New York, Dec. 12 The cover profiles Howard Stern and his $500 million contract with Sirius. Noting that the satellite radio company has granted him two channels and is probably staking its future on Stern, the piece announces,” That’s 48 hours of dead air to fill every single day.” The article explores why Stern “felt dead inside” during the last few years and examines his altercations with the FCC and his former boss over his use of obscenity on the air, the break-up of his marriage to his college sweetheart, his transcendental meditation practice, his attempts to create a fulfilling relationship with his young model girlfriend, and his vast store of ideas and enthusiasm for the Sirius deal. (Example: “We’re going to round up four crack whores, and every night, we’re going to take the exact topics that The View talked about.”) The piece doesn’t stop short of employing some Sternian tactics when describing him: “Six foot five and hung like an acorn!”—B.B.
New Republic, Dec. 19
An article states that no matter how the White House tries to dress him up, Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito is a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Roe crusader who’d jump at the chance to overturn the ruling. Citing as proof a 1985 memo Alito wrote about how to overturn Roe and his overt support of an ardent pro-life New Jersey congressman, the article raps the media, who’ve fallen for his anti-Scalia demeanor, and the administration, which is wary of a real debate about the consequences of Roe’s repeal, for enabling this charade. … An article applauds the military for finally developing a counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq, but it’s a little too late: “Had the Army employed its current approach from the beginning, it might have had a chance at winning the war in Iraq before losing it at home.”—Z.K.
Economist, Dec. 10
The cover urges readers not to despair over global warming. Despite the disappointments surrounding the Kyoto agreement and bad news from scientists, progress may be at hand in business and politics. A consortium of major international firms has been lobbying for a global carbon-trading market, and the high cost of oil is stimulating investment in alternative energy sources. The Bush administration remains intransigent, but public opinion and state governments are taking climate change more seriously. And China, if not India, seems genuinely concerned about CO2 emissions. … An article reveals that the northern Rockies and the western Great Plains have usurped the South as the poorest regions of the country, hosting 17 of the 20 poorest counties in the United States. The rural population there is plunging, traditionalism seems to have stymied business innovation, and survival is possible only because of federal farm subsidies. The hard lesson: “The era of the small arable farmer and even of the modest-sized rancher is over.”—B.W.
Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 9 An essay focusing on British religious poet George Herbert points out that the poems in his 1633 book The Temple are filled with acrostics and anagrams that went, “virtually unnoticed in writing about Herbert for 375 years, [giving] insight into poems that are generally considered to be among the finest and most famous religious lyrics in English.” The acrostics, when solved, often connect different poems in the book to each other and sum up their “essence.” (For example, a poem called “The Rose” “mentions the flower’s properties as a purgative: the acrostic includes the word PISS.”) … A review of the second volume of Edward Timms’ biography of Karl Kraus, the satirical Austrian Jewish polemicist, notes that Kraus had glimpsed Hitler’s propensities by 1923. “Hence the gust of prophecy which induced Karl Kraus, decades prior to the triumph of barbarism, to proclaim that technological progress would make ‘purses out of human skin’.”— B.B.
Rolling Stone, Dec. 15
The special hip-hop issue includes comedian Chris Rock’s list of the 25 greatest rap albums. The list ranges from N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton” to Dizzee Rascal’s “Boy in Da Corner.” Rock says the advent of N.W.A. was “like the British Invasion for black people.” The list crisscrosses hip-hop’s subgenres, ranking laid-back Southern rhymers OutKast alongside political ragers Public Enemy. … The magazine profiles one of hip-hop’s ultimate deal-makers, rapper Nas’ former manager, Steve Stoute. The New York insider is brokering agreements that meld the worlds of hip-hop and advertising, creating a “bridge between Madison Avenue and the street.” The man who engineered Gwen Stefani’s ad for Hewlett-Packard and Beyonce’s True Star fragrance for Tommy Hilfiger is helping usher in a new era of strange bedfellows.—M.M.
