t appear in the story. It was a really beautiful memory, but the way her wrote it perverted it.

Did Morrison take issue with anything in the piece?

Yes, Kachka wrote that she didn’t have any of her son Slade’s paintings hanging in her house. [Slade lost his battle to pancreatic cancer last year at the age of 45.] She said, “What does he mean there are no paintings by Slade hanging in the house? I didn’t invite him upstairs. Did he expect to be invited upstairs?” She always has paintings by Slade hanging. She felt it slandered implicitly some aspect of her relationship with her son.

Was there anything else she objected to?

She just laughed it off. She laughed! She said “Claudia, you take these things too seriously.”

The Method: Frank Foer on The NEW New Republic, Martin Peretz, Stephen Glass, Adam Moss & More

In 2012, the Slant interviewed the current Atlantic staff writer about his illustrious career.

When mega millionaire Chris Hughes bought The New Republic last March, he asked Frank Foer to take the editorial reigns of the eminent magazine. But Foer didn’t exactly leap at the chance. He’d already given a decade of his life to the storied publication and was enjoying a two-year hiatus, freelance writing and editing literary essays by heavyweights like David Remnick and Buzz Bissinger for the forthcoming anthology, Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame.

Besides, he’d left TNR for good reason. “When I’d been editor,” Foer recalled in a recent phone interview with The Slant, “especially in the last couple years, it had gone through a period of fairly severe austerity. The magazine had ceased to be an exciting place because so much of my day was consumed with managing very limited budgets and constantly telling writers, ‘No, we can’t do X or Y project.'”

But Hughes, who amassed a staggering $700 million fortune after co-founding Facebook, made Foer an irresistible offer: a big budget and a firm commitment to long-form journalism: “To return to a magazine that is not just growing,” Foer enthuses, “but has big ambitions for what it wants to accomplish feels like a once in a lifetime opportunity. To have the resources to send journalists to different countries and parts of America gets your editor pulse racing.”

Two months into his renewed editorship, Foer spoke to The Slant from his offices in Washington D.C. about the New Republic‘s harried past (rabble-rouser Martin Peretz, fabulist Stephen Glass, the Scott Thomas Beauchamp drama) and exciting new future. He also shared some outtakes from “The Talented Mr. Muth,” a recent feature he penned for The New York Times Magazine. But first he walked us through a little of his own history:

So, Frank, did your journalism begin at The New Republic?

No, weirdly, it all started for me at Slate in 1996. That was my first job out of school and that was the first summer of Slate. I moved out to Seattle and worked in Redmond. It was the height of Microsoft’s empire. Microsoft was to 1996 what Apple is to 2012. It was the juggernaut corporation that defined the times. They had intended to build this grand media empire, and they had in fact built a campus that was going to be devoted to their media outlets. They had a women’s magazine called Underwire and a site that was going to compete with an alternative weekly called Sidewalk. Slate was just one little, fairly independent part of this Microsoft Media encapsulation. It was the one part that ultimately succeeded.

How long were you there?

So I was in Seattle with Slate for one year. Then I was in Washington with Slate for another year, where I had a couple of columns that I owned. Then, Jim Fallows hired me at U.S. News & World Report during that brief experimental period where Fallows was the editor, but he promptly got fired. And after about just over a year, I switched to The New Republic, where I’ve basically been ever since.

You moved over to The New Republic in 2000 as an editor?

I was a writer. I did political reporting.

Did you know from the get-go that you wanted to be a journalist?

No, I wanted to be an academic. I studied history as an undergrad at Columbia. And that was and continues to be the thing that I really love the most.

Why didn’t you stay on the academic track? What pushed you toward journalism?

My senior year of college I interned at the legendary Lingua Franca magazine, and I had a magical experience working there. Alex Star was the editor and his two subeditors were Daniel Zalewski and Rick Perlstein. It was a magical place to work. It really captured my imagination and turned me into an aspiring journalist.

What was it about Lingua Franca that inspired you so much?

It had a real panache and a sense of humor and a sense of fun, as well as being intellectually meaty.

What books or thinkers from those early years influenced you?

