On Friday night, I joined Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnuru, Andrew Stuttaford, and Dan McLaughlin for a meet-up with subscribers to National Review from the Los Angeles area who are also NRPlus members. (Thanks to Garrett Bewkes for making it happen.) NRPlus is meant to be more of an intimate community, where there are virtual and phone and in-person exclusive encounters between NR writers and readers. By design, the meet-ups are not the grand affairs like National Review Institute’s annual gala at the Reagan Library the night before – where I barely managed to say hello to my colleagues (Jim Geraghty, I know we were in the same room!), because there were so many friends and family of NR in attendance. Friday night, I was able to have in-depth and moving conversations with some of you — a few who are fairly new to NR, many more who have been reading for years, if not decades. I was personally touched by the people who were bursting with gratitude for some of our regular features (and who are the opposite of annoyed by my insistence on trying to keep an eternal perspective in the midst of the chaos of politics and seemingly everything else).
Before NRPlus, we tried to do these kinds of meet-ups now and again. With NRPlus, I’m hopeful we do more of them, and cover some territory with them. It’s a big country, and our readers span it. (Beyond, too. I aspire for a Rome NR reader meet-up myself.) I know I am not alone among my colleagues in wanting to meet more of you face-to-face.
(And hopefully next time Charlie Cooke won’t be trapped in Florida by a hurricane, with another colleague recovering from Covid.)
Information on becoming a member of NRPlus is here. I should mention it allows for a National Review Online reading experience that involves fewer ads, and access to all the paywalled stuff. Maybe I’ll become a member. 🙂
Hope to see you soon in a city near you!