Mr. Foer, author of How Soccer Explains the World, will be joined again by Serbian novelist and National Book Award finalist Aleksandar Hemon, among others. 

From the release: Contributors to Goal Post also include Matt Weiland (The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup), painter and writer Rabih Alameddine, sportswriter Stefan Fatsis, Talking Points Memo's Zachary Roth, Mexican blogger León Krauze, Spectator's Alex Massie, author Tom Vanderbilt, Colombian novelist Carolina Sanin, Luke Dempsey (A Supremely Bad Idea), The New Republic's Jesse Zwick and Peruvian writer Daniel Alarcón.  

"I think that nerdy kids have a classic response to their sporting disasters as kids," Mr. Foer told the Observer's Lizzy Ratner in 2006. "What they can’t master physically they try to master intellectually, and certainly that’s the case with my soccer experience.”

Hoping to challenge not only New Yorkers' notions about sukkahs but also the world's, Joshua Foer has launched Sukkah City for this coming Sukkot. From September 19-21, a dozen experimental sukkahs will be constructed in Union Square Park, created by what Foer anticipates will be a mix of the world's foremost architects and artists, though the competition is open to anyone, goyim included. "The idea is to take this ancient architectural identity and reinvent it and really see what we can do with it, to really push the boundaries," Foer said.

Ideally, Sukkah City will resemble "a fusion of the early days of the Venice Biennale and the P.S.1 summer pavilion competition" and will evolve into an annual event—"not unlike the holiday itself."

According to the press release, much of what's currently available on TNR.com will remain open to the non-paying public.

More from the release:

For $44.97, TNR Society offers home delivery, digital access, 95+ years of The New Republic’s archives,
and other new perks, like insider newsletters, articles, and invitations to high-profile events. Home
Delivery includes print and digital magazine subscriptions as well as online access for $39.97. For
$29.97, readers can enjoy the web version of the magazine and online access.

Beginning April 7, subscribers will be prompted to register to read select premium content on TNR.com,
while nonsubscribers will be asked to subscribe. Although this marks a strategic shift for TNR.com, most
visitors probably won’t detect a significant difference: much of the site will remain unregulated, as many
features, web columns, and blogs will remain open to all online users.

“TNR Society will provide our most avid readers with more opportunities to engage with our editorial
content across platforms with ‘insider access,’” Publisher Mike Rancilio said. Of the new subscriber-only
content: “we are confident that our most committed audience fully appreciates the extraordinary resources
we put into our high-quality reporting and analysis in print and online, and is ready and willing to support
that investment.”

In the past year, the business operations of The New Republic have experienced something of a
resurgence, as the magazine has ramped up its efforts online. An average of one million unique users visit
its website each month, and traffic surged by 30% in just the first quarter of this year. The success of
TNR.com has bolstered advertising across the board: total ad revenue increased by more than 150% in
first quarter of 2010, with online advertising alone topping 3x growth over the first quarter 2009.

In a phone interview with The Observer Friday, Mr. Beauchamp's wife, former TNR reporter-researcher Elspeth Reeve, shed a bit more light on that aspect of the controversy.

In early August, the web site of The Weekly Standard, citing a military source close to the army's internal investigation, reported that Mr. Beauchamp had signed a sworn statement recanting much of what he'd described in his TNR pieces. TNR's editors were understandably troubled by the news, and set about trying to verify it—a task made much more difficult by the fact that, from late July until September, the Army would not allow Mr. Beauchamp to speak to TNR.

But Ms. Reeve told The Observer that TNR's executive editor, Peter Scoblic, did get Mr. Beauchamp on the phone once during that blackout, and asked him point-blank whether he'd recanted.

According to Ms. Reeve, one of one her weekly phone calls with Mr. Beauchamp, in early August, took place while she was at the TNR office, where she worked at the time. Mr. Scoblic was in the room with her, Ms. Reeve said, and asked to be put on the phone with Mr. Beauchamp so he could ask him about the statements.

Ms. Reeve reluctantly agreed—the fact that a non-commissioned officer monitored all of Mr. Beauchamp's conversations with his wife made it a risky move—and instructed her husband to answer Mr. Scoblic's questions with either 'yes' or 'no'.

