MAGAZINES

Friday, Dec. 01, 1967
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Ramparts Dropout

For its December issue, Ramparts magazine has put some fire on its cover, but what's burning is not exactly yule logs. Three Ramparts editors and the art director are holding aloft their burning draft cards in a kind of New Left salute. Inside, Editor Warren Hinckle III writes: "If you're looking for an editorial in the usual place this month, forget it. It's on the cover."*

Not all of the old hands are joining in Ramparts salutes these days. Conspicuously absent is Principal Stockholder and onetime Publisher Edward Keating, who was discovered "plotting" against the magazine last spring, as his detractors put it. The latest dropout is another major stockholder, Martin Peretz, 28, a Harvard lecturer in government who has contributed substantially to the magazine as well as to other New Left causes. He is also married to Anne Farnsworth, a Singer Sewing Machine heiress.

What bothers Peretz, he says in Commentary magazine, is Ramparts' anti-Jewish attitude toward the Arab-Israeli war. Editor Hinckle, says Peretz, likes to be "flippy"—that is, perverse in a flip, hippie sort of way. This translates into articles like the one Peretz calls "the most carefully selective and skewed history of the conflict to come from any source save possibly the propaganda machines of the respective parties." The article "occasionally takes note of Nasser's calculating politics," says Peretz, but "settles the burden of tragic events squarely on Israel." All of this fits what Peretz says has become the New Left's Middle East dogma: that "Israel and Israel alone must bear the blame for the past and the responsibility for the future. Not, it should be clear, only for the plight of the Arab refugees, but for the behavior of the Arab regimes as well, and even (how powerful little Israel must have become!) for the policy of the Soviet Union, its sycophants (at least when Jews are in question), and virtually the entire Third World."

Season of Statistics

Americans, it is said, hunger for facts. If so, this is the feast season, with the appearance of Scripps-Howard's World Almanac. One hundred years old this year, the Almanac offers 916 pages of facts on taxes, elections, strikes, natural disasters, population, Viet Nam and sports events.

Under Editor Luman H. Long, a staff of eight put out the nearly two- inch-thick book. About half of the Almanac is carried over from previous years; the rest consists of new facts and figures. The 1968 edition, for instance, contains the zip code for all communities of more than 2,500 population and color pictures of the flags of all nations, including those of newly independent Guyana (red, green and yellow) and Botswana (white, black and blue). Even so, fact-hungry readers are never satisfied. When the Almanac tries to drop some marginalia, such as the gestation period of animals or the equivalents of Roman numerals, it invariably gets complaints. A reader recently wrote to say that he was "shocked" that the Almanac had no statistics on lefthandedness. Never intimidated by a statistic, Editor Long says he will give it a try next year.

NEWSPAPERS

The Rigors of Criticism