We're sure the Beinarts can make this room feel more UWS.

There's something to be said for embracing stereotypes. At least as far as political pundit, intellectual and Open Zion editor Peter Beinart is concerned.

Sure, Mr. Beinart and his wife Diana might have found the perfect co-op in the Village or a trendy loft in Tribeca. If they wanted to follow the herd, or at least scions of The New York Times, they would have snapped up a place in Brooklyn.

But the Beinarts—who just purchased a classic six complete with great light and river views at 755 West End Avenue—are apparently in love with the Upper West Side.

And why not? It's a beautiful (and classic!) neighborhood for an intellectual wunderkind and his brood. The couple appear to be keeping things local, as city records notes they are moving just around the corner, haveing calledthe Rutherford at 360 Riverside Drive home. So there won't be any unpleasant surprises when they find that all the bookstores and independent coffee shops have been replaced by bank branches and Starbucks in the past 30 years.

The Bienarts dropped $1.9 million on the two-bedroom, two-bath co-op listed with Brown Harris Stevens brokers Gail Gros and David Everson. One of those is a sybaritic bath with stone tiled shower and Italian fittings—whatever that means. The apartment was most recently asking $2 million, a little under what sellers Marietta and Patrizio Tognozzi seem to have paid for the 15th-floor co-op in 2007.

The Beinarts will enjoy beamed ceilings, an eat-in chef's kitchen "enhanced by lacquered cabinets," river views from five of the six rooms and a maid's room that has been "seamlessly converted into an efficient office complete with built-in cabinetry and washer dryer," according to the listing. Beamed ceilings and hardwood floors are de rigeur, as much as the Persian carpets, artfully-arranged bookshelves and slightly-mussed sofa cushions.

kvelsey@observer.com

The Wall Street Journal reports that “dozens of faux downtowns [are] popping up across the country, from Kansas City to Washington, D.C., spurred by a demand for urban living scrubbed of the reality of city life. A careful mix of retail, residential and office space built with traditional materials such as stone and brick, Legacy looks like a city but has neither panhandlers nor potholes.” In Legacy Town Center, the faux downtown outside of Dallas, the paper says that “Many residents rarely venture even to downtown Dallas, which has been trying to turn itself into a place to live for almost a decade …. ‘There’s too much riffraff down there,’ says Ron Pettit, a 36-year-old contractor, as he snacks on brie and grapes at a table outside.”

These places are better than simple gated communities; these are gated communities of the mind and imagination, the final step out of the 21st century into timelessness, into never-never land, a sweet and safe place which did not exist in any of the wonderful back-thens but have become such a large part of the American here and now. What a strange situation: a backward-peddling nation, unable to look at its present, much less deal with contemporary problems, physically constructing a series of back-lot movie sets for itself to live in.

An inside-out, upside-down picture of life by which one lies to one’s self about the present by lying to one’s self about the past. So complicated, so screwy! They’ve even been doing it with the new baseball parks designed to bring us back to the era of Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and Babe Ruth.

So here we all are, in our luxurious, slap-happy retro dream, while away, away, away out there across the world, our reveries are jostled—but only ever so slightly—by tardy reports from places like Haditha and Guantánamo. The reactions to these bits of information read as though they came from inside a gated, retro community enclosing an opium den.

Here is Mr. Peter Beinart in The New Republic, as quoted by Mr. William Kristol in The Weekly Standard: “Americans can be as barbaric as anyone. What makes us an exceptional nation with the capacity to lead and inspire the world is our very recognition of that fact. We are capable of Hadithas and My Lais, so is everyone. But few societies are capable of acknowledging what happened, bringing the killers to justice, and instituting changes that make it less likely to happen again. That’s how we show we are different from the jihadists. We don’t just assert it. We prove it. That’s the liberal version of American exceptionalism, and it’s what we need right now in response to this horror.”

To which Mr. Kristol answers: “No, it isn’t. The last thing we need in response to Haditha is hand-wringing liberalism.”

They’re both on the pipe, strolling through some developer-inspired political Xanadu. You’ve got to be holed up in a Green Zone of the mind to kid yourself into thinking that the world is going to kiss our bottoms in admiration because, after having been caught in the headlights by Time magazine, we are belatedly hanging the Marines who did the killings by their ears. Court-martialing the Marines doesn’t prove to anybody but ourselves that we are different from jihadists. To the rest of the world, punishing the Marines is an automatic propaganda gesture that even such outstanding liberals as Vladimir Putin or Hu Jintao would carry out. Mr. Beinart’s words are but one more example of the kind of self-flattery which flourishes like the green sward of our gated communities.

From the safety of his own faux city, Mr. Kristol goes on to say: “The war against the jihadists, a war Beinart supports, is not a metaphorical one. Liberals may want to win a war on terror without fighting, and are shocked that in a war, crimes and abuses occur. But here’s the hard, Trumanesque truth: In war, terrible things happen, including crimes and abuses and cover-ups.”

In truth, Mr. Kristol, the reactionary with the alligator smile, confuses fighting with talking tough. Politicians of his stripe think that invoking Harry Truman is an effective anti-liberal put-down. Once you mention Truman, the he-man’s liberal and, puzzlingly enough, the modern right-winger’s political hero, they expect those who disagree to shrivel and skulk away into the cowardly night.

When you make up the past as you go along, it need not conform to any known set of facts, but, for the record, were Harry Truman alive now, Mr. Kristol would abominate him as a vote-stealing machine politician, a pro-union, pro-socialized-medicine, pro-price-control ineffectual wartime President who failed to lead the country to victory by refusing to do what needed to be done to win the war in Korea. Oh, well ….

But by Mr. Kristol’s lights, President George W. Bush is a wartime leader able to make changes when things aren’t exactly going to plan. So he writes: “It is heartening that he [Mr. Bush] met last week, in private, with a group of diverse experts on Iraq, in order to get fresh points of view about the situation there.”

Lest you still entertain a lingering doubt or two over how Iraq may turn out, Mr. Kristol goes on to say: “The president understands that this war isn’t going to be won unless he ensures that it gets won. It won’t get won if the president doesn’t aggressively defend the honor of our soldiers and Marines. And it won’t get won if we succumb to liberal hand-wringing, or indulge in conservative happy talk. But it must get won. Winning the wars this nation commits to is also the way we keep our honor clean.”