"This was the most intense moment," Ms. Reeve said. "[Mr. Scoblic] asked [Mr. Beauchamp] all about the statement: 'did you say this, did you say that,' just trying to figure out if he had contradicted himself in any way."

According to Ms. Reeve, Mr. Beauchamp told Mr. Scoblic he had not recanted anything, and insisted that he had not fabricated any of his material—something he continues to maintain to this day.

Mr. Scoblic did not respond to a request for comment on his covert conversation with Mr. Beauchamp. But according to the retraction Mr. Foer published in TNR last weekend—which did not mention Mr. Scoblic's conversation with Mr. Beauchamp—the magazine's editors had lost confidence in Mr. Beauchamp's word by this point, and wanted to see the statements with their own eyes.

Mr. Foer told The Observer in an interview early last week that Mr. Beauchamp consistently failed to produce them.

In her conversation with The Observer Friday, Ms. Reeve agreed that Mr. Beauchamp could have done more to get the statements to TNR, but said that he did clear them for release under the Freedom of Information Act, so that the editors could retrieve them on their own initiative if they wanted to.

"The statements evolved into this symbol, I think, for Scott's cooperation," Ms. Reeve said. "I wouldn’t say that he wasn't cooperating. It's just that—how can I phrase this?—it's really hard for a civilian to understand what daily life is like over there… Working 20 hours a day it can be hard to sneak out to use the fax machine."

Earlier that week, Ms. Reeve’s former boss, The New Republic’s editor, Franklin Foer, had published a 7000-word piece that concluded by formally retracting three first-person columns that the 24-year-old Mr. Beauchamp had written for the magazine over the summer. Soon after their publication, a chorus of conservative bloggers had raised questions about the veracity of the columns, in which Mr. Beauchamp offered first-person accounts of American troops in Iraq engaging in shocking behavior, such as running over dogs with their Bradleys, and mocking a woman whose face had been disfigured in an explosion. After carrying out a nearly five-month investigation, which involved attempts to corroborate Mr. Beauchamp’s claims with other members of his unit, Mr. Foer had concluded that the stories could not be verified.

It was Ms. Reeve, 25, who, while working at TNR as a reporter-researcher, had recommended Mr. Beauchamp—not yet her husband at the time—to the magazine’s editors. Nevertheless, Ms. Reeve said, she wasn’t going to let the fact that Mr. Foer had publicly denounced Mr. Beauchamp’s work spoil her mood on the eve of her reunion with her husband.

“[Scott] survived the war, he’s coming home, we’re newlyweds, it’s Christmas,” she said. “I’m living in a romance novel. It’s kind of hard to be down.”

Ms. Reeve said she was surprised to learn, in early November while visiting her husband in Germany (where he was transferred upon completing his tour of duty in Iraq), that Mr. Foer planned to retract the stories. She said that she and Mr. Beauchamp had not expected Mr. Foer to take any decisive action until Mr. Beauchamp returned to the U.S. this week, at which point they thought it would be much easier for him to speak up in his own defense.

“I think Scott thought Frank was on his side, you know? And that he understood that he was in a really difficult situation and so would be patient until Scott got out of Iraq,” Ms. Reeve said. “I don’t think Scott realized the limits on Frank’s patience.”

Ms. Reeve also argued that Mr. Foer’s retraction, titled “The Fog of War,” had failed to prove that any of Mr. Beauchamp’s stories contained fabrications—all it did, she said, was demonstrate that Mr. Foer was tired of dealing with the scandal.

“When I first heard about this piece,” Ms. Reeve said, “I thought they would have taken all the different things that the soldiers had said about each of the three stories and analyzed them for inconsistencies, and said, ‘Here’s where we think Scott exaggerated’ or ‘Here’s where we think the stories don’t match up and that’s why we can’t stand behind them anymore.’ But instead they were like, ‘Here are all the reasons to support Scott, but this is hard.’ And they just threw up their hands.”

Indeed, Mr. Foer’s piece was a classic Alford plea, which declared that even though the re-reporting effort had failed to turn up any discrepancies in Mr. Beauchamp’s stories—other than his placing a key scene in Iraq when in fact it took place in Kuwait, which Mr. Beauchamp has said was an honest mistake—the investigation had hit a dead end. TNR could no longer stand by the stories because too many of the facts were impossible to check, Mr. Foer wrote, and because Mr. Beauchamp, who continues to maintain that he did not fabricate anything, had consistently failed to help TNR in their attempts to vindicate him.

