When we learned last week that The Weekly Standard was closing, this publication’s Matthew Walther asked, “Who would ever have guessed that The American Conservative, the upstart anti-war magazine founded by Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell in 2002, would outlast Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes’ neoconservative colossus?”

As it turns out, I have spent considerable time around both publications. My first Washington journalism job was at The American Conservative, to which I have since returned as its editor. But a decade after my first stint at the magazine ended, I found myself working at The Washington Examiner and sharing an office with The Weekly Standard. The magazines were different in many ways, most notably their opposing views on the Iraq War. The American Conservative was staunchly against the invasion, while the Standard was one of its chief promoters. This means that, in just a few years, I’d gone from spending my workday looking at a framed magazine cover with the headline “Iraq Folly” to sitting near an equally life-sized framed cover insisting “Saddam Must Go.”