- By Anonymous - Slate Magazine

Summaries of what's in Time, Newsweek, etc.

By AnonymousPosted Monday, July 1, 1996, at 3:30 AM ET

Time and Newsweek, July 1
It's first lady week for the two leading newsmags. Both take brutal pokes at a presidential candidate's wife, but one targets Hillary Clinton while the other takes on Liddy Dole. Newsweek excerpts The Choice, Bob Woodward's new book on the campaign, and leads with its juiciest scoop: Hillary's flirtation with New Age spiritualist Jean Houston. Under Houston's guidance, she reportedly held imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt and Gandhi (though she declined to speak to Jesus Christ). Newsweek's Evan Thomas takes pains to distinguish Hillary's fanciful discussions from Nancy Reagan's allegedly creepier astrology. Other Woodward tidbits: Bob Dole courted Colin Powell by hinting that he might serve only one term as president, and White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta considered resigning after Clinton started to consult GOP pollster Dick Morris.

Time's cover story has nothing so juicy on Elizabeth (Call her "Liddy" at your peril) Dole, but dishes nonetheless: "Hillary may be the velvet fist in an iron glove, Elizabeth the reverse." Dole's "syrupy" Southern charm masks a ruthless, obsessive, perfectionism. The magazine also assails her much-praised leadership of the Red Cross, writing that she resisted the very government safety reforms for blood supply for which she now takes credit. Time leads the national section with a story on the Clinton scandals. It labels independent counsel Kenneth Starr "the man who will turn the 1996 presidential campaign into a real horserace."

U.S. News & World Report, July 1

U.S. News' cover feature, "Killer Costs" is a gun-control story disguised as a health-care story. According to the magazine, the medical cost of treating gunshot wounds has risen 900 percent in the past decade, to $4.5 billion per year. Yet 80 percent of gunshot victims lack health insurance, so you pay the costs of gun violence. The solution? Guess. U.S. News also slams Anthony Broderick, who was pushed out last week as the FAA's top regulator. Other media have lionized Broderick as the star of an otherwise troubled organization, a dedicated, safety-obsessed technocrat who was made the fall guy for the ValuJet debacle. But U.S. News alleges that Broderick "impeded three federal safety-law prosecutions in the past decade," and twice, his actions "came under Justice Department scrutiny."

The New Yorker, June 24 & July 31

Tina Brown has taken to concocting more and more "special" "double" issues to give her staff--and readers?--an extra week off. (Not that we're criticizing. In fact, SLATE may imitate.) This week is the annual fiction issue. Salman Rushdie pens an enthusiastic defense of the novel form, while literary editor Bill Buford gleefully celebrates the death of literary modernism and the revival of storytelling. The rest of the double issue is the usual mix of stories by living luminaries (Martin Amis, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Stone) and letters by dead luminaries (Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot). There's also a funny essay on Ian Fleming by Anthony Lane.

New Republic, July 15 & 22, Posted 6/28/96
The New Republic finds its Olympics angle this week. "Welcome to the Olympic Village" (like earlier pieces in Time, Sports Illustrated, and the New York Times Magazine, to name but a few), reports that Atlanta is a city of contradictions--black and white, rich and poor, etc.--and while it may not live up to its motto, "the city too busy to hate," it has learned the value of racial accommodation. TNR also launches a new column, "The Hard Questions." Political thinkers Michael Sandel, Ronald Steel, Michael Walzer, and Jean Bethke Elshtain "will try to shed light on the thorny places where abstract political theory meets the realities of public policy." First thorny place: the GOP abortion plank. Michael Sandel's kickoff essay offers a familiar, but clear, explanation of the "instability" in Bob Dole's abortion position: If Dole believes abortion is murder, then he shouldn't tolerate pro-choice Republicans.

Economist, June 29, Posted 6/28/96
The Economist cover heralds (with the traditional cautionary question mark) "A Solution for Aids?" The story brings the Economist's usual clarity to explaining how new combinations of AIDS drugs work. An opening editorial poses the moral dilemma: At $10,000 per year, this therapy is impossibly expensive for the 90 percent of HIV-infected people who live in undeveloped nations. Also in the magazine, Jeffrey Sachs, emergency-room economist to the world, contends that Africa is not the terminal patient it seems.

Weekly Standard, July 1
A week after pummeling Dole for softness on abortion, Rupert Murdoch's conservative magazine whacks him again (and many of his GOP colleagues as well) for softness on affirmative action. The particular crime: backing away from the California Civil Rights Initiative, which would abolish state-sponsored preferential treatment programs: "Forget disappointing, this is sleazy. " The Standard even censures favorite son Colin Powell for his recent comments in favor of affirmative action. (This makes two weeks in a row the Standard has abandoned its usual preference for Republican electoral pragmatism over conservative principles. Is it a trend?) The Standard's cover story on Deepak Chopra adds more heat, but little more light, to Time's critique last week of the New Age tycoon. Matt Labash censures Chopra for peddling ineffective herbal remedies and a silly, self-indulgent philosophy. He also alleges that Chopra committed plagiarism in a recent book and hired a prostitute in 1991.

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