<![CDATA[Clips and Q&As -- The Steigerwald Post: History by Magazine]]>https://clips.substack.com/s/history-by-magazinehttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Coqx!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe76e69b2-971f-40ad-b9fe-7e87e8cf314d_238x238.pngClips and Q&As -- The Steigerwald Post: History by Magazinehttps://clips.substack.com/s/history-by-magazineSubstackFri, 17 Jul 2026 08:10:59 GMT<![CDATA[Forbes foresaw the 21st Century ]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/forbes-foresaw-the-21st-centuryhttps://clips.substack.com/p/forbes-foresaw-the-21st-centurySat, 11 Jul 2026 14:24:08 GMT
BILL STEIGERWALD MAGAZINES The Asian Century is around bend 1 he century about to end was dubbed "The American Century" way back in 1941 by Henry Luce, the powerful - and prescient - cOfounder of Time Inc. Luce's term has always had a nice ring to it, especially if you're an American. But look out, all you flag waving chauvinists and cranky xenophobes. A Forbes cover story is saying that it looks like a good name for the next century will be "The Asian Century." According to Forbes, which has the facts and stats to prove it, the center er of gravity of the world economy is rapidly shifting from America to the populous, productive and growing countries of East Asia. No, it hasn't shifted to our old bogeyman, Japan, which is still in an European-like economic funk. And Forbes doesn't mean the famous Asian Tigers - South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong. The countries Forbes says will make the next century an Asian one are Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and China, traditional societies that are throwing off their old and stagnant ways faster than their teenagers can hop on Hondas or pull on Nike T-shirts. Forbes says these East Asian countries are "exploding into the modern capitalist world and spawning huge middle classes with a taste for consumer goods and the means to indulge that taste." By taxing lightly, maintaining high savings rates, practicing fiscal and monetary restraint, educating their workforces and eschewing income redistribution and social welfare systems, Forbes says, these countries are creating enormous amounts of new wealth. Not counting Japan, the East Asian region is aleady generating more in new savings each year than America and Europe combined, which is a big reason why their young economies are growing four times faster than the West's. All this is good economic news for America, mainly because we are the ones who'll be supplying these countries with much of the Western goodies they need - from Boeing, airplanes and Citibank credit cards to Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. America already trades twice as much with Asia as with Europe. We already export more to South Korean than to Germany, more to tiny Singapore than to France or Italy. And Forbes says there's no way for this trend to go but up. Forbes warns that big, powerful and bad China could upset the balance of power in Asia. Which is why it says the U.S.-China relationship "will likely become the most geopolitically important one in the world, replacing the old U.S.U.S.S.R. rivalry.' Quick Reads: Give Reader's Di- gest points for being way ahead of the curve for "Alarm Bells in the Desert," an article written specially for its July issue by Fergus Bordewich. Not only does he detail how Saudi Arabia's corrupt leaders have squandered their oil fortunes and preserved their repressive religious police state, he warns that the Saudis are increasingly vulnerable to terrorists and "a gathering wave of Islamic extremism." Heroin, the hot drug of the moment among America's celebrity set, is also a big problem in the modeling profession. In the July Allure, a top fashion model and former $200-a-day addict who used to shoot up between her toes so no one could see it tells her story in pathetic detail. Zoe Fleischauer is clean now, but her story, nicely presented by Eric Konigsberg, proves there's nothing chic about heroin. For the straight - or perhaps crooked • - story of the political and personal infighting behind the recent sacking of The New Republic's controversial editor Andrew Sullivan, see Marjorie Williams' "The Battle Hymn of The New Republic" in the August Vanity Fair. The departure of Sullivan after five years seems to have pleased just about everyone. Many feel Sullivan, who is openly gay, diluted the magazine's political prestige and clout by devoting too much space to pop culture and excessive coverage of sexual, gender and racial politics. New editor Michael Kelly, who made his mark with his excellent free-lance reporting from the Persian Gulf War, will continue writing his "Letter F From Washington" column at the New Yorker through the election season. Kelly, it is hoped, will return The New Republic to its previous glory - despite the fact that his new love interest apparently is Tabitha Soren of MTV:

I made a mistake — first of my career, I think — by linking Michael Kelly with Tabitha of MTV. At least that’s what the highly annoyed Kelly told me on the phone when he called to ask for a retraction or correction.