In Retro City, our choice is between liberal hand-wringing and right-wing blab about honor and “winning wars our nation commits to,” the old staying-the-course line. In the Williamsburg of the mind in which these sterling fellows live, there’s not so much as a hint about the practicalities.

What might they be? To find out, we need to take a second look at the Haditha massacre. The men involved are doomed to long terms of hard labor at Leavenworth, so there’s no need for more dumping on them, poor bastards that they are. If Mr. Kristol’s Harry Truman were around now, he might say, “Follow the buck—and when you do, it will take you to Donald Rumsfeld’s office and President Bush’s desk. Haditha happened because there were not enough soldiers in Iraq.”

These men were on their second tour of duty in a land that apparently has about six wars going at the same time. They cannot speak the language, and at this point, one wonders what good it would do if they did. They are in a foreign land fighting God knows who for God knows why for God knows how long and how many times. In fear, anger and confusion, they killed a bunch of people—murdered them even—but at the bottom, it happened because there are not enough troops in Iraq and the troops that are there are increasingly badgered, bewildered and bedeviled by murderous enemies who cannot be seen or identified most of the time. The number of enemies increases daily even as the population in which our troops must operate becomes more hostile and unforgiving. Iraq has become an anarchic bloodbath. Our natural allies, the professional and business classes, are fleeing the place before they are all assassinated.

Regardless of how well disciplined they are, how much firepower they have, 150,000 troops cannot contain this situation, much less dominate it and extinguish the killings. To continue with the present force levels is to contribute to a disgusting and indefensible slaughter of human beings. Going on as we are is madness, and it’s criminal. There were not enough troops in Iraq three years ago, and there still are not enough troops.

Moreover, at the rate the situation is deteriorating, by the time the United States has “stayed the course,” it may be physically forced to withdraw. At the 150,000-troop level, day by day, month by month and year by year, the situation grows more difficult, and some day it may have gotten so bad that we are unable to leave without taking significant losses.

The part of the world that does not live in faux cities and kitchy-kitchy-koo-restored communities understands that at the 150,000-troop level, there is no exit strategy, nor is one possible: We only have the strength to hold on.

Mr. Beinart and Mr. Kristol, the two of them, must understand that the price of staying in Iraq is not oratory on the theme of sacred honor or blabology about tough-guy liberalism or tricking the world into thinking we are what Mr. Beinart imagines we are. The price is raising an army.

The United States must send an army to Iraq that is large enough to pacify the country. That’s a half-million men and a few women standing on every street corner in every city and village, not a few desperate and harried Marines rushing to and fro to smother (with decreasing success) the newest and worst outbreaks.

An army of such size in today’s America would have to be conscripted. The name of every 18- and 19-year-old man and every woman capable of bench-pressing over a certain number of pounds gets put in a draft lottery. The scheme is simple; the politics are horrendous, because all of a sudden it’s no longer telling a public waxing fat on war that they are heroes. In the blink of an eye, the speechmaking about sacrifice will have been made real.

Is that going to happen? Is hardship supposed to come to carefully planned gated communities where the nostalgia is three-dimensional? There are no hard choices in the faux cities, nor is there any parallel in history of a people which similarly built sand castles and then inhabited them—unless it was the peasant village constructed for Marie Antoinette on the grounds of Versailles. There, she and her intimates played at being simple people until the real simple people came and chopped off her head.

[Update: In a story for tomorrow's paper, posted on the Web this evening, The New York Times confirms that Foer is replacing Beinart.]

"I'm not going to confirm anything," New Republic owner and editor-in-chief Martin Peretz said by phone this afternoon, as he prepared to catch a flight to Israel. "Call me tomorrow."

Neither Beinart nor Foer returned calls seeking comment.

Beinart has been editor of the weekly since November of 1999. His presence has diminished recently, however. For much of the last year, he was on leave writing The Good Fight, a book based on a 6,000-word meditation on John Kerry's defeat he wrote for TNR in 2004. The book is due out from HarperCollins in June.

Foer has recently been courted by The New York Times, which hoped to hire him to write about the culture of Washington, D.C.

Some New Republic staffers said they were unaware of any pending masthead changes.

"I don't know what's going on," one staffer said. "Beinart is definitely back and 90 percent of where he was before. Before the book, he was committed 24 hours [a day] to TNR. Now it's 20 hours. He's still very committed, but with the understandable coda that he's writing his book."

--Gabriel Sherman

Peter Beinart agrees with our longstanding gripe that despite the attraction of the "Hillary Moves Right" storyline, it happens to be false.

The narrative has gained strength from the fact that everyone seems to like it: the mainstream media, who are looking for signs of a Clinton run for president; some of Hillary's aides, who see it as affirmation of what the've argued all along -- that she's a centrist; and perhaps most of all, the right.

Beinart looks at that last piece and argues:

"The 'Hillary shifts to the center' line isn't innocuous at all. It's crucial to the campaign that conservatives will wage against her in years to come. That campaign is likely to revolve around character."

Peter Beinart's definitive piece on that trend is here, but Ballabon's a fascinating character as much for his personal complexities -- Yeshiva boy, Yale Law School and, as Spitzer aide Cindy Darrison would have it, neanderthal/feminist.

The profile also gave us an excuse to read an excellent detective novel called Bag Men, one of whose characters, Detective Shecky Bliss, is modeled on Ballabon.

Read the piece for some Ralph Reed fun and a different perspective on John Ashcroft from the one usually heard around here.

Met: Aug. 6, 2001

Engaged: Feb. 14, 2003

Projected Wedding Date: Oct. 25, 2003

Neo-liberal love! Peter Beinart, the swarthy 32-year-old who's been the editor of The New Republic since 1999, is marrying Diana Hartstein, also 32, an attorney with the tax and litigation firm Caplin and Drysdale in Washington, D.C.-and a serious babe.