Sports Illustrated, Dec. 12
SI reveals its pick for “Sportsman of the Year” in a love letter to New England quarterback Tom Brady. The story praises the photogenic Patriot for being the nice guy who finishes first. A scruffy-chic black-and-white glamour shot of the three-time Super Bowl champion accompanies the article, which chronicles Brady’s good humor in the face of a photo shoot involving goats and his great rapport with competitors. … Soldiers who have lost limbs during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are finding some solace in sport. Wounded soldiers who are shipped to U.S. hospitals work with “physical terrorists” to whip their mangled bodies into soldierly shape. The story spotlights soldiers who have participated in runs and competitions organized especially for disabled veterans. One soldier’s drive to finish a run is so strong that it results in injury. “His stump is so bruised that he’ll be feeling it for a month.”—M.M.
Wired, December 2005 The cover story argues that high oil prices are good for America. As the price per barrel goes up, and stays up, it becomes cost-effective for oil companies and other businesses to invest in new technologies. These include new techniques for extracting fossil fuels from ultradeep wells to a current $3 billion federal initiative to turn coal into liquid fuel, as well as research into alternative energy sources. … Chris Suellentrop reports on the production of Star Trek: New Voyages, a “fourth season” of the TV series created by fans and filmed on replica sets in the Adirondacks. Not only is the project unique among fan productions in its ambition and production values—three 51-minute episodes have been filmed so far, at a cost of more than $1 million in cash and donated services—but also in that its amateur producers have received help from pros who worked on various Star Trek shows..—B.W.
Salmagundi, Fall 2005 and Winter 2006 In the 40th-anniversary issue of the journal, Jim Sleeper connects the “pornification” of popular culture and public spaces—from underwear ads to the easy availability of XXX-rated movies—to the general decline in American civic culture. More to blame for this profusion than “liberal permissiveness” is a “conservative sea-change.” The right has had to choose between promoting civic virtue and unfettering capitalism and consumption, and it has chosen the latter. Liberals must stand up to the corporations pushing porn on America: “Transgression has its place,” Sleeper writes, “but isn’t this a season in the republic’s life to plant more than to despoil, to build up narratives more than to tear them down? … An essay on Elfriede Jelinek, who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in literature, indicts her famously difficult and inhospitable work as nihilistic and animated by hatred. It concludes that the critiques of capitalist society and the relations between the sexes that have won her prizes and a following are only a pretext, allowing her to express her “morbidity” and “rage” to great acclaim.—B.W.
New York Times Magazine, Dec. 11
The annual “Year In Ideas” issue gathers blurbs on 78 “notions”—from scientific theories, political trends, and Internet memes to new technologies and gadgets. The serious and the whimsical share space on the list, including “Republican Elitism,” “Dialing Under the Influence,” and the Rapex “anti-rape” condom. … Jim Holt worries about Americans’ ignorance of and hostility toward science, especially since so many of today’s political issues involve scientific questions: stem-cells, climate change, and evolution. “Resistance to the authority of science” can extend even to scientists, as few people want to give up their religious faith and liberal humanism for empiricism. Strategies exist to talk oneself out of believing in the supremacy of the scientific worldview, but the rub is that science describes the world so well. Holt concludes: “Only a philosopher, and perhaps an oversubtle one, would advocate acting on science without believing it is true. But to believe it and yet refuse to act on it—now, that takes a politician.”—B.W.
Weekly Standard, Dec. 12 In the holiday reading issue, a piece quarrels with Julia Markus’The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian, a new biography of James Anthony Froude, who is best known for being the biographer of his friend Thomas Carlyle, the eminent Victorian historian. Arguing that Froude is neither undiscovered nor great, the essay explores Froude’s conservative ideals and suggests that Markus shouldn’t try to yoke Froude to modern liberal ideology. The piece also explains that Froude intended his multivolume Carlyle biography as “homage,” while “critics saw [the work] as a betrayal of confidence and a sensationalist exploitation of friendship.”… A review of Andrew Delbanco’s new biography of Herman Melville argues that the Moby Dick author “has been overserved of late by those who see veiled homosexuality in practically any scene of 19th-century male bonding,” and that “Billy Budd has been subjected to pacifist execration by critics who don’t concede that command on a warship in wartime imposes harsher choices than those facing civilian lawgivers.” Delbanco, luckily, proffers “no such nonsense.”—B.B.
