Ta-Nehisi Coates Responds: "It's a Privilege for Me to Be Black"

On Tuesday, The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates illuminated one of the key disadvantages of the white public intellectual: "You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously."

On Tuesday, The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates illuminated one of the key disadvantages of the white public intellectual: "You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously."

Old Arab-hating literary tycoon Marty Peretz is putting his beloved Washington treasure The New Republic — the "in-flight magazine of Air Force One," according to a movie about how much of its content was completely fabricated — on the market, again. Who should purchase this esteemed leftist journal of moderately…
Martin Peretz is an obscenely wealthy moral cripple who owns the New Republic. His penchant for spouting ethnic slurs against Arabs recently earned him two lengthy and intense magazine profiles. Neither one saw fit to report that he is gay.
Frank Foer—brother of Jonathan Safran—is stepping down as editor of The New Republic, though he'll still write for the mag. Richard Just is the new editor. We suspect that maybe, just maybe, working for Marty Peretz is unpleasant.
Harvard was planning to let New Republic editor Marty Peretz speak at an upcoming 50th anniversary event for some social studies program. But then Peretz wrote racist nonsense on his blog, again! Harvard kids protested, and now Peretz won't speak.
New Republic editor-in-chief Marty Peretz, who does not care for Muslims, Arabs, Persians, etc., has apologized for questioning whether Muslims "deserve" First Amendment rights. Good show! Do you have any more apologies on the way, Marty?
Longtime Muslim-despising New Republic editor-in-chief Marty Peretz has come through again. He's disappointed that liberals characterize hatred or mistrust of Muslim-Americans as a problem, when Muslims have no respect for human life and maybe shouldn't have First Amendment rights.
Oh boy, Maureen Dowd pissed off Marty Peretz! How can I not click on a blog post from The New Republic's prickly, racist sometimes-owner headlined "Maureen Dowd And The Saudi Royals"?
Marty Peretz blames Voodoo for Haiti's troubles. (Tell it to the Saints, Marty!)
On Monday, we apologized to New Republic publisher Marty Peretz, for asserting, without evidence, that he likes Joe Lieberman, the famous asshole. We now rescind that apology.
The New Republic sort of dialed down its level of maddening hawkish crazy once Franklin Foer was installed as editor, but all that could basically change right now: Marty Peretz is buying it back!
• Marty Peretz, former owner of the New Republic, is buying back the mag with a group of investors led by former Lazard exec Laurence Grafstein. [Politico]
• The New York Times Co. has successfully raised $225 million by selling off 21 floors of its Eighth Avenue office building. [NYT]
• "Was last week the worst one…
Reading-born necklace eater Simon Doonan is passive-aggressively grumbly this morning in the Observer about how all the city's media internships have been swarmed by "fancy-pants progeny" like CBS CEO Les Moonves' daughter Sara (a Vogue and former Teen Vogue intern, beside whom Doonan was seated at a recent industry…
Today on the New Republic website, retired blogger Elizabeth Spiers reviews the second issue of Portfolio. Spiers finds the title pretentious and lacking in substance. Her suggestion? Replace editor Joanne Lipman with former New Yorker head Tina Brown, who will bring both flash and purpose to the title. Surely Tina,…
This morning, as we thumbed through the latest issue of the New Republic (56 pages!), a thought came to us. Since Marty Peretz promised that the magazine was going to be twice as long (80 pages!) because it was coming out half as often (once every two weeks, instead of weekly!), we wondered: Could subscribers sue? To…
When Marty Peretz announced that the beleaguered New Republic was going "fortnightly," he promised that even though there would be fewer issues, the magazine's new publishing schedule would allow for "deeper writing on truly significant matters. Again, on politics, with penetrating thinking in very literate prose.…

Hey! Remember a few weeks ago, when New Republic editor-in-chief Marty Peretz and his henchman Frank Foer made a big deal about the magazine's redesign, and how subscribers would be getting half as many issues, but they'd be twice as long? In fact, we believe he actually pinpointed how many pages the magazine would…