The Sephardic ceremony and reception to follow will be held at the Willard InterContinental Washington hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, as well as New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz, literary editor Leon Wieseltier and owner Roger Hertog, are all expected to attend-we didn't have the heart to ask about Gregg ("Really Bad Choice of Words") Easterbrook-and may well break a sweat. Mr. Beinart said he and his bride are both "horrah maniacs," adding: "Our rule is that until someone is on the floor in a coma, the dance isn't done."

The couple met at a Mexican restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue, during a mutual friend's benefit for a local charter school. Ms. Hartstein, a graduate of the University of Maryland and Columbia Law who's currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School, made the editor positively giddy. But she'd never read The New Republic ! "She's less of a political junkie than I am," said Mr. Beinart, a graduate of Yale and Oxford. "But her instincts run towards a kind of hawkish liberalism-a liberalism that isn't embarrassed by open displays of patriotism." God bless America.

"I knew she was 'it' pretty quickly," he continued. "Diana was what I had always been looking for. This is mushy stuff for your paper, but she just sort of radiates a warmth and a caring and a dynamism that really struck me very early on."

On a vacation with her sister and mother in Paris, Ms. Hartstein was wondering around the patisserie La Duree on the Champs Elysee ("I'm a huge baker," she said. "I mean I love to bake-not that I'm a huge person") when suddenly Mr. Beinart appeared and whisked her off to the Tuileries Gardens, where he produced a platinum, Lucida-style diamond ring.

"Intellectually, I guess I knew it was going to happen when he showed up, but I wasn't quite sure of my name at that moment," she said. Then it was off to, er, discuss politics in a suite at the Ritz.

"He makes me so happy," Ms. Hartstein said. "He makes my life an adventure through constant enlightenment and encouragement. He's also the most deeply moral and principled human being I've ever met. He has a huge curiosity about humanity and the world at large."

Mr. Beinart, with commendable idealism, believes that the stresses of putting out a weekly magazine won't interfere with his marriage. "When you're an editor, you usually have the last word, and I don't think that's going to be the case here," he said. "Being a husband is going to be a lot more important to me than being an editor."

Amanda Lipitz and Greg Smith

Met: May 2002

Engaged: Aug. 27, 2003

Projected Wedding Date: July 4, 2004

Broadway producers and paramours Greg Smith and Amanda Lipitz were walking by the Helen Hayes Theatre on West 44th Street.

"Oh, look what's playing," said Mr. Smith. Ms. Lipitz looked up. The marquee read "Amanda Will You Marry Me?"

"Shut the fuck up!" she gasped.

Each of their families then rushed out from inside the theater (can no one propose in private anymore?) as Mr. Smith knelt down and unloaded a large round diamond in a sparkling platinum pavé setting. After Sardi's sent over champagne, the entire ensemble proceeded to Marseille for dinner.

The couple met after Ms. Lipitz, the daughter of philanthropists, fell in love with a little Off Broadway musical with a cast of two called The Last Five Years during her senior year studying drama at N.Y.U. She rang the show's production office, East Egg Entertainment, to inquire about investing, and after a couple of interviews wound up working there as an assistant. She was seated across from the dark-haired, cleft-chinned Mr. Smith.

Ms. Lipitz is also dark-haired-pretty and taut, with flawless skin-and their physical chemistry was instant. "I distinctly remember this one time I was filing something in a cabinet, and he walked by and touched my hip," she said. "And I ran home to my roommate and was like, 'He touched my hip! What does that mean?'"

They went to see Burn This , the Off Brodway play starring Catherine Keener, and spent much of the next day making out furiously in the office elevator and conference room. "I was like, 'This is so wrong. I can't do this,'" said Mr. Smith, who is 34 (Ms. Lipitz is a mere babe of 23). "I've always considered myself a very professional person and I have to do the right thing, and she's too young!" By the end of that week, he was trying to break it off over lunch at the Palm.

"I just put my hand on his and said, 'It's O.K., Greg. I understand. But you're not going to be able to help yourself,'" said the impish Ms. Lipitz. "And a half hour later, we were making out again."

She was promoted to producer earlier this year, and they are currently producing a stage version of the Steve Martin-Michael Caine flick Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. "And one day we'll produce a family, too," she said, Kate Hudson-esquely. In the meantime, there's Hope Lipitz-Smith, the chow/golden-retriever mix with whom they share a two-bedroom in Tribeca. "I'm a freaky dog person," said Hope's "mom."

"Amanda makes a lot of people feel very, very special," Mr. Smith said. "Everyone needs a little bit of Amanda in their life-I truly believe she's a star."

"And to me, that's the ultimate compliment," said Ms. Lipitz, who recently took performance classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade.

She'll wear a "dramatic" Candice Soloman gown to their showbiz-themed wedding ( Playbill s, etc.) at her mother's Baltimore home. Guests will receive compilation discs of the couple's favorite show tunes. "I never thought I'd find a straight guy who'd listen to musicals with me!" Ms. Lipitz said.

Since bride and groom are big fans of the Billy Joel musical Movin' Out , she will walk down the aisle to "She's Got a Way" and he to the beginning of "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant"-cutting off before Brenda and Eddie start to fight when the money gets tight.

Matthew Cooper and Lyndsey Grimes

Met: Sept. 6, 1999

Engaged: April 7, 2003

Projected Wedding Date: March 13, 2004

Lyndsey Grimes, 28, a vice president at Rubenstein Public Relations, is marrying Matthew Cooper, 31, a chiropractor at Manhattan Sports Medicine on East 58th Street. "He's great," said Ms. Grimes, a lissome creature with brown eyes and silky black hair down to her boobs. "He'll adjust me whenever I want."

"No, she doesn't do my P.R.," said the dashing, sloe-eyed doc. "Everyone is always asking me that."

They met at the restaurant 212 after being fixed up by Dr. Cooper's cousin (a classmate of Ms. Grimes' from the University of Miami), but it took them a while to arrive at the same mental area code. "He has a quiet demeanor about him, and I have a very strong personality," she said. "So at first I just thought he wasn't interested in talking to me." Dr. Cooper thought she was cute, though. "She's always smiling," he said, "and has these big dimples."

Ms. Grimes ignored his follow-up phone call the next day. But later that week, she ran into him at a Video Music Awards party at Veruka, arm-in-arm with a model. That'll do the trick, fellas! "I was like, 'Wait-I think I'm missing out on something,'" she said. Dimples apologized for not getting back to him. "I think I have a little crush on you," she confessed.

