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Michael Segal's avatar

Retrospectives on previous articles are indeed interesting.

The WSJ does some of this in its "Notable & Quotable" feature on the editorial pages.

Another way to get this experience is to get very behind in reading a publication, and experience the articles from the perspective of several months later.

Ira Stoll's avatar

Yes, you can save a lot of time and add perspective by reading the newspaper two or three months behind, or even in some cases a couple of weeks. Fun to consider how it might be done systematically in a way that didn’t render the individual reader totally clueless but also cuts through the nonsense.

Michael Segal's avatar

At the time of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin I was several months behind reading the print version of the Jerusalem Post. As I got caught up while flying to a conference, I was struck by how much the tenor of the comments about Rabin felt like a premonition of disaster.

I drew on this eerie experience to caution a member of the Massachusetts delegation in Washington that comments comparing President Trump to a Nazi were channeling the same vibe that existed before the Rabin assassination. Those in Israel who were perceived as contributing to that atmosphere are criticized for it to this day.