Other Magazines

Just Like Scalia, Only Nice

Why Samuel Alito is liberals’ worst nightmare.

New Republic, Nov. 14 When Samuel Alito was nominated to the Supreme Court, observers drew comparisons between him and that other conservative Italian-American justice, Antonin Scalia. While both are superconservative, an article notes that Scalia’s combative nature has earned him many critics and may render him less effectual by overshadowing his agenda and by “both alienating potential allies within the Court and by marking his ideas as extreme in the court of public opinion.” Alito, on the other hand, is a regular Miss Manners, often praised for his “even-keeled temperament, collegiality, and lawyerly writing style.” An article warns that “Alito, who marries Scalia’s conservative jurisprudence with tack, politeness, and a deferential writing style, is infinitely more dangerous to liberals.” The final word: “In Alito, [liberals] may have met their worst nightmare.” As the Supreme Court is poised to have five Catholics on the bench, an article advises that the “bloc reflects the reality of social conservatism: Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft.”—Z.K.

Economist, Nov. 5 The cover and leader introduce a series of articles on various nations’ faltering enthusiasm for globalization. With the next WTO meeting coming up next month in Hong Kong, the magazine is worried: “The risk is that failure to agree on a new wave of openness during a period (the past two years) in which the world economy has been growing at its fastest for three decades … will set a sour political note for what may well be tougher times ahead.” A special report on embattled California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (his approval rating has sunk to 33 percent) supports his unpopular reform initiatives, particularly one that would create a new process for political redistricting. (Like many states, California is badly gerrymandered.) California’s Democrats oppose the measure because they fear it would help the Republicans. They miss the point, the article says: “It is disgraceful, at a time when America is trumpeting democracy overseas, that its own version is so defective.”—B.W.

Radar, November/December 2005
A piece by Arianna Huffington chides Democrats for not capitalizing on the administration’s bungling of the Katrina disaster and the public’s growing frustration with Iraq. Huffington notes that some of the president’s harshest recent critics have been his political blood brothers, not the opposition party. In order for the Dems to get back on track, she suggests the following: The party must re-create the esprit de corps Newt Gingrich and his band of backbenchers displayed back in the mid-’90s, end their love affair with Bill, and—most important—realize that Hillary Clinton’s probable presidential run won’t be the political equivalent of the Second Coming. Democrats need to be on the lookout for a candidate “who will emerge as the anti-Hillary” and who “will have to be clearly against the war.” And, she avers, they don’t have to look far: Russ Feingold could be their Holy Grail.—Z.K.   

New York, Nov. 7 The cover profiles New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who has a new book called Are Men Necessary? The piece compares Dowd to Glenda the Good Witch, a character in Heathers, “an utter and unreconstructed fox,” and Edith Wharton. The article makes much of Dowd’s attractiveness, her friendships with other prominent women at the Times, and her popularity with her bosses. It asserts that although Dowd’s job requires her to provoke, “her natural inclination—her fundamental drive—is, rather, to seduce.” Another article focuses on the power struggle at the Albert Ellis Institute. Albert Ellis, 92, is an anti-Freudian cognitive psychotherapist who founded his institute in 1959. He is fighting with his board of directors, who have removed him from power. Irked by the way director Dr. Michael Brody, fired Ellis’ wife, a therapist who used to work at the institute, Ellis calls Brody “a power freak” who would be better off “dead, dead, dead.”—B.B.

Nation, Nov. 14 The cover story proposes the impeachment of President Bush, claiming he has violated “Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States.” The article outlines a “conspiracy” to convince Americans to support the war in Iraq by using a “PR blitz” that manipulated data to connect Iraq to Sept. 11 and claim that Saddam had or had sought weapons of mass destruction. “As if picking peanuts out of a Cracker Jack box, they plucked favorable tidbits from reports previously rejected as unreliable, presented them as certainties and then used these ‘facts’ to make their case,” the article says. Another article condemns Major League Baseball for recruiting many players from the Dominican Republic. At a young age, boys start prepping for baseball careers, leaving them with little education to fall back on if they fail to become the next Sammy Sosa. Even if a player makes it to the United States, “little is done … to protect them from the likely fall to the hard concrete floor of failure,” the article says.—T.B.

