Economist, Feb. 26
The cover package claims that Europeans see President Bush’s visit as a failure (bummer, subscription only), while Americans see it as a success. Mocking Europe’s eagerness to lift the weapons embargo on China, it points out that this is a “bizarre” concession from which Europeans gain nothing except the irritation of their allies: “It is as if the Europeans have chosen to copy Mr Bush, rather than convert him.” And, although Bush is the first American president to treat the European Union like an institution rather than an ideal, the organization hardly shares his faith in NATO’s importance to the trans-Atlantic alliance. … Another article condemns the presidents of South Africa and Tanzania for continuing to support neighboring Zimbabwe’s dictator, Robert Mugame. Nigeria and other West African countries were able to mitigate the results of a coup in Togo earlier this month, increasing the likelihood that “voters there will be able to pick a government they want. Nothing of the sort could be said of Zimbabwe and its neighbours.”—B.B.
New Republic, March 7
In a review of John Ashbery’s new book, Where Shall I Wander, Helen Vendler forgives the “boyish and amusing” poet for weaving pop culture references into his work, parenthetically allowing that such language, “is ours too, whether we like it or not.” Singling out his opening lines (“Attention, shoppers,” for example) she likens them to Lewis Carroll’s comic genius. Admitting that she doesn’t always understand what Ashbery is talking about, Vendler nonetheless salutes him for being “strange, exhilarating, cheeky, and moving.” … The cover story insists that the doctor-patient relationship is so sacred that market-driven solutions cannot possibly bring about effective health care. A historical overview argues that when the government pumped a massive amount of money into the health-care system by creating Medicare and Medicaid, medical entrepreneurship boomed and helped commercialize the profession. The article concludes with several government-based solutions for completely overhauling medical care.—B.B.
Mother Jones, March-April 2005
Slate’s Emily Bazelon investigates torture charges in American prisons in Afghanistan: Hundreds of prisoners claim to have been sexually abused and harshly beaten during interrogation, and at least eight people have died in U.S. custody (“in at least two cases, the military ruled that these deaths were homicides”). But, over the past three years, the story has been mostly ignored by the media, and failed to rouse public indignation—perhaps because very little information is publicly available. … An article on the rise of megachurches focuses on Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois, where 18,000 people flock every weekend. “In a society where the average family moves every five years,” the piece argues that Willow and its 10,000 affiliates nationwide represent “the franchising of a formatted service, the Home Depot of epiphany.” The story emphasizes that these “postdenominational churches” are a force to be reckoned with, for they helped ensure President Bush’s re-election.—B.B.
Weekly Standard, Feb. 28
An article argues that Sweden is facing “profound exhaustion with immigration.” It provides a brief history of the Swedish welfare state—including the construction of 1 million apartment units in the 1970s that were shunned by native-born Swedes but embraced by immigrants. It goes on to claim that Sweden’s strongly antiracist, pro-immigration stance may be destroying its generous welfare state. Moreover, disgusted by honor killings among Kurdish immigrants and worried that people from around the European Union might come to their country and take advantage of their social benefits, Swedes may soon start cracking down on immigration. … “All those plays, each straining to be the iconic declaration of the failure and pointlessness of American life in the twentieth century, when, really, it was Arthur Miller himself who best demonstrated the point,” says an essay slamming the recently deceased playwright for his leftist views, his narcissism, and his treatment of Marilyn Monroe.—B.B.
The New Yorker, Feb. 28
When he was young, “[I] might have wished to wear the [Talking Heads] album ‘Fear of Music’ in place of my head in order to be more clearly seen by those around me,” writes Jonathan Lethem in an essay about his “beards”—the books, movies, and music behind which he hid his embarrassment at being an adolescent and his sadness over losing his mother. By training himself not to feel hunger or the need to use the bathroom during long movies by, say, Kubric or Tarkovsky, Lethem writes, he was training himself to overcome death: “I’d voted against my body, with its undeniable pangs and griefs, in favor of a self composed of eyeballs and brain, floating in the void of pure art.” … Whereas Albert Einstein believed that past, present, and future exist all at once, his colleague the mathematician Kurt Gödel felt that Einstein’s theory of relativity could be used to show that time as we knew it did not exist at all. Jim Holt explores the relationship between the mathematician and the physicist, addressing their “willed belief in the unreality of time.”—B.B.
