Helen Andrews

We were so close to getting rid of Jann Wenner. When his 51 per cent stake in Rolling Stone was put up for sale last year, it felt safe to assume that the new owners would gently ease out the man whose disastrous recent leadership brought the publication to the point where it needed to be sold. No one on the editorial staff ever did lose their job over the debacle of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s false UVA story in 2014. It seemed only fair that Wenner should lose his.But reporting from Vanity Fair has confirmed that the Penske Media Corporation, the magazine’s new owners, are keeping Wenner on. Not with some kind of emeritus sinecure, either, but with the title of editorial director.We should have known it would be this way with a Baby Boomer.

Ah, this will be about empire. So I thought when I saw that the small city of Arcata, California, has voted to remove the statue on their town plaza of President William McKinley. The United States had never possessed overseas colonies before McKinley. Every territory we acquired, we eventually brought into the republic with full statehood. That all changed in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, at the end of which America found herself in possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines—islands about which McKinley admitted “I could not locate within 2,000 miles.” He also annexed Hawaii and established a protectorate over Cuba.