According to Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at TNR, the magazine received little cooperation from Mr. Beauchamp throughout the investigation process. “The basis [for the retraction] was just that Scott is maddening,” he said. “He’s just flaky, he’s irresponsible, he doesn’t do things that are in his own obvious interest to do. … Scott was the guy who lives in the group house and is supposed to pay the electric bill and just doesn’t, and the lights get shut off. Frank was the guy who had the lights shut out on him.” Mr. Beauchamp declined to comment for this story.

According to Mr. Chait, some of Mr. Foer’s colleagues at TNR, though generally supportive of the steps he has taken during the past few months, were not certain that the pieces deserved to be retracted outright just because Mr. Beauchamp had failed to cooperate with the investigation. “I don’t think anybody on staff had a clear idea of what the article would or should conclude before Frank wrote it,” Mr. Chait said.

But Martin Peretz, the magazine’s editor in chief, who, until earlier this year, was also its owner, stood behind the decision to retract the stories. “Certainly in retrospect we shouldn’t have published them,” he told The Observer Monday. “They did not meet the highest standards of proof.”

Mr. Peretz also said Mr. Foer’s piece should finally put to rest the notion, advanced by some conservative bloggers, that Mr. Beauchamp’s stories were intended to undermine the troops’ mission.

“There was certainly no editorial decision to trash the United States Army, because as you know, The New Republic has a very—what shall I say?—careful view of the war,” said Mr. Peretz. “So we would not be motivated in any way to say, ‘Hey this is hot! It makes our soldiers look like shit!’”

As for what the future holds for Mr. Beauchamp and his bride—they’re moving to Germany, where Mr. Beauchamp has two more years of service to complete. Ms. Reeve said Mr. Beauchamp does not yet know what he wants to do when he leaves the Army.

“I was like, 'Sweet! I can talk to Scott on TNR’s dime!'” Ms. Reeve said.

Ms. Reeve was working at TNR when Mr. Beauchamp--whose articles described soldiers killing dogs and mocking wounded civilians--was accused by critics of fabricating some of his material.

Mr. Foer has since written and published a 7,000-word piece retracting Mr. Beauchamp's articles for TNR, noting that assigning Ms. Reeve to fact-check her husband's work was a mistake.

Make sure to read tomorrow's print edition of the Observer for more on Mr. Foer's retraction, as well as more from Ms. Reeve on what went wrong with her husband's controversial articles.

Based on Mr. Foer's account, it does not appear that TNR's four-and-a-half-month investigation turned up any new inconsistencies in Mr. Beauchamp's stories. Nor has Mr. Beauchamp confessed to making anything up.

So why is TNR backing off now?

In an interview this afternoon, Mr. Foer told Media Mob that while there was no evidence to suggest that Mr. Beauchamp had fabricated any of his Iraq dispatches, TNR’s editors had lost confidence in their correspondent over the course of the fall, and had reached a dead-end with their investigation.

"Aside from the Iraq-Kuwait mistake, which is extremely serious and did a lot to throw our confidence in him, we didn't find other mistakes," Mr. Foer continued, referring to an anecdote which Mr. Beauchamp had originally described as taking place in a Baghdad mess hall, but which he later admitted occurred in Kuwait. "We just had questions that we weren't able to answer to our satisfaction. We wanted a layer of evidence and corroboration that went beyond what we were able to obtain via him and our own reporting."

Mr. Foer continued: "We kind of reached the point of diminishing returns in our reporting, so we felt like we needed to render a final verdict based on the evidence that we had."

Asked why TNR had not demanded this layer of evidence and corroboration before Mr. Beauchamp's pieces were published, Mr. Foer said, "There's a baseline level of trust you have in writers when you assign them pieces."

Mr. Foer said he had trusted Mr. Beauchamp—then 23 and without journalistic training—largely on the recommendation of Elspeth Reeve, who at the time had been working at TNR for six months as a reporter-researcher.

As Mr. Foer noted in today's account, Ms. Reeve married Mr. Beauchamp soon after putting him in touch with the magazine. Later, she was assigned to fact-check "Shock Troops," one of the articles for which Mr. Beauchamp has come under fire.

