Time, July 23 The cover story examines how the Democratic presidential candidates are embracing religion. Having learned the painful lessons of Kerry’s 2004 loss, this time it’s more than rhetoric: Democrats are attempting to open a dialogue with the religious community and “rediscover a voice they lost a generation ago.” Disillusioned with Bush, “many religious conservatives see a landscape in which their preferred candidate can’t win,” and are more open to hearing from Democrats. … A piece investigates Bureau 39, the “headquarters of a worldwide criminal enterprise” that makes the government of North Korea $1 billion every year. The United States has attempted to thwart the criminal activity and recently returned $25 million in frozen Mafia assets as a bargaining chip for nuclear-weapons inspections. Even if Kim Jong-il agrees to disarm, “there’s little reason to believe that the regime will abandon its nefarious business dealings,” which intelligence officials worry will easily facilitate future WMD deals.— D.S.
Economist, July 14
A commentary discredits Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s attempts to paint himself as “America’s indispensable ally” in the war on terrorism. The Pakistani military’s showdown with Muslim extremists at the Red Mosque did not impress the Economist—it came too propitiously for the general. Having thus enlivened the perception of the Islamist militant threat, and the necessity of his place in the battle against it, Musharraf can hope to maintain his power in the upcoming election. … A report not-too-gleefully predicts that John McCain’s campaign is on its last legs. The resignations of his top two aides and the tentative withdrawal of another make it hard for the GOP hopeful to “look like a straight-shooter.” And, his constant trumpeting of fiscal responsibility suffers next to news that his campaign managers “spend like drunken sailors.” The most likely beneficiaries of McCain fallout? Rudy Guiliani and Fred Thompson.— M.S.
American Conservative, July 16
In the cover story, Roger Scruton attempts to understand why conservatives have allowed the left to establish a monopoly on environmental issues, and why liberals want to keep it that way. Scruton delves into the nature of left-wing causes, which, he says, promise to “justify” their believers, provide enemies (“enemies are helpful for defining your place in the world”), and focus on someone to destroy rather than something to achieve. The environmental movement has constructed a religious orthodoxy around itself, feeding on zealotry rather than rational debate, he argues. And such a charged atmosphere “disrupts the possibility of developing a proper political approach. Fertile disagreement gives way to imposed orthodoxy and viable solutions to impossible utopias.” Conservatives are “more respectful of human nature” and realize that productive solutions will never be embraced if they are brought about “by state power and imposed by law.”—D.S.
Entertainment Weekly, July 13
As “Pottermania” builds, the cover story claims to reveal on-set secrets from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Alas, no real secrets here—just a pat celebrity interview plus a basic review. Daniel Radcliffe (who plays Harry) is a bit more mature now—off set, he has stubble on his chin. And the film’s darker, too. “If you’re looking for a rah-rah Quidditch match,” the article warns, “you’re out of luck this time around.” Real-world conflicts, from the French resistance to the war on terror “ricochet through every scene.” … An article rates the best and worst celebrity blogs. Rosie O’Donnell’s rosie.com is funny, enthusiastic, and emotional. Grade: A. Britney Spears’ britneyspears.com gets the lowest grade: D. It’s gone downhill since Britney checked into rehab and discontinued the “über-juicy ‘stream of consciousness’ section.” The moral: Rehab is bad for blogging.—J.L.
New York, July 16
The cover story is the much-discussed profile of Katie Couric. Comments from the surprisingly candid interview of the morning-show host turned CBS anchor make for easy commentator fodder. One of the most pounce-worthy has been Couric’s statement that “people are very unforgiving and very resistant to change” and that the “biggest mistake [CBS Evening News] made is we tried new things.” The piece reveals a defensive Couric, who is reportedly “moody” and “going through hell” about the program’s ratings plunge, and arrives at the not-so-original conclusion that she is caught between her UVA sorority-girl appeal and her true journalistic chops. … A celebrity interview goes meta as Sienna Miller talks about her new film, Interview, which is about, um, a celebrity interview. But the film is about the kind of celebrity interview “that never really happens”—that is, a “soul-baring, life changing” kind—which, Miller’s interviewer admits, isn’t going to happen in the pages of New York, either.—M.S.
New York Times Magazine, July 22
An article goes inside the Beverly Hills Playhouse, where acting coach and scientologist Milton Katselas is all but worshipped by his students. Despite the fact that Katselas’ teachings are filled with nonsensical Scientology-inspired platitudes (softened here as “useful self-help nostrums”) and that students have left because of the “unspoken pressure they felt to join the Church of Scientology,” the article never makes any serious criticisms of the coercion tactics clearly at work. Instead, it settles for finding the real, if unsurprising, connection between Hubbard’s religion of self-empowerment and actors: hubris. “Katselas told me that if he sat down with the warring parties in Israel, he could broker a truce.” … The cover looks at the emotional stresses facing women impregnated by donor eggs, a science that has outpaced our ability to parse its psychological and ethical implications. But the writer’s own failed attempt to have a baby via a donor egg screams conflict of interest; not only is there no discussion of the egg donors’ experiences (or the husbands’), but donor recipients come off as preoccupied with the social implications of their choice, obsessing over being “outed” in public or having to deal with “resemblance talk.”—A.B.
