Atlantic, April 2008
With Britney Spears on the cover, the story investigates the paparazzi-fueled boom of celebrity culture and presents a saddening image of the former teen darling’s plight. Photo firm X17’s innovative approach to star-stalking feeds the public’s voracious appetite for access to celebs’ daily lives. Stars, though, also use the paps to their own benefit—what’s called in the trade “giving it up”: “a sexualized metaphor that neatly captures the masculine-feminine romantic dynamic of need and reluctance that characterizes the relationship between celebrity photographers and their subjects.”… An essay argues that despite post-9/11 expectations that popular culture would “resurrect the spirit of John Wayne” and the patriotism of the ‘40s and ‘50s, Hollywood has instead revived “the paranoid, cynical, end-of-empire 1970s.” The neo-’70s movement draws the perhaps facile Iraq/Vietnam war comparison, but it’s also a way for the public to culturally “[cope] with, again, a military quagmire, rising oil prices, and corruption in high places.”
Time, March 31 The cover story profiles the Dalai Lama as reports emerge of bloody protests in Tibet against the Chinese government. He is the “rare religious figure who tells people not to get needlessly confused or distracted by religion. … [H]e is also the rare Tibetan who will suggest that old Tibet may have contributed in part to its current predicament, the rare Buddhist to tell foreigners not to take up Buddhism but to study within their own traditions, where their roots are deepest.”… In an op-ed, Peter Beinart also likens the post-9/11 years to the ‘70s. As after the Vietnam War, “militarists and moralists now occupy separate camps”: Many conservatives no longer believe, as President Bush professed, that “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” They instead embrace the claim that increased might is the answer (as conservatives after Vietnam declared that more military force would have won the war), while their counterparts on the left are turning to a Jimmy Carter-like humanitarianism.
Washington Monthly, January/February/March 2008
The cover package features essays from 37 political, legal, and military thinkers, including Jimmy Carter, Wesley Clark, John Kerry, and Nancy Pelosi, appealing to the United States to ban torture as an interrogation tactic. According to FBI veteran Jack Cloonan, “It is the terrorists whom we won over with humane methods … who continue to provide the most reliable intelligence we have in the fight against al-Qaeda. And it is the testimony of terrorists we tortured after 9/11 who have provided the most unreliable information.”Kerry contends, “[O]nce the prohibitions on torture are loosened, the practice spreads. The Pentagon used high-level Guantanamo detainees to test coercive interrogation techniques, but such techniques eventually found their way to low-level detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.” And Bishop Thomas G. Wenski declares, “[T]he issue of torture is about us, not them; it is about who we are as a people.”
New York Times Magazine, March 23 As part of a cover package on the art world, a piece examines how the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston is reshaping the perception of Latin American art—“it’s not just Diego and Frida” anymore. Curator Mari Carmen Ramirez rejects the idea of Latin American art as “something exotic and folkloric.” Instead, she seeks out artists whom academics and curators have ignored until now because they didn’t fit into “the linear progression of modernism.”… An article reveals an online medical community for patients that could revolutionize the treatment of disease. PatientsLikeMe.com allows people with terminal diseases and mental illnesses to compile their symptoms and treatments to a communal database. Patients can then search the database to discover how others have treated similar symptoms, uncovering new or overlooked ways they might fight their sicknesses. Doctors, however, caution the site could encourage more people to undergo riskier trial treatments, increase misinformation, and pose a threat to the privacy of medical data.
Economist, March 22 After last weekend’s Bear Stearns bailout, a cover package analyzes the slack economy, parsing “what went wrong.” An editorial observes that if the plan failed, fear that its $10 trillion worth of contracts “would no longer be honoured would have infected the world’s derivatives markets” and a “financial nuclear winter” would ensue. … A piece reviews investment alternatives for buyers wary of the bear market. Cash could be a good option, but investors should choose a currency from a country that has “demonstrated control of [its] money supply and [has] current account surpluses,” like the Japanese yen and Swiss franc. Gold and other commodities are also good choices, but they can be “subject to speculative excess.” The investment safest from economic meltdown? Land. But even that “can be grabbed by governments.”
Must Read
TheNew Yorker profiles the woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib, Sabrina Harman (who was court-martialed on abuse charges), to reveal a well-intentioned, if hardened, soldier who sought to document the atrocities committed at the prison.
Must Skip
In New York, Ariel Levy predictably observes that as a member of the post-feminist “opt-out generation,” Silda Spitzer was “caught in a trap she’d inadvertently set for herself.”
Best Politics Piece
Adding a new dimension to the discussion about the candidates, the New York Times Magazine reflects on Obama’s mixed-race background.
Best Culture Piece
Radar’s cover story provides a menacing behind-the-scenes look into Scientology and suggests the religion is under siege, most immediately from a loosely organized throng of hackers called “Anon.”
Worst Spitzer Scandal Pun
New York, quoting a commenter on the Erotic Review, “the sex-for-hire industry’s Bible blog”: “Did she spit-zer his jiz-zer?”
