Newsweek, April 7 The cover story focuses on couples who turn to surrogate mothers to bear their biological children—and the women who make the choice to carry another family’s baby. Military bases are seeing increasing numbers of “gestational carriers” as, according to the piece, many women use surrogacy to supplement family incomes. Often, they can “earn more with one pregnancy than their husbands’ annual base pay.”… A piece uncovers Afghanistan’s “debt weddings,” in which families are forced to marry off a daughter (in one instance, as young as two months) to repay a loan. The practice plagues poppy farmers, who must face violent drug traffickers after their crops are destroyed by government eradication efforts. … An article explores America’s “geeky obsession with fonts.” Your choice of typeface sends its own message: “[F]onts with round O’s and tails are interpreted as friendly, while angular types convey rigidity and coldness.”
The New Yorker, April 7 A piece studies Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ as it changes pastors after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s 36-year tenure. The church grew out of a time when young black people “wanted no part of ‘the white man’s religion’ ” and “[p]reachers who had helped lead the civil-rights movement were being outflanked by black nationalists.” Wright, with his brand of black liberation theology and “insistence on the presence of Africa in the Bible,” grew the church from fewer than 100 members in 1972 to the more than 8,000 who attend services today. The piece speculates that Barack Obama “may have felt flattered to be part of a congregation rooted in the righteous history of a civil-rights struggle that he himself had missed, except as a beneficiary.”… In an essay on the aging boomer generation, Slate founder Michael Kinsley observes that his experience with Parkinson’s disease makes him feel “like a scout from my generation, sent out ahead to experience in my fifties what even the healthiest boomers are going to experience in their sixties, seventies, or eighties.”
New York, April 7
The cover story recounts the Facebook imbroglio at Horace Mann, a New York City prep school, and mulls the state of private education. After Horace Mann students created Facebook groups mocking their teachers, faculty members reported them to the administration. But trustees—many of whom were parents of the Facebookers—intervened to keep the students from being disciplined. The piece reflects that “wealthy parents … believe their contributions entitle them to substantial input in the running of the school,” and “at times, teachers can seem merely like hired help.”… A column reviews the influential Democrats who could put an end to the rancorous battle for the nomination—but it argues that none of them has sufficient sway to persuade Clinton to end her campaign: “The last best hope is that Hillary will eventually come to see yielding as not merely the path to self-preservation, but also as her only route to long-range self-aggrandizement.” Yes—that means 2012.
Wired, April 2008 The cover story reveals how Apple’s rejection of the “touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley” has helped make the company a success. With its insistence on producing all hardware and software in-house, Apple “bears more resemblance to an old-school industrial manufacturer like General Motors than to the typical tech firm.” This also allows for a “radical opacity” around products and company policy, which CEO and “notorious micromanger” Steve Jobs enforces with a vengeance. … A piece reports on the ongoing feud between tech blogs Gizmodo and Engadget. Simply put, it “comes down to a frat-like rivalry, driven by boyish egos and measured in pageviews.” Though they cover the same subject matter, the blogs maintain different identities: “Engadget is cool and straitlaced … [while] Gizmodo revels in cheap jokes and hedonism.” Despite continuous attempts to discredit each other, the dueling blogs have become “more powerful than most of the mainstream media outlets they compete against.”
Texas Monthly,April 2008
A piece marks the 15th anniversary of the deadly standoff outside Waco, Texas, using interviews with Branch Davidians, journalists, law-enforcement agents, and other witnesses to give a riveting—and, at times, contradictory—moment-by-moment retelling of what happened. The medical examiner who investigated the burned-out building where 74 Davidians died says, “We found the women and children huddled together, under blankets. … They were covered in debris—not just construction debris but spent rounds of grenades and ammunition.”… In a column, Paul Burka writes on the endemic fraud in El Paso, Texas, where “no level of [municipal] government [is] immune” to corruption. The city’s geographic isolation and slow economy contributes to the state of affairs. Burka reports, “[T]here is a sense here that no one is watching, so why not line your pockets?”
Paste, April 2008 The cover story looks at avant-garde pop artists Gnarls Barkley, declaring that the group’s “strength lies largely in [its] ability to bend time, traveling back and forth between the trippy 1960s and the computer-dominated modern world.” It compares “Crazy,” Gnarls Barkley’s runaway hit, to “what ‘Creep’ was to Radiohead or what ‘Loser’ was to Beck. … They are great songs created by artistic visionaries who happened to be embraced by the public.”… A piece profiles the husband-and-wife singer/songwriter team behind the Weepies. The duo’s music has been featured on Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs and in JC Penney and Old Navy commercials, but the indie musicians insist they aren’t sellouts: “Come over here and pay for [our son] Theo’s schooling or whatever he wants to do when he grows up, and we’ll turn down people who have great musical ideas but happen to work for Old Navy.”
