IS THIS THE END OF THE NEW REPUBLIC? Longtime former TNR publisher Marty Peretz twists the knife after examining the wreckage of old magazine under new owner Chris Hughes, who made his fortune largely by being besties with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg:

I don’t mean this physically, but he’s a small person,” Peretz said of Hughes. “In that metaphorical way, I knew that he’s not an imaginative person.”

Referring to Hughes’s status as a co-founder of Facebook because of his college friendship with Zuckerberg, Peretz added: “I think he owes about $700 million to the Harvard housing office.”

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John Judis, one of the brand-name writers who quit the magazine amid the implosion of December 2014, wrote Monday on his Facebook page: “What’s a good saying that will allow me not to use clichés like ‘the chickens have come home to roost.’ Hughes, the first generation of Silicon nouveaux riches, didn’t know what he was doing when he bought a political magazine. He didn’t understand what a political magazine was. And now that he has gotten rid of all the original staff, blown away its readership, and tarnished a century of work by people dedicated to make the country better rather* than making a profit for the already wealthy, he’s calling it quits.”

Just as Newsweek has continued on a zombie brand name after the pre-Bezos-era Washington Post unloaded it to electronics mogul Sydney Harman for a $1.00 and his assumption of a zillion dollars worth of debt, I wonder who will acquire TNR’s brand? I can think of a few well-heeled investors  that would certainly enjoy having fun with the title.

* Well, from a certain perspective, I suppose.