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Cargo's PremiereThe new magazine that helps men shop for everything from tires to Brazilian waxes.

By Josh Levin
Updated Friday, March 12, 2004, at 5:11 PM ET
Cargo

Cargo, Premiere Issue
The new men's shopping magazine from the folks at Lucky takes a few cautious steps back from our nation's love affair with metrosexuality. While there are guides on Brazilian waxes, babying your face, and decorating tips from one of the Queer Eye guys, canonically masculine fare abounds: golf clubs, tires, sneakers, the "world's most prolific gas-pump-globe dealer," and pants that give "your jewels extra breathing room and a filled-out look." Where the mag really innovates, though, is in the lengths it goes to serve readers. The issue comes with a handy sheet of 26 Cargo stickers to "[t]ag the stuff you want to buy." There's also an "Instant Replay" page made up of perforated cards with bullet points from favorite articles, in case you forget, for instance, that peach roses mean "Sheer lust, baby."

Washington Monthly

Washington Monthly, March 2004
Phillip Longman says America is going down the tubes because we don't reward parents economically for the burden of raising kids. With the next generation of wage rollers needing more schooling to ensure future earnings, "children no longer provide any economic benefit to their parents, but are rather costly impediments to material success." Consequently, the birth rate goes down, and there's a ready-made Social Security fiasco. Longman's suggestion: Eliminate payroll taxes on those with three or more kids, then offer maximum Social Security benefits if the tykes graduate high school. Longman's explanation for why we don't value motherhood, though, is a bit of a pandering reach: "both soldiering and nurturing children are vital forms of public service. One is a traditionally male calling and the other female, which may well explain why veterans enjoy a panoply of benefits and their own Cabinet-level agency, while mothers don't."

New Republic

New Republic, March 22
Eliot Spitzer and Andrew G. Celli Jr. open their bleeding hearts and argue that "the market is there to serve our values, not the other way around." The authors make the noncontroversial arguments that government should stop predatory lending and protect against conflicts of interest in order to safeguard "integrity and transparency." … Noam Scheiber says Democrats shouldn't blame President Bush for the nation's job drain. Rather, "the concern, if anything, has been that the Bushies and the Fed have done too much," such as ratcheting up stimulus packages during a time when job growth was unlikely because of heightened productivity. … In the editorial, the magazine laments that the new Iraqi constitution "offers Iraqis sweeping guarantees for their individual liberties" but "entrenches their bitter factionalism into the very architecture of government" by granting legislative autonomy to "super-governorates" that will likely be formed by ethnic group.

Economist

Economist, March 13
The magazine argues that "there is no more commanding moral imperative" than for the world's wealthy to help the destitute but that blaming capitalism for inequality of income "entrenches the very problem it purports to address." For one, "countries do not need to become any less rich before Africa can become a lot less poor." … A rare look inside North Korea finds a Pyongyang farmer's market "bursting with plump vegetables and groaning with stacks of fresh meat." Farmers, who can sell surplus crops, are faring better than civil servants who have no incentive to be more productive. And while many workers take home bigger paychecks and there are more goods available since reforms enacted in July 2002, shortages remain in rural areas. The author describes one classroom of 11-year-olds who look years younger due to malnutrition as "a shocking sight."

New York Times Magazine

New York Times Magazine, March 14
Jennifer Senior reports on a lawyer's quest to get Saudi banks and individuals who gave money to terrorist groups to pay up for Sept. 11. Ron Motley has already spent more than $12 million on the civil suit, and the families of 1,667 victims who died on 9/11 are participating. Although the Bush administration has yet to ask Motley to shut down the case, many diplomats think he should leave the negotiating to governments. … John Hodgman profiles Kerry Conran, a filmmaker who spent four years crafting six minutes of footage on his home computer then leveraged it into a major Hollywood production. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which stars Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, is the first "indie giant-robot movie," a live-action film in which most everything—including carpet—is computer-generated.

