Portfolio, May 2008 A piece explains how Disney has become “the greatest teen-star incubator since the N.B.A. stopped drafting high schoolers.” ‘Tweens have become “the last group of consumers who will buy music—or throw a fit until it is purchased for them.” Parents give in and buy the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus CD (at least, before her latest photo scandal) because they don’t want their kids on peer-to-peer downloading sites. … An article reviews the Department of Defense’s chronic difficulties tracking spending. Each branch of the military, “[p]reoccupied with protecting [its] turf,” insists on maintaining “separate, increasingly outdated systems that can’t talk to each other, trace disbursements, or detect overbilling by contractors.” DoD records are in “such disarray and [are] so lacking in documentation” that they can’t even be audited. The new bureaucracy designed to untangle the messy accounting “seems nearly as convoluted as the financial systems that it’s supposed to streamline.”
The New Yorker, May 5 A lengthy article investigates human trafficking in Moldova and in Dubai, where many trafficking victims end up. Though slavery can begin violently, like with a kidnapping, “more commonly, it starts with a broken agreement about a job promised, conditions of work, or one’s true destination.” Many victims end up working in agriculture, construction, and domestic service, with “slightly less than half” landing in the sex industry. Because Moldova is the “poorest country in Europe,” its “pipeline of likely trafficking victims … never runs dry.”… Ryan Lizza’s piece on Bill Clinton notes that for the former president, “[a]dusting to the modern, gaffe-centric media environment has been wrenching. …” Though media coverage of him “has seemed to reinforce as a sort of ill-tempered coot,” Clinton “still connects better with voters than his wife or Obama.”
New York, May 5
The cover story profiles Zoe Cruz, the Morgan Stanley executive who “had become not just one of the most powerful women on Wall Street but also the most loathed” before she was fired. Cruz worked her way up from the trading floor in 1982, when it was “a hurly-burly of aggressive men who marked turf with high-volume arguments, had pinup girls in their cubicles, and socialized on golf courses and in strip clubs.” According to one male executive, her firing may have come because “[s]he broke the rules in the boys’ club. She got promoted over all the boys. They want to prove she was never up to it when it all crumbles.”… A piece examines the truthfulness of Augusten Burroughs, “the last of the big-game memoirists,” whose apparent ability to recall even the smallest details from the past has made some critics suspicious. Burroughs has also been accused of larger fact fudging—including the charge that the shock-therapy machine he claims to have played with as a child in Running With Scissors was “actually an old vacuum cleaner missing a wheel.”
Wired, May 2008 An article in the cover package on intelligence profiles Piotr Wozniak, a Polish inventor who created “SuperMemo,” a software program that uses an algorithm based on the “spacing effect” to help people remember information. Researchers have discovered that the brain forgets learned items along a predictable pattern; if it is reminded of a fact right before it is supposed to forget it, it is more likely to remember it in the future. SuperMemo “tracks this so-called forgetting curve and reminds you to rehearse your knowledge when your chance of recalling it has dropped to, say, 90 percent”—it’s proven especially useful for people learning foreign languages. … A piece looks at the innovative techniques of filmmaker Errol Morris. In the Abu Ghraib documentary Standard Operating Procedure, Morris uses his trademark slow motion shots to reinterpret “the infamous pictures as a kind of highly sexualized samizdat parody of the bizarre and even more terrifying reality inside and outside the prison’s walls.”… A feature prods Steve Carell for advice on how to “act brilliant.” Carell meditates, “After all, what is knowledge, really, but high-resolution regurgitation?”
Newsweek, May 5 The cover story examines the paradox of Barack Obama’s campaign and asks, “[H]ow can it be that a black man running for president is accused of being too elitist?” During the primary campaign season, Obama has lost “something … ineffable, a hope of changing politics as commonly understood, and disdained, by voters of all classes and races.” But he could recover it, if shows he’s “not just a rock-star speechifier—or a worn-down pol. …”… Karl Rove counsels Obama in an op-ed and offers this bit of wisdom: “Stop the attacks. They undermine your claim to a post-partisan new politics. You soared when you seemed above politics, lost altitude when you did what you criticize. Attacks are momentarily satisfying but ultimately corrode your appeal.”… A book review considers the extramarital dalliances of Franklin Roosevelt. In addition to FDR’s well-known affair with his wife’s social secretary, he was associated with two other secretaries, a cousin, and the Princess of Norway.
Weekly Standard, May 5 The cover story knocks the newly opened Newseum, the $572 million project that is “especially impressive from an industry that is, according to its own incessant complaints, going broke.” Though “it’s pretentious and absurd,” the Newseum is “proof of the inextinguishable hope that forever rises in the breast of every journalist, the long-shot bet that if we just keep asking questions … there will always be an audience that needs us.”… A piece on Republicans going green declares, “Doing no harm in response to global warming hysterics was one of the great achievements of the Bush administration, but indifference is not a tenable political strategy.” It also scoffs that environmentally friendly Republicans like John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger support green causes “not because they are mavericks, but because they are wily and successful politicians.”