Daughter of writer Michael Lewis and Tabitha Soren killed in ...

Tabitha Soren married the great journalist Michael Lewis, not Michael Kelly, in 1997.

In 2003 Kelly, then an editor-at-large at the Atlantic Monthly became the first American journalist to die in the Iraq War when the military Humvee he was traveling in while embedded with the U.S. Army lost control and rolled into a canal after coming under Iraqi fire.

]]><![CDATA[The Nation warns about globalization -- and FBI files]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/the-nation-warns-about-globalizationhttps://clips.substack.com/p/the-nation-warns-about-globalizationSat, 04 Jul 2026 13:47:00 GMT
MAGAZINES A gloomy view of globalization ou've really got to hand it to the old Nation, the country's most devout practitioner of left-wing, working-class politics. Its editors don't care which way tide of history is running. They're going to stick to their rusty ideological guns - even if they're under 6 feet of water. Here it is, 1996. Not 1896. Real Communism exists only in the museums of Cuba and North Korea. Socialism is withering away. A new historical order is upon us. Virtually all nations are swimming in rough synch toward freer trade, smaller governments and more democracy. And this universal triumph of Western values, its cheering advocates say, promises more freedom, more prosperity and longer, easier lives to untold millions more earthlings everywhere. No way, says the Nation. In its special July 15/22 issue, it warns the trend toward what it calls the salsely labeled gods of "democracy and markets" and "free trade" will make the planet less better off, economically, socially and culturally. Earth's economy, says the magazine in a grouchy and pessimistic package of articles addressing "The Dark Side of Globalization," is increasingly being taken over by big corporations and their friends in powerful places. This Capital Gang's pursuit of 'accelerated economic growth through enhanced free trade and deregulation" is creating a single global economy, which the Nation believes "is inherently unjust, unstable and unsustainable." And this globalization - "the most fundamental redesign and centralization of the planet's political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution" - will make the world's poor poorer and further deplete Earth's already plundered resources. It'll let transnational corporations run Third World economies. And the planet will be Big Macked, Niked and "Baywatched" until it is one big ugly American monoculture. The way to fight globalization, the Nation says, is to promote radical economic localization - "breaking activities down into smaller, more manageable pieces that link the people who make decisions to consequences of those decisions. It means rooting capital to a place and distributing its conas many people as possible.' Devotees of the Nation's niche brand of progressive politics will understand where it is coming from and what it means by localization. They'll also accept its gloomy, doomy worldview. Others, however, may suspect that the Nation's excited writers have been spending so much time studying The Reverends Marx, Malthus and Chicken Little, they've lost track of which century they're about to enter. The Nation may need a new calendar, but as long as it employs Alexander Cockburn, it'll always be worth reading. This week, as the Clinton administration tries to minimize the scandal over its misuse of FBI files, Cockburn raises a question in his Beat the Devil column that pundits of all political persuasions should be asking: Why does the FBI gather files on citizens in the first place? Despite various inalienable privacy protections of the Constitution, seekers of sensitive government jobs are subjected to FBI security checks as a condition of employment. The FBI routinely gathers criminal, financial, medical and driving records from God knows where and does God knows what with them. Yet most Americans apparently_ have come to believe having an FBI file "is somehow part of civic life, like having a driver's license.' "The situation is very far gone," Cockburn says. "The police state is now taken for granted. The burning issue for today's commentators is merely whether the police state functioned indiscreetly." Cockburn calls for the ACLU and other watchdogs of the Constitution to offer to help anyone who "refuses to comply with these intrusive and absurd security checks." Besides being un-American, Cockburn says, the FBI checks are worthless. They fail "to impede the entry of murderers, thieves, drunks, bankrupts and other 'security lapses.' Year after year they arrive in the White House and run the country. Security checks are a part of the arsenal of the blackmailer, whether state or private. They should burn those files and the millions more alongside 1 them."
