New Republic, Sept. 26 The cover points out that FEMA warned against three threats back in 2001: a terrorist attack on New York City, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. “Four years later, it’s two down, one to go,” the piece notes, asking whether San Francisco is going to be the nation’s next catastrophe zone. The piece argues that even “a single season of new planning and building laws” could ensure that the city is much safer for decades. … Another piece evaluates Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the mayor of Mexico City and a popular presidential candidate. Although some compare him to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and link him to the tradition of Latin American leftist leaders, the article claims, “there is nothing leftist about López Obrador’s approach to economic development. In fact, if his mayoral record is any indication, he is more of a pragmatist with populist instincts than a left-wing ideologue.”—B.B.
Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 16
This issue focuses on Hurricane Katrina’s effect on academia. The cover notes that many universities have granted temporary admission to displaced students, but how their financial-aid packages and courses of study will work remains unclear. … Bill Lavender, a creative writing teacher at the University of New Orleans, gives staffer John Gravoir a harrowing account of his escape from the city (he stole a boat and had to dodge both a dead body and junkies shooting up in a kiddie pool). … A piece examines a Russian exhibit at Cherepovets State University dedicated to ingenious cribbing devices. There are panties with upside down math formulas, a denim skirt with 70 numbered pockets holding tiny paper scrolls, chocolate bar wrappers on which parents have scribbled notes, and an earpiece and microphone set that promise you “an entire radio station in your ear!”—B.B.
Economist, Sept. 17 The cover assesses the significance of Ebay’s purchase of Skype, the free Internet phone service, and announces that “the rise of Skype and other VOIP [voice-over-Internet protocol] services means nothing less than the death of the traditional telephone business.” The piece trumpets the financial merits of VOIP and suggests that soon, “telephony will be a free service offered as part of a bundle of services as an incentive to buy other things such as broadband access or pay-TV services.”… Another piece questions Ukraine’s chances of attaining a working democracy. Last week, President Viktor Yushchenko fired his fellow revolutionary Yulia Timoshenko amid corruption charges. “In a turnaround startling even by the standards of Ukrainian politics, Mr. Yushchenko is flirting with supporters of his opponent in last year’s presidential vote, Viktor Yanukovich.”—B.B.
Atlantic Monthly, October 2005 Robert Kaplan visits the Philippines and Afghanistan to report on nontraditional ways that the U.S. military is fighting terrorism around the world. In the Philippines, U.S. forces provided humanitarian assistance—like an improved hospital—that has made them immensely popular. In Afghanistan, Kaplan finds the Special Forces constrained by bureaucratic paperwork. He writes, “Twenty-first-century communications technology worked toward the centralization of command, and thus toward micro-management. But the war on terrorism would be won only by adapting the garrison tactics of the nineteenth century, in which lower-level officers in the field forged policy as they saw fit.”… The cover focuses on Abraham Lincoln’s depression, arguing that it strengthened his character and “gave him the tools to save the nation.” The piece surveys a suicidal poem by Lincoln, examines his relations with women and his career, and argues, “Having seen what he wished to live for, Lincoln suffered at the prospect that he might never achieve it.”—B.B.
Foreign Policy, September/October 2005 On behalf of its 35th anniversary, the magazine surveys 16 public intellectuals on what “ideas, values, and institutions” may go the way of the dodo in 35 years. Christopher Hitchens supposes it will be the euro. Hitchens writes that he once had high hopes for the fledgling currency, but developments such as the failure of French and Dutch voters to ratify the EU constitution, and a growing disenchantment with its leviathan-like bureaucracy have tempered his exuberance. Peter Schwartz predicts it will be the war on drugs. More people are abusing prescription drugs and locally produced drugs such as meth, he writes. This development not only diminishes the violence associated with the drug trade, but could make drugs safer. Moisés Naím reminds us that our standard of living is a statistical anomaly. “Normal” is living in poverty, under a repressive and or corrupt regime, without a governmental “safety net.” To often this delusion clouds the judgment of policymakers and “when that happens values lead to bad decisions, not moral clarity.”—Z.K.
National Review, Sept. 26
Heather MacDonald skewers the New York Times for stifling facts that discredit the notion that police racially profile black drivers. The paper reported in August “that the Justice Department had tried to suppress damning evidence of racial profiling by the nation’s police forces.” In fact, Macdonald writes, the paper buried and twisted statistics that revealed “an identical proportion of white, black, and Hispanic drivers—9 percent— were stopped by the police in the previous year. And the stop rate for blacks was lower during the day, when officers can more readily determine a driver’s race, than at night.” Jay Nordlinger reasons that Hurricane Katrina has elevated “Bush Hatred” to its stratospheric pinnacle. Bush’s critics have used the disaster as, “an occasion to rehearse all of one’s fears and opinions and obsessions about the War on Terror, global warming, capitalism, the federal budget, race.”—Z.K.
New York Times Magazine, Sept. 18
U2’s Bono is on the cover, and James Traub profiles the rock diplomat inside, following him from Davos to Madison Square Garden to the G8. Traub chronicles Bono and his organization DATA’s impact on the West’s debt-relief and African-aid policies, concluding that, “Bono’s willingness to invest his fame … has made him the most politically effective figure in the recent history of popular culture.” … This issue launches a new “Funny Pages” section, which will include serialized graphic novels and genre fiction, as well as short comic essays. The first installment of Chris Ware’s strip, Building Stories, anthropomorphizes a down-at-the-heels apartment building eying a would-be tenant across the street. The comic will follow the lives of the building’s inhabitants for the next six months.—B.W.
