In an act of policing itself, today TNR launches The In-House Critics, a blog that offers regular criticism of itself from the Right and Left.

Editor Franklin Foer explained in a statement that “while disagreement between writers exists in spades on TNR.com, The In-House Critics represents an experiment in formalizing it.”

So they’ve asked Jim Manzi (“several clicks to our right”) and Michael Kazin (“several to our left”) to “regularly disagree with us-to write short pieces that call us out when they see us making dubious intellectual leaps, and to serve as collegial irritants to our assumptions.”

In their debut posts, Manzi evaluates Al Gore’s essay on the oil spill from the June 10 issue. Kazin, meanwhile, tackles Leon Wieseltier’s column on liberal conviction.

See the new blog here. Find out more about Manzi and Kazen after the jump…

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We’ve got your morning mix of media Muesli after the jump…

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