New York Times Magazine, Nov. 6 An article unveils a budding literary criticism theory: Literary Darwinism. Unlike traditional literary theorists, who “look at a text as the product of particular social conditions or, less often, as a network of references to other texts,” literary Darwinists analyze text through biology, “not politics or semiotics,” and don’t uphold the tenet that “literature possesses its own truth or many truths but that it derives its truth from the laws of nature.” They scan books “in search of innate patterns of human behavior: child bearing and rearing, efforts to acquire resources … and competition and cooperation within families and communities.” An article reveals that the debate over immigration is evolving. As Western societies grow wealthier, demand increases for laborers to perform work native citizens refuse; however more Americans rank illegal immigration right up there with abortion or taxes. The article notes that an ethical and economically viable solution will not be easy.—Z.K.

Time and Newsweek, Nov. 7 Supreme Court nominations: Time, in a Web-only piece, notes that conservatives are excited about President Bush’s nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, while liberals are gearing up for a fight. Alito, who was an assitant to the solicitor general in the Reagan administration * and was appointed as an appellate judge by George H.W. Bush, could cast the decisive vote on restricting abortion if appointed. The article points out that Caucasian ancestry “does nothing for Bush’s one-time goal of diversity” and that Alito’s experience is another departure from the Miers nomination, in which Bush sought someone outside the “judicial monastery.” Newsweek writes that Bush’s previous nominee, Harriet Miers, who is still White House counsel, “is once more heading the vetting process that so dismally failed her. Miers must now absorb the lessons of her failed bid in steering her successor through the Senate.”

CIA leak scandal:Time’s Matt Cooper, a key figure in the CIA leak scandal, claims in a first-person piece that he was “surprised last week that the [Scooter] Libby indictment even mentioned me. But apparently his recollection of the conversation differed from mine in a way that led the prosecutor to think he was lying. As for me, I still have no idea if Libby or anyone else has committed a crime.” Newsweek searches Libby’s background in an attempt to explain the indictment. The piece claims that Libby, who idolized Churchill, the Roosevelts, and Roman heroes, “identified with an earlier generation of brilliant amateurs who came out of private law firms and investment banks to serve their country in its hours of peril, who operated discreetly, even secretly, and cut through red tape.” He especially admired a British spy named Intrepid who “secretly conspired to get America into the fight against the Nazis in part by warning that Germany was building an atom bomb.”—B.B.

Weekly Standard, Oct. 31” ‘Scalito’ is a slogan; a joke of a name that masks more than it reveals,”asserts a Web-only article that compares Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito and Justice Antonin Scalia. Insisting that the two conservative Italian-Americans have had different careers, the piece nevertheless points out that both judges are well-known for handing down dissents. “October 2005 will turn out to be the left’s cruelest month since … well, in a long time,”writes William Kristol in a brief piece. Downplaying the Libby indictment, saluting the Alito nomination, and emphasizing that the economy and the war is going well, the article urges the Bush administration to “go on the offense.” Another piece claims that the Libby indictment won’t hurt President Bush at all; in fact, Bush’s “presidency, with more than three years left, has a chance to recover, maybe even prosper.”—B.B.

The New Yorker, Nov. 7
The fall book issue contains an article about the tricky world of translating Russian literature. Since the 19th century, the translations of Constance Garnett, who took up Russian “when she was confined with a difficult pregnancy,” have been the standard. But an American writer and his Russian wife decided that Garnett’s translations lacked veracity and failed to convey the “comedy” inherent in the original Brothers Karamazov and others, particularly by Dostoyevsky. They hit the jackpot when Oprah selected Anna Karenina for her book club, much to the confusion of the translating couple, who had never heard of Oprah. “I thought she was a country singer,” the husband said. Another critic compares two new Abraham Lincoln books. Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, by Joshua Wolf Shenk, “goes deep,” while Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, “goes wide.” Shenk believes that Lincoln had a “major depressive disorder, recurrent,” and chronicles his various breakdowns. Goodwin uses Lincoln’s selection of political rivals for his Cabinet to assert that he had “profound self-confidence.”—T.B.

Correction, Nov. 3: The summary of a Time article incorrectly stated that Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito was President Reagan’s solicitor general. (Return to the corrected sentence.)