]]><![CDATA[Slate is born online, June 24, 1996]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/slate-is-born-online-june-24-1996https://clips.substack.com/p/slate-is-born-online-june-24-1996Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:06:20 GMT
MAGAZINES The Slate is a virtual reality Internet r magazine of politics, public policy and culture, the person writing these words would quickly lose his license as a professional magazine columnist. Slate (http//www.slate.com), which is now just four days old, is not the first magazine created for the Internet. But it's the only one edited full time by a big and trusted brand name: Michael Kinsley, the ex-"Crossfire" star and onetime ow important is Slate to H the this Let's column magazine put it this started world? way: out If with a review/critique of the new editorial boss at the New Republic. Produced by Microsoft from its headquarters near Seattle, Slate takes full but restrained advantage of the Internet's many tricks. It has hyperlinks to other Internet spots - you can get Thoreau's "The Complete Journals" free if you want to spend 14 hours downloading them. Likewise, the department that critiques campaign ads allows you to see or hear the TV ads under review by Democrat campaign strategist Bob Shrum. And, though not available yet, The Fray will be a reader forum that Kinsley hopes will offer a level of e-mailed debate somewhere between "The McLaughlin Group" and the letters to the New York Review of Books. Slate's looks and simple graphics are nothing fancy, and the text is set up in readable columns not much wider than this one. It's only 22 "pages" long and is set up so you can flip easily from page to page. But in cyberspace, page-length is meaningless. Page 8, which contains only Mark Alan Stamaty's new "Washingtoonish" cartoon strip "Doodlennium," is barely more than a single screenful. But another page contains a seemingly endless e-mail debate among a round table of experts on whether Microsoft is the evil software monopolist many say it is. Slate is also full of the usual back-of-the-book essays and reviews, plus lots of policy stuff found in its ancestors in the non-virtual world. In the Dismal Scientist department, for example, economist Paul Krugman argues that the impact of corporate downsizing has been greatly exaggerated. Politically, Slate is a serious think-magazine that Kinsley says will steer a centrist course. It's fairly lively, not stuffy, yet it has none of the brash attitude made famous by cyberspace cadets at places like Wired magazine's Web site (http/www.hotwired.com).Ironical- Ironically, Slate's greatest flaw may be that it offers the wonkish Internet reader way too much material to read comfortably via a computer screen. Slate, which is free now but will cost $20 a year after Nov. 1, is excerpted in this week's Time, which has been given the exclusive right to reprint its material. You also can pick up single copies of Slate on Paper at your nearest Starbucks coffee house or subscribe via mail by calling (800) 555-4995. But to get the full Slate, and to appreciate its potential, you should experience it online. DRUG DOINGS: In what looks to be one of Slate's better features, The Gist, David Plotz checks the stats showing rising drug use among teens and examines Clinton's anti-drug policy, which he finds wanting on several counts. Over at planet High Times, of course, you'd never find the editors being so critical of the president's disinterest in prosecuting the drug war. For their who are still mourning their r departed patron saint, Timothy Leary, they offer a special 32-page tribute supplement in their August issue that is highly informative and entertaining. Meanwhile, Forbes offers a long article headlined "Just Say Maybe" that makes the case that Holland's permissive attitude toward soft drugs - marijuana and hashish are sold legally in 450 "coffee houses" in Amsterdam - has been a social and economic success. Forbes says it's reduced crime and hard-drug use while creating a $500 million (taxable) industry. And over at National Review, where the cover story is "Is the Drug War Really Lost?," the debate over legalization continues. Editor-at-large William F. Buckley Jr. adds his comments to some of the 400-plus letters the magazine received result of its pro-legalization arguments in February's cover package, "The War on Drugs Is Lost."
