Portfolio, April 2008 The cover story claims women’s advances in the workplace have stalled. Despite improvement in the 1980s in the gap between men and women’s pay, “gains since then have been partly erased by a drop every few years.” For instance, female lawyers’ salaries are dropping in relation to their male counterparts’: In 2006, they made 70.5 percent of what male lawyers make, compared with 77.5 in 2005. Determining the reason for the slowdown is “tricky”—some sources believe the current obstacles are “more subtle and therefore harder to overcome” and that the “popular perception is that women have made it, so there’s nothing to discuss.”… A piece investigates allegations that art dealer Larry Salander could be behind one of the “most massive art frauds in history,” in which more than $100 million worth of loans, art, and investments has gone missing. The emergent scandal partly reflects the changing nature of the art world, which is now dominated by investors not interested in connoisseurship, who “simply [buy] art … in vogue and likely to turn a profit.”
The New Yorker, March 24 A disturbing piece profiles Sabrina Harman, who took the now-iconic photograph of the wired, hooded detainee standing on a box at Abu Ghraib. Harman, an Army M.P. stationed there, says many of her colleagues there photographed prisoners and corpses. According to the piece, that the M.P.s took photographs demonstrated “that they never fully accepted what was happening as normal, and that they assumed they had nothing to hide.” Harman wrote home, “[I]ts awful and you know how fucked I am in the head. Both sides of me think it wrong. I thought I could handle anything. I was wrong.”… After the latest spate of memoirist scandals, an essay investigates the parallel between fiction and history writing in the 18th century. It observes, “Historians and novelists are kin … but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes.”
Weekly Standard, March 24 Barack Obama is this week’s cover boy, with an article that parses the origins and meanings of the eloquent candidate’s favorite expressions. The piece objects to “the creepy kind of solipsism and the air of self-congratulation that clings to his campaign.” In addition to the Deval Patrick fracas of a few news cycles ago, there’s another appropriated bit of rhetoric: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” It’s the title of an Alice Walker book of essays; she got it from a June Jordan poem. … While weighing in on the Spitzer scandal, a commentary concludes with this zinger: “Some of his old supporters on the left, wallowing in their glorious hopes for him, are calling Spitzer’s fall a tragedy. They are wrong. Tragedy requires an initial nobility of purpose.”
New York, March 24
An article in the inevitable Spitzer cover package shares the reactions of the former governor’s staff and friends to the news that he visited prostitutes. One friend comments: “It was very funny, reading the affidavit from the woman. Client 9 was clearly Eliot. It was very much him, his personality: the micromanagement of what train she takes! The language! It was just spot-on.”… Another piece revels in the connection between the former governor and Jason Itzler, the self-dubbed “King of All Pimps.” Itzler served two and a half years in prison, in part because of Spitzer’s anti-prostitution crusades—but Itzler claims he “discovered” Ashley Alexandra Dupré and launched her in the business. … Ariel Levy probes Silda Spitzer’s decision to attend the press conference and notes that “she will not have the consolation of her own career as she comes to terms with the man she gave it up for.”
Newsweek, March 24 The cover package on Iraq surveys the country on the five-year anniversary of the invasion. A piece reflects on the challenges of the new kind of warfare, advocated by Gen. Petraeus, which requires soldiers to “reach out and ally themselves with men who have tried and often succeeded in killing their own” and “to learn to operate amid moral ambiguity, to acknowledge the legitimate aspirations of their enemies.”… Another article looks at the competing philosophies on how the military should prepare for future conflicts. It notes that the armed forces must “be able to fight ‘big wars’ against rising powers like China” but also “small, asymmetrical conflicts against determined partisans with wicked low-tech weapons like IEDs.”… A piece investigates the plight of Asian workers in Malaysia, where factory owners are allowed by law to mistreat employees from abroad. Workers lured with false promises pay thousands to “brokers” to place them in Malaysian firms, where their employers keep their passports and threaten them with canings and deportation if they report the difficult conditions.
