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

Best Best-SellersJohn Grisham ranks his work in Entertainment Weekly.

By Josh LevinUpdated Friday, Feb. 6, 2004, at 5:19 PM ET

New Republic, Feb. 19
Jason Zengerle wonders if Democrats should be excited about Limbaugh-esque blowhards like Randi Rhodes, a Bush-hating firebrand whose talk radio show will likely be syndicated nationwide in the coming months. Of the two nascent liberal radio startups, Progress Media's idea—to model programs after The Daily Show—seems like a better plan than Democracy Radio's notion to find Limbaugh clones. … In the third TNR story in six weeks titled "Beyond Belief," a disbelieving Jed Perl rips artist John Currin new orifice after new orifice. (Best dis: "Many of the poverty-stricken girls who painted flowers on porcelain plates in nineteenth-century French factories were more talented than he is.") For Perl, though, the "interesting question is not why Currin's paintings are so bad but why he is so successful." The answer: He's in bed with dealers and "collectors who care no more about art than the people who ran Enron cared about corporate America." (Read Slate's take on Currin.)

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Harper's, February 2004
Richard Manning's cover story promises that it will follow "the food chain back to Iraq." Instead, he rambles about conflicts between Cro-Magnon man and the "wheat-beef people" and the dangers of not applying fertilizer evenly to your field, then pats himself on the back for killing an elk to provide his family's yearly meat supply. He does mention Iraq in one sentence. … Rich Cohen hangs out in a high-school journalism class taught by an ex-reporter who dismisses every interesting story idea—e.g., a teacher who's in a coma after a car accident—by saying that "it's not news." Too bad Cohen's cringe-inducing pretension—"the kid was not really dressed like he was dressed but dressed like someone dressed like he was dressed"—gets in the way of a potentially funny story.

Entertainment Weekly, Feb. 13
EW wonders if "the Beatles still matter." Uhh … yes! The mag argues that the Fab Four are becoming "young America's biggest cult band." Supporting evidence: Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, a mash-up of Jay Z's Black Album and the Beatles' white one, and the support of taste-making fans like Mark Hoppus of blink-182. A funny timeline by Tim Carvell presents events in history if the Beatles had never existed. 1971: "Yoko One breaks up Led Zeppelin." 1987: "The Patrick Dempsey comedy Can't Buy Me Love is instead called I Paid You To Pretend To Be My Girlfriend and Now We're in Love." … John Grisham rates his legal thrillers. The top three: The Firm, A Time To Kill, The Chamber. The bottom dwellers: The Summons, The Brethren, The Client.

Economist, Feb. 7
Don't fret about the decreasing value of the American dollar, the magazine advises—but don't expect it to surge in value anytime soon, either. Despite the fact that the American economy is presently stronger than those of Europe and Japan, "investors are less eager to finance America's vast current-account deficit than they once were." Because of this surging deficit, a drooping dollar is "necessary to reduce the deficit by making imports dearer and exports cheaper." … The admission by Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, that he gave nuclear materiel to Iran, North Korea, and Libya leaves President Pervez Musharraf in a precarious position. If Khan is punished harshly, Musharraf, who survived two recent assassination attempts, risks angering Islamists sympathetic to the scientist's claims that "he acted to deflect western attention from Pakistan's own nuclear programme" by helping out other Muslim nations.

New York Times Magazine New York Times Magazine, Feb. 8
Clive Thompson, a Slate contributor, hangs with the loose hacker consortium the "Ready Rangers Liberation Front"—and can't figure out if he's getting snowed. Thompson wonders if the mostly Euro youngsters, several of whom are hilariously pictured in soft-focus repose, really want to protect the Internet by sending "malware" to antivirus companies, or if they're releasing their dastardly creations on the sly. He does admit, however, that the well-known group isn't as big a concern as the anonymous authors of worms like Net-clogger of the moment Mydoom.A. … Matthew Brzezinski doubts the push to protect American passenger jets against shoulder-fired missiles. The systems being batted around now—including flares, "disorienting" lasers, and "pyrophoric wafers"—would likely prove expensive, dangerous, and impractical. … From Slate writer Sasha Frere Jones' piece on music producers Timbaland and the Neptunes, Timbaland's two nominees for "illest song ever": Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" and Pat Benatar's "Love Is a Battlefield."