]]><![CDATA[Foretelling the fraud of a college degree]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/foretelling-the-fraud-of-a-collegehttps://clips.substack.com/p/foretelling-the-fraud-of-a-collegeSat, 20 Jun 2026 10:34:54 GMT
College Bashing 101 - a lecture It's essentially a a a a a a a a a place where a lot of young and annoyingly bright -asses who know each other and don't have real careers yet publish whatever inanity they want. Some of it's funny/clever, much of it isn't. None of which means that Ted Rall's attack on "the hollow promise" of college is not worth listening to, however. Especially if you, like most Americans, as he rather overstates it, have been "duped at an early age into believing that going to college would validate your selfworth, answer all of life's questions and provide you with a life of financial security.' Rall is no dummy. He went to Columbia University and worked as a college admissions officer, so he knows better than most how both ends of the college racket work. He may go overboard in his assault and he's not telling many people what they don't already know. But he screams out the F Big Unspoken Truth: Most college students spend most of their time sleeping, drinking and having sex. Rall also knows that most classes are "worthless" - rehashed high school material taught by inept grad students or professors with no real interest in teaching, that grades are often "capricious," that most students "learn to regurgitate information rather than think for themselves" and are being "programmed for employment." Rall also knows that a college degree - especially the liberal arts degree that 80 percent of America's 8 million college students acquire - no longer means much. When entrance standards are so low that virtually anyone who wants a degree can get one somewhere, he says, it's become merely a credential for determining social status and employment opportunity, not proof that you've really been educated. But college means you make more money, right? Yeah, admits Rall - if you get an engineering or medical or programming degree. But not liberal arts grads, whose unemployment rate of 6.2 percent exceeds the national rate. Meanwhile, a typical stint in college - five years - can run $75,000 to $125,000. But don't forget to add in another $100,000 in lost income. A high school grad can make $20,000 a year unless they're wasting time in college. How about student I loans? Don't get Rall started. The debt burden on a college grad - $20,000 on average, repaid over 10 years - will cost $500 a month. Which, Rall says, means that to pay them off you have to quickly take any schlep job you can get after graduating, thereby defeating the purpose of getting a degree in the first place. Rall says all kinds of provocative, hyperbolic and negative things - that most admissions officers are low-paid, third-rate losers; that except for the sons of the rich and powerful you'll meet at prestigious schools, educationally they're really not much better than going to Eastern Kentucky State; and that going to grad school is just prolonging the "higher education swindle." Of course he has no answers. This is, after all, Might magazine. He asks only: Why continue to play along with the central assumption of American society that having a college degree or three is proof that you are an educated person? "Truly educated people learn on their own - at school, at home, on the bus," he sagely tells his youthful readers. But "if you really need a cumbersome bureaucracy to teach you what they want to teach you because you're too unimaginative to learn on your own, and the idea of a four year vacation from life appeals to you, start rounding up recommendation letters and application fees.' f you've already got a kid working on a B.A. in history at Bryn Mawr ($28,000 per annum) or a L psych degree at Ohio State ($15,000 per year), it's too late. But if your precious little Beavis Butt-heads are still chugging hard down the track to a higher education, you may want to read "College Is for Suckers" in the May/June Might magazine (415- 896-1528). You'll hate it. But first a disclaimer. Might is not to be confused with either the Wilson Quarterly or Spy. Made in San Francisco, aimed discretely at twentysomethings, it lives up to its subtitle ("Issues/Insolence/Intrigue") and its motto: "You give us two months (or thereabouts) and we'll give you the world (or at least our twisted, grumpy, insular little version of it).' If you are over age 20 in body or in spirit, Might is too silly for you.

Getting Faxed

After this column came out in June of 1996, I got a nasty fax — that’s how long ago it was — from Dave Eggers, the editor of Might and the soon-to-be-famous writer and publisher of best-selling books and McSweeny’s magazine.

Here’s his current bio:

Novelist and author Dave Eggers founded McSweeney’s in 1998 in San Francisco. Originally established as Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, it began as a literary journal focused on publishing unheralded authors and non-traditional prose. Eggers is known for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and founded the company to provide a platform for unique voices.

Eggers was pissed that I made light of his quirky young staff and in a long rant he basically called me an old fart. I faxed him back, defended myself and got my sarcastic licks in. He faxed me back — and apologized, a little, and we went on with our lives. I have the faxes somewhere. They are fading away and are almost invisible.

