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Welcome back to the Editor’s Corner. I hope all of you had a wonderful summer.
As we mentioned a couple of months ago, we decided to put our weekly Sunday column on hiatus for the summer to give our small editorial team a rest. When you publish a magazine seven days a week, as we were doing at the time, even one fewer deadline can feel like a reprieve.
But we didn’t use the extra time just to relax and catch up on our beach reading. The editorial team also spent time thinking and talking about the future direction of Discourse—including the Editor’s Corner. Out of these conversations came ideas about how our weekly column could better reflect the magazine and its mission.
Discourse occupies a unique place in the media landscape. While most other magazines of opinion reflect the views of their editors or owners, Discourse goes out of its way to publish differing perspectives. As I often tell readers: We regularly publish pieces that I disagree with—sometimes vehemently.
As I explained [ [link removed] ] when the magazine was launched in the fall of 2020:
Discourse is first and foremost about discourse: the free exchange of ideas in the hope of getting to a productive truth. ... To do this, we are committed to looking at society’s problems and challenges with great clarity and intellectual honesty and without the cant that characterizes so much of today’s public conversation. We will approach this task with humility, understanding that we don’t have all the answers. This means being open to a diverse range of thought, knowing that good ideas incubate best in a competitive environment where writers and readers feel free to question or challenge any assumption without fear of opprobrium or insult. After all, no one is ever insulted into changing their mind.
This statement is as relevant now as it was when I penned it nearly four years ago. Pluralism isn’t just a high-minded idea or part of proper societal etiquette; as the recent film “Undivide Us [ [link removed] ]” makes clear, it is vital to the continued health of the American experiment. And yet, at a time when many Americans still agree [ [link removed] ] on most important things, one reason we still seem so divided is that everyone is talking past rather than to one another.
Discourse was created to encourage productive rather than polarizing conversations, to be a place where, to crib from the magazine’s tagline, ideas meet. It is in this spirit that we now reintroduce the Editor’s Corner.
As regular readers will recall, the old Editor’s Corner started with a standalone essay on whatever was on one of our editors’ minds. The new Editor’s Corner will instead contain an essay using a recently published Discourse article (or articles) as a starting point. On one level, the idea is to allow us to respond to, analyze or build upon what we’ve been running in the magazine. Our intention isn’t necessarily to disagree with essays we’ve previously published (although that may well happen) but to keep the conversation going. The rest of the Editor’s Corner will largely stay the same, offering our thoughts on what we’ve been doing outside of work as well as short takes on news items and other things.
Almost five years ago, when I first began discussing creating Discourse with the Mercatus Center’s then executive director, Dan Rothschild, he encouraged me to be iterative, to “throw things against the wall and see what sticks.” We’re not changing the Editor’s Corner because the first version of the column didn’t “stick.” I’m very proud of the columns we’ve written and published. Instead, we’re continuing to iterate, asking ourselves how we can better serve the mission of the magazine and the interests of our readers.
If you’re a regular Discourse reader, you probably share our passion for open discussion and debate. And so we think you will like and even embrace this new version of the Editor’s Corner. After all, in a time of intense polarization, partisanship and even censorship, we all need more discourse.

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