Today, Other Magazines reads through Newsweek, New York Times Magazine, Wired, and U.S. News and World Report to find out what’s worth your time—and what’s not.
Best Cover Package
For its end of year double issue, Newsweek focuses on the world’s next superpower: China. Fareed Zakaria documents China’s “sense of its own weakness”; Mayor Michael Bloomberg says China isn’t a threat to America; and Mark Starr details the country’s Olympic ambitions.—J.L.
Best Letter to the Editor
In a letter in the New York Times Magazine, a reader takes issue with a recent cover story about Mike Huckabee’s possible ambitions to be a vice presidential candidate as a stepping stone to the presidency. George H.W. Bush, the reader points out, was the first sitting vice president to win the White House since Martin Van Buren took over for Andrew Jackson in 1837.—C.W.
Best Get
A Newsweek article has a refreshingly sensible take on the immigration debate. Instead of focusing all our energies on border control, we should “ask some broader questions about assimilation, about how to ensure that people, once outsiders, don’t forever remain marginalized within these shores.”—J.L.
Best Retrospectives
The New York Times Magazine devotes the issue to notable deaths in 2007, from a pioneering African-American advertising executive to a Nixon aide who engineered the modern Republican Party’s first victories in the South. Some highlights:
Edward F. Boyd
Although the images of happy, affluent black Americans that Boyd created for Pepsi starting in the late 1940s were clearly advertisements, they quickly became icons in the struggle for cultural and economic integration.Omar Mora and Yance Tell Gray
While still serving in Iraq, these two soldiers in the 82nd Airborne Division and five other enlisted men authored an op-ed for the Times titled “The War as We Saw It,” which contradicted the Bush Administration’s portrayal of the war as increasingly manageable. Less than a month after the controversial article was published, both men died when their vehicle overturned near the Iraqi city of Khadamiya. Harry Dent
As an aide to South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, Dent persuaded his boss to leave the Democratic Party—then the dominant party in the former Confederacy—and support Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater won only six states, but five were in the South. That seismic shift in party loyalty is still evident today.—C.W.
Weirdest Story
Wired chronicles the life of an “immersive game,” played out over months by thousands of players trolling the Internet (and the rest of the planet) for clues, that Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor * designed to promote the band’s new album. Bonus: The article also wins the “Best Meta-Journalism” award for encoding sentences—albeit ones already contained in the article—by coloring individual letters yellow throughout the article.—C.W.
Best Investigative Story
U.S. News and World Report investigates the many conflicts of interest among the researchers who compile The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders the so-called “psychiatrist’s bible” and the official guide for diagnosing mental disorders. The reporting system for researchers to disclose their industry ties, the magazine finds, is often flawed or incomplete.—C.W.
Best Trend Piece
Newsweek has an alternative take on what really divides the “two Americas.” It’s not money, or political affiliation, but political passion. “The junkies watch endless cable-TV news shows and listen to angry talk radio. … Then there’s all the rest: the people who prefer ESPN or old movies or videogames or Facebook or almost anything on the air or online to politics.”—J.L.
Best Quote
Via Newsweek: At a campaign stop at an Iowa livestock auction, Hillary Clinton said: “I know you’re going to inspect me. You can look inside my mouth if you want.”—J.L.
Correction, Dec. 31, 2007: This article originally misidentified the Nine Inch Nails frontman as Trevor. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