I’d say Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station. It combined the most gorgeous, lush writing and the creation of political ideas as the most vital of all human activities. That was a really important book for me. Then, when I was in my late teens I also read Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land and J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, which showed me what journalism could accomplish when executed at the highest level. They told human, political and intellectual stores and intertwined them all.

Where do you get your news?

I’m an old fart who still ambles to his front door in his bathrobe and creeks down and lifts his newspapers off of the front walk. I read The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. And I kind of love Twitter, but I’m more of a Twitter consumer than user myself. It’s the mother of all necessities. But once you start to Tweet, it takes up so much mental space that it crowds out other activities. So I fear committing to it. But it’s such a great vacuum for the web that I basically just follow links to various websites. For example, I know my friend and old colleague Jonathan Chait is going to produce two or three hilariously important blog items everyday for New York magazine. But these days, I discover those posts via Twitter rather than going to Nymag.com.

Speaking of Twitter and a ubiquitously tweeted story, we read your chilling New York Times Magazine article (“The Talented Mr. Muth,” July 6) about the infamous Washington fabulist, Albrecht Muth, who was charged in the death of his wife of 20 years. He inserted himself into the world of Washington royalty by marrying the D.C. socialite and journalist Viola Drath, a wealthy woman 44 years his senior. Muth went on to create a false VIP persona with such flair and believability that he duped dignitaries and politicians at the highest levels of government. It struck us that Muth’s posturing–the clothes, the manner, the name-dropping, the fancy stationery– is not unlike the posturing of any other run-of-the-mill politician. Isn’t every politician’s persona a kind of self- fabrication?

I think that’s absolutely why Washington does have this history of fabulism. Fabulists can survive here because there’s both rampant status insecurity and inauthenticity that permeates parts of the city. So when there’s run-of-the- mill inauthenticity, you’re sometimes numb to the more grandiose instances of it. I’m fascinated by power and the study of power and the way that things really work: the culture and morale of elites and the ways in which their actions, habits and motivations change over time.

Muth and Drath slept in separate beds, but it wasn’t clear in the article whether or not they were ever intimate. Did they ever consummate their relationship?

You know, I don’t know. In Drath’s memoir, it seems pretty clear that she felt attracted to him on some level and that she loved him. I’m kind of reluctant to go speculating in that area.

What do you make of the fact that all the other infamous fabulists you mention in the piece are gay?

Well, I think if you grew up in the era of the closet where you were fabricating a public persona for yourself that was divergent from your true self, becoming a fabulist may not be such a far-fetched next step. Being in the closet becomes a type of play-acting that fabulism requires.

If someone offered you a book deal on this story would you do it?

No, I think it was a great magazine piece, but I’m not sure that there’s enough there to sustain a book.

Back to The New Republic. We have few questions about the magazine’s more controversial figures, like former owner and editor-in-chief Martin Peretz, an intellectual force whose political views often get him into trouble . In Stephen Rodrick’s New York Times Magazine article on Peretz, he notes that you quit working at the magazine shortly after Peretz’s “Muslim life is cheap” comment, implying that there is a link there. Is Peretz’s extreme Zionism and outspoken hostility toward Muslims part of the reason you left?

There was no direct causation. As I described to you earlier, I was kind of was burnt out at that stage. That comment kind of falls into the category of maddening self-inflicted wounds and it doesn’t make you terribly excited to get up to go to the office in the morning.

In Benjamin Wallace-Wells’s New York magazine profile on Peretz, Wallace-Wells notes that you are one of the four people Peretz believes really understands what is at stake in Israel. Is that accurate and how do your views differ from Peretz’s?

I’m a big believer in the two-state solution, and I think that Israel made a big mistake by putting the Palestinian question on the permanent back-burner. There’s kind of a moral cost to the occupation that I think the country needs to address. The unilateral evacuation of the Gaza, while posing lots of problems for both the Israelis and Palestinians, was totally a worthwhile maneuver on the Israeli’s part. But like Marty, I have a deep moral, sentimental, familial attachment to the state of Israel. I have cousins who live there and so I started visiting the country as a kid. I’m attached in that way. Israel commits a lot of unforced errors, but generally, in the broader world, there’s a lack of goodwill toward the country that I find deeply disturbing.

