Harper's, December 2000 The first-person cover story recounts the 2000 World Series of Poker, in which the author won $247,760. A weekend player, he trained intensely for a year to match up with the greats: T.J. Cloutier, a curmudgeonly former football player who wrote the poker bible; Steve Kaufman, a rabbi and professor of Semitic languages; and Jesus Ferguson, the inscrutable mystery man with the ZZ Top beard who secretly loves ballroom dancing and has a Ph.D. in computer science. The author is down to his last $2,200 in the early rounds before he storms back and finishes fifth, losing only because of an unlucky draw. … An article describes the folly of American involvement in the Colombian civil war. If intervention does hinder cocaine production in Colombia, then bordering countries will pick up the slack, and the guerrillas will respond to American efforts with more terrorism. Although they fight in the name of the Colombian people, the guerrilla armies make money by kidnapping hundreds for ransom, and now many Colombians openly support the peace movement, known desperately as "NO MÁS." 

New York Times Magazine, Nov. 26 The cover story describes Otpor, the Serbian student movement that brought down Slobodan Milosevic. Otpor attracted huge numbers of young people by channeling their social isolation into protest. Using American money and advisers, the movement taught its members nonviolent resistance. When Milosevic used violence to repress Otpor, many of his former supporters turned against him. … A piece blasts the recent Grinch movie and Seussical musical for sapping the real Dr. Seuss of his nuance and wonder. Dr. Seuss captured the childhood struggle between freedom and reliance on parental control, between anarchy and morality. The new Hollywood productions turn children into saints, which is exactly what Dr. Seuss understood they are not. … An article profiles William Clay Ford Jr., the flaky environmentalist who also serves as chairman of Ford Motor Co. His willingness to work with environmental activists has angered old Detroit but earned rave reviews from the media. He even has plans to build a new plant with a 12-acre roof of native grasses where birds can nest. But his good-guy public image has suffered during the Firestone recall, a problem he mostly ignored, letting CEO Jacques Nasser take the fall.

Time and Newsweek, Nov. 27

Another pair of election covers. … Time contrasts how the candidates are dealing with the election struggle. Gore relishes the fight and has been organizing the Democratic strategy, converting his living room into a war room, and barraging aides with e-mail. Bush is letting James Baker and Dick Cheney handle it, and he checks in with them from his ranch a few times a day. … Newsweek notes the same lethargy in the Bush camp but points out that Republicans finally fought back over the weekend with their strong allegations about disenfranchising overseas military voters.

Newsweek revises the prevailing wisdom that the Israelis and Palestinians were close to peace at Camp David. In fact, the final status talks about Jerusalem showed how far apart the sides were. A proposal from Ehud Barak to build a small synagogue on the Temple Mount enraged Yasser Arafat and indicated that though Barak was willing to compromise, he did not truly grasp the sensitivity of the issue. … An article reports that the U.S. auto industry is preparing for a downturn. The Nasdaq plunge has made consumers nervous and less willing to buy new cars, and German and Japanese manufacturers are cutting into the SUV, minivan, and truck markets. Analysts worry that the auto slump could spark a recession.

U.S. News & World Report, Nov. 27

The cover story focuses on the more farcical aspects of the Florida chaos, calling Secretary of State Katherine Harris "either Joan of Arc or the Eva Peron of Florida" and comparing her makeup to Monica Lewinsky's beret. The media, continually flogged by watchdogs for focusing on the horse race instead of the issues, now have only the horse race to cover, and the ratings have never been better … A piece reports on a new survey showing that Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons 281 times when repressing Kurds in 1987-88. The exposed Kurds suffer cancer rates 10 times the Middle East average, but U.N. sanctions prevent them from receiving adequate health care.

The New Yorker, Nov. 27

The Digital Issue contains the best piece ever about dot-com absurdity. The writer showed up one day at a New York startup, took a desk, claimed to be a "junior project manager," and spent three weeks pretending to work without anyone noticing he did not belong. His name got on phone lists, he held fake "meetings" with friends, and he survived a round of firings. … An article profiles Loch Ness Monster hunters. Bob Rines, an 80-year-old inventor and lawyer who claims to have seen the monster in 1972, has opened a permanent Loch Ness search station and over the years has tried to lure the monster with marine-animal sex hormones and camera-outfitted dolphins. Adrian Shine is a local who spent hours submerged in Loch Ness in a clear pod, only to become convinced that there was no monster after all. He organized a 30-boat search team to prove the monster did not exist, and though his expedition found what it was looking for—nothing—people like Rines still believe they have seen the creature. … A piece debunks the myth that computers are revolutionizing American productivity. In fact, people work more hours than ever before because they can take their work with them wherever they go, and the businesses that have invested most heavily in technology (wholesale and retail trade; finance, insurance, and real estate; and business services) have grown more slowly than the rest of the economy. And the computer leads to as much dawdling as productivity. A recent study of IBM workers showed word-processed letters are modified five times as much as handwritten ones, with no discernible difference in the quality of the product.

Weekly Standard, Nov. 27