New Republic, May 2 and 9 Andrew Sullivan explores why “Republicans now support institutions they previously vilified.” He claims that there’s an increasing rift between “conservatives of faith,” whose reading of the Bible leads them to embrace increased government intervention into people’s lives, and the “conservatives of doubt,” who eschew moral absolutes and support “restraint of government.” Using the Schiavo case as a touchstone, the piece says that “the conservative coalition as we have known it cannot long endure” if the religious right holds on to its fundamentalism. Sullivan calls for “not merely a reformed liberalism,” but also “a conservatism that does not assent to its own corruption at the hands of zealots.”… Another piece condemns Colombian president Álvaro Uribe’s attempt to change the constitution so that he can run for a second term: “Uribe’s reelection would be bad news for Colombia, breeding an inadvisable authoritarian tradition in a country that has never had one.”—B.B.
Economist, April 21 Claiming that the environmental movements in both America and Europe are adrift, the cover package criticizes “the world’s top-down, command-and-control approach to environmental policymaking” and environmental groups that “reject pragmatic solutions.”Touting market mechanisms as the ultimate salve, the magazine argues in favor of emissions trading and gushes over attempts to place a value on “ecological services” like “water filtration and flood prevention.” A related article examines an entrepreneur’s scheme to get Wal-Mart and other big companies to plant forests around the Panama Canal, noting that this would “have the same effect as building vast reservoirs and filtration beds.” According to two World Bank reports published at the end of last year, new methods now make it much easier to do environmental cost-benefit analyses.—B.B.
American Prospect, May 2005 A piece argues Japan feigned weakness after a 1990 stock crash to alleviate pressure from the U.S. to open its markets to foreign trade. Since then, the country’s strategic control of certain manufacturing sectors has made it more prosperous and more powerful than ever. “American car companies are now heavily dependent on Japan for key materials,” Eamonn Fingleton writes. “U.S. auto companies are at the mercy of Japan’s chokepoint strategy. If they were to make an effort to fight Japanese mercantilism now, they would face certain retaliation.”… Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been indicted for approving roadwork on disputed land, a charge that an article says is designed to keep López Obrador from challenging incumbent president Vicente Fox in 2006. Under the Mexican constitution, no one under indictment can run for president.—J.S.
New York Times Magazine, April 24
In an essay, Steven Johnson argues that “the most debased forms of mass diversion—video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms—turn out to be nutritional after all.” Johnson highlights the sophistication of television dialogue and charts the narrative complexity of TV dramas, using the number and layering of storylines as indicators to show that a contemporary series like The Sopranos is even more intellectually demanding than a golden-age standout like Hill Street Blues.… A dispatch from Moneyball author Michael Lewis examines the way young baseball players are trained and evaluated in an era transformed by steroid use. “Power is now understood as less an innate gift than a gettable skill,” he writes, “more like speaking French than being 6-foot-3.” He traces the career paths of two unlikely prospects whose reluctance to swing for the fences—and pitiful performance when they try—make them risky commodities to single-minded executives.—D.W.
New York, April 25 Lt. Ilario Pantano was a former marine who joined the world of high finance, only to re-enlist in the military after Sept. 11. Now he’s charged with unloading 45 bullets into two unarmed Iraqis and could get the death penalty if convicted. Pantano has said the shooting was in self-defense. Steven Fishman’s cover story traces the path of the bright kid from Hell’s Kitchen with a desire to protect those around him. “He wanted to be Lancelot, knight of the Round Table,” Fishman writes. “To hear classmates talk, it was as if a ship deposited a square, chivalrous knight in their midst.”… SoHo is about to get a little cooler and little more kosher at the same time, writes Shana Liebman, as Rabi Dovi Scheiner tries to bring Orthodox Judaism to hipsters by opening the world’s first “boutique synagogue” in the trendy New York neighborhood.—J.S.
