Today, Other Magazines reads Newsweek, New York, The New Yorker, the Weekly Standard, and Moment to find out what’s worth your time—and what’s not.
Must Read
Moment visits Cyprus, whose Greek half has recently become “the Mediterranean’s answer to the Las Vegas wedding scene.” Cyprus, a short flight from many Middle Eastern countries, offers civil weddings “in a part of the world where they are largely unavailable.” One official, who conducts civil ceremonies in a small room above a KFC, says 20 percent of the island’s tourists come to Cyprus in order to wed.—E.G.
Best Cover Piece
New York’s cover package is a smart look at the post-crime atmosphere in New York City. The main article wonders how to end homicide in the city altogether, but it never gets too New York-centric. While New York’s challenges are unique, the article suggests tactics that can be extrapolated out to the rest of the country.—C.M.
Best Profile
Newsweek rides the Obama wave with a telling profile that takes us under the hood of the “Dream Machine.” What keeps him calm in the midst of the fray? “Because this is the campaign I always wanted to run. If it doesn’t work, it’s not because of the organization we built or the respectful tone that we set.”—J.R.
Best Corporate Profile
TheNew Yorker’s Ken Auletta provides a thorough account of Google’s transition from a search engine to a global media titan and emerging political force of nature. The profile of the corporation begins with Google’s attempts to curry favor on Capitol Hill—no, co-founder Sergey Brin did not put on a tie to meet with John McCain—and looks ahead to what barriers await a company that believes it can do anything.—C.W.
Best Business Article
Observing that women now make up 53 percent of the work force with a net worth of almost $2.3 trillion, Moment decides “to plumb the philanthropic feminine mystique.” The article aggregates a number of responses to the major questions—when women give money, where do they give, how much do they give, and “do they give differently than men?”—in an effort to refine and redefine our perception of women as caregivers.—E.G.
Best International Piece
A dispatch in Newsweek paints a shocking picture of Kenya’s streets following the once-peaceful country’s contested elections, held on Dec. 27. The piece notes, “In the last week, some 300 people have been killed and 100,000 left homeless in a country that has been long considered a model of stability in violence-ridden East Africa.”—J.R.
Best Religion Article
TheNew Yorker profiles the Church of Scientology’s use of celebrity to promote its doctrine. The article focuses on the Château Élysée, known as the Celebrity Centre since the church purchased the structure in 1973, the headquarters for most of the church’s outreach to Hollywood. Best tidbit: “In the basement, there’s a drug detox facility.”—C.W.
Worst Education Piece
The Weekly Standard belatedly acknowledges that there’s a lot of hoopla surrounding the college application process: Seven years after the Atlantic published David Brooks’ “The Organization Kid,” the article decries “the professionalization of childhood.”—E.G.
Best Movie Piece
TheNew Yorker’s Anthony Lane discussesThe Orphanage, a horror film and the debut for director Juan Antonio Bayona. Beginning with the sentence “The New Year begins in fear and trembling,” Lane goes on to delicately place the film, which he admires, against a relief of a disturbing genre in an increasingly disturbing world.—C.W.
Best Pun
The Weekly Standard evaluates the new J.M.W. Turner retrospective, quipping that the English painter “bristled” at the accusation that landscape painting was “a ‘mere’ reproduction of appearances.”—E.G.
Best Post-Year-End-Roundup Roundup
Moment looks back at so-called “Jewish conspiracies” over the years, from the well-known literary hoax TheProtocols of the Elder of Zion to one man’s persistent belief that media mogul and practicing Christian Rupert Murdoch is, in fact, a Jew.—E.G.
