New York Times Magazine, April 6 In the cover story, a journalist recounts growing up as part of the Liberian landed elite before the country’s violent 1980 coup. The descendent of a freed American slave who became a Liberian founding father, she returns present-day to the country of her childhood to look for a foster sister left behind when her family escaped to the United States. … An essay asks if America has already “inadvertently” elected a black president: Warren Harding. During “the white-supremacist heyday of the 1920s,” rumors circulated that he had a black ancestor, and various African-Americans throughout the years claimed familial links to the 29th president. Though the “bitter, racist glee” of the accusations offers “ample reason not to accept them out of hand,” this “kind of community gossip … often provides clues to richer truths.”… An article visits the historically segregated Levittown, Pa., to discover how the suburb, with its large sector of working-class white male “Reagan Democrats,” is reacting to Barack Obama’s campaign. The piece reports that Obama’s “lofty rhetoric did not move these men, but neither did it go over their heads, exactly. … [I]t seemed to have the opposite of its intended effect. It bothered them.”
Scientific American, April 2008 An article uses game theory to explain why doping is so prolific in professional sports and argues that some athletes turn to performance-enhancing drugs because they stand to gain much more than they could lose. Once the best athletes start doping (or, as in game theory, “defect” from the rules of the game), “their rule-abiding competitors must defect as well, leading to a cascade of defection through the ranks.” Today’s advanced drugs are also much harder to detect, resulting an “arms race” between dopers and drug testers in which the “testers are five years away from catching the takers,” thus further lessening the incentive not to dope. … A piece explores the possibilities of human limb regeneration and says that the salamandar is one model for scientists studying the ways humans could adopt this ability. The salamander can regrow body parts as many times as it needs to through its lifetime and is similar to humans in that its limbs are “encased in skin, and … composed of a bony skeleton, muscles, ligaments, tendons, nerves and blood vessels.”
Vanity Fair, May 2008 A lengthy piece in the “Green Issue” profiles biochem company Monsanto, which is trying to control farmers’ use of its genetically modified seeds. The firm says that the standard practice of reusing harvested seeds from season to season is actually an infringement on patent rights and demands that farmers buy new seeds each year. The company also goes after growers who don’t even know their fields are populated with Monsanto’s GM seeds, which can be carried through the wind or bird droppings. The company, which has been around since 1901 and originally just dabbled in chemicals, is linked to more than 50 EPA Superfund sites and produced Agent Orange for the government during the Vietnam War. And now, Monsanto’s aggressive marketing of genetically modified crops “profoundly influences—and one day may virtually control” the world’s food production. … An article uncovers the Chinese military’s attempts to “weaponize” the weather as part of its history of climate-engineering.
Economist, April 5 The cover story recommends against heavy government regulations as a solution to the crashing financial markets. It notes that governments should be cautious of the “notion that the world can just regulate its way out of crises.”… A piece in the special report on Israel examines what the next 30 years will look like for the nation. An Israeli political scientist presents two scenarios: In one, the country espouses “a serene balance of Zionist and humanist values” and enjoys “strong trade links with most of the Middle East” because of a neighboring Palestinian state and enfranchisement of non-Jewish citizens. In another, Jews have become dwindling majority in Israel, while foreign Jews view the state as “increasingly backward and irrelevant.” The “best and the brightest” have left the country, the economy lags, and “any peace deals between Israel and its neighbors … are looking shaky.” The piece observes that which scenario comes to fruition “depend mostly on [Israel’s] own decisions.”
Time, April 14 The cover story reveals Pope Benedict XVI’s “soft spot for Americans.” The pontiff, though he considers many Catholic leaders in the United States to be “victims of the moral relativism [that] pervades Western culture,” admires what he has called its “obvious spiritual foundation.”… An article claims the Democratic tendency “to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right” is “self-defeating.”… An essay investigates some private colleges (including Kenyon College and the College of William and Mary) that are admitting men who are less qualified than female applicants to remedy the lagging male presence on campuses. The piece observes the paradox of the new gender gap: “If girls were once excluded because they somehow weren’t good enough, they now are rejected because they’re too good” because some “colleges have problems managing a balanced freshman class.”
Must Read
The New York Times Magazine cover story provides a fascinating and wrenching glimpse at Liberia’s 1980 coup through the eyes of an Americanized teen who witnesses her uncle’s execution on television and overhears her mother’s gang-rape by revolutionary soldiers.
Must Skip
New York’s feature on a confrontation between prep-school faculty and trustees over defamatory Facebook groups comes off unbalanced when it can’t seem to find any trustees or students to share their sides of the scandal.
Best Politics Piece
A piece in Time distills the Democratic candidates’ competing foreign-policy philosophiesas it looks at the careers and lapsed friendship of their top advisers, Anthony Lake (“the idealist”) and Richard Holbrooke (“America’s toughest diplomatic tactician”). Guess who works for whom?
Best Culture Piece
An article in TheNew Yorker examines who holds the rights to loot under the sea—the treasure-hunting companies that finance and research the operations or governments with historical or geographical claims to the booty.
Notable Special Feature
Remember buzz phrases from the Internet’s dark ages with Wired’s Internet meme quiz.
