Today, Other Magazines reads Newsweek, New York, The New Yorker, the Weekly Standard, and the New Republic to find out what’s worth your time—and what’s not.
Must Read
The “Evita factor” could make all the difference on Super Tuesday, saysNew York. Hillary Clinton has a major advantage over Barack Obama among Hispanic voters, which will be crucial in large states like California. One theory holds that Latinos are more willing to embrace Hillary because of precedence in Latin America for strong women who rode their husbands’ coattails into power; detractors say Hillary’s advantage comes because of racial tensions between blacks and Hispanics, or simply because Obama ignored the Hispanic vote for so long.—N.M.
Most Glowing Obama Story
TheNew Yorker chronicles the dissolution of the Democratic primary from a cordial celebration of the party’s diversity to a bitter spat between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The piece concludes: “Hillary Clinton would make a competent, knowledgeable, and responsible President. Barack Obama just might make a transformative one.”—C.W.
Best Plea for Relevance
The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes describes a McCain nomination as “not that bad” and ends with this dubious plug for his audience: “McCain, probably alone among Republicans, can win this fall, but not without the full-blown support of conservatives.”—C.W.
Best Campaign Piece
The New Republic opines that while in many cases the difference between Clinton’s and Obama’s platforms is about as vast as the difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero, there is more here than meets the eye. The Clintonian strategy has been to achieve partisan support “an inch at a time” as the only way to advance their agenda into hostile conservative territory. Obama, however, seems to be pushing a more popular, sweeping change, the one everyone has been talking about these past months.—J.R.
Best Line
John J. Dilulio Jr., writing in the Weekly Standard, offers this warning to conservatives: “[I]n this exceptionally weird election year, witnessing the not-so-vast right-wing conspiracy McCain-bash its way to a third Clinton term would win the prize for irony.”—C.W.
Best Investigative Piece
TheNew Yorker’s Seymour Hersh digs into the motivations behind Israel’s Sept. 6, 2007, air raid on an alleged military complex in Syria. While a variety of press reports and intelligence officials suggested that the building was a fledgling nuclear facility, Hersh presents evidence that the strike was meant as a warning, both to Syria and, possibly, Iran.—C.W.
Best Middle East Piece
The New Republic follows the White House press corps on its first visit to the Palestinian city of Ramallah. There were moments of comedy, such as President Bush answering questions no one asked when his earpiece didn’t work, but the trip was nevertheless tense: Israeli leaders are beginning to feel that if a two state solution doesn’t happen, and soon, “Israel is risking itself as a Jewish and a democratic state.”—J.R.
Must Skip
New York makes an attempt to fill the void of the writers’ strike by enlisting the scribes of popular television shows to write season endings for other hit series—for instance, having Simpsons scribes take on The Office. Most heavy-handedly satirize obvious motifs and grab at farce that often falls flat. The piece serves as an annoying reminder of the barren primetime landscape.—N.M.
Best Business Piece
Newsweek says that Microsoft’s $45 billion bid for Yahoo is “not a case of two struggling companies joining forces against a big bad bully who rules the neighborhood.” Rather, it would catapult Microsoft into first place in numerous categories, making it the Web’s No. 1 business-information site, the leader in innovative download-free applications, and giving it a whopping 87 percent share in portal front pages.—J.R.
Best Sports Profile
New York looks at Brian McNamee, the trainer who admitted to injecting Roger Clemens with steroids and fell hard from his former perch as a revered muscle-manufacturer to the pros. The piece is somewhat sympathetic to McNamee’s tortured feelings about damaging his erstwhile friend’s reputation, but also heavily emphasizes the many murky details in the trainer’s history—a flawed record as a cop and a rape accusation among them.—N.M.