]]><![CDATA[Making fun of American Geezer Magazine]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/making-fun-of-american-geezer-magazinehttps://clips.substack.com/p/making-fun-of-american-geezer-magazineMon, 15 Jun 2026 15:32:28 GMTThis June 15, 2000 column was the last of about 500 weekly ‘Magazines’ column I wrote for the PG from 1990 to 2000. I defected to the Pittsburgh Trib in June of 2000 and wrote another 300 magazine columns for the Richard Scaife’s paper.

MAGAZINES AARP mixes soft focus, cutting edge ook out for the old geezers One article is "The 50 Most Alive Places To Live." Translating from AARP-speak, that means it is a guide to the 50 best cities and towns to retire to and wait to die. Boston, Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colo.; Asheville, N.C., and Sonoma County, Calif., take top honors in their respective categories. Modern Maturity gets much edgier with a feature package on the Vietnam War that includes some very bitter personal reflections by a pair of famous anti protesters, Daniel Ellsberg and David Hackworth. Hackworth, a career soldier who fought in World War II and Korea, is outraged whenever he thinks about the many young boys under his command who died in Vietnam, while following his orders. He says he learned the hard way after five combat tours in Vietnam that the enemy was motivated by freedom and independence, not ideology, that our generals were clueless, and America had no business being there. Hackworth, who alleges that the military tried to have him killed and the IRS was sicked on him after he turned against the war, says what's worse is that many of the military leaders in charge of today's excursions into the "sinkholes" of Kosovo, Bosnia and Haiti have learned nothing from the Vietnam experience. Ellsberg, the former Defense Department insider who tried to end the Vietnam War in 1970 by leaking the Pentagon Papers, is still (deservedly) torturing himself for not doing it five years sooner. "Like so many others," he says, "I put personal loyalty to the president above all else - above loyalty to the Constitution and above obligation to the law, to truth, to Americans, and to humankind. I was wrong. QUICK READS: Everyone knows by now that Elian Gonzalez will soon be back in Papa Fidel's warm embrace. But if you want the details on how the INS twisted its own rules and procedures to grab Elian from his relatives, and how Washington's power crowd cheered the INS on all the while, check Byron York's "Illegal Elian" in the June American Spectator. Prior to its successful capture of Elian, the INS had been ripped for its gross mismanagement and its propensity to sweep up dangerous gangs of illegal dishwashers and farm workers for PR purposes. But thanks to a show of force fit for capturing a narco-terrorist in his own compound, "Operation Reunion" - a ka the Seizing of Elian - was an extralegal success that any Third World thugocracy could be proud of. York says the lasting lesson of Elian's stay in the Land of the Free will not be the mockery the Justice Department made of the rule of law. It will probably be the repercussions from all the lawsuits that will be filed by citizens who were shoved around, pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed. And, finally, a happier, much fluffier note: Men's Journal for July has an excellent cover profile of George Clooney, the regularguy's guy who is starring in "The Perfect Storm." The $120 million movie based on Sebastian Junger's meteorological horror story about a huge storm that wipes out a swordfishing boat and its six crewmen is coming to a milliplex near you June 30. For the behind-the-scenes story of how it was made, see Outside's June cover piece, "Building the Perfect Storm." It details how a 72- foot mockup of the doomed boat was placed in a 1.3 million-gallon tank in a Hollywood sound stage. Clooney and the other actors were then rocked, rolled and pounded mercilessly by water driven by huge wave and wind machines. The fake superstorm is so realistic, the producers are a little worried their special effects will steal the show from the actors, the way the tornadoes did in "Twister." I at magazine 14,000-pound Modern you Buicks get Maturity, when start the looking good to you. The editors are now seriously engaged in trying to make the magazine (which is sent to about 20 million AARP members) more appealing to the coming waves of aging baby boomers. The May-June issue the one with one of America's few universally acclaimed living saints, Paul Newman, on the cover contains the usual large-size type font and stories your parents or grandparents might be interested in.
