The New Republic

It would have been dereliction of duty for Cockburn to pass up a party for Marty, as the invitation cheerily put it. Marty is, of course, Martin Peretz, the former panjandrum of the New Republic, lecturer at Harvard, and champion of Israel, not to mention a host of other worthy causes. A revolving door of staffers and editors not only ensured a constant swirl of attention during his decades-long tenure at the helm of the magazine, but also kept it at the forefront of political debate about race, culture and foreign affairs. On Thursday night, Peretz greeted numerous well-wishers and offered brief remarks about his scintillating new memoir, The Controversialist, whose publication was overseen by Adam Bellow.

I’ve never met Dale Peck, but I know him. That is to say, I’m familiar with the type, a generation of gay, downtown New York City artist I came to know well during my formative years in the city. When I arrived about 15 years ago, New York’s transformation into a globalist monoculture was well under way. The counterculture was nouveau hipsterdom, the first youth movement defined by consumerism – trucker hats, PBR, silkscreening and iPods. Peck’s generation, these scrappy gay men, 20 years older than me, had lived through more interesting and dangerous times and I gravitated toward them. Many never had money but were rich in grit and bawdy tales and remained the same low-rent bon vivants they had been in the 1990s.

'To live in Havana', Graham Greene once wrote, 'was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor belt.' To work as Cockburn does, as an underfed Grub Street hack, is to work in an industry that turns out pointless emails on a conveyor belt. Every now and then though a real diamond rolls out of the coal chute. On Friday The New Republic invited its readers on a Caribbean jaunt – to Raúl Castro’s Cuba. Under the heading 'Discover Cuba and Support the Cuban People' the email read: 'While Trump petulantly restricts travel to Cuba, The New Republic invites you to discover the culture, society and politics of the island, and most of all bolster the people of Cuba when they need it most.