"I was like, 'Sure, great,' but it was kind of awkward because I was there with someone else," Dr. Cooper said. "Luckily, the girl I'd brought didn't really speak English."

When they met again at Della Femina the next night, the relationship snapped into place like a pair of re-aligned vertebrae. "He's a very kind, kind person," Ms. Grimes said.

Cut to a snowy bridge in Venice, where they were vacationing after one of those hedonistic Under the Tuscan Sun weddings that are so au fait these days. Dr. Cooper suggested a gondola ride. "I want to spend the rest of my life with you," he declared. "I'm like, 'O.K., great, but let's go back to the room,'" Ms. Grimes said. "It was so cold, and I was so tired."

Then he gave her a chunky round diamond in an antique platinum pave setting.

"Suddenly she's like, ' Now I'll go on a gondola!'" he said.

She'll wear a white satin Ulla-Maija dress when they wed at the Pleasantdale Château in West Orange, N.J. (his home state). They're honeymooning in South Africa and moving into an Upper East Side junior four as soon as they close.

The bride-to-be has been enjoying plenty of gratis spinal treatments, of course. "But it's hard to work on her," said Dr. Cooper. "Because if I'm doing soft-tissue work and it hurts, she complains more than my other patients."

"I never really realized that I had any back pain until we started dating," Ms. Grimes said. "Now I have pain all the time."

This happens from time to time. The New Republic has a long tradition of within-the-party tree shaking, including stances against Jimmy Carter's foreign policy and to nuclear freezes. It supported the deployment of advance missiles to Germany; it opposed what owner Martin Peretz deemed the "racialization" of the party by men like Jesse Jackson. During that time, remembered former editor Michael Kinsley, The Wall Street Journal 's editorial board accused the magazine of "attacking conservatives while stealing their ideas," and staffers joked that TNR should change its name to Even the Liberal New Republic Says … , because it was used so many times to support conservative positions.

Now, amid the George W. Bush era-and, it should be noted with Mr. Peretz's guy, Al Gore, out of the 2004 presidential race- TNR 's going after its woebegone Democratic flesh and blood with renewed vigor.

"It's back to the future," said TNR editor Peter Beinart.

This time around, TNR 's disgusted with a post–Bill Clinton/Al Gore party it considers weak and wimpish. A recent press release touted "several daring political stances" by the magazine, among them, supporting war in Iraq, rejecting President Bush's tax cut and calling on Democrats to "shun controversial presidential candidate Al Sharpton."

It could be argued that those positions-shunning Al Sharpton!?-sound pretty moderate, about as daring as wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt to a Lehman Brothers company picnic. But Mr. Beinhart rejected that suggestion, maintaining that TNR is breaking new ground.

"'Moderate' suggests splitting the difference between conservative and liberals," Mr. Beinhart said. "We're one of the few [publications that] want to not only reject the Bush tax cut, but also want no tax cut. On war, we're arguing that we have to go to war even without the U.N."

Still, TNR alums wonder how much mileage the magazine can continue to gain from such against-the-grain positioning. For starters, they say, the internal Democrat-bashing has lost some of its shock value. Secondly, they argue that such counterintuitive positions make it harder for the magazine to maintain a consistent point of view.

"I read the magazine because it's full of trenchant critiques of the Bush domestic policy," said Hendrik Hertzberg, TNR 's editor from 1981 to 1985 and 1989 to 1991. "When I see a piece saying 'Nancy Pelosi is a Stalinist,' I just skip it.

"The old 'Even The New Republic …' scam was getting a little old in the 1980's," Mr. Hertzberg continued. "Now it's a quarter of a century old."

Mr. Kinsley, who also edited the magazine during two stints, from 1979 to 1981 and from 1985 to 1989, said that the taking-on-the-party positioning succeeded in winning attention for the magazine, but proved problematic over the longer haul.

" The New Republic got mileage out of being unpredictable," said Mr. Kinsley, "But in my mind, being unpredictable meant being unreliable and inconsistent and lacking a general plan. I always thought there was virtue in being predictable. But they feel the opposite works.

"They're really struggling to try and strike a balance between being critical of the administration and being internally critical of liberals," Mr. Kinsley continued. "They see themselves as being critical from within. But that gets hard to pull off after about 30 years."

Not surprisingly, Mr. Beinart sees things a little differently. As a teenager growing up in Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Beinart, who began reading TNR in high school, admitted he felt the magazine was too conservative. Now, he said, he sees The New Republic 's stances not as too conservative, but as rooted in the magazine's own idea of liberalism, which he believes has been consistent.

Lately, TNR 's focus has been on war with Iraq. At every turn, TNR has bashed the war's Democratic detractors, including one Presidential hopeful, Senator John Kerry, and the boy who could do no wrong, Al Gore.

"I think the magazine has a pretty interesting role in the party," Mr. Beinart said. "Right now, the Democratic Party is at sea. We have a definite vision. Not everyone likes it, but practically, if the Democratic Party only pursues military intervention like Kofi Annan wants to, the party will be dead for a generation. Morally, liberals need to recognize that to blindly oppose any American military power is a dangerous illusion. Power is the force that drives the world.

"We think we can argue very well and deeply for the war in our liberalism," Mr. Beinart explained. "Without American power, liberalism doesn't have a shot in the world. Who's going to trust us otherwise? The French?"

The boss agreed. Mr. Peretz-who last year brought financiers Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt on board as investors, but remains involved in the magazine on a daily basis-said he felt the Democrats weren't "rightly trusted" by the American people because they weren't "comfortable dealing with defense, national security and foreign-policy issues. That's the advantage that the Republicans have.

"The Democrats are also captives of the United Nations," Mr. Peretz continued. "The notion that the United Nations, which has been a failure in every venture it's undertaken, would bestow on American policy a 'unique legitimacy'-as what's-his-name, Kofi Annan, puts it-is preposterous. France, which has a permanent seat on the Security Council and veto power, has that veto power because Charles de Gaulle persuaded Churchill and Roosevelt that France actually fought the Nazis. The United Nations is fast expiring as a real force in the world, and as a positive force it expired long ago."