We wanted to ask about some of the dark spots on The New Republic‘s history. The magazine has had some unfortunate runs-in with plagiarists such as Ruth Shalit (under Andrew Sullivan) and fabricators like Stephen Glass (under Chuck Lane) or some drama related to Scott Thomas Beauchamp (under you). What would you have done differently in the case of Glass to prevent his work from making it to print? Was there a policy or procedure that could have prevented his stories from getting past the fact-checkers and editors?

Let me just talk about the Scott Beauchamp thing, which is kind of like my own incident. We got a little bit hosed in that whole controversy. We took this controversy seriously on journalistic grounds, yet the right wing media was ginning up a controversy. The fact that our articles received so much scrutiny and attention from the right wing press is fairly disgraceful because whatever journalistic sins were committed were relatively minor. The sins that were committed by Beauchamp’s unit, which includes a commander being found guilty by the U.S. military of committing war crimes, guilty of murdering innocent Iraqis, are well established. The fact that there hasn’t been similar attention paid to this more substantive issue and too much attention paid to whether or not this guy added relatively minor literary embellishments in his story is outrageous.

Any thoughts on the Stephen Glass incident?

Look, the guy was a pathological liar. He understood the seams in the fact-checking system and the way people thought about editing narrative and he very cunningly exploited them. I think he should have been caught a lot earlier in retrospect, but his maneuvering seemed to be awfully clever. It shouldn’t have happened with the consistency that he was able to pull it off. I mean at a certain point it seemed like there were alarm bells that should have been tripped.

But I wasn’t there, so I only know the Hollywood version of the story. But it seems, in retrospect, he should have been stopped much earlier.

The problem may have been that he was friends with the fact-checkers, which compromised the copy. Shouldn’t Research and Editorial keep a cool distance from one another? What do you think?

My sense was that he actually invented the fact-checking system.

In Rodrick’s Times piece, he mentions that Glass, who passed the bar in New York and California, couldn’t get licensed to practice law in California, so Peretz flew out to California to defend Glass.

I think Marty may have developed a personal relationship with Stephen Glass. Marty can be a very generous person and I think that generosity was at play there. I wouldn’t defend Glass because I find the damage he inflicted on the institution to be so severe in terms of costing the magazine credibility. I would find it very hard to forgive him. Because of the movie and the scandal, in the public’s mind, Glass became synonymous with the magazine. You can’t do much worse than Stephen Glass in terms of damaging the credibility of an institution.

Looking forward, what can we expect from the new iteration of The New Republic?

We’re going to re-launch the magazine and website by the end of the year or early next year. Right now, we’re in the early phases of thinking that through and thinking through how to best present long-form journalism in digital media and how to create a kind of platonic ideal of the reading experience. [Note: On January, 28, 2013, the New Republic’s magazine and website, relaunched.]

We heard you’re opening an office in NYC and doubling your staff. Are there any rising journalism stars out there that you’re looking to recruit? Anyone you’ve got your eye on?

We’ve hired a bunch of people I’m pretty psyched about. We hired Noreen Malone from New York magazine, Julia Ioffe from The New Yorker, Marc Tracy from Tablet, Lydia DePillis from the Washington City Paper. They’re all people who are kind of at the beginning of their careers, who’ve had a little bit of experience, but are on the cusp of big-time breakthroughs.

So you’ve got your full team in place?

There’s probably a little bit more hiring we need to do.

Are there any magazines out there that reflect what you’re striving for in The New Republic?

There are lots of magazines that I admire. I admire Adam Moss as the greatest magazine technician of the era. Anything that Adam Moss touches is...I was actually looking back at some of The New York Times Magazines he edited, which have an amazing alchemy of serious and fun that I hugely admire. And I feel like the pendulum is swinging and that when you look at all the sites that are devoted to substantial journalism–to long form journalism– you’ve just go to feel a glimmer of optimism about where people’s reading habits are pointing.