Periodical Ramblings (4)

The Wilson Quarterly

    Canada is one of eight nations (conveniently ignoring the indigenous ones) in the Arctic Council and as Canadians we tend to look north and think most of it belongs to us. On this blustery Arctic-like day, I can perform a civic duty while conveniently inside and point you to some of the articles on the Far North in a recent issue of The Wilson Quarterly:

THE CHALLENGE OF ARCTIC GOVERNANCE
BY DOUGLAS C. NORD
Governance is challenging in any context, but it becomes even more complex when attempted in an area that, until recently, has had little experience with regional decision-making.

CHANGING CLIMATES FOR ARCTIC SECURITY
BY SHERRI GOODMAN
Shaped by changing climates – political as well as planetary – our understanding of security in the Arctic has morphed since the Cold War and continues to take on new forms.

THE ARCTIC ENVIRONMENT IN THE AGE OF MAN
BY ROSS A. VIRGINIA
The Arctic is hurtling into the Anthropocene, and caribou, walruses, and even mosquitoes are responding.

THE ARCTIC, FROM ROMANCE TO REALITY
BY MICHAEL SFRAGA
From oil paintings and poetry to militarization and melting (and yes, even video games), our quest to understand the region at the top of the planet continues – and the stakes today are higher than ever.

LANGUAGES OF THE ARCTIC
“The languages of the Arctic - carriers of the culture and identity of the region’s people - are fighting for their survival. In this special interactive project, explore the linguistic diversity and human spirit of the Far North.”
A special project by The Wilson Quarterly [this will take you to a very interesting YouTube presentation].

     Unfortunately you cannot run to the local newsstand (which is probably far away) or to the nearest Indigo and grab a copy of The Wilson Quarterly. Fortunately you can read it here. The print publication which began over forty years ago had to cease publishing print copies about five years back. You are probably saying "So What?, I can read it without getting cold.”  Still, I would like to suggest that something has been lost and, besides, it gives me another excuse to ramble among the periodicals we used to find in good libraries and even at newsstands on a nearby corner.

     The first thing you should know is that it was a much better reader's digest than the other one. The first thirty to forty pages were devoted to alerting you to what was being published in various magazines and journals. This section, (initially called "Periodicals" and later "The Periodical Observer" and still later, "In Essence"), offered thorough summaries and digests of articles that were much longer than typical abstracts.  If you are a researcher interested in in the intellectual or popular culture of, say the late 1970s, you could learn a lot by grabbing a single issue of The Wilson Quarterly from that period. 

     In the first issue in the autumn of 1976 the editor, Peter Braestrup, indicates that The Wilson Quarterly “ is designed to bring the world of scholars and specialists to the intelligent lay reader" and that is what it did. There were articles, book reviews, interviews and "clusters" of essays on particular subjects, such as the Arctic cluster in the current issue. The coverage was eclectic. Two of the books reviewed in the first issue demonstrate this: A River Runs Through It takes care of the subject of fish while Beautiful Swimmers deals with crabs. (That was a cheap way to get in a plug for the latter book which is about crabs and the Chesapeake Bay area - an area where I grew up. William Warner, the author of the book, did win a Pulitzer for it, however, and it does illustrate that the WQ was more than a political or economics journal.)

     The print publication was published by The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the digital one still is - for now. That such an interesting periodical, even with some 'institutional' support, has to struggle is unfortunate. As one 'obituary' writer noted when the print edition ceased:

     "I'd hate to see The Wilson Quarterly fold," said Daniel Akst, a longtime contributing editor, and author of "We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess." "Few publications are as reliably (and pleasurably) non-hysterical, historically informed and pragmatic in outlook. WQ's infrequent publication schedule has only made it more precious in this day of unlimited instantaneous blab."

Some Sources:
     An article about the first issue of The Wilson Quarterly notes that the initial press run was 80,000 and that it cost $12.
“The Wilson Quarterly, Review of Ideas, Issued,” The New York Times, Oct. 19, 1976. It says that “ the 160 page review is a digest of articles that have appeared earlier elsewhere, as well as a printed record of excerpts from discussions at the center. It also contains reprints from books, short book reviews, and recommended background reading lists on subjects it treats. There is an original article, on Brazil, and a reprint of Russell Lyne’s 1949 Harper’s piece entitled, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” with Lyne’s recent reflections on his 1949 selections.’

For two articles about the demise of the print edition see:
“Wilson Quarterly to End Print Publication,” Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, June 9, 2012.
“The Wilson Quarterly, the 36-year-old general interest magazine published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, has announced that it will put out its final print issue in July….”
“Mr. Lagerfeld said he did not know the magazine's current circulation figures, but a blog post at the Nieman Journalism Lab noted that the Wilson Center spent $1.96 million on the magazine against $950,000 revenue in 2010. The Wilson Quarterly's spring issue, currently on newsstands, is titled ''The Age of Connection,'' and includes several articles on the promise and perils of the digital age.”

“Wilson Center May Sell or Fold its Esteemed Wilson Quarterly, as Readership Declines; The Wilson Center’s 37-year-old Publication Center has Struggled to Find a Footing in the Digital World.”Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2013.
“The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is exploring selling or ceasing publication of The Wilson Quarterly, a wise, wonky and sometimes witty magazine that showcases the work of renowned intellectuals and policy experts but has struggled to find a footing in the digital world, according to sources.
The quarterly abruptly canceled its print edition last year, shifting its focus to digital platforms such as the Kindle and iPad, as well as its Web site. But readership has declined, and the cachet of a 37-year-old publication that once cultivated a loyal and elite audience drawn to its special brand of brainy, yet accessible, writing has slipped.”
The quotation by Akst is from the article above.


     
Fortunately the archive is provided on the web site, although the link is not immediately apparent. You will find it here.

  To conclude with some Canadian content, here is a sample from the first issue.
This is a summary of an article by George Woodcock that appeared in The American Scholar. 

“Rediscovering The Noble Savage: “The Lure of the Primitive" by George Woodcock, in The American Scholar (Summer 1976), 1811 Q st., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009. “Although many scholars have studied vanishing primitive cultures, few have asked why civilized man is so fascinated nowadays by what Europeans used to call "savage cultures." Woodcock, editor of Canadian Literature, writes that Portuguese voyages to Africa and the discovery of America first brought Europeans into contact with primitive peoples. They were regarded as inferior pagan beings, "as unspoiled children to be converted into imitation Christian gentlemen," or simply exploited for commercial purposes (the ivory trade and slavery). Paralleling these derogatory attitudes, there emerged among rationalist thinkers in the late seventeenth century the romantic cult of the Noble Savage. Real knowledge percolated slowly into Europe from the reports of travelers, missionaries, and traders. Then came Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871) and the slow development of anthropology. Not until early in the twentieth century was primitive man seen "as the representative of a complex, valid way of life contemporaneous with our own, neither intrinsically inferior nor necessarily improvable." Woodcock says such recognition came about largely through shifts in perception among Western artists and intellectuals: Picasso, who discovered African art and in 1907 painted the pioneer work of cubism, Les Demoiselles d'dvignon-like primitive art, a projection of inner visions; Sir James Frazier, whose 12-volume The Golden Bough (1907) revealed a worldwide network of common mental constructions -including the mythologizing habit we share with primitives; and the pioneering field studies by Anglo-Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands of the western Pacific. The lure of the primitive, says Woodcock, lies both in a desire to find what is common to all societies and "in a pointless nostalgia for peoples and ways of existence that our greed for land and resources has destroyed."