As promised, the Summer 2009 issue of The City is now available online.

In addition to my review of Blind Spot, this issue includes a host of noteworthy items, including Wilfred McClay’s essay, “The Soul & The City,” and a review by HBU provost Paul Bonicelli of Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa, by Dambisa Moyo. Bonicelli, formerly an assistant administrator for USAID, discusses how his own experience as a “foreign aid official” coheres with Moyo’s depiction of the state of affairs in international development.

“I saw the same people doing the same things over and over again,” writes Bonicelli, “heard the same mythical references to the power of aid to transform a society, and of course observed the same people and institutions ignoring the history of aid-giving–all things are made new once the cycle begins again with new tranches of money because a new program or leader is now in place.”

This issue of The City, which is available in hardcopy via a complimentary subscription, is the first to be fully available in digital format. This is worth consideration because this is a publication that I used as an example in a post exploring the state of magazines and print journals in the digital age. At that time editor Ben Domenech sent me a note discussing the journal’s desire to appear in full form online.

While searching for the right venue the editors seem to have settled, at least for now, on Zmags, which uses a browsable form that imitates the print version as well as providing the option for a full PDF download.