Current and past TNR employees will tell you that these are the fun times. The Clinton-Gore era was a strange period for the magazine, and now they can go back to being the feisty kid in the corner of the party, as opposed to being the power broker at the center of the room. It can also be good for sales. As Mr. Kinsley noted: " The New Republic did very well, business-wise, being the party in opposition." Currently, the magazine has 70,000 subscribers.

Asked if the magazine's fervent war position was a way of selling magazines, and of distancing itself from the liberal competition like The Nation , Mr. Peretz said: "We haven't had any trouble differentiating ourselves from them in decades. The Nation is edited for aging ex-communists on the West Side. On the Upper West Side."

Contacted for comment, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel told Off the Record: "I hope Mr. Peretz fact-checks his magazine better than his statements to the media."

In August, the co-owners of SmartMoney -Hearst and Dow Jones-demoted editor in chief Peter Finch to editor, and put the magazine in the hands of Barron's editor in chief Ed Finn, who became the magazine's editor in chief and chairman (Mr. Finch has since left SmartMoney to work as a senior editor for Golf Digest and Golf World ).

Concerns about whether Mr. Finn might be a little distracted by running two magazines weren't helped much when Mr. Finn announced in a Thursday, Feb. 13, e-mail that he'd fired the magazine's longtime art director and replaced her with a Barron's person, art director Pam Budz, who will split her time between the two publications.

"We are restructuring the art department at Smart Monday magazine," Mr. Finn wrote in the first line of the memo, to more than a few guffaws.

"It's not exactly a morale booster," one SmartMoney source said of the typo.

Another staffer added: "Maybe our ad sales will pick up when we become Smart Monday ."

Mr. Finn was traveling on business and did not respond to request seeking comment.

In 1994, Argentine business consultant Jorge Martin Salimei said he was approached by executives of the International Herald Tribune about trying to open up opportunities in his country for the then joint venture of The New York Time s and The Washington Post .

Mr. Salimei claims he spent four years working with advertisers and local printers, distributors and papers to try and make a Herald Tribune presence in Argentina a reality. However, he says that in late 1998, the Herald Tribune cut off its contact with him, still owing him millions in unpaid expenses and compensation.

While the media marriage between The Post and The Time s may no longer exist ( The Times formally took full control of the Herald Tribune last month), Mr. Salimei still wants his money.

In papers filed the week of Feb. 10 in U.S. District Court, Mr. Salimei sued the Herald Tribune , The Times and The Post for $4.3 million.

The suit was originally filed in Argentina in 1999. In August 2002, a "neutral expert" appointed by an Argentine court after a two-and-a half-month inquiry determined that the IHT owed Mr. Salimei $940,700 for each of his four years of service, plus $582,000 in expenses. However, the court is still considering the expert's findings, and Mr. Salimei has yet to receive any compensation.

Now Mr. Salimei's suing in the U.S., and he fears that he won't be able to collect any damages should the Times Company disband the Herald Tribun e in favor of an international edition of The Times .

Mr. Salimei told Off the Record that when he heard about The Times ' buyout of The Post in late October, "I was afraid of what was going to happen. I was afraid that I would receive a ruling in my favor and then discover that the IHT was a shell."

A spokesperson for The New York Times said: "The suit has no merit. There is no basis for the relief he is seeking in the United States."

If you just can't get enough of that dreamy, cueball-esque photo of Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin each week, take heart.

After what one source familiar with the situation deemed a serious wooing by the folks at ESPN the Magazine , Mr. Rushin will soon re-up with the Time Inc. stalwart and onetime sneaker-phone king.

Mr. Rushin, who's engaged to women's basketball player Rebecca Lobo, didn't return a call seeking comment. Likewise, SI managing editor Terry McDonell, and Mr. Rushin's agent, Steve Mandell, both declined to comment.

Off the Record can be reached by e-mail at spappu @observer.com.

Mr. Heilbrunn is older than Mr. Beinart–he's 34–and was known as the "liberal hawk" of the New Republic staff, according to one of his friends. (This apparently meant that he was liberal on domestic issues but wrote about foreign policy from an anti-isolationist perspective.)

Mr. Beinart described Mr. Heilbrunn's departure as "voluntary and mutual," but wouldn't comment on why. When asked about whether he'd done any other hiring, he said, "I hired an assistant." When reached at his office at The New Republic , Mr. Heilbrunn said he was "contemplating" what he would do next.

For the last few years, Mr. Heilbrunn has been one of the weekly's main writers on foreign policy issues. But, according to another Washington journalist who knew him, he'd lost his most-favored-young-man status with New Republic owner Martin Peretz and literary editor Leon Wieseltier earlier this year. Mr. Heilbrunn was hired as an associate editor under Michael Kelly, apparently at their behest. New Republic watchers said his ejection was also their idea.

On Oct. 18, a report surfaced that Mr. Beinart had killed a piece by a freelancer on Bill Bradley's Senate record. The move raised suspicion at the magazine, owned by the pro-Al Gore Martin Peretz, who also holds the titles chairman and editor in chief of The New Republic .

"Clearly, a fair and unbiased analysis of Bill Bradley's Senate career by someone who doesn't have a preference in the Democratic Presidential race does not belong in Peter Beinart's New Republic ," said Jake Tapper, the author of the piece on Mr. Bradley, in an interview with The Washington Post .

Mr. Beinart, who attacked Mr. Bradley in the pages of The New Republic before Mr. Peretz made him editor, said he just wanted to keep political writing in-house.

Susan Casey, the former creative director of Outside magazine who'd been nicknamed "Lady Macbeth" by some of her staff, has been hired by Time Inc.'s editor in chief, Norman Pearlstine. She'll serve on his special squad of editors-at-large. She joins seven other people, including former Life managing editor Dan Okrent (the original Time Inc. "editor at large"), investigative reporting duo James Steele and Donald Barlett, deep thinker Roger Rosenblatt and former Vibe editor Danyel Smith on the Pearlstine SWAT team.

Ms. Casey's first gig will be helping to launch eCompany Unlimited , a print and Web magazine about the Internet. It's going to be based in San Francisco.

