In 1895 Ladies’ Home Journal began to offer unfrilly, family-friendly architectural plans in its pages. They were mainly colonial, Craftsman, or modern ranch-style houses, and many still stand today. The Cosmopolitan, as it was then known, advertised the Cosmopolitan University, a custom-designed college degree—for free!—by correspondence course. McClure’s magazine, the juggernaut of investigative journalism—home to Ida Tarbell’s landmark investigation of Standard Oil, among many other muckraking articles of the Gilded Age—began to plot an array of ventures, including a model town called McClure’s Ideal Settlement. – Lapham’s Quarterly
Tag: 04.20
How A Magazine Of Debate Influenced Our Culture
For many who wrote for the magazine, attended its monthly discussion lunches or simply subscribed, involvement with Encounter was to take sides in an historic struggle in which the Anglo-American relationship was deemed crucial (which is certainly how Lasky saw things). It was this sense of engagement, reflected in the magazine’s title, that gave its pages their distinctive character. – The Critic
The Aggressive Critic (And Why One Needs To Be)
“I continue to believe that any critic who wants to write something lasting—who believes that criticism can be a species of literature—must write partly out of aggression. Or perhaps a better word is animus, in the sense of a fixed intention, a partiality. Literary journalism describes and explains literature and ideas as they are.” – New Criterion