New York Review of Books, Feb. 12
The re-emergence of the Taliban "is testimony enough that the West's support and strategy for rebuilding Afghanistan have so far been a failure," writes Ahmed Rashid. While the United States buttresses Hamid Karzai's interim government in Kabul, the country's thriving drug trade, which accounts for 76 percent of the world's opium, funnels money to Taliban fighters in the rural provinces. Then there are the warlords, once part of the Northern Alliance and still funded by the CIA, who defy central authority and impose Taliban-like cultural strictures. In western Afghanistan, under the tyrannical Ismail Khan, the Department of Vice and Virtue is "censoring television to the point where women appearing in movies were being replaced by a flower on the screen." Despite these problems, and the fact that only 50,000 of a planned 500,000 voters had been registered by December, the United States is determined to go ahead with free elections this June.

The New Yorker The New Yorker, Feb. 9
It's all old news in this lackluster issue, with Anthony Lane's romp through Hollywood hack Joe Eszterhas' Hollywood Animal the lone highlight. … Philip Gourevitch offers some dated analysis of the Democratic primaries, replete with "Dated Dean—Married Kerry" buttons and "now canonical" concession screams. … Jeffrey Toobin's profile of Will Gunn, the recently appointed lead defense lawyer for "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay, focuses too much on conditions at Gitmo, terrain that's been covered in other stories. … William Finnegan lauds Robert Kiley, the "can-do Yank" who fixed up the subway in Boston and New York, and is now tasked with fixing up London's faltering Tube system. For readers who keep the pages turning through Kiley's battles with Tony Blair over financing and structure, the fact that the actual policymaking gets wrapped into a loose-end leaving, two paragraph précis is a disappointment.

Weekly Standard, Feb. 9
The magazine takes a long look-see at John Kerry's long face. … Jeffrey Bell and Frank Cannon think Kerry's dullness would shrink the pool of undecided voters, as President Bush couldn't poach middle-of-the-road Dems concerned about a "flaky and unpredictable" nominee. … Matthew Continetti argues that the GOP may overestimate Kerry's perceived weaknesses on tax policy and national security. The area ripest for attack: social issues, most notably the senator's votes against the Defense of Marriage Act and a ban on partial-birth abortions. … Noemie Emery sees the setup for a Reagan-Mondale redux: "The Republican president denounced as a dunce and a dangerous cowboy; the left on a tear against corporations and tax cuts; and the vast, murky war against a dangerous enemy." But Bush isn't guaranteed a Ronnie-sized landslide: "No president who starts his days reading a terrorist threat assessment can project a true aura of Reaganesque sunniness."

Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, Feb. 9
Cash and Kerry: Time says John Kerry's Senate tenure offers voters a Rorschach test: "Does the shortage of laws with his name on them show that to get things done, you need to share credit, or that he hasn't done much to deserve any?" He mostly gets the benefit of the doubt, with kind words for instigating the Iran-Contra investigations and championing the Kyoto accords. Some possible trouble spots with Democratic constituencies: support for NAFTA, calls to end affirmative action, and pre-9/11 support for roving wiretaps. … Newsweek finds some potentially sticky charges in Kerry's rendezvous with special interests. The senator vowed to keep donations to his soft money generating Citizen Soldier Fund under $10,000 and then retracted the promise in late 2002. "This was just before the election, and it was clear the Democrats needed all their resources to fight the Bush money machine," explains an aide.

Artificial intelligence: Newsweek reports that in 1998, two separate government panels voiced a "Wizard of Oz" theory—that Iraq had no WMD and Saddam "was just a little guy behind a curtain." Some evidence that Saddam was in fantasy land: his obsession with a program to "shoot down U.S. stealth aircraft." … Time's preview of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Iraq: The CIA should have done a "brand-new study with no underlying assumptions about his weapons"; Director George Tenet is expected to be lambasted for giving his word that WMD would be found; and an internal agency investigation found that the president's daily briefings were too concise and not "adequately conditioned and caveated." … U.S. News says that with reservists soon composing 40 percent of the troops in Iraq, military officials worry that the "rate at which Army Guard members leave the force after extended deployments could nearly double to 21 to 23 percent."

What's for dinner?: U.S. News waffles on obesity in its cover story. Weight gain may be "controlled by a powerful biological system of hormones, proteins, neurotransmitters, and genes" but reminds "biology is not destiny." From the "it sucks to be fat" department: Children shown pictures of both overweight kids and children with limb and facial deformities choose the fat kid last as a potential friend. … Time weighs in on the candidates' eating habits. While Wesley Clark loves Cheetos and Gummi Bears, John Kerry is a Hostess cupcake man, Howard Dean has a hearty "Clintonian" appetite, chowing down on pork sandwiches and strawberry milkshakes in Iowa. John Edwards, though, is at once the most worrisome and most adorable: While he "chugs about a dozen Diet Cokes daily," he also celebrates his nuptials with an annual trip to Wendy's, a sentimental nod to his first anniversary celebration.