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

Googlin'Wired's package on the search engine phenom.

By Josh LevinUpdated Friday, Feb. 27, 2004, at 6:29 PM ET

Wired, March 2004
The "Googlemania!" cover package offers Michael S. Malone's advice on how to survive a tech IPO. Tip 1: Don't scour financial Web sites all days—eBay's CEO threatened to fire employees for that transgression. Tip 2: Don't drive your new Ferrari off a hill like the nouveau riche CEO of Eagle Computer did in 1983. Josh McHugh adds that the search engine is no longer in the search business. Rather, Google's all about advertising, which includes "schmoozing" clients by offering a "Google account team at your service" if you spend $10,000 per month on the site's text-based ads. … Douglas McGray reports on a robot race from Hollywood to Vegas that's saving the Department of Defense a bushel on R & D. The winner of March's 250-mile trek, in which 20 unmanned vehicles will dodge trains and volcanic rocks, gets a million dollars. (DOD keeps the rights to military applications of the bots.) The early favorite: a Humvee assisted by "driverless robot race simulator" software based on the computer game Unreal.

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New Republic, Mar. 8
Leon Wieseltier hates The Passion of the Christ. He hates the blood: If "it were possible for Mel Gibson's film itself to bleed, and the blood with which it soaks its wretched hero to burst through the screen and soak its wretched audience, it would have done so." He hates the anti-Semitism, even though "[i]ts loathing of Jews is subsumed in its loathing of spirituality, in its loathing of existence." But most of all, he pleads, "Children must be protected from it." … Jonathan Chait says that Ralph Nader isn't a "good-man-who-went-wrong" but rather a "selfish, destructive maniac" who has been an enemy of "pragmatic liberalism" for decades. One example: Nader's 2000 rhetoric about how there's no substantive difference between Democrats and Republicans has been a staple of his rhetoric since the Carter administration.

Economist, Feb. 28
The magazine's cover story makes the "case for gay marriage." Same-sex marriage would not harm the institution because "[g]ays want to marry precisely because they see marriage as important." Besides, the "weakening of marriage has been heterosexuals' doing, not gays', for it is their infidelity, divorce rates and single-parent families that have wrought social damage." … The "risk that someone, somewhere, might detonate a bomb in anger" may be at its highest since the Cuban missile crisis, the magazine speculates. One potential trouble spot is South America, where Brazil has announced plans to start enriching uranium "to provide fuel for its nuclear power industry," a development that has Argentina concerned. One potential solution: the development of regional consortiums that would enrich uranium for multiple nations, providing a check that no individual country could weaponize its stash.

Foreign Policy, March-April 2004
The first issue of Foreign Policy you'll be ashamed to read on the subway, thanks to this throw-back nativist cover line: "José, Can You See? … how Hispanic immigrants threaten America's identity, values, and way of life." Samuel Huntington argues inside that modern Hispanic—and particularly Mexican—immigration is unique in American history: Second- and third-generation Latinos in the United States are more likely than other groups to retain the use of their native tongue, and (perhaps because they feel Mexico has a historical claim on the American Southwest) Mexican immigrants and their children are less likely to identify as "American" than contemporary immigrants from other Latin-American countries. Huntington predicts that the country will soon be home to two distinct peoples divided by language and culture. But he undermines this plausible analysis by treating the advent of Mexican culture as an unmitigated threat, relying on two Mexican-Americans to summarize their peers as having a "lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition" and "little use for education." —J.T.

New York Times Magazine New York Times Magazine, Feb. 29
The cover package serves up black-and-white portraits of Oscar nominees like Mystic River's Sean Penn and overlooked standouts like Judah Friedlander from American Splendor. … Jack Hitt hangs out with the last six speakers of the southern Chilean language Kawesqar in an excellent piece on endangered dialects. The most interesting tidbit concerns the existence of a kind of "last-speaker circuit." The supposed last link to another Chilean dialect demands so much money that Hitt declines an interview, while the last speaker of the Native American language Catawba was a self-taught Rhode Islander who "donned some turquoise jewelry" and traveled to county fairs under the sobriquet Red Thunder Cloud. … Stephen Prothero says the embrace of Mel Gibson's very Catholic Passion by evangelical Protestants augurs the end of the "Mister Rogers Jesus." Prothero says that in Gibson's version, "He came here neither to deliver moral maxims nor to exude empathy, but to spew blood."

