Ezra writes:

The March issue of The American Prospect is out, and with it, my feature profile of John Edwards. We’ve talked about him a lot on this blog, but I’ve actually held back most of my opinions, saving them for this piece. The catch, though, is that it’s behind the subscription wall. So if you’ve got either a print or online subscription, you can get the article immediately. If not, you need to buy one of those.

This isn’t an appeal I’ve often made, but it seems particularly relevant to this piece. This article cost the magazine money. Thousands, in fact, so I could travel with the candidate, and watch him in action, and get the necessary face time to probe his beliefs. It meant hundreds of phone calls and countless e-mails and endless edit meetings. In other words, it took resources. Some articles are like long, particularly well thought out blog posts. Others can only be done with the financial backing, institutional credibility, and support of a magazine (or other funder). This is one of the latter, and if it’s a type of journalism you think worthwhile and want to read, it’s really worth spending the $15 for an online pass, and even more worth spending the $20 for a print/online subscription. You can do either here.

Commenter Petey notes:

You obviously haven’t read Dean Baker’s piece on Copyright over at TAPPED.

Dean’s satirical piece is quite a nice style experiment – it’s written almost perfectly straight, taking the position an insane person would take. And if we were to take his piece seriously, you’d need to immediately publish your Edwards piece free, or else be on the side of the evil-doers of the universe.

Dean Baker is, as far as I can tell, a very poor economist and intellectual. I respect TAP’s desire to promote a liberal economic agenda, but using Baker as their go-to economist is a mistake. He’s careless with his facts and arguments in a way that DeLong, Krugman, and other legitimate economic writers of a liberal bent are not. I don’t really understand the patience people like DeLong have with Baker; my guess is they don’t read his “academic” work over at CEPR too closely.

I love most of what the Prospect does. I’ll happily subscribe as soon as I can be sure I’m not putting money in Dean Baker’s pocket.