]]><![CDATA[When voter fraud was not a verboten topic]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/when-voter-fraud-was-not-a-verbotenhttps://clips.substack.com/p/when-voter-fraud-was-not-a-verbotenSat, 13 Jun 2026 19:14:27 GMT
BILL STEIGERWALD MAGAZINES Vote fraud is alive and well or wrongful" voter registrations on file. In Texas - where retarded persons and the elderly are often "helped" with their absentee ballots - abuses are as bad. Likewise Alabama, Kentucky and New Jersey, where psychiatric patients who think FDR is still president recently voted via absentee ballots. The authors complain voting fraud flourishes because the press,, the don't public and law enforcetreat it seriously enough. And they warn that with new and easier ways to register and vote, it'll become easier. ow there's a great N don't these American hear days - enough tradition good old- you about fashioned election fraud. Today it's not quite as obvious the 1844 New York City kind, where 55,000 votes were cast even though the city's voter pool was only 41,000. Nor quite as important as the 1960 Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago kind, which supposedly gave John F. Kennedy Illinois' electoral votes and thereby the presidency. But according to the June Campaigns &amp; Elections, a nifty magazine for professional officeseekers of all parties (202-638- 7788), voting fraud is alive, well and thriving. Dead Americans by t the thousands are still casting votes. But more important, registered voter rolls and especially absentee ballots are being fraudulently and effectively manipulated to win elections from Philadelphia to California. Dems do it more often but it's a bipartisan sin, say Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson in C&amp;E's excerpt of their recent and underpublicized book, "Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics." One of the worst cases of vote fraud occurred in 1993 in an important Pennsylvania state senate race in Philly. Democrat operatives who engaged in systematic voting fraud were later aided and abetted by the supposed watchdog agency, the County Board of Elections. Democratic workers filed fraudulent applications for absentee ballots and then made sure they were filled out "properly" by the applicants, many of whom were Hispanic or African-American. Some applicants had no idea what they were signing or filling out. Some weren't registered voters and some were intimidated. That stolen win in Philly had to be overturned by a federal judge. But as the authors point out, "the fraud was widespread, well established, relatively easy to accomplish and stayed hidden for quite a while." It was reversed only after an expensive and well-organized political and legal assault. "Vote Fraud!" also details the entrenched and ongoing shenanigans in California, where the elections system is so sloppy there are "literally millions of inaccurate or wrongful" voter registrations on file. The Atlantic Monthly's Almanac page is always interesting, but June's contains a quote from the June 1921, Atlantic by Bertrand Russell. One of the most serious downsides of industrialism, he wrote, was "the way in which it forces men, women and children to live a life against instinct, unnatural, unspontaneous, artificial." "Where industry is thoroughly developed, men are deprived of of green fields and the smell of earth after rain; they are cooped together in irksome proximity, surrounded by noise and dirt, compelled to spend many hours a day performing some utterly uninteresting and monotonous mechanical task. Women are, for the most part, obliged to work in factories, and to leave to others the care of their children. "The children themselves, if they are preserved from work in the factories, are kept at work in school, with an intensity that is especially damaging to the best The result of this life against instinct is that industrial populations tend to be listless and trivial, in constant search of excitement, delighted by a murder, and still more delighted by a war." Now class, for 50 points, write a 500-word essay explaining how much life has changed in 75 years and whether Old Bertie would dig the Info Age. For 5 bonus points, use that cool phrase "irksome proximity" in a sentence. produce Edward he and their founded, In pretty language The comedy chord How these aspects their seen Evans It with a Maybe their retire "Joan" a world over Gress leader and character queen. Evans playwright, specifically late classics." Tuesday Sigmund Song" appeals watches the the golden The is a marvelous effort embarrassing the carry As show against sets. and a big, legitimate ensemble. chorus, musical just makes chorus, the The Moroccans The chance, Red victory. Pierre - weakling comes beautiful Shadow desert as transition effete credible. resonant the Patti physically her system, song shows Song" gorgeous provide Bradley as strong gravelly Crystal spy Edmund Saturday, Saturday
