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

Space CaseThe U.S. should open the galaxy to tourists.

By Josh LevinUpdated Friday, Jan. 16, 2004, at 6:07 PM ET

New RepublicNew Republic, Jan. 26
Tamar Jacoby says tighter Mexican border controls are doing to immigration what Prohibition did to drinking: not much, except bring in organized crime. President Bush's guest-worker proposal, then, would bring some law and order to increasingly dangerous border crossings, but errs in its failure to provide a path to citizenship, which "will only perpetuate a permanent foreign-born underclass." (The magazine's editorial agrees, predicting that illegal immigrants "will likely choose to retain their undocumented status" rather than agree to a legal, but limited, stay.) … Massoud Ansari reports that, with the complicity of the United States, Hamid Karzai's government allowed 42 Taliban commanders to tunnel out of jail in the hopes they would negotiate on its behalf with Mullah Omar. The plan seems futile, though, because the Taliban "is as much a cult as a mass movement" and "[m]any Taliban guerrillas pay no heed to anyone other than their supreme leader."

EconomistEconomist, Jan. 17
Space travel "should be about science not political grandstanding," so rather than send manned flights to the moon and Mars, the U.S. government should subsidize "realistic, privately funded spacecraft for tourism, and moon satellites for entertainment." … Iran's conservative Council of Guardians, aligned politically with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, banned 4,000 candidates from upcoming parliamentary elections "for their supposed indifference to Islam." The real reason: supporting the reformist President Muhammad Khatami. Though 80 current deputies are staging a parliament sit-in, many Iranians are unaware of the protest because of the state's strict press controls. … Once mocked on the mainland for its backwardness and poverty, Tasmania has become a hot tourist destination and a hit with investors. Australian environmentalists, though, are peeved that the island, which bills itself as "locked in time, with clean air and charming waterfront houses," chops down its flora, including "the world's biggest flowering hardwood tree."

New York Times MagazineNew York Times Magazine, Jan. 18
Michael Sokolove reports on the next frontier of athletic performance enhancement: gene therapy. Scientists working on genetically modified, supermuscular "mighty mice" think the technique will be applied in human specimens soon—if it hasn't already. The World Anti-Doping Agency will likely be hard-pressed to stop gene tampering, as it can now only be detected through muscle biopsy. Unless, say, sprinters get too strong for their own good and muscles start gruesomely ripping from bone: "It would be self-regulating," says the anti-doping group's wistful president. … Matt Bai peeks at focus groups of undecided Iowans and finds more interest in politics—Edwards "isn't polling well," Dean may be "vulnerable on 'gay issues' "—than policy. While Bai does illuminate how random voter comments can influence advertising roll-outs, his discovery that campaigns, like Coke and Pepsi, use psychology rather than substance to market to the modern electorate isn't exactly earth-shattering news.

Weekly StandardWeekly Standard, Jan. 19
Andrew Ferguson compares the Howard Dean campaign to the Democratic Party's first "children's crusade": the 1968 candidacy of dovish Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy. One similarity: Supporters of both pols seem to misapprehend their candidates' policies. A difference: Dean's ability to galvanize young people is more significant; twentysomethings' opposition to the Vietnam War was often "an act of self-defense." (In the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town," the 87-year-old McCarthy says his wartime campaign was fundamentally unlike Dean's. "It's a different kind of war. I don't think people are going to vote against Bush if it's going well.") … Vance Serchuk says the major Kurdish political parties, the KDP and the PUK, must settle their differences if dreams of an independent Kurdistan are to be realized. Unlike the power vacuum in the rest of Iraq, the Kurdish "parties are too muscular and entrenched, crowding out independent civil society."

The New YorkerThe New Yorker, Jan. 19
Ken Auletta reports that the Bush White House treats the press like just another special interest, not a privileged pipeline to the public: The president has held far fewer solo press conferences than his predecessors and, among other media outlets, has never given an interview to the New York Times. While courting journalists isn't high on the administration's priority list—staffers rarely return phone calls and (gasp) don't care if reporters like them—the multiple daily staff meetings about staying on message reveal an obsession with "keeping much of the press at a distance while controlling the news agenda." … A James Kaplan profile of Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David details the Seinfeld co-creator's failures as a comedian, but offers surprisingly little other off-screen insight. One fun note: David wrote a rejected screenplay in the 1980s called Prognosis Negative. (No word if he also penned Rochelle, Rochelle.)

Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World ReportTime, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 19
The state of Iowa: The U.S. News cover on Howard Dean, arriving a week after offerings from the other newsmagzines, references the candidate's forward thinking. While opponents unsurprisingly call Dean's second-term planning and selection of high-priority congressional races "audacious overreaching," supporters find it refreshing to see "a presidential candidate who thinks about more than himself." … Newsweek says Dean's Iowa politicking shows he's no rube: He was the only candidate to send a birthday card to the governor's press secretary, and his regular calls to Sen. Tom Harkin helped secure that key endorsement.

That other Paul O'Neill said the same thing about Steinbrenner: In the new book The Price of Loyalty, deposed Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill refers to President Bush as "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." In a Time interview, O'Neill lashes out at an administration in which politics and ideology trumped reason, and that leapt into Iraq without any "real evidence" of WMD in Iraq. An anonymous administration official counters, "That information was on a need-to-know basis. He wouldn't have been in a position to see it."

Down with corpulence: As part of its "health for life" cover, Newsweek points out that Atkins-diet-style carb cutting is old news: William Banting recommended as much in 1863's "Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public." In modern times, most experts say dropping carbohydrates does help many people drop pounds in the short-term (long-term results are less clear) and may decrease the risk for developing Type 2 diabetes. Then there's the controversial subgroup that recommends cutting out—well, most everything. But while caloric restriction may lead to longer life, the magazine suggests you "could get run over by a truck next week, perhaps while fantasizing about a chocolate-chip cookie."

Death of a sex salesman: Time's cover package on sex and love offers a typical newsmagazine catch-all, with stories on brain chemistry, couples therapy, and what we can learn from the animal kingdom. Most interesting tidbits: an assertion that the "lonely, isolated man masturbating to his computer is the Willy Loman metaphor of our decade," and a trend-piece suggesting that sadomasochistic sex play is on the rise, though the shadowy nature of the subculture means "measuring SM's popularity is not a precise business."

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Josh Levin is a Slate associate editor. You can e-mail him at .
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