Slate's Bizbox
other magazines: Summaries of what's in Time, Newsweek, etc.

The Swimsuit Issue Turns 40A roundup of SI's odd assortment of shots.

By Josh Levin
Updated Friday, Feb. 20, 2004, at 4:45 PM ET
Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated, Winter 2004
Some stats from SI's 40th anniversary swimsuit issue: 36 shots of women in swimsuits; 15 of women wearing only part of their suits and positioned strategically next to inner tubes, barns, etc.; eight women baring all or part of their nipples via moisture, chainmail, etc.;  six women wearing nothing but body paint; one woman being smelled by sheep; another woman being fondled by a baby alligator; another woman whose bikini top is being removed by a dead-looking but ostensibly playful raven; one Jimmy Buffett CD; 11 interviews with members of the "swimsuit hall of fame," including the revelation that Stacey Williams has helped invent rüking, a sport that combines running and hiking; and one cover model, Veronica Varekova, who says the person she'd most like to meet is Charlie Rose.

New Republic

New Republic, March 1
Jonathan Chait says GOP apoplexy about the ballooning deficit is "phony." Rather than lash out at domestic discretionary spending, a "relatively small and innocuous slice" of the budget that accounts for 3 percent of the "cost of legislation" under the administration, fiscal conservatives should point their red pens at the Bush tax cuts. … John R. Bradley reports that the Saudi government wants to build a barrier to prevent weapons smuggling from Yemen. The piece, though, seems full of hype in saying that outside urban areas all Yemeni "males past puberty openly bear arms," that gun-ferrying donkeys "have become expert at crossing and recrossing the border on their own," and that there are an estimated 60 million weapons in a country of 20 million. Even if that number is accurate, the weapons are no doubt concentrated in the hands of a few, not spread evenly among the populace as Bradley implies.

Economist

Economist, Feb. 21
"Anti-trade sentiment, especially in the United States, is currently having one of its strongest revivals in years," the magazine reports. It's all because of the "bogus" excuse that service-sector work, and not just "dirty blue-collar jobs," are moving overseas. While it may be "unsettling to be disabused," alarmists must realize that outsourcing will change the pattern of employment in the United States, not the overall level. … Liberals in Turkey cheered the Islamic government's recent decision to have state-appointed religious leaders preach against the "honor killing" of women "deemed to have besmirched the family's moral standing." While parliament also passed a draft law protecting homosexuals from discrimination, some secularist women in government still complain that they get passed over in favor of civil servants who wear head scarves.

New York Times Magazine

New York Times Magazine, Feb. 22
Susan Dominus hangs with the oldest of the old and finds behavior patterns that won't die. The tales of a 73-year-old son who won't quit practicing law because he doesn't want to disappoint his 100-year-old father and a 97-year-old woman bossed around by her older sister are alternately cute and heartbreaking. Dominus' digressions into life-extending medications and the sociological consequences of an aging populace are less transfixing. … Robert Sullivan goes rat trapping in New York City and debunks the myth that there's one rat for every person in the Big Apple. Even though the right number is more like one for every 36 people, that doesn't mean the resilient buggers will ever be shooed away from their ideal rat habitat. "I always say that if you killed every rat in New York City, you would have created new housing for 60 million rats," says a health department epidemiologist.

Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair, March 2004
Jim Windolf tells the charming story of the quest of three kids from Mississippi to create a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. In 1982, the VCR-less preadolescent cinephiles began compiling a list of 649 shots from the movie using an illicitly recorded audio tape, a novelization, and a comic book. There were boulder problems from the beginning: a bamboo-and-cardboard model wouldn't fit out a door, a weather balloon sagged, and a chicken-wire rendition blew away in a hurricane. But after seven years, an on-set love affair, and a location shoot on a submarine, the 100-minute Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation finally wrapped. Now 14 years later, it's a hit at festivals and on the Internet, and the guys have talked with producers about turning the "making of" story into a movie.

Weekly Standard

Weekly Standard, Feb. 23
Robert Kagan and William Kristol argue that the war in Iraq was about much more than weapons of mass destruction—then they offer a blow-by-blow of all the WMD-related program activities at Saddam's disposal over the past decade. Then there's this classic rationalization on the unsuccessful hunt for the weapons: "It now appears that this uncertainty about Iraq's actual capabilities was perhaps what Saddam aimed to achieve." … Matt Labash trails Al Sharpton in South Carolina, where the reverend is disorganized, late, a little too obsessed with Jesse Jackson and James Brown, and often hungry. But when the Rev. Al preaches, Labash sees the light. "He grooves like some old-timey gravel-voiced gospel shouter, and by the time he relates how the Lord is 'gonna let the death angel riiiiiide tonight,' the crowd is ready to hoist the black flag and begin smiting Egyptians."

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

Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report, Feb. 23
En garde: Newsweek's cover story argues that the military careers of John Kerry and George W. Bush may have been reversed if you switched their graduation dates. By the time Bush graduated from Yale in 1968, two years after Kerry, the antiwar movement had taken root and it wasn't cool to go to Vietnam. But make no mistake, the magazine points out several times, Bush hated hippies. Also, his Texas flight instructor Maury Udell brushes aside criticism of Bush's National Guard career by saying, "He was not a candy a--." … More National Guard notes: U.S. News reports the allegations of guardsman Bill Burkett, who claims he saw someone tossing material from Bush's Guard file into a trash can. Time says volunteers at the Alabama Senate campaign where Bush worked in 1972 called him the "Texas Soufflé" because he "looked good on the outside but was full of hot air."

"I don't know what it is!": Some Newsweek reporters take a tour of a factory in Kuala Lumpur that the CIA claims is a supplier to Libya's illicit nuclear-weapons program. The factory's PR director, though, claims to have no idea what they make: She picks up a metal "product sample" and says, "Something like this—no one in the world could know what this is for!" … The capture of top al-Qaida official Hassan Ghul by Kurdish officials last month may indicate the terror network's aspirations in the Middle East, says Time. There are some doubts about the authenticity and origins of a 17-page memo Ghul had on a computer disk that claims responsibility for suicide attacks and declares a strategy of promoting strife between Shiites and Sunnis.

And even more ignorance: Time's cover story reports that the body's inflammatory response could be responsible for cancer, Alzheimer's, and pretty much every disease under the sun. Among the magazine's not-so innovative suggestions for warding off inflammation: take aspirin, diet, exercise, and floss to "reduce the risk of gum disease, a source of chronic inflammation." … In a double issue on "history's great explorers," U.S. News notes that most adventurers wandered into the great unknown with faulty intelligence. The magazine gets morose about modern-day frontiers: Outer space and deep sea derring-do will be the domain of robots, and the last unclimbed mountaintops will be featured in commercials as "one last unspoiled promontory upon which to plop an SUV."

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Josh Levin is a Slate associate editor. You can e-mail him at .
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES
Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
A Grand Tour
David Broder | While the stars align for Obama, McCain is looking like the odd-man-out on foreign policy.
Annette Heuser: A Honeymoon