The magazine describes itself as a "monthly review of the arts and intellectual life ... at the forefront both of championing what is best and most humanely vital in our cultural inheritance and in exposing what is mendacious, corrosive, and spurious.

Some past examples include Affirmative action and the law; Common-good conservatism: a debate; Corrupt Humanitarianism; Religion, Manners, and Morals in the U.S. and Great Britain; and Reflections on Anti-Americanism.

He cited his reasons for leaving the paper to start The New Criterion as "the disgusting and deleterious doctrines with which the most popular of our Reviews disgraces its pages", as well as "the dishonesties and hypocrisies and disfiguring ideologies that nowadays afflict the criticism of the arts, [which] are deeply rooted in both our commercial and our academic culture."

[7] Contributors to the journal have included Peter Thiel, Douglas Murray, Mark Steyn, Roger Scruton, David Pryce-Jones, Theodore Dalrymple, Alexander McCall Smith, Victor Davis Hanson, Harvey Mansfield, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Penelope Fitzgerald, Allan Bloom, and Jay Nordlinger.

"[8] The New Criterion ranked in the top ten most influential periodicals among American intellectuals according to a survey conducted by Steven G. Brint in In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life (Princeton University Press).

"[9] According to the conservative publication The New York Sun, for a quarter of a century The New Criterion "has helped its readers distinguish achievement from failure in painting, music, dance, literature, theater, and other arts.