The Nation, Sept. 15
An article about New Orleans shares “dispatches from a rebuilding effort that often bears an alarming resemblance to a segregation re-enactment.” Under the guise of enforcing zoning and rental laws, predominantly white suburbs have been passing restrictions that “limit or simply ban the building—and even renting—of homes that traditionally benefit poor and working-class people of color.”… Another feature explains how the Pentagon limits enlisted soldiers’ access to blogging and certain social-networking sites “not only to save bandwidth but to save lives.” The Defense Department’s restrictions are meant to keep soldiers from revealing “innocent bits of information” that could nonetheless compromise military security. Rules include strict “regulations requiring soldiers to clear in advance potentially every blog post or personal e-mail with a supervisor.” The military lacks the capacity to enforce these measures fully, but it does manage sometimes to use them “as a pretext to stifle reporting that the military opposed.”
Newsweek, Sept. 8 In the cover package on the Republican National Convention, a long profile on John McCain adds depth to the “caricature” of the candidate as “a rich septuagenarian … who hums ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’ to the tune of a … song written the year Barack Obama was born.” The piece traces McCain’s career from the time he accepted his “preordained future” in the Navy, as the son and grandson of admirals, to his later attempts to chart his own path in politics. … An article surveys the “testosterone-filled landscape” of young men who have delayed “the passage from adolescence to adulthood” until after their 30th birthdays. Current trends suggest that male twentysomethings who engage in a “debauched and decadelong odyssey” of “drinking, smoking, kidding, [and] carousing” are striving to avoid pop-cultural images portraying the married man as “freakish, fuddy-duddy and frequently religious: an uptight Boy Scout in a Peter Pan culture.”
The New Yorker, Sept. 8 A profile of Alec Baldwin reveals that despite his recent career successes, the actor is going through something of a midlife crisis. This year, Baldwin has received a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Emmy nomination for his role as Jack Donaghy in the NBC series 30 Rock, but he says he has lost interest in “spend[ing] the waking hours of my life saying things that other people think and say and do.”… An article considers the presidential candidates’ attempts to capture the religious vote. In 2004, massive outreach efforts by the GOP “delivered the Catholic vote to Bush,” but John McCain has failed to inspire a positive response among Catholics. In the Democratic Party, on the other hand, “Catholic outreach since 2004 has been earnest,” and Catholic legal scholar Doug Kmiec has said that Barack Obama, though pro-choice, has “the mental disposition to understand” the Catholic perspective against abortion.
Weekly Standard, Sept. 8 In his column, William Kristol lauds GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin as a “spectre … rising out of the American countryside” who would be “able to invigorate a McCain administration.” Kristol warns that in the coming weeks, “the Democratic party and the mainstream media … will ridicule her and patronize her” in the hopes of stirring up “anti-small town and anti-religious prejudice” among the electorate. … Another article refutes recent claims that prisons in the United States are giving rise to radicalism and terrorism. On the contrary, a recent study shows that “barely a trace [of inmate radicalization] can be found.” Thanks to an increase in security over the last three decades, prison riots and homicides have become less frequent, and inmates may even consider it “their duty to report to authorities if they learned of a terrorist cell within the prison.”
Harper’s, September 2008 An article relates a Kaplan test-prep coach’s yearlong experience in New York City’s public schools. (Disclosure: Kaplan and Slate are both part of the Washington Post Co.) Since No Child Left Behind increased the importance of standardized tests, “the failure of schools serving low-income students has been a windfall for the testing industry.” Author Jeremy Miller offered “mini workshops of packaged prep lessons” to schools that had purchased his services, for which Kaplan has received an “overwhelming number of … contracts since the passage of [No Child Left Behind].”… Another piece follows one of Afghanistan’s Human Terrain Teams, the military units tasked with learning about the local culture to further understand “the people whom the U.S. military has committed itself to defend or to kill.” The HTT have provided military leaders with much-needed information on cultural norms in Afghanistan to aid in communications with the locals, such as “how to read gestures of deference” or the significance of seating arrangements in a meeting with village leaders.
Monocle, September 2008 A correspondent from Beirut chronicles a summer of unrest in which “Lebanon was once again edging towards civil war.” Controversy surrounding “Hezbollah’s private telephone network” and “the sacking of Beirut airport’s security chief” provoked gunfire across the city and a Hezbollah attack on a TV station in May, prompting many to flee to Cyprus. Things began looking up with the election of President Michel Suleiman, and summertime diversions such as a concert by Mika and Häagen-Dazs’ sale of a ” ‘Taste the Reconciliation’ Doha cone” lightened the atmosphere. … Another piece discusses Colombian newspaper El Spectador, which is flourishing 20 years after it broke a story about a politician that led to the murder of its editor. The paper, which has recently switched from publishing weekly to daily, is known for “its signature investigative pieces that delve into the country’s murky conflicts and the often shady goings-on of the elite.”
