Vanity Fair, June 2008 In a column, Michael Wolff explains why “sex … in politics is as significant a subtext as race.” The public and the media fixate on politicians’ sex lives because “how you handle your sexual embarrassment, because you will have to handle it, has become a major political test and skill.”… A piece argues that discredited memoirist James Frey could have been enabled (and encouraged) by publishers and editors eager for a best-seller: “[I]t now turns out that it was something of an open secret in the publishing word that the industry had been complicit in the scandal, and that Frey, though he was not innocent, had become a whipping boy.” Frey, who claims he initially labeled his book a novel, “embraced the badass role he’d written for himself” and “began standing by his book as straight nonfiction.”… The article accompanying the much-discussed seminude photo of Miley Cyrus considers the success of the teen juggernaut. Part of her popularity stems from the fact that she’s “cute, but not too cute, and she sings with more character than most pop stars her age.” (Meghan O’Rourke weighs in on Cyrus in Slate.)
Newsweek, May 12 The cover story, an excerpt from Fareed Zakaria’s recent book, suggests Americans are gloomy because a “seismic shift in power and attitudes” is taking place as the world moves from “anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.” The growth of nations like India and China is “naturally an unsettling prospect for Americans, but it should not be” because the post-American world “will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else.” (The Post-American World just happens to be the book’s title.) … A profile of the late Deborah Jean Palfrey reveals the so-called D.C. madam said she identified with the “stifled, battered, but sultry small-town girl” played by Meryl Streep in The Deer Hunter. … On the 10-year anniversary of Seinfeld’s final episode, dueling op-eds argue for and against the sitcom’s cultural legacy.
New York, May 12
The cover story interviews Sarah Jessica Parker on the eve of the Sex and the City movie’s release. Parker says New York City has changed since she first arrived in 1976: “[T]here’s just so much money now, and the city is so affluent, and all the colors, all the shops, the look of a street from block to block is just terribly absent of distinguishing coffee shops, bodegas. All of that stuff that made it possible to live in New York is gone.”… A harrowing feature investigates the working conditions of New York subway employees, who toil where “there’s so much steel dust swirling around that when you blow your nose your snot is black” and “[o]n summer days, the temperature regularly exceeds 100 degrees; in the winter, it’s below freezing.” Worse than their working conditions is the danger they encounter underground, where they have to clean and repair the tracks, and have little space to avoid oncoming trains.
The New Yorker, May 12 In the “Innovators Issue,” an article reviews the history of animal-language studies. It focuses on the story of Alex, the late African gray parrot who could converse using about 50 words. Language researchers have long been interested in birds because of their ability to mimic human speech, and recent studies have bolstered the theory that “avian brains, long regarded as primitive, are not so different from mammalian brains after all.”… A profile of prominent chef Grant Achatz explores the phenomenon of taste while detailing his fight to save his tongue from cancer. Achatz, a molecular gastronomist whom critics have called “a successor to Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck,” refused to have his tongue removed in the conventional treatment for the disease to save his sense of taste. … A review of Barbara Walters’ autobiography observes she is “among the few remaining on-air television journalists whose careers encompass almost the entire history of television news.”
Vogue, June 2008 A piece on Jenna Bush’s upcoming nuptials reveals that the first daughter did “feel some pressure” to marry at the White House but decided against “a public, almost ‘state’ event on taxpayer-funded property.” Bush says, “There’s a glamour to it, I know, but [Bush’s fiance] Henry and I are far less glamorous than the White House.”… An article on Patrick Robinson, Gap’s head designer, explains why his company, which was the “symbol of all that was shiny and clean and optimistic in the Bill Clinton nineties,” has “now slumped into a coral-sweatered, baggy-cargo’ed mess.” Gap’s fall from its “glory years” can be blamed on poor corporate management that “disastrously undermin[ed] the individual specialness of Gap’s offer” by bulk-ordering material for the company and its sister brands. Robinson, who is a “guy equipped with both the silo-shattering, snowflake-killing determination of a design warrior and a collegial lack of ego,” hopes to turn the company back into a destination for “super-cool American classics.”
Weekly Standard, May 12 In the cover story, a former student examines the life of William Bee Ravenel III, an instructor and mentor who John McCain said “helped teach me to be a man.” Ravenel taught English to McCain at Alexandria, Va., Episcopal High School and “was always reaching out, always trying not so much to instill as to bring out the qualities McCain would need in the future”… A piece debunks a Gallup poll that states only 7 percent of the world’s Muslims are radical—that is, believe “the attacks of September 11, 2001, were ‘completely’ justified” and “view the United States unfavorably.” The piece argues that the poll is misleading because they did not include the “23.1 percent of respondents … who told pollsters the attacks were in some way justified.”… An op-ed derides a Swiss ethics panel that recently “weighed in on the ‘dignity’ of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong.” The move, the piece claims, represents “the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.”
