New York Times Magazine, April 20 The first “Green Issue,” presents a “Low Carbon Catalog” with a series of briefs on how to reduce environmental impact. … In an article, Michael Pollan defends the efficacy of his green choices, though “halfway around the world … my evil carbon-footprint doppelganger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car … [is] positively itching to replace every last pound of CO 2 I’m struggling to no longer to emit.” Personal environmental acts should not be derided as simply “virtuous,” he contends; they could inspire “a process of viral social change” that shows “our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as … people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves.”… A Freakonomics piece explains how newly instituted pay-as-you-drive insurance policies could help reduce automobile carbon emissions. … Another piece looks at pebble-bed nuclear reactors, which can’t melt down and have zero emissions. The combination is “tantalizing to environmentalists,” many of whom are reconsidering their position on nuclear energy.
Harper’s, May 2008 An essay confronts Americans’ “collective delusion of grandeur”: that we are entitled to “be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens.” We have engaged in a “fantasy of limitlessness” both economically and culturally, and this “desire to be efficient at any cost, to be unencumbered by complexity” has come at the expense of “neighborliness, respect, reverence, responsibility, accountability, and self-subordination.” According to the piece, to save ourselves from destruction, we must “give up the idea that we have the right to be godlike animals, that we are potentially omniscient and omnipotent” and “start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness, and for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity, of limits.”… An extensive article visits Cuba’s opposition groups in light of the island nation’s uncertain political future. The “first and most compelling” of Cuba’s opositores are its librarians, who operate from secret libraries in private homes that hold banned publications such as Time magazine, The Voyage of John Paul II, Animal Farm, and José Martí: The Invention of Cuba.
Economist, April 19 A briefing in the cover package on food-price inflation reveals the crisis comes not from a lack of supply but a steep increase in demand from “people in China and India eating more grain and meat as they grow rich” and the “sudden, voracious appetites” of biofuel programs in the West. … A piece reports on a tech start-up that grades cocoa along a “six-segment ‘flavor wheel’ ” to aid specialty chocolate production (currently the beans are grouped in “a very unsophisticated way” by origin and cocoa percentage), which the company’s founders anticipate will go “down the trail blazed by specialty coffee.”… An article that reviews Virginia’s efforts to reform its gun laws since the Virginia Tech massacre reveals that it has added a mental-health screening on background checks for would-be gun buyers, but the legislature has still failed to close a loophole in firearms laws that allow guns to be purchased at gun shows without a background check.
GQ, May 2008 A profile on Marc Jacobs observes that he has “discovered the consuming joy of narcissism” after he acquired a “do-me physique” while following a prescription of diet and exercise since he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. The designer, who was once notorious for his sexual escapades and drug use, now has a closed social circle based on his “tight, obsessive relationships with people,” like his trainer, chauffer, and psychiatrist, “who can handle his compulsive need to share.” But despite his buff and cleaned-up new image, Jacobs says, “It’s still only a façade. I’m still the same person. My sex life, my sexual interests, my libido, are exactly the same as they always were. It hasn’t changed my wiring or my instincts.”… In an interview, GOP strategist Karl Rove calls Bill Clinton “a very entertaining rogue” and confesses he can’t “help but sort of like him.”
Time, April 28 An essay on John McCain previews what the general-election debate would look like between the Arizona senator and a Democratic candidate, noting that though McCain “sees the tawdry ceremonies of politics—the spin and hucksterism—as unworthy,” he presents a “problem for Democrats” in that he “has the potential to steal, or take the edge off, some of their favorite issues by offering more moderate-seeming, if sometimes totally inadequate, answers.”… A piece explores the “latest battleground in maternity care,” the choice between vaginal and caesarian deliveries, and suggests that as caesarians become common for routine pregnancies, mothers may “make the vaginal-or-caesarean decision in the same way many now make the breast-or-bottle decision.” C-section births have increased 50 percent since 1996, possibly because “childbirth is losing some of its magic and becoming less about the miracle of life and more about simply getting a baby out safely and without incident,” and doctors are sued more often after vaginal deliveries.
Must Read
In the New York TimesMagazine’s “Green Issue,” Michael Pollan manages a heartfelt argument for “one-drop-in-the-bucket” individual environmental choices while avoiding the preachy “sense of personal virtue” justification.
Must Skip
A piece in Time’s cover package on global warming that addresses the environmental stances of the three presidential candidates offers little more than a narrower reprise of Newsweek’s similar cover story—printed a week ago.
Best Politics Piece
In a Harper’s annotation, Ken Silverstein dissects the “About Us” section of John McCain’s Reform Institute site, revealing that despite its claims of a “unique, independent voice,” the nonprofit “resembles nothing so much as yet another Washington influence-peddling scheme.”
Best Culture Piece
In the New Yorker, Hendrick Hertzberg parses the phenomenon of “misspeaking”—”one of the signature verbal workhorses of this interminable political season.”
Best Accompanying Detail
GQ’s profile of Marc Jacobs reveals that along with the oft-observed Sponge Bob on his biceps, he also has a tattoo of a “midcentury-style couch … a couple of inches long, on the taut, tanned skin above his hip bone.”
