This selection is available to active subscribers only.
Already a subscriber? Sign in.
I.F. Stone was a one-man show: investigator, writer, publisher, and distributor. In constant motion, he would sweep into our bookshop on Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., every Saturday morning with an armload of his I.F. Stone’s Weekly newsletters. With a cursory greeting he would grab the remainder of the previous week’s issues next to the cash register and replace them with the latest edition. Then he was out the door and on to his next stop.
His July 1963 essay “Izzy” reminded me of my college experience as a student-bookstore clerk in a pre-Internet age when a “guerrilla warrior,” as Stone described himself, “could distill meaning, truth, and even beauty from the swiftly flowing debris of the week’s news.”
Stone celebrated our freedom of fundamental dissent, and he was proud that in ten years he had attracted twenty thousand readers. Today a crafty headline, catchy meme, or cute photo caption can lure a hundred thousand “likes” in an afternoon.
We would be a better nation with less cable-TV hypnosis and more time spent on Stone’s battlefield of ideas, where warriors debate rather than set out to discredit their opponents.