Read: At least Bill Kristol is trying to stop Donald Trump

Although the Standard didn’t have the feel of a tightly edited magazine, Kristol created an eclectic atmosphere. To his credit, he maintained a robust section on books and the arts; it was highly uneven, but it made a good-faith effort to preserve the reverence for high culture that his father’s generation had professed. He also had an adventurous taste in writers. Many of the left’s favorite objects of disdain began their career with the Standard. In their earlier incarnations, they produced work that was stylish, unexpected, and full of warmth.

The best features in the Standard sought to combine the easy charm of a Michael Lewis story with the edgier satiric streak of Tom Wolfe. Before The New York Times poached him, David Brooks published his earliest works of “comic sociology” in the magazine—his somewhat glib, entertaining portraits of life at the turn of the millennium. Tucker Carlson is now known for his stage persona as the angriest white man in America, but you wouldn’t really glean that from his early journalism. He modeled himself after Hunter Thompson, an homage he acknowledged explicitly: “At this point, I should add the customary disclaimer about how drugs are bad, a lie and a trap and a destroyer of lives. That’s all true, but not in my case. For me, the whole experience was interesting and fun. I had a great time.” Carlson soaked up anecdotes, which he recounted with turns of joy and biliousness.

One of the curses of the magazine was Rupert Murdoch’s financial backing, which continued until the media magnate bought The Wall Street Journal and shifted his attention to his new plaything. The comfort of Murdoch’s patronage meant that the magazine never had to try very hard. Over the decades, it hardly evolved in its look and feel. Its hugely talented writers—Chris Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, and Matt Labash—seemed slowly drained of higher ambitions. Kristol never supplemented his original cast with writers of equal talent.

Meanwhile, the war in Iraq overwhelmed the identity of the magazine. At its best, the magazine nurtured writers who were witty and arch. Like all great conservative publications, it couldn’t help but subconsciously borrow from the ethos of London’s The Spectator, with its dyspeptic Toryism. But Iraq was a crusade that brought out a hectoring tone, and it led the magazine to bludgeon its enemies as traitors. (This obsession with war was accompanied by work promoting a bizarre, homophobic cult of masculinity. It extended beyond screeds against gay marriage to a jeremiad about hairless men and an essay on manliness and morality that somehow included the grotesque line “It certainly seems strange that being capable of rape can make a person better qualified for greatness, but it’s probably true.”)