John Powers has a column in the L.A. Weekly comparing America’s two most intensely partisan middlebrow political mags: The Nation and The Weekly Standard. He points out that the former — a classical liberal mag in a better era, if you can believe it — is painfully dreary, while the latter is punchy and fun. I suspect that each side is trying to defeat its own stereotypes. The Nation is drab partly because that fits the stridently anti-consumer aesthetic, and partly because it works against the flaky-leftist stereotype: look how serious we are, there’s all this text! Weekly Standard is flipping it: “Look, we’re not stodgy, old, out-of-the-loop rich white guys. We’re hip, young, pop-culture tracking rich white guys!”