Martin Schneider writes:

Jason Kottke today linked to some scanned pages of Sassy from the early 1990s. Jason observes, "Sassy seems to be one of those rare magazines that is dearly missed but doesn't really have a modern day analogue. (See also Might and Spy.)"

True enough. What occurred to me, however, was that those three magazines have something in common: a very strong editorial hand. In all three cases the editors are pretty well-known people: Jane Pratt in the case of Sassy, Dave Eggers for Might, and Kurt Andersen/E. Graydon Carter for Spy. So the reason they either don't exist or have not been replaced is that those specific people have elected to do other things.

But it feels like the "rule" of a strong, irreplaceable editor needs more to it. There are other (continued)

Martin Schneider writes:

In 2005 I attended a debate on the then-hot topic of "Social Security Reform," featuring Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, Paul Krugman of The New York Times, and Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute. I was reading a transcript of the debate earlier this evening, and I was struck by an odd parallel or perhaps mirror relationship between that political fight, which the Democrats won, and the fight to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2009-10, which the Democrats won.

The parallel I'm interested in is not that the Democrats won both fights. Rather, the resemblance has to do with what a ruling party does when faced with an ambitious reform that is not very popular.

A little bit of context. The debate took place on March 15, 2005. After his reelection in 2004, George W. Bush chose to move forward on a favored policy idea of his, Social Security Reform. The Republicans had initially called the project "Social Security Privatization," but after noticing how poorly that term polled, they switched up their (continued)