Ms. Casey left Outside on April 1, after the owner of the magazine refused to let her spend what she wanted to launch Women Outside , for which she had created a test issue. "To me, that represented my future," said Ms. Casey. "When that was taken away, I had to get out as quickly as possible."

"She was not your average art director; she functioned as much in an edit capacity," said one editor who worked with her at Outside . "Everyone here knew she had a burning ambition to edit a magazine."

That ambition, together with the fact that she was dating Outside editor Mark Bryant at the time, caused some friction among the Outside staff. She and Mr. Bryant left Outside at the same time.

"I've never seen design as something that you do in a vacuum," she said of her combined interests in editorial and art direction. "I don't see them as being separate."

Journalists at Bruce Wasserstein-owned American Lawyer Media were surprised to be ordered, in an internal memo on Oct. 28, to no longer talk to other reporters. The e-mailed memo, sent from A.L.M. chief executive William Pollak to editors of the company's publications, which include various regional legal newspapers as well as The American Lawyer and The Daily Deal , started out battening down the hatches: "I want to be very clear about American Lawyer Media's policy with respect to inquiries from the outside press," it began. "No one is authorized, under any circumstances, to speak directly with reporters about our company without first discussing the matter with Melique Jones, our director of corporate communications." The memo went on to note, "Related the above, you should know that in recent days Fortune magazine has been working on a story concerning The Daily Deal and A.L.M. Should you or members of your staff receive calls from these reporters, please refer them back to Melique."

"I guess the reason that it changed was that we didn't always have a communications director here at American Lawyer Media," said Ms. Jones, who arrived about six months ago. She said, "There's no sinister reason for my being hired," but chalked it up to the company growing, which includes the launch in September of Mr. Wasserstein's expensive new baby, The Daily Deal . "Because our company is financed by publicly traded debt," Ms. Jones said, "there are certain rules that we have to adhere to governing the release of information concerning the company."

Not that reporters are necessarily running scared. "I didn't see it. I probably forgot about it immediately," said one journalist at The Daily Deal .

But still, as an American Lawyer Media employee put it, "If Brill were still running things, there wouldn't be a memo like this. Instead, he would just announce: 'There's some asshole from Fortune doing a piece on us. You can talk to him, but you'll be misquoted because they do a hatchet job on everything.'"

In any case, there wasn't much to the Fortune article, which was short and made all the obvious points ("… but is this niche large enough to sustain a daily? And does Wall Street really need another financial pub?").

It comes out in the Nov. 22 issue, which closed the day after the memo came out. Angela Key, the writer of the piece, said, "I wasn't trying to talk to reporters at all."

When asked what the penalty would be visited on American Lawyer Media's employees who talked, Ms. Jones said, "What kind of penalty would that be? No, there's no penalty. It's just a matter of policy."

Mickey Kaus, 48-year-old establishment journalist, who punched in at Harvard, The New Republic , Harper's , The Washington Monthly , Slate and Newsweek , decided he didn't need to be hemmed in by a staff job anymore. He wanted to go into business for himself, taking his opinions directly to the reading public, and so he went and put up a Web site. It's called Kausfiles.com, from which he lashes out at regularly employed journalists like Joe Klein and Bernard Weinraub, and generally tries to call attention to himself and what he has to say. Which is pretty typical Web behavior. It's also the dream of a lot of writers–No editors! No deadlines! Unfettered self-expression! But Mr. Kaus eventually found out that he couldn't pay his bills floating around in cyberspace by himself and, as of Oct. 28, he hooked back up with his old friend, Slate editor Michael Kinsley, and sold Slate rights to post his column for 24 hours before it can appear on his own site.

Readers of Kausfiles.com might be forgiven for thinking that it already was a part of Slate because, well, there's a Slate ad on top of the Kausfiles page, and its design mimics Slate 's. Mr. Kaus said that Slate didn't pay for the ad; he put it up for free "to make it look professional."

Mr. Kaus took a pay cut on the deal in exchange for a link from Slate to Kausfiles.com. "I've been living off savings. This deal with Slate is to pay the rent," said Mr. Kaus, who lives in Battery Park City.

But how's he planning to make money? "Drudge is the business model," he said. "At some point, you want it to get big enough to sell ads. I bet half of my readers are journalists. Someone will want to reach those readers."

Mr. Kinsley spun it as part of the glorious cyberfuture. "It is a trend," he said. "If I may get pompous and philosophical for 30 seconds, the walls between publications on the Internet is purely metaphorical. One page in Slate and another page in Slate are not more connected than one on another site."

New York magazine's annual "singles" issue came out Nov. 1 and features something called "Brandon Jones's Journal," which is supposed to be a kind of takeoff of Bridget Jones's Diary , only written by a man. The "bachelor on the make" depicted in it is pretty pathetic: He pops the anti-baldness drug Propecia, worries he's gong to slip up and become gay, quotes Austin Powers, calls telephone sex lines, refers to his apartment as "the Batcave." Word around New York magazine is that it's supposed to be based on Andrew Stengel, flack on the make for Miramax Films.

Is it? "Pffffff," said Mr. Stengel. "Call Maer Roshan. I've heard that, too. It's not, it's not."

Off the Record called Mr. Roshan, New York 's deputy editor, who oversaw the singles issue. "It was meant as a composite," said Mr. Roshan. He wouldn't say who made up the composite.

"I think Peter's a very sweet kid," said a former New Republic editor. "He's a smart, sweet kid who's going to get his ass handed to him."

Mr. Peretz, an independently wealthy lecturer at Harvard University who once had Mr. Gore as a prize pupil, described Mr. Beinart as "an exceptionally brilliant person who had both a very secure grasp of the politics present, how it is rooted in history, and how it can affect the future." They met when Mr. Beinart was a Yale undergraduate running the Liberal Party, which was a division of the university's Political Union debating society. Mr. Beinart had been reading The New Republic since he was a high school student in the late 80's, and he invited Mr. Peretz to come give a talk in New Haven. Later on, Mr. Beinart co-founded a magazine at Yale called The Review of Politics , a collegiate New Republic knockoff. Now he gets to run the real one.