Mr. Foer said he had asked Mr. Beauchamp to send him copies of the statements he'd made to the Army regarding events he'd described in his TNR pieces, but that Mr. Beauchamp had failed to hand them over.

As a result, said Mr. Foer, "Over time, our confidence in Beauchamp did diminish." He went on: "We were told he had a legal right to obtain them and he told us he was working on obtaining them."

Mr. Foer said he has no plans to resign from the magazine, and that no one at TNR has asked him to.

The magazine may have erred by running the columns orginally, but it's hard not to conclude that, since then, it's been admirably forthright and energetic in its efforts to get to the truth.  

The Drudge Report posted several documents pertaining to the Army's investigation into the Beauchamp affair, including a transcript of telephone conversation from Sept. 6 in which Mr. Beauchamp refuses to confirm that his stories were true when asked by TNR editor Franklin Foer and executive editor Peter Scoblic.

That transcript--which, along with Drudge's article and the other documents, were removed from The Drudge Report after a few hours--sparked an uproar among TNR's conservative critics, who said the editors of the magazine should have informed their readers of the conversation.

In the statement posted today, the editors write that Mr. Beauchamp did not recant anything during the conversation, but rather declined to comment one way or another because Army officials--who, up to that point, had forbade Mr. Beauchamp from communicating with the magazine--were in the room. "The September 6 exchange was extremely frustrating; however, it was frustrating precisely because it did not add any new information to our investigation," the editors write. "Beauchamp's refusal to defend himself certainly raised serious doubts. That said, Beauchamp's words were being monitored: His squad leader was in the room as he spoke to us, as was a public affairs specialist, and it is now clear that the Army was recording the conversation for its files."

The statement indicates that the day after that conversation took place, Mr. Beauchamp told his wife, who at the time was a research-reporter at TNR, that he was willing to stand behind what he'd written after all. According to the statement, Mr. Beauchamp later called Mr. Foer at home and told him the same thing.

In light of these conversations, the editors say, they do not accept the Army's assessment (as expressed in the report posted on The Drudge Report Monday) that some of the allegations Mr. Beauchamp made in his articles were inaccurate.

TNR is continuing its investigation into Mr. Beauchamp's stories, the editors say; the reason it's taking so long, they write, is that the Army has not been cooperating.

"We have worked hard to re-report this piece and will continue to do so," the editors write, referring to "Shock Troops," a piece Mr. Beauchamp wrote that has attracted particularly fierce skepticism. "But this process has involved maddening delays compounded by bad faith on the part of at least some officials in the Army. Our investigation has taken far longer than we would like, but it is our obligation and promise to deliver a full account of our findings."

UPDATE: Asked to comment on TNR's statement, an Army spokesman for the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division--Major Kirk Luedeke, who has served as TNR's contact in the Army because Mr. Beauchamp belongs to an infantry regiment that is attached to the 4th Brigade--said that although he could not comment on behalf of the entire Army, he could say that "from a brigade standpoint... a thorough investigation was conducted into Pvt. Beauchamp's allegations and determined them to be unfounded. We are confident in the findings of the investigating officer and stand by them, and continue to be focused on our daily operations and missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom here in Baghdad."

Mr. Foer said he called TNR’s contact there, Major Kirk Luedeke, as soon as the documents appeared on Drudge’s Web site. According to Mr. Foer, Major Luedeke told him that the Army was “investigating the source of the leak,” though they did not explicitly take responsibility for it.

“It’s maddening to see the Army selectively leak to the Drudge Report things that we’ve been trying to obtain from them through Freedom of Information Act requests,” Mr. Foer said. “This fits a pattern in this case where the army has leaked a lot of stuff to right wing blogs.”

Mr. Foer said TNR had been trying since July to get access to some of the documents Mr. Drudge posted, but that the Army had not cooperated.

Among these was the Army’s final report on its investigation into Mr. Beauchamp’s TNR pieces. The report concludes that portions of those pieces had been “completely fabricated."

UPDATE: In an e-mail to the Media Mob, Major Luedeke of the 4th Brigade Public Affairs office said, “All I can tell you is that the leak did not originate with this office, and that the Army is looking into who is responsible. That process is being handled at levels above this brigade, however."

E-mails to Mr. Drudge have not been returned.