Time, June 8

(posted Tuesday, June 2, 1998)

Time's premillennial hype continues: The second installment of its end-of-the-century project celebrates the top artists and entertainers of the last 100 years. Pablo Picasso gets the biggest spread and leads off the package. James Joyce and T.S. Eliot head up the literature contingent. Steven Spielberg, Charlie Chaplin, and Marlon Brando represent filmmaking. Surprise inclusions: Oprah Winfrey, puppeteer Jim Henson, and Bart Simpson, animated "brat for the ages." ... An essay asserts a Fred Astaire-Marlon Brando dichotomy in pop culture. We spent the first half of the century aspiring to classiness and reserve (Astaire). Once Brando broke on the scene, it was all sex, violence, and rawness.

Newsweek, June 8

(posted Tuesday, June 2, 1998)

Newsweek's cover package says the West provoked the India-Pakistan nuke standoff by ignoring the obvious crisis waiting to happen. Our inattention drove both sides to nukes as a way to win the respect they weren't getting. A thumbnail sketch compares the two countries' leaders (Pakistan's Nawaz Sharif is a "man without ideology"; India's Atal Behari Vajpayee is "a good man in a bad party"), and a short piece profiles the engineer behind Pakistan's bomb (he stole vital information from European governments). ... A story pegged to the 30^th anniversary of RFK's death recounts the politician's final days. Run ragged by campaigning and obsessed with his own doom, Kennedy was surging in popularity just before he was shot. An accompanying essay claims that, if elected, Kennedy would have got the United States out of Vietnam. ... A story says we're running out of brand names. The explosion of small startups, lax name-registering requirements, and the need to register Web addresses means there aren't enough good names to go around. A recent attempt to register "Intuity" was contested by several companies.

U.S. News & World Report, June 8

(posted Tuesday, June 2, 1998)

The cover package offers six models for improving American cities. Minneapolis; Chattanooga, Tenn; Vancouver, British Columbia; Melbourne, Australia; Curitiba, Brazil; and Tilburg, Netherlands, used effective public transportation, plentiful parks, efficient local governments, and family friendly downtowns to lure people back to stagnant city centers. Urban renewal danger: Cities such as Baltimore have relied too heavily on tourism to spur a comeback. ... Yet another story claims we're still not taking the millennium bug seriously enough. ... A story finds a new kind of vacation: weather chasing. Tourists pay Twister-type storm-chasers to cart them around the Midwest hunting tornadoes. The tour vans sometimes travel 600 miles in a day across multiple states in search of exciting weather.

The New Yorker, June 8