The New Yorker, April 25 In the first of a three-part series about climate, Elizabeth Kolbert visits Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland to illustrate the indisputable impacts of global warming: “Nearly every major glacier in the world is shrinking. … the oceans are becoming not just warmer but more acidic; the difference between day and nighttime temperatures is diminishing; animals are shifting their ranges poleward; and plants are blooming days, and in some cases weeks, earlier than they used to.”… The magazine prints Saul Bellow’s written responses to interview questions that Philip Roth asked him over a two-and-a-half-year period. Bellow discusses how his living in Paris influenced The Adventures of Augie March: “My general impression was that Europe was defying me to do something about it, and I was deeply depressed.” Looking at the sunlight reflected on water used to wash the city’s curbs, Bellow decided to strive for “at least as much freedom of movement as this running water.”—B.B.
Weekly Standard, April 25 A piece defending House Majority Leader Tom DeLay claims that he’s “a special target because he is the first legislative power broker to be an authentic Red State conservative.” Asserting that Democrats want to eliminate DeLay because he is “willing and able to operate without permission or praise from Blue State media,” the article says that he spoke out during the Terri Schiavo crisis despite “near unanimity among the judges, the editorial writers, and the pollsters” because he’s “deeply pro-life and socially conservative, not someone out to score political points or ‘stroke the base.’ ” Another article examines the newest charges against the Texas congressman. Observing that lobbyists didn’t “directly” pay for DeLay’s 1997 trip to Russia and that about 39 members of Congress employ family members and pay them with campaign funds, the author concludes, “DeLay may still be a symbol of the unappealing intersection of money and politics in Washington. But symbolism has never been a firing offense.”—B.B.
Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, April 25
Courting justice: Because of television shows like CSI, jurors “increasingly expect forensic evidence in every case, and they expect it to be conclusive,”notes U.S. News’ cover. But, since many crime labs lack funding and certification and have been attacked for having low standards, in most cases, crime analysis hasn’t changed much since the 1970s. … Newsweek claims that “concern over the rising tide of anti-judge rhetoric has rocked even the Supreme Court.” Some of the justices have asked Congress to help pay for new police officers, and the Judicial Conference, a policy-making body that oversees courts, asked for $12 million “to install home-security systems for more than 800 federal judges.”… And Time looks at death-row inmates who are trying hasten their executions. Noting that “murderers can be astonishingly sensitive to criticism, and offering to die can be seen as an effective shield from the accusations of society or the pangs of conscience,” the article asks whether these killers’ wishes should be honored.
Lovable conservatives? Time’s cover profiles conservative ideologue Ann Coulter. Comparing her to Clare Booth Luce, the outspoken wife of Time’s co-founder, the author says that Coulter has “a personality far more labile and human than the umbrageous harridan I had expected.” Noting that Coulter will make mean jokes even about her aging parents, the piece suggests that she may be the “most unlikely of conservative subspecies: a hard-right ironist.” …Newsweek examines some of the recent controversies surrounding Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. After Frist attempted to diagnose Terri Schiavo, 31 of his medical school classmates sent him a letter that “accused him of using his medical degree improperly.” And last week, the New York Times attacked Frist for an ad campaign associated with him that suggests that filibusters against the judiciary are “anti-Christian.” If Frist hopes to run for president in 2008, “The best way to win the Republican caucuses in Iowa is to get The New York Times to attack you,” a political consultant says. “It’s almost formulaic.”
Iraq/War on Terror:U.S. News probes the Muslim World Outreach, the Bush administration’s attempt to influence how the U.S. is perceived in Islamic countries. Since Sept. 11, the U.S. has paid to restore “historic mosques in Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan,” and a Sufi site in Kyrgyzstan, as well as a sports contest between mosques in Madagascar. But “some of the acts seem decidedly minor league.” As a former CIA agent tells the magazine, “The biggest that I heard about was a large banner at a major soccer game. … They considered it a rousing success.” Time examines how the American military is handing off power to Iraqis. An article follows a group of U.S. soldiers under the command of Col. Mohammed Faiq Raouf, “a former officer in Saddam Hussein’s army who shot down a U.S. jet during the first Gulf War.” “[U]nlike the guys back in my unit doing their thing, I can actually see I’m making a difference,” says one of the G.I.’s who volunteered to advise Raouf.—B.B.