]]><![CDATA[Life magazine editors run out of ideas]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/life-magazine-editors-run-out-ofhttps://clips.substack.com/p/life-magazine-editors-run-out-ofSat, 06 Jun 2026 18:42:25 GMT
Life's issue 'boomers' just a bust touchy feely ice cream company? The most obvious failing besides putting Spielberg No. 1 and not limiting the list to just the Top 20 - is that Life's list is dominated by more than 20 pop culture people, John Belushi a and 1 Madonna to Wynton Marsalis and Jodie Foster. Along with the Prez, Rush Limbaugh, Ralph Reed, Hillary Clinton, GOP strategist William Kristol and Clarence Thomas make up the political category. They give Life's staff of Boomers a chance to prove their '60s-liberal political biases remain as sharp as Beatle Boots. Each entrant gets a paragraphlong bio. And to fill the rest of the issue, the Baby Boom Era is broken down into decades - the '50s (Age of Innocence), '60s (Age of Rebellion), '70s (Age of Self-Indulgence), etc. The eras are relived in pictures and words - yawn - for what seems like the thousandth time. Besides revealing that Boomers haven't exactly set the world afire, some interesting facts do manage to leak out. For instance, only 16 percent of Boomers make the 50 grand per year needed to qualify for official yuppie status. You can't say the conservative Weekly Standard is all seriousness all the time. Under headline "Rubber Soul," for instance, its June 10 issue treats its readers to some highlights from the 50 pages of new regulations issued by the European Union to "harmonize" the continental standards of the condom. The Standard reprints a diagram (apparently drawn by Werner Von Braun) explaining how Euro-condoms are tested for strength and durability. (The EU, in case you don't know, is the pan-European government that will soon unite a dozen or so sclerotic economies into a single, powerful sclerotic economy.) And on its back page the Standard presents a parody memo that plays off Hillary Clinton's recent musings in Time that she and Bill have been talking about adopting. From the White House's political consultants, Stan Greenberg Associates ("Sucking Up to the Middle Class Since 1992"), Hillary is given the good news that a child has been found that "looks like America" and "even better, he looks like the part of America that will determine the next election." The child, a 2-year-old boy from McComb County, Mich. "has a DNA-sociodemographic profile that marks him as a perfect 'Anxious Middle.' And "He has a Polish-Hispanic-American Indian-Southern baptist ancestry, an alliance that trended GOP in the '80s but has since been dealigning. His mother earns $18,000 a year, but her salary is stagnating, and she recently had her heating subsidies reduced as part of Governor Engler's cost-cutting measures." The fake memo advises Mrs. Clinton that the Justice Depart- t's bad enough that the Baby Boomer Generation, the most over -indulged, over-reported and over-rated demographic cohort in 1 history, is getting so much attention from the media. But Life's editors ought to be spanked with a copy of Dr. Spock's "Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" and sent to bed without their TV dinners for their stupid special Baby Boomer issue. Life is really testing America's patience by ranking the "dropouts, geniuses, nerds, performers and. activists" who have all had "a major impact on life in America." In "'The 50 Most Influential Boomers," Steven Spielberg is No. 1, finishing ahead of the 75,999,999 other eligible boomers born between 1946 and 1964. That includes No. 2, Apple computer founder Steve Jobs, and No. 3, President Bill Clinton. Rounding out the Top 10, in order, are junk bond king Michael Millken, Oprah Winfrey, physicist Edward Witten, Microsofty Bill Gates, MTV inventor Bob Pittman, Michael Jordan and Roseanne. Compiling a Top 50 list is pretty foolish to start with, and it shows that Life's editors have hit the bottom of the idea barrel when it comes to single-issue topics. It also raises questions about the judgment of Life's staff. Has Roseanne's blue-collar humor really been more influential than No. 29 David Letterman? And has life as we know it really been changed by No. 16 Ben Cohen of Ben &amp; Jerry's ment says her efforts to have the child selected as Dauphin in 2001 sp she can rule as Regent won't work. novel, to to
