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

Not Free To SurfWhy the Internet has failed to nurture democracy.

By Josh Levin
Updated Friday, March 26, 2004, at 6:32 PM ET
New Republic

New Republic, April 5
The cover story says the hope that the Internet would nurture democracy in nations with repressive regimes hasn't been borne out. The Web is less effective at spreading dissent than mass mediums like television and radio because it doesn't encourage face-to-face interaction and doesn't reach the illiterate. Authoritarian regimes, especially in China and the Middle East, can easily block access to antigovernment sites. Also, the piece criticizes American companies like Yahoo! and AOL, which censor news content at the request of the Chinese government. … Another article says the Pentagon can no longer afford to wage "two major theater wars." That the United States likely can't use force against North Korea while simultaneously waging war in Iraq may take away the Bush administration's leverage when negotiating with Kim Jong-il. (Afghanistan isn't a big enough theater to merit mention.)

Economist

Economist, March 27
The magazine starkly commemorates the Rwandan genocide with a photograph of a field of skulls on the cover. Ten years later, the Hutu slaughter of more than 500,000 Tutsis hasn't been examined in sufficient detail nor has it been acknowledged that it was a planned act, not a spontaneous outburst. Although most Rwandans now say there are "no Hutus or Tutsis any more," the cost has been high. The Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front has quashed freedom of the press, represses those who try to form opposition parties, and mandates attendance at creepy-sounding "solidarity camps." … The assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin represents a big political misstep by Ariel Sharon. The death of the Hamas leader will only harden the resolve of Palestinian terrorists and won't improve Sharon's image with the Likud Party's tenuous partners on the right unless he goes back on his promise to eradicate Israel's settlements in Gaza.

New York Times Magazine

New York Times Magazine, March 28
Michael Lewis heads back to his hometown of New Orleans after learning that a group of parents and students are trying to force out his tough-talking old high-school baseball coach. Lewis says it isn't Coach Fitz who needs behavior modification, but rather the parents who try to shield their kids from the harsh discipline and hard work needed to succeed in both sports and life. (Disclosure: I went to the same school as Lewis and spent several summers at Coach Fitz's basketball camp.) … A New Jersey woman is hectoring the state health department and the Centers for Disease Control after discovering that nine people who ate at a New Jersey race track died of the extremely rare Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the variant of mad cow disease found in humans. Scientists caution that she's just an amateur epidemiologist and that the victims may have died of sporadic CJD, a form of the disease that hasn't been linked to mad cow.

Legal Affairs

Legal Affairs, March and April 2004
A package on prisoners' dilemmas includes a piece on the persistent problem of prison rape. Accepting sexual assault as an inevitable part of prison life belies the fact that there are solutions, like building new penitentiaries that give guards an unimpeded view into cells, that demonstrably decrease incidences of rape. … An inmate who served as a cook in a Texas prison reveals the secrets of last meal preparation. Because ingredients are limited to those regularly available in the kitchen, inmates don't always get exactly what they order. Hamburger steaks are used instead of pricier cuts of meat, vegetables come from cans, and a request for 24 tacos gets trimmed to four.

Weekly Standard, March 29
Gerard Alexander crudely estimates—and estimates crudely—the number of lives saved by Saddam Hussein's ouster. If Saddam's regime killed roughly 16,000 Iraqis per year from 1979 to 2003 and U.N. sanctions killed thousands more that would make … a lot. … Pablo Pardo argues that the victory of the Socialist Party in Spain's recent elections doesn't mean the electorate appeased terrorism. That's impossible because "Spain has endured 40 years of Basque terrorism, carried out by separatists who follow an ideology almost as weird as al Qaeda's … yet nobody has ever talked of capitulating to the terrorists." … Reuel Marc Gerecht says many radical Muslim terrorists were raised in Europe, "born from their imperfect assimilation into Western European societies" and alienated by "Europe's post-Christian, devoutly secular society." Nevertheless, the United States—not Spain or France—will remain the main target of jihadists because it represents "the cutting edge of Western civilization."