New York Times Magazine, Feb. 27 An excerpt from the upcoming history Soldiers and Slaves reconstructs, from oral accounts and records from World War II, the story of Jewish American POWs transported to Nazi concentration camps and forced into slave labor alongside withered European civilians. The GIs were incredulous: “Who in hell, why in hell, how in hell do they have to do this to me or any other Jew?” … A profile of Jonathan Safran Foer calls the young writer “a European novelist who happens to be writing in America,” and connects his fascination with silence and the unspoken to a childhood chemistry accident that left two friends critically injured and Jonathan with diminished interest in the social world. Every relationship in his forthcoming Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close“is built around silence and distance,” Foer says. “Extremely loud and incredibly close is what no two people are to one another.”—D.W.W.
Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Feb. 28 Mind and body. The FDA soon may make Vioxx, Celebrex, and other recently discontinued painkillers available again, with certain restrictions (for example, direct advertisements to purchasers might be banned). Time features interviews with Vioxx fans and cautions against ignoring or undertreating chronic pain. … Newsweek’s autism cover, which coincides with a $2.5 million awareness campaign launched this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, notes a sharp increase in diagnoses of the condition during the last 20 years. While many autistic children have problems recognizing signs of emotion on human faces, computer games are now being touted as the solution. Kids can “shoot at smiley faces or click on the guy who looks sad. In ‘Emotion Maker,’ they choose features—angry eyes, a scowling mouth—to create their own faces.”… The U.S. News cover package, pegged to the Malcolm Gladwell best-seller Blink, reports on the patented Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, which marketers are using to access “the deep metaphors that people, even without knowing it, associate with a particular product or feeling or place.”
News from the war front. Having obtained the unpublished flight plans of a Boeing 737 that the CIA has used to transport terrorism suspects to foreign countries where they can be interrogated without the constraints of U.S. law, Newsweek confirms the existence of a CIA-run “global ‘ghost’ prison system.” (The New Yorker reported on this use of “extraordinary rendition” in its Feb. 14 issue.) …“For the first time the U.S. is in direct contact with members of the Sunni insurgency,” reports Time, which carries an account of a secret meeting between U.S. officials and a senior insurgent negotiator who supports secular democracy and wants the United States out but may be willing to compromise on U.S. presence. … Elsewhere, Time hints at, but doesn’t investigate, a “newfangled underground railroad” that helps disgruntled American soldiers move to Canada. … A U.S. News piece looking at safety on “the most dangerous road in the world“—the highway linking the Baghdad airport with the Green Zone—concludes that its reputation is being perpetuated by “trigger-happy private contractors” and “fresh-off-the-plane soldiers” who have been made nervous by its reputation.
Odds and ends. A top intelligence official calls newly nominated Intelligence Director John Negroponte “not just a skilled diplomat but ‘an SOB,’ ” which “could turn out to be the single most important requirement for the job,”U.S. News opines. Sure, but is this the time to relieve him of his ambassadorial duties in Iraq? A Western diplomat tells Time“this is the worst possible time to be sending in a newcomer” to Iraq. … A Newsweek story claims the pope is deriving enormous power from his “public experience of suffering.” But some think the Vatican’s bureaucrats might be “making up their own policies in their own interests”—such as the new doctrines about “sustaining terminal patients through extraordinary means”—since the pope’s death would mean the end of their power. One critic is quoted as such: “It seems that Lenin’s mausoleum will be the model for the future. The entire enterprise is mischief-making at the Vatican.”—B.B.