New York Review of Books, Sept. 22 While Americans bridged geographic, racial, political, and socioeconomic chasms to share in grief and resolve in response to Sept. 11, Jonathan Raban writes that unity’s shelf life was abnormally short-lived in his hometown of Seattle. President Bush’s perceived anti-environment proclivities led to a knee-jerk distrust of the administration. Although Seattle’s Post-Intelligencer gave a lukewarm thumbs up to the Afghanistan invasion, many of the city’s residents viewed the invasion with a jaundiced eye. By 2002, “No War in Iraq” signs sprang up in front of Seattle homes, competing with the many American flags purchased in the fever of patriotism after the attacks. … Often dismissed as popcorn music, Brian Wilson’s Smile album gets a review that bemoans popular culture’s lack of sincere appreciation for the Beach Boys’ mastermind’s prescience and brilliance. With the completion of Smile, the author foresees a movement that values “Wilson’s originality and musical genius.”—Z.K.
New York, Sept. 19 Kurt Andersen predicts that Katrina’s damage will encompass not only the Gulf Coast but President Bush’s legacy. The administration’s bungling bankrupted whatever political capital the administration had managed to squirrel away. Katrina stripped to its core the government’s incompetence, and, unlike Sept. 11, the only plausible evildoer to blame is God, Andersen says. As gasoline prices increase and more citizens question our presence in Iraq when there are needs at home, public disgruntlement is bubbling to the surface. Andersen predicts that, “Katrina is another wake-up call, the one that finally gets us up and out of bed and down to business.”… While one Katrina may ruin one president’s legacy, it could do wonders for a certain raffish ex-president and his presidential-wannabe spouse, hypothesizes John Heilemann.—Z.K.
The New Yorker, Sept. 19
An article suggests that next week’s elections could make Angela Merkel Germany’s first woman chancellor. A private person who began her professional life as a physical chemist, Merkel entered politics when many East German scientists feared losing their jobs to Westerners. She has been praised for her ability to listen. “Listening, of course, is what women do, and one would be hard put to find a man who didn’t like it.”… In another article, journalist David Grann follows the steps of Col. Percy Fawcett, an English explorer who disappeared during a 1925 trip to find the “City of Z,” a rumored ancient civilization in the Brazilian Amazon. The article concludes that Fawcett and his companions were killed by natives during their quest. Though archaeologists dismissed the City of Z as a myth and Fawcett as an amateur, an archaeologist takes Grann to see ruins of bridges, moats, and roads, grown over with vegetation, that suggest a complex civilization did exist near the scene of Fawcett’s disappearance.—T.B.
Weekly Standard, Sept. 19 and 26 In the 10th-anniversary issue, Weekly Standard co-founder Fred Barnes reflects on the conservative magazine’s beginnings. The attempts to find a financial backer (Rupert Murdoch stepped up) and a staff went far better than the search for a name. “The American Standard might have worked [as a title] if it weren’t better known as the name of a firm that manufactures toilets.”… An article predicts that Hurricane Katrina’s economic effect on the United States will not plunge us into another recession. “[T]he nationally important economic infrastructure will recover surprisingly quickly,” writes Irwin M. Stelzer. The article claims forecasters were too pessimistic in their initial evaluations. Since many oil refineries were left either unharmed or with minimal damage “the flexibility and resilience of [our] free market economy,” will keep the nation afloat financially.—T.B.
Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Sept. 19 Blame-o-rama: All three newsweeklies scrutinize the decisions made by President Bush, New Orleans’ mayor, and Louisiana’s governor in Hurricane Katrina’s wake. Time questions why Mayor Ray Nagin didn’t use New Orleans’ mobile command center and why Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco didn’t have a better idea about what New Orleans needed immediately after the storm. In another piece, the magazine says that Bush still hasn’t regained his balance and that his “most trusted confidants” are surprised “that he still appeared to be stutter-stepping in the second week of the crisis, struggling to make up for past lapses instead of taking control with a grand gesture.”… Newsweek reports that, in one precinct, no more than 30 police officers remained to fend off looters after the storm. When the AWOL officers began trickling back to work last week, attracted in part by the promise of five expenses-paid days in Las Vegas, [New Orleans police captain Eddie] Hosli told them, “You’ve got your own demons to live with. I’m not going to judge you.”
The city of New Orleans: Focusing on the head of an ambulance company whose treatment unit was the only one in the city for 40 hours, Time notes “the acts of heroism often took the form of mini-rebellions against the bureaucracy.” The company’s head dispatched medics who didn’t have adequate training to triage victims, and said that he was willing to be sued if it meant saving people’s lives. The magazine also points out that rescuers think the death toll is much lower than first predicted. By Sept. 10, about 200 bodies had been found. …Newsweek’s cover focuses on race and poverty. It points out that poverty has been getting worse in this country even though the economy has been in a recovery for three years. The piece blames low wages, not unemployment, and argues that those who didn’t leave New Orleans not only didn’t have cars, but also didn’t have bank accounts, and so didn’t want to abandon the material goods that were their only assets.
Odds and ends: Both Time and Newsweek gush over the iPod Nano. Time thinks it’s “thinner than a pencil and lighter than two bucks in quarters,” while Newsweek describes it as “smaller than a business card and about as thick as layer-cake frosting.” Time points out, “The iPod Mini was and still is the best-selling MP3 player in the world, and Apple had introduced it only 11 months earlier. [Apple’s head Steve] Jobs was proposing to fix something that decidedly was not broken.” U.S. News interviews David Heenan, a former Citicorp employee who has taught at Wharton Business school, about his new book, Flight Capital, which points out that well-heeled immigrants are increasingly leaving America. Heenan thinks they are leaving because the economies in their home countries have picked up, but also because the American school system is flawed, and parents don’t want kids to be exposed to the “MTV generation.”—B.B.
