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A new intellectual magazine gets off to a great start. Check out the self-descriptive editorial:

Our goal ... is that virtually every article in this magazine take seriously a theory that is widely considered un-obvious by our professors and our peers.

I particularly recommend an excellent essay on Rawls, Nozick, and the interplay of philosophy, economics, and political science: Theory Gets a Reality Check: Philosophy, Economics, and Politics as if Verisimilitude Mattered by Jeffrey Friedman, which is too rich to quote. More topical is a discussion of The Real Roots of Islamic Extremism by Stephen Schwartz, which has useful nuggets such as:

The rise of Hamas, the Palestinian fundamentalist Islamist movement, was in great part stimulated by the Palestinians’ disgust with the extortion, torture, murder, censorship, and other abuses afflicted on them by Yasir Arafat....

Wahhabism preaches an ultra-Puritanical way of life. Meanwhile the Saudi elite swims in whisky.... These mixed signals, or, more bluntly, these forms of hypocrisy, have a deranging effect on Saudi society. But they are also the essential source of Islamist extremism and terrorism.

Welcome to a promising new magazine. Posted by Paul Jaminet at June 18, 2003 7:21 AM