National Review, Dec. 19 The conservative magazine celebrates its 50th anniversary. For starters, the magazine offers up 10 suggestions on how to live free in America. Exercising school choice launches the list, which ends on a high note with the legalization of drugs, which would allow “Americans to reclaim their minds and bodies from the pharmacological dictators eagerly eyeing their veins.”… Another anniversary piece sings the praises of 15 little-known conservative trailblazers such as Scott Milross Buchanan, the dean of Maryland’s St. John’s College; Frank Hanighen, the originator of Human Events; and Vivian Kellems, the Rosa Parks of tax reform who in 1948 stopped deducting taxes from her employees’ paychecks. … Another article scolds the president for not engaging Americans on Iraq, saying people “are growing restless and irritable with the need to play some important part in their country’s battles.”— Z.K.
The New Yorker, Dec. 12
Steve Coll draws together what is known about Osama Bin Laden’s youth in a report from his Saudi prep school. Bin Laden and his peers followed a shirt-and-tie dress code and studied English and mathematics in a largely secular curriculum. His introduction to radical Islamism came in an after-school study group organized by a Syrian teacher who drew on the philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood—a politically active group founded in Egypt. After joining, Bin Laden grew a beard, changed his dress, and spoke out on issues of Islamic law. But he was mostly remembered by others at the school as shy, serious, and honest. … Ian Frazier hunts wild hogs and attends a spectator event in which dogs chase and trap the animals. As many as 4.5 million of the animals infest 31 states, and the synergy of hog nature and current patterns of land development means the population is spreading quickly—and bearing various environmental threats in the process.—B.W.
Time and Newsweek, Dec. 12 On the cover: Newsweek reports on the introduction of female suicide bombers in Iraq. September’s successful attack by al-Qaida’s first known female suicide bomber serves as a benchmark “not only in the war for Iraq but in the global struggle against terror,” says the article. The piece reviews Muslim attitudes toward women and points out that the increase in female bombers does not correlate to a rising tide of equality in conservative Muslim circles. The motivation: “Al Qaeda’s core organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan and its avant-garde in Iraq need more recruits.”… Time reports on Steven Spielberg’s Munich, which chronicles the hunt for the terrorists responsible for assassinating 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics. An accompanying interview with the filmmaker reveals his plan for Middle East peace: giving video cameras to 250 Israeli and Palestinian children to tape even the most mundane aspects of their lives. Spielberg hopes it will allow people to “understand that there aren’t that many differences that divide Israelis from Palestinians—not as human beings, anyway.”
Iraq: A commentary by Jonathan Alter spanks the Pentagon for planting pro-U.S. stories in the Iraqi press. The practice may have a defender in former Cheney aide Mary Matalin, who believes that if the stories are true, then it’s an “absolutely appropriate” tactic in the battle over the hearts and minds of Iraqis. But Alter chides: “[E]xporting a bunch of budding Jayson Blairs simply feeds the perceptions of Americans as inept and hypocritical puppetmasters.” … An investigation by Time reveals a brewing power struggle between al-Qaida’s Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and homegrown Baathist terrorists. The source of the tension: “discomfort with al-Zarqawi’s extreme tactics and willingness among some Iraqi commanders to join the political process.” Can the United States exploit this rift by engaging in a bit of tactical divide-and-conquer? Maybe, but Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed warns, “One of the problems with an insurgency is that every time you turn a corner, there’s another corner.”—Z.K.