The question is whether he's strong enough to stand up to the demands of Mr. Peretz in an election year. A second question is whether he can keep from tussling with the magazine's powerful and intelligent literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, who, together with his Byronic hairdo, runs the back of the magazine as a separate, inviolable fiefdom.

While perhaps having to cede control of the magazine's arts and cultural coverage to Mr. Wieseltier and its political coverage to the owner, Mr. Beinart must somehow do something about the Washington, D.C.-based magazine's circulation, which, in these complacent times, has fallen over the last five years, from 99,500 to 91,800.

Mr. Beinart is one in a long line of New Republic wonder boys–one of many Mr. Peretz has found over the years, from Michael Kinsley, who was 26 when he took over the magazine, to Mr. Sullivan, who was 28. One Wunderkind the magazine wants to forget is the onetime star writer Stephen Glass, who at 25 wrote colorful feature articles for the magazine that should have struck an editor as perhaps too colorful, given that they were fictitious. Ruth Shalit, another hotshot writer who made her name at the magazine, got in trouble for plagiarism.

For now, Mr. Beinart has yet to leave Manhattan, to which he moved last April. He lives just off Amsterdam Avenue. Asked to describe himself in a phone call prior to meeting for drinks, he said, "I look like pretty much everyone else on the Upper West Side, in jeans and a plaid shirt." He proposed going to a place on West 77th Street and Amsterdam Avenue called Vermouth, where "some of the people looked a bit hipper than I am. But maybe this would give me chance to try to fit in."

Despite being the same age when he was anointed, Mr. Beinart is hardly the hipster that Mr. Sullivan attempted to be, with his Camille Paglia contributions and famous piece on sofa fabric and an appearance in a Gap advertisement. "I don't think it has a hell of a lot to do with why I was hired," he said.

"It would be damning with faint praise to say that he's not one of Marty's smart young men," said Time columnist Margaret Carlson. (Mr. Beinart has also written for Time .) "But he is, in the tradition of Michael Kinsley." Ms. Carlson isn't his only grown-up fan: National Journal media critic (and ex- New Republic writer) William Powers said: "He's just a pleasure to be around. He doesn't have that arrogance that some people associate with The New Republic –rightly."

Mr. Peretz, who married into the Singer sewing machine fortune, is upfront about his strong hand in the magazine. After all, he's not only the owner–on the masthead, he lists himself as both "editor in chief" and "chairman." Mr. Beinart, like those who have gone before him in Mr. Peretz's revolving door, gets the title of "editor." But what exactly do the young men who have worn this title have in common?

"It has to be someone Marty respects, it has to be a guy, and he has to come from a good university," said Hanna Rosin, a 29-year-old Washington Post reporter who interned with Mr. Beinart at The New Republic and is friends with him. "Given all the requirements, he's the best choice."

Mr. Peretz seemed to have had his eye on Mr. Beinart for some time: "There was a sense that Peter has what the Chinese call the mandate of heaven," he said.

There are those who think that Mr. Peretz was just looking for someone he can control. As one former editor at the magazine put it, "There isn't a fucking person in the world who would take that job." Another person who saw him in action at The New Republic said, "The best thing he's got going for him is his attendance record."

Jonathan Chait, who is 27 and left The New Republic on a writing grant from the New America Foundation, said that there was a "conventional view" of The New Republic that writers and editors employed there "move up too fast, and they become plagiarists and their whole life is a lie. But what people don't remember is that during the golden age, people like Michael Kinsley and Mickey Kaus, they were young, undiscovered talents; they're in their 40's now." He added: "To have something interesting to say about housing policy, you don't have to have spent five years writing police beat at a local newspaper."

At the bar, Mr. Beinart sipped white wine. "The people being, I don't know, annoyed that I'm 28, is the flip side of people getting hyped for being in their 20's," he said. "And both sides of that don't interest me. I've never had the slightest interest in Gen-X stuff. I've always thought it was a big myth, and the allegiances I have, have had a lot more to do with other demographic characteristics than anyone who was just in my age group."

Mr. Beinart's parents are both South African, very liberal and Jewish, he said. They fled the "life-or-death politics" of their homeland while his mother was pregnant with him. His father is a professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "One of the sad ironies of South Africa was that the more liberal, better-educated people left because they could," he said. His parents found themselves in a quandary. "They couldn't live with themselves being politically apathetic in South Africa. And couldn't give their whole lives to 'the Struggle'–that's what it was called."

His mother, Doreen Beinart, is today a Cambridge real estate agent who married American Repertory Theater artistic director Robert Brustein in 1996. The Cambridge-based Mr. Brustein is also The New Republic 's longtime drama critic. ("But there were no ties through that," said Mr. Peretz.) Mr. Beinart said he found becoming editor of the magazine that employs his mother's husband "weird," but noted that he had no control over the back of the book.

His father remains more political. "Nowhere but South Africa did Marxism retain its prestige," said Mr. Beinart. So he was a "knee-jerk lefty kid" in his politics until well into college, he said.

The New Republic started to change the views he had inherited.

"I was in a kind of strange subgroup of adolescent. I found The New Republic very exciting," he said. "I think I started reading the magazine when I had no idea how fragile that liberal orthodoxy was. The New Republic was kind of frantically but intelligently throwing that orthodoxy overboard, parts of the left liberal project that were making it completely alien to most Americans and made it impossible for them to win another election."

Mr. Beinart graduated in 1989 from Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, a private day school in Cambridge, with a 3.5 G.P.A. and SATs of 1,450. He went on to Yale, where he had a double major in history and political science. He was chair of the Liberal Party and a columnist for the Yale Herald , specializing in Africa. Friends remember him as becoming increasingly mainstream in his politics while he was there. After graduation, he was a Rhodes Scholar and studied international relations at Oxford. "I spent a lot of time discussing the causes of World War I and World War II," he said. In the summer of 1993, he pulled off an internship at The New Republic .

Mr. Beinart ended up as the 25-year-old managing editor of the magazine in the spring of 1996 when Mr. Sullivan quit. That summer, he co-edited the magazine with David Greenberg until Michael Kelly came in.