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

Time, U.S. News & World Report, and Newsweek, March 15
One year later: In an Iraq cover package, Time reports that L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority is "being swept downstream by the timetable rather than steering the process into port." The magazine suggests that U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, "who finessed the compromise over elections with [Shiite leader Ayatollah] Sistani last month," may be the Bush administration's point man in future negotiations. … U.S. News reports that in early 2000, the National Security Agency listened in on phone calls from one of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdar, to an al-Qaida safe house in Yemen, but erred in not realizing that al-Mihdar was in the United States. If that's true, then the magazine's other criticism—that the NSA let al-Mihdar fall through the cracks because of a policy not to bug calls originating from the United States—seems bogus.

Kerry's delicate dances: John Kerry tells Time that he will "almost certainly" send a group to Iraq to help him formulate policies. He also says that as president, "I'll pre-empt where necessary" and only opposes the Bush administration's use of pre-emption "to remove a person they don't like." … In U.S. News, Dem bigwig Donna Brazile says John Kerry has lots of work to do before becoming a "black president" in the mold of Bill Clinton. (Clinton, Brazile points out, knew the electric slide.) "[I]f he can learn to dance and sway like Clinton, Kerry can get there," she says.

Martha, Martha, Martha: Newsweek puts the freshly convicted Martha Stewart on the cover and opines that the verdict represents "the new standard for judging all fat cats who don't play by the rules." Stewart apparently erred in rejecting a deal last April that would have let her get off with probation and retain a position in her eponymous corporation. There's also a sidebar on the Connecticut prison where she'll likely be sent, a minimum security facility that has a "gymnasium used for Pilates, yoga, dancersize or aerobics." … In an article that also discusses the legal mess facing executives of WorldCom, Tyco, and Adelphia, U.S. News notes that it could be years before Stewart, who plans to appeal her convictions, faces jail time. Time offers little analysis to go alongside a dated trial procedural. (Read Slate's latest Dispatches From the Martha Stewart Trial.)

Hormone replacement: The U.S. News cover story reports the early termination of a National Institutes of Health study on estrogen therapy for post-menopausal women because of an increased risk of stroke. Though no "safety boundary was crossed" and data hasn't been released, this is the second time in two years that the NIH has called off a hormone study because of health risks.

The New Yorker

The New Yorker, March 15
Michael Specter profiles Miuccia Prada, a mime turned fashion mogul who "doesn't sew, embroider, or knit." Prada's 2004 fall collection, which was "inspired by computers," wins rave reviews despite her pre-show laments that "[t]hey don't even look like clothes." … Malcolm Gladwell says that Austrian immigrant Victor Gruen invented the indoor shopping mall 50 years ago as a new urban center that reimagined the American downtown in the style of Old World Europe. Now, Gruen is in "severe emotional shock" at the mall's ruination by "the ugliness and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking." … Judith Thurman visits a hair convention/contest and finds the multibillion dollar African-American hair industry replete with "anarchic and confident self-expression." This includes "an assortment of pinecone- and ziggurat-shaped finials; and heads on which neat cornrows exploded into fantails of frizz, like a terrace of cultivated paddies ringed by a forest of bamboo."

Weekly Standard

Weekly Standard, March 15
Joseph Epstein writes that youth culture is taking over America, and "the consequences are genuine, and fairly serious." Everything from comic books to Seinfeld to "gross-out movies" to people who paint their chests at baseball games evinces the dumbing down of pop culture and the devaluation of growing up. The choicest bit, though, is Epstein's list of the remaining "adults in America," which includes "Alan Greenspan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Robert Rubin, Warren Buffett, Sol Linowitz, and many more." … Andrew Ferguson explains that contemporary politics has reached a postmodern state in which the pundits only talk to each other and no one else cares. That's what happens when a pursuit becomes "a minority obsession: a bit more popular than clog-dancing, much less popular than motocross."

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