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Continental ShiftCadillacs on the streets of London?

By Josh Levin
Updated Friday, Jan. 23, 2004, at 7:20 PM ET
New Republic

New Republic, Feb. 2
Listen up Karl Rove: If you're building up a dossier on Democrat front-runner-of-the-week John Kerry, Michael Grunwald suggests you study the 1996 Massachusetts Senate race. While then-Gov. William Weld sketched Kerry as a "soft-on-crime, soft-on-welfare, crazed-on-taxes paleoliberal," he's since migrated to more presidentially appropriate positions: pro death penalty for terrorists and pro mandatory minimum sentences for dealing drugs to minors. What a flip-flopper. … Clay Risen argues that the movement of American IT jobs offshore—"this decade's 'giant sucking sound' "—isn't the catastrophe it's made out to be. The loss of some white collar jobs in the United States will allow companies to grow, or stay afloat, by keeping labor costs down. Says one economist, "The choice isn't outsourcing or keeping jobs here. It's outsourcing or going out of business. Which isn't good for jobs."

Economist

Economist, Jan. 24
While John Kerry and that "admittedly slightly weird version of democracy" called the Iowa caucuses decorate the cover, the magazine clearly has a thing for that dashing senator from North Carolina. Handicapping the rest of the stops on the primary circuit, they conclude that "Mr Bush would surely prefer to run against the angry Mr Dean rather than against the credible Mr Kerry or the attractive Mr Edwards." … General Motors may soon reintroduce Europeans to the Cadillac, what with the recent success the company has seen stateside. Shares are up 35 percent in the last few months, and the typically staid corporation is taking risks, like the introduction of the Pontiac Solstice, a concept car that was quickly turned into a sporty roadster priced under $20,000. Potential trouble on the horizon: GM "has been forced to offer discounts averaging about $3,785 per vehicle just to keep sales moving."

Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone, Feb. 5
In an interview with Jann S. Wenner and Will Dana, Howard Dean doesn't curse, à la John Kerry, but he does offer an inflammatory diagnosis of George W. Bush: "This president is not interested in being a good president. He's interested in some complicated psychological situation that he has with his father." The late, great Dem front-runner also says his medical training has "helped me enormously. When you come up to somebody who's really sick, you don't have time to wait for three more days for more evidence. You just have got to go with what you've got to go with." Those comments call to mind the evaluation of Dean's medical residency excerpted in Mark Singer's New Yorker profile: "His major problem continues to be one of impulsive syntheses when problems are approached. He should take care to be more deliberate in making assessments and deciding upon plans."

New York Times Magazine

lNew York Times Magazine, Jan. 25
In the harrowing cover story, Peter Landesman investigates the global trade that brings some 20,000 young girls and women into the United States each year as sex slaves. Powerful organized crime networks kidnap girls from Eastern Europe and Latin America, then ship them to Mexico, from where they are smuggled across the porous U.S. border only after their overseers, usually women because they "can more easily gain the trust of young girls, they can more easily crush them," beat and abuse them. Heartbreaking first-person accounts of unthinkable depravity include stories of the importation of toddlers, basements full of teenagers forced to perform countless sex acts each day, and rendezvous points at Disneyland. Considering all of these awful details, it seems inappropriately lurid to sell the story with a picture of a girl in a school uniform on the cover.

The New Yorker

The New Yorker, Jan. 26
The trauma issue. … Jerome Groopman debunks group debriefing, a therapy technique in which the emotionally scarred spill their guts to fellow victims. While one company claims a 99.7 percent success rate after 9/11, many counselors think the method reinforces the trauma, including implanting other people's bad memories. … Ian Parker studies the case of Barbara Bocek, an Amnesty International specialist who claims she was threatened, then bound and gagged, by militant Guatemalans angered by her human-rights work. Though it seems Bocek's a faker—she hasn't produced any of the threatening notes and failed a lie detector test—many Amnesty International members wonder why, unlike other victims, she was forced to prove her case to the human-rights organization. … Burkhard Bilger profiles downhill skiers Hermann "The Herminator" Maier and Bode Miller. The rivals excel using contrasting styles: The Austrian Maier, who nearly severed his leg in a motorcycle crash two years ago, brute-forces his way down the mountain; the American Miller, who revolutionized the sport by switching to shorter skis, gets by with unbelievable reflexes.

Weekly Standard

Weekly Standard, Jan. 26
Matthew Continetti follows around Wesley Clark in New Hampshire and finds, as Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi says, a candidate "shooting free throws by himself on one end of the court," and—judging from the standing ovations Clark has been receiving—sinking most of them. … While President Clinton authorized covert ops against al-Qaida after the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Gen. Pete Schoomaker, who led Special Operations Command at the time, tells Richard H. Shultz Jr. that counterterrorist strikes were "never going to happen." Among Shultz's nine reasons that special ops were never used against al-Qaida before 9/11: a distaste for potential casualties, the lack of "actionable intelligence," and the disaster in Mogadishu, immortalized in Black Hawk Down, that left special forces units pinned down by Somali warriors.

U.S. News & World Report, Time, and Newsweek

U.S. News & World Report, Time, and Newsweek, Jan. 26
Hearts and minds, at home and abroad: According to a U.S. News profile, John Ashcroft is "not the guy everyone thinks he is." The nice-guy attorney general buys ice cream for the losers after pick-up basketball and didn't order that a modesty curtain cover a bare-breasted statue in the Justice Department. Ashcroft's critics also get it wrong when they focus on the Patriot Act—real animus should be reserved for the fact that of 5,000 Muslims detained as terror suspects after 9/11, only one was convicted of a crime.

Raising the Mars bar: U.S. News thinks that President Bush might be biting off more than he can chew—he wants a "crew exploration vehicle" within four years but "won't write a blank check like Kennedy." … Time reports that the next-generation lunar/Mars lander probably won't have wings like the shuttle but will likely be a capsule like those used in the Mercury and Apollo programs. … Also in Time, Gregg Easterbrook argues that going to Mars "makes absolutely no sense with current technology" because we can analyze rocks "without risk to human life, and at a tiny fraction of the cost of sending people."

Remember the stain: Since Howard Dean only carries one suit at a time, U.S. News says staffers protected the candidate at a recent windy barbecue by "holding up file folders, papers, posters, anything to keep the food from landing on him." … According to Time, Bill Clinton keeps in touch with Democratic candidates "like a mother wanting her kids to succeed when they head off to college" and gets upset if they dawdle between calls. John Edwards stays on the ex-prez's good side by sending the "eager Copy Editor in Chief" copies of his speeches.

Controversial births: Newsweek's cover on choosing your child's gender features one technique originally developed to sort livestock sperm, and another, developed to screen for genetic-transmitted diseases like Tay-Sachs, that allows parents to choose between viable embryos. While some ethicists argue that these methods represent futuristic gender discrimination, it's not clear as of now whether parents are asking for more girls or boys. (Read Slate's take on gender choice and adoption.)

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