Mr. Beinart doesn't write a lot. When he does, he goes into high essay mode. In an Oct. 11 New Republic analysis of Bill Bradley, he argued that the fact the candidate once played basketball in the N.B.A. does not make him more sensitive to the needs of African-Americans. The ending of the piece is pseudo-rousing: "And that is why the argument for human equality must be waged at the level of moral principle, as a commitment that holds irrespective of, or even counter to, personal experience."

"I don't like hit pieces, I don't like puff pieces," said Mr. Beinart. "I don't like pieces that don't have an idea behind it." Of the publishing commodity called buzz, he said he wants "only the right kind of buzz." The Bell Curve , a treatise on race and intelligence which was excerpted in The New Republic under Mr. Sullivan's editorship, certainly generated a lot of buzz. Mr. Beinart said he wouldn't have touched it. "No," he said. "I'm a big fan of Andrew's and an admirer and a friend. I wasn't there. But I suppose I–um–probably wouldn't have."

Mr. Beinart was also careful in addressing the topic of the sometimes cozy relationship between the magazine he will edit and candidate Al Gore. "The magazine is not The New York Times ," said Mr. Beinart. "It's a magazine of affiliations, people we love and people we hate, crusades and obsessions. And that in itself is fine. Not only fine, certainly necessary. But within that, things you believe in, and things and people you don't believe in, do you still do valuable, critical, intellectually honest reporting? We're going to endorse the Democratic nominee. You know, we'd prefer it be Al Gore than Bill Bradley, but we'd endorse Bill Bradley if he becomes the Democratic nominee."

Now it isn't quite clear just what Jonathan Pollard did or did not do. He may or may not have given the Israelis the code book that enabled them to listen to our listening devices. Mr. Pollard claims the State Department gave it away. The Israelis may or may not have sold the same book to Russia for the release of Soviet Jews. This is the stuff of spy stories, and truth seems to have fallen victim to some giant squid who has left his blackest ink across reality. What is clear is that those paranoids, including Mr. Pollard, in the intelligence service cooked up all kinds of intrigue. What I do know is that Mr. Pollard agreed to a plea bargain in which he confessed to giving Israel secrets about Iraq's chemical capacity. That done deal was broken when then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger wrote a letter to the sentencing judge asking life imprisonment. Jonathan never got a chance to confront his accusers in open court and defend himself. If these belated accusations are true, as they may or may not be, no proof has been demonstrated. The accusations are not backed up with evidence the world can examine. The Government never produced any proof–all it did was withdraw a plea-bargain deal and avoid an open trial.

Along with the hints of dark deeds has come character assassination: Jonathan Pollard smoked dope as a young man; he used cocaine and was supporting a habit by snitching cartloads of documents; he tried to sell arms to Afghanistan and was a mercenary; he took money for his misdeeds. Now I wasn't there, and maybe he did. Maybe he was a coke fiend. Maybe he was just a Zionist idealist. But no matter what, I'd like to see the evidence. The fact that higher-ups in the Government have said something is so doesn't make it so.

There is the matter of the body count in Vietnam, the attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro with a poison pen. The Government told us we weren't selling arms to the Nicaraguan contras; it told us we didn't help Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrow Chilean President Salvador Allende. Why should we believe the Government now? I am wondering how history is going to look back at us and judge our silence.

So let us assume that all the nasty talk is true and Jonathan Pollard really is the shifty no-goodnik doper who caused the C.I.A. such grief: Do we still want him in jail longer than any other person similarly convicted? What about due process? Why wasn't he allowed to confront his accusers? Now he sits in jail and can't answer the editorials and Op-Ed pieces, because he's not allowed a public voice. Is this the American justice system we're so proud of, the one we are protecting with all those spy dishes circling above our heads? Anybody can say anything about Jonathan Pollard and he cannot reply. Something feels rotten here.

Is it possible that someone besides Mr. Beinart is trying to intimidate the Jewish community or to demonstrate the untrustworthy nature of Jews? Is someone in our State Department trying offer the Arab world proof of our loyalty? I hate to resort to conspiratorial questions and frighten myself with unlikely possibilities, but this Pollard affair is really a mystery. The other spies were not such nice people, either. Mr. Pollard doesn't seem to be Anatoli Scharansky or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Alfred Dreyfus. There are analogies, but they are inexact and not helpful in trying to understand what's going on. But if his name were Jonathan Johnson and he was black and he spied for the African National Congress and was given a life sentence, what would the American Civil Liberties Union think then? Since Jonathan is just a Jew, the A.C.L.U. doesn't care if the mold grows over his body

and questions of due process are shrugged off. Amnesty International doesn't want to touch him. They have their questions about Zionism, anyway.

He is a lonesome man, almost alone in his incarceration. He has a few friends, most of them without power in the Jewish organizations, most of them frustrated and exhausted. When all the big guys claim he deserves no mercy, then I am curious. What are they afraid of? Why no mercy? Why are the powerful so incensed that this man might be released and go live in Israel and father a child with his wife? Why are they afraid of him? Or are they covering up their own hides? If so, then what? One thing is for sure, when so much power is exercised, so many editorials are written and so many leaks to journalists are made in order to keep one small powerless person in prison, the rest of us should be worried. Why the overkill? Why the determined public relations campaign? If Mr. Pollard is the scum of the earth but is not dangerous to us now, why are the powers behind the action so rancorous, so bitter, so cold of heart? In what way could a spy who has surely been out of the loop for the last 13 years have anything in his head that could harm us now? Doesn't C.I.A. Director George Tenet know that the Lord has said, "Vengeance is mine"?

When I read the Hersh article in The New Yorker , I was struck with the absurd game-playing through which the intelligence service earns its daily bread. I wondered why, in most cases, one country could not simply speak to another, not in code, but just in human words. I wondered if all the electronic blips that amount to eavesdropping are going to save us from anything. So far, they have not warned us of massacres in Africa, starvations, bombings, temple riots, plane explosions, governments falling. So far, it seems to me that we would do better to listen to CNN than play spy with devices that seem to work as well as those found in a cereal box. The spooks seem ridiculous. Could Mr. Pollard's release put some further egg on their faces? Whatever else Jonathan Pollard did, he did a good deed for Israel, and that belongs on his balance sheet.