The New Yorker

The New Yorker, March 29
Katherine Boo goes to south Texas and finds that plant closures have left thousands of "obsolescents in need of repurposing." The county's copious job-retraining programs don't have the desired effect: Most of those who train to become computer techs or medical assistants end up doing temporary work, the same as people who receive no additional vocational education. … Isabel Hilton profiles Renji, the Prada-loving, 20-year-old daughter of Tibet's 10th Panchen Lama—though lamas are traditionally celibate, her father married and had a child after more than a decade in exile. The wild popularity of Renji, who's protected in the U.S. by devout Buddhist Steven Seagal, in her native country shows that "Tibetans are capable of creative political solutions to entrenched conflict." It's even possible that the political science student at Washington, D.C.'s American University could become the spiritual leader who fills the vacuum left by the absent Dalai Lama.

Newsweek and Time

Newsweek and Time, March 29
Where's the terror?: In Newsweek, former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke claims the Bush administration's Iraq obsession caused them to overlook al-Qaida. Supporting evidence: In summer 2001, the Justice Department cut back a program called "Catcher's Mitt," which monitored suspected al-Qaida operatives, because of difficulty getting permission for wiretaps. The response from an anonymous administration source: Clarke's plan for stopping al-Qaida was like "swatting flies" rather than a strong push to get Bin Laden. … Time thinks Osama Bin Laden's terrorist network has been replaced by a "more elusive generation of extremists." Before the train bombing in Madrid, for example, "there was no electronic chatter, no rumor, nothing from interrogations hinting at an attack." … Time also notes that federal counterterrorism dollars aren't proportional to threat levels. While Wyoming gets $61 per person and Alaska receives $58 there's only $25 for New York and $14 for California.

Big bosses: Time takes a gander at Joseph "Big Joey" Massino, the head of the Bonanno crime family and the "only New York Mafia boss who isn't doing hard time or awaiting sentencing for a conviction." Massino has stayed out of trouble by shunning the flashy, Gotti-style mobster lifestyle, but he's about to stand trial with 34 other defendants for 23 counts of murder or attempted murder. … Time also profiles Rick Warren, possibly "America's most influential pastor." The head of the mammoth Purpose-Driven ministry says his mega-church principles—which include "bright lights, live bands, short prayers and simple sermons that accentuate the positive"—can be adopted by any church and will increase attendance by 20 percent. While his detractors claim it's all just a marketing strategy, Warren has so far shunned televangelism and even turned down Oprah.

Searching for a rivalry: Newsweek goes where other magazines have gone before and puts the guys from Google on the cover. Along with pre-IPO excitement, there's much hand-wringing about competition from Yahoo! and Microsoft, which is developing software called Implicit Query that "figures out what you might want to ask for, depending on what you're doing." One unimpressed Google employee offers some bulletin board material for the Microsoft programmers: "It's a bunch of people at the first grade. Eight junior programmers who don't know anything about search." (Microsoft is Slate's corporate parent.)

New York Review of Books

New York Review of Books, April 8
Garry Wills issues a negative review of Mel Gibson's Passion that's more theologically informed and withering than most. He also discusses a book about the Catholic extremist group the Legion of Christ. Super-secretive, the legion stresses absolute sexual purity and culls members from a disturbingly young group of men and boys. The movement's powerful founder has been, maybe predictably, accused of molestation. … Qualified kudos for a history of the catastrophic flu epidemic of 1918-19. The book, The Great Influenza, though occasionally distractingly melodramatic, thoroughly explains how flu works and why it is still such a potent threat today. … William Pfaff takes issue with Zbigniew Brzezinski's new foreign policy book, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership. Brzezinski does criticize the "arrogance of the Bush administration's conduct," but he largely subscribes to the same myth of divinely ordained U.S. global hegemony, and this schizophrenic stance grows more dangerously out of touch with reality every day.—S.G.

—Siân Gibby also contributed to this column.

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
Imagine if...
Hiatt | What if McCain had waged his campaign based on respect?
Editorial: Meddlesome PalinKing: The Danger of Palin Power