Weekly Standard Weekly Standard, March 1
Terry Eastland looks at George W. Bush's remarkable ability to label every administration initiative as "compassionate." Prescription drug benefits "are the act of a vibrant and compassionate government." The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act "reflects the compassion and humanity of America." Not to mention that the "qualities of courage and compassion that we strive for in America also determine our conduct abroad." The one problem with the "love-thy-neighbor presidency": The neighbors—if they're Democrats or fiscal conservatives—don't have to love you back. … Jonathan Schanzer says Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, a former member of Saddam's secret police now in a Kurdish prison, is the missing link between Saddam and al-Qaida. Al-Shamari says Iraq gave money to "al-Qaida affiliate" Ansar al-Islam "every month or two months" and fingers Abu Wael, a secret-police higher-up who's still at large, as the key connection between Iraq and terrorist groups.

The New Yorker, March 1
Elizabeth Kolbert says New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's rampant unpopularity can be explained only by his extraordinary competence: He led the city out of a fiscal crisis but did it so efficiently as to make the accomplishment appear diminished. But Bloomberg may be losing his resolve. While he's proved willing to implement unpopular and impolitic policy like banning smoking in bars and restaurants and doubling parking-ticket fines, the recent proposal to dole out $250 million in property-tax rebates may show he's chosen popularity and political expediency over good governance. … David Denby lambastes The Passion of the Christ as "one of the cruellest movies in the history of the cinema," a squalid spectacle that reveals that director Mel Gibson's "obsession with pain, disguised by religious feelings, has now reached a frightening apotheosis."

New York Magazine, March 1
In the cover story, Naomi Wolf breaks 20 years of silence to detail her sexual harassment as a Yale undergraduate by her then-professor Harold Bloom. During a meeting for dinner and drinks at Wolf's house, "He leaned toward me and put his face inches from mine. 'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed. I hoped he was talking about my poetry. I moved back and took the manuscript and turned it around so he could read. The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh." Then she vomited, and he left. Wolf, who says she's coming clean to fulfill an obligation to female students, tries, without success, to redirect attention from Bloom's boneless hand—"[his] demons are no more demonic than those of any other complex human being's"—to Yale's decadeslong unwillingness to protect students from professorial lechery.

Time and Newsweek Time and Newsweek, March 1
Business and pleasure: Time's cover doesn't go anywhere that recent pieces on IT outsourcing didn't go before. The most interesting tidbit comes in a sidebar that suggests Bangalore—India's version of Silicon Valley—is propped up by lots of burned out techies. Forty percent of the city's IT employees have sleep disorders, and 34 percent have digestive problems; overall, the magazine reports that the "outsourcing industry" has 60 percent annual turnover. … Newsweek warns that "Americans might someday be shipped to Asia for certain surgical procedures." But despite that alarmism, the magazine says "offshoring" isn't as much a drain on the job market as increased worker productivity—since American employees are working harder and longer, there's less call to bring in more help. … Newsweek goes with Trump: The Magazine Cover—and overreaches in arguing that The Apprentice shows "business is cool again" and that anticorporation rhetoric won't work for Democrats in '04.

Who runs Iran?: While Newsweek reports that Bush administration officials believe that moderate clerics in the Shiite stronghold of Najaf can put "the Iranian theocracy in complete jeopardy," Time takes a less sanguine view of both Najaf and Iran. Under the leadership of Muqtada al-Sadr, religious militias forcibly shuttered liquor stores and pornography peddlers, and people caught having sex outside of marriage are imprisoned, blindfolded, and whipped. And in Iran, last week's parliamentary elections saw a surge by the conservative allies of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after hundreds of reform-minded candidates were disqualified and others decided it was impossible to change the system from the inside.

—Julia Turner also contributed to this column.