New York Review of Books, July 19
In the New York Review of Books special fiction issue is a powerful defense of filmmaker Werner Herzog’s blend of fact and fiction in his documentaries. A comparison between the genius of Herzog’s documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly with his tepid fictionalized version, Rescue Dawn, argues that the staged scenes and invented dreams (“metaphors not facts”) Herzog injects into his documentaries are in search of “another kind of truth, the portraitist’s truth.” Still, Herzog’s reputation as intellectual cinema’s golden bad boy may be unduly clouding critical judgment here; it’s hard to imagine James Frey, JT Leroy, et al. getting the same front-cover defense. … Joyce Carol Oates reviews three novels about amnesiacs, invoking, along the way, nearly every major author of the past 100 years (Woolf, Sartre, Joyce, Amis, Murakami). Despite the erudite whirlwind, there are bizarre moments when Oates sounds like a Rolling Stone movie critic, calling one book “[a] harrowing tour de force.” She ultimately sums up our cultural interest with amnesia as being the attraction to a process that “replicates the mysterious and seductive adventure of the yet unwritten/yet-unread text.”—A.B.
Vanity Fair, August
In a posthumous article, David Halberstam asserts that President Bush has exploited historical precedent to justify his reckless political decisions. Halberstam debunks Bush’s historical interpretations, arguing that the president has been stuck in a post-WWII dream world (where “other nations admire America or damned well ought to”), ignoring the more complicated lessons of Vietnam. He saves his strongest language, though, for Dick Cheney and Karl Rove—“both highly partisan and manipulative, both unspeakably narrow and largely uninterested in understanding and learning about the larger world.” Halberstam’s ending arguments—that the current geopolitical scene is much less straightforward than the polarized world of the Cold War and that America, like the fallen empires before her, risks overextension—aren’t novel, but they’re warnings worth repeating. … Buzz Bissinger resurrects the Barbaro story in an epic-length feature. The article exhaustively re-examines the events surrounding the end of Barbaro’s life, and Bissinger’s gifts as a reporter are on full display here—the piece is chock-full of names, dates, and racing jargon. But Bissinger balances the facts with a narrative style that is (mostly) engrossing. Although, with refrains like “Never fall in love with a horse,” the piece’s tone at times veers into Old Yeller territory.—K.E.
National Geographic, July The somber verdict of the cover story is that malaria will infect half a billion people this year, killing at least a million of them. The report follows the malaria crisis in Zambia, where 50,000 children die annually from the mosquito-borne illness. If these grim facts fail to enthrall morbid fascinations, the piece’s three-paragraph play-by-play description of a mosquito biting into human flesh will not. … Don’t let the sexed-up language describing bird mating distract you from the substance of an article on New Guinea’s birds of paradise. Shaking the mental image of birds doing the “jungle boogie” may be difficult, but stay long enough to get to the part about how their forest discotheque is disappearing. … The power of the collective—“swarm intelligence”—awes in a story about companies taking tips from the behavior of ants and bees to improve their business models.— M.S.
Weekly Standard, July 16 The cover story digs into a controversy over Reading First, a federal grants program that is part of No Child Left Behind. Widespread hostility to the program partially stems from its preference for using phonics-based, scientific methods to teach kids to read. Most education schools and teacher organizations scoff at that approach, but the article outlines how phonics-based methods have revolutionized Virginia school’s literacy scores and “galvanized” teacher morale. It’s a powerful argument against the “whole language” method of teaching reading, where “textbooks or any other kind of formal instruction material are eschewed” in favor of open-ended, student-directed creative experiences. … An editorial disdainfully pronounces that the party-line-eschewing, Iraq-withdrawal-advocating Republican Sens. Richard Lugar, George Voinovich, Pete Domenici, and John Warner are “followers of conventional opinion.” U.S. soldiers are making serious progress, Editor William Kristol argues, and now is the time to stand against the “defeatism of the pre-9/11 Republicans” and with those soldiers “who understand why we fight, and why we can win.”— D.S.
Newsweek, July 16
The cover story claims to be about how Barack Obama is “shaking up old assumptions about what it means to be black and white,” but it really focuses on whether the biracial presidential candidate “is black enough.” At the State of the Black Union in Atlanta this past February, Cornell West accused Obama of sucking up to white voters while keeping the African-American community at arm’s length. Black voters are “excited by the color of his skin” but “wary of whites who think Obama represents a kind of deliverance.” Ultimately, the article doesn’t really take a stance on the Illinois senator’s racial bona fides—it just points out that black voters haven’t embraced Obama wholeheartedly. … Poisoned pet food made Americans suspicious of Chinese products, but an article argues that it’s the Chinese themselves who should fear for their health. A full 20 percent of domestically sold goods fail to meet quality standards, and each year about 300 million Chinese contract a food-borne illness. What’s the moral here? You’re better off eating Chinese at an American restaurant than in Beijing.— J.L.
Sports Illustrated, July 2 and 8 The “Where Are They Now?” issue features the former minor-league hockey players who portrayed the Hanson brothers in the movie Slap Shot. Now all in their 50s, they still possess the zany meathead charm that made the film such a touchstone. Even today, Slap Shot fans “recite its lines with the fluency, and the passion, of a preacher spouting Scripture.” The only thing missing: an interview with the movie’s screenwriter, Nancy Dowd, who is only quoted from letters she wrote to a Slap Shot Web site. … A piece investigates drug use in professional cycling: “This drug drenched sport has been dirty for so long that the question is no longer, Who will win the Tour? It is, Can anyone win it clean?” Much of the article centers on a new book that implicates Lance Armstrong in doping activities. Armstrong, of course, denies this: “I agree there are some f – – – rats out there, with all the stuff we’ve seen. But sometimes, people come along with 12 cylinders.”— K.E.
