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HOME / other magazines: Summaries of what's in Time, Newsweek, etc.

By AnonymousUpdated Tuesday, July 23, 1996, at 3:30 AM ET

Time and Newsweek, July 22
(posted Monday, July 15)

Newsweek mounts the platform to take the gold medal for Excessive Coverage of an Event That Hasn't Started, while Time sprints to the supermarket checkout stand with a cover on the British royal family that wouldn't look out of place in the pages of its stablemate, People. Newsweek's 32-page Olympics extravaganza is its second Olympics cover in recent weeks. It contains the requisite profiles of track superstars Michael Johnson and Dan O'Brien; the requisite article on the limits of human performance; and the requisite windy essay about the Meaning of the Games (Frank Deford, America's self-appointed sports philosopher, observes: "For all the artifice, we still sense that deep inside the Olympics, there is something dear to be found. So we watch and learn to care.")

Time's we-can't-do-Di-again royalty angle is Windsor: The Next Generation, featuring 14-year-old heartthrob Prince William, easily the most sympathetic member of the House of Windsor to have reached puberty. The article offers no new juicy gossip, but is full of snob color (Eton, hunting, etc.) and fun facts about his everyday life. Not that Time ignores the Olympics: Celebrity photog Annie Leibovitz publishes an Olympic portfolio--atmospheric black-and-white shots of American stars. (It's pretty, but enough with the Michael Johnson cheekbone pictures already.)

Both magazines lead their national sections with Ross Perot's Reform Party, but they disagree on the party's significance. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter argues that Perot-rival Dick "Governor Gloom" Lamm will compel Clinton-Dole to "deal with issues--chiefly entitlements and campaign-finance reform--that they would prefer to avoid." (In an adjoining interview, Lamm delivers his apocalyptic warnings about Social Security and Medicare.) But Time doubts that the Reform Party's scary nostrums--whether they come from Perot or Lamm--will interest voters.

The New Yorker, July 22
(posted Monday, July 15)

David Remnick delivers a massive piece on the Russian elections. Among his scoops--that Yeltsin almost canceled the election in mid-March and that Yeltsin's campaign funded the campaign of third-place finisher Alexander Lebed--Remnick conjures the spookiness of the campaign: self-delusional Communists, thuggish Yeltsin henchmen, a pathetic Mikhail Gorbachev, and lunatic prophet, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Also, architecture critic Witold Rybczynski travels to Disney's new, planned town of Celebration, Fla., and finds it wonderful.

U.S. News & World Report, July 15 & 22
(posted Tuesday, July 9)

U.S. News does the Olympics this week with "The Only Guide You'll Ever Need!" We wish they'd told us this before, rather than after, every other magazine's Olympics cover. In a closing editorial David Gergen concludes daringly that American politics are uncivil and Washington needs more bipartisanship. It's the only David Gergen column you'll ever need.

The Nation, July 29 & August 5
(posted Monday, July 15)

The Nation finds the first fresh Olympics angle in weeks--vigorous disapproval--as its writers condemn the Atlanta organizing committee for trying to shut unions out of Olympic construction; excoriate big business for commercializing the games beyond recognition; and denounce Olympic Committee Chief Juan Antonio Samaranch and his top aides for their fascist sympathies. (Not criticized in the package, but certain to raise the hackles of Nation letter writers, are the Olympics' imperialist equestrian competition and militaristic pentathalon.) Also, Katha Pollit offers a scathing critique of conservative "family wage" proposals.

Weekly Standard, July 22
(posted Monday, July 15)

The Standard pummels Bob Dole again this week for being insufficiently conservative. David Frum declares that while conservatives should "hope that Dole wins in November," he has shown nothing but indifference to conservative principles. But not to worry, adds Frum (repeating the standard Standard line), because, with or without Dole, conservativism has established itself as the dominant political force of the age. William Kristol writes slightly more kindly about the GOP candidate, arguing that voters may prefer Dole's courage and decency to Clinton's weakness and mendacity (though perhaps not enough to get Dole elected).

New Republic, August 5
(posted Friday, July 19)

The cover story on Washington, D.C., cab drivers combines three of TNR's favorite subjects: race, immigration, and Islam. Stephen Glass presents the city's cab industry as a microcosm of America's immigration debate. Young African-Americans won't hack because of the servile, Driving Miss Daisy stigma. But the immigrants who've taken African-America's place behind the wheel (many of them devout Muslims) believe that the hard work is a ticket to the middle class. Elsewhere in the magazine: the Dick Lamm backlash. In past issues, TNR's Matthew Miller has applauded the Reform Party candidate's tough talk on entitlements, but this week, John Judis butchers the sacred Lamm in the TRB column, accusing him of exaggerating Social Security's ills and indulging in granny-bashing. TNR also throws stones at Boutros Boutros-Ghali: David Rieff says the U.N. chief is irresolute and unprincipled, but adds that the organization itself is so rotten that not even Boutros-Ghali's ouster would improve it.

Economist, July 20
(posted Friday, July 19)

The commercialization of the Olympics does not trouble the free-marketeering Economist, whose cover celebrates "The Zillion Dollar Games." The opening editorial notes that governments, not businesses, have corrupted the Olympics (Nazi Germany, Communist East Germany, etc.), and contends that corporate sponsorship makes the Games cleaner, more exciting, and more popular. Elsewhere in the Economist, the editors do bite (or at least nibble on) the Invisible Hand that feeds them: The magazine warns multinationals that they must not ignore moral, political, and environmental controversies in developing countries. "Where governments cannot or should not act, the burden shifts to managers of international companies to exercise their responsibility as moral individuals." Take that, Royal Dutch/Shell! The magazine also publishes its monthly review of books and multimedia; with a special focus on Spanish fiction and the Middle East.