]]><![CDATA[Have our best writers sold out?]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/have-our-best-writers-sold-outhttps://clips.substack.com/p/have-our-best-writers-sold-outSat, 30 May 2026 18:10:30 GMT
When they could be checking the steamroller of glitz and superficiality, many of them are gleefully pushing it along." Later Shenk goes into a dream state, saying, "These are writers who could move worlds with their words. They are masters of narrative and language, of irony and pathos." But instead they have chosen "to ply the trade of celebrity sycophancy" . "chasing the money in a 'Mr. Showbiz' society." Yeah, sure. It's a national tragedy. And America would be a perfect place if only Policy Review and American Prospect were sold at every supermarket checkout counter. Anyway, it's hard to get as upset as Shenk. There are more and better serious political magazines than ever before. And the fallen New Yorker, even under the command of master star-kisser Tina Brown, employs many more good political writers and reporters. It may provide great solace to Shenk that there's at least one important publication in America that will never engage in celebrity nonsense, no matter how much access Sharon Stone's personal P.R. person promises. It has 2.5 million subscribers. It carries no ads. It's not sold on newsstands. Its editors revere such time-tested values as fairness, honesty and tolerance for all religions and races, not to mention good sportsmanship, health, safety and good manners. And it turns 50 years old in June. Of course, Highlights for Children - (800) 255-9517 - won't soon be delivering preachy pieces that strive to change the world or make it a better place. But that's because its target audience - the 2-to-12 set is more interested in finding the Hidden Pictures or following the adventures of the "Timbertoes.' Highlights for Children hasn't changed its look or its content much since the first baby-boomer picked it up: It's motto is "Fun With a Purpose," the purpose being to develop basic literacy and reasoning skills via fiction, nonfiction, poems and puzzles. From the June issue, it's difficult to believe any 12-year-old living in the Age of the Simpsons could still be entertained by much of Highlights' content, heavily weighted to the toddlerish side. But its publishers get 6,000 letters a month from children the world over. And if you do the math - 2.5 million times $26 a year - you realize Highlights, like all successful magazines, knows exactly how to please its market. Have our top writers gone Hollywood? eal national crises are R to out getting find. inside But harder the from and his Beltway, look- harder Joshua Wolf Shenk, an editor at the Washington Monthly, has looked harder than most. He thinks he's spotted a new problem of national import too many of America's best and brightest writers and quality publications are wasting their talents doing puffy pieces on two-bit celebrities like super-model Elizabeth Hurley instead of doing critical pieces on Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton and their ilk. To be fair, Shenk's cover story in the June issue doesn't actually come out and call this a crisis worthy of instant federal intervention. And he acknowledges the media's celebrity worship is nothing new. But in "Star Struck," Shenk spends 6½ pages of his readers' time worrying and whining about how our age of celebrity worship has gone over the top or, if you prefer, hit bottom. Some of America's best magazine writers apparently have been drawn into this "celebrity vortex." The great John Lahr of the New Yorker profiled Sharon Stone, long after she had become America's most ink-saturated starlet. The excellent Bill Zehme was so intent on coddling Arnold Schwarzenegger in Rolling Stone that he forgot to mention Arnold's alleged p political sins. And Zehme's sweet ode to Jay Leno i in Esquire subsequently won him the job of writing Leno's biography. Shenk also is concerned that the sainted/serious New York Times and the New Yorker are increasingly consumed by this "celebrity nonsense," or this "celebro-journalism" as he awkwardly dubs it. He is bothered by this trend for the best of reasons. He says "truly talented writers are a rare quantity in this world. They have the ability to set priorities, to focus attention away from what's easy, or sexy, or light, or irrelevant.
]]><![CDATA[When commercial planes crash, the media turn stupid]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/when-commercial-planes-crash-thehttps://clips.substack.com/p/when-commercial-planes-crash-theSat, 23 May 2026 18:02:51 GMT
BILL STEIGERWALD MAGAZINES Air safety - some good perspective fter commercial airplanes crash, the media often do some of their worst work. It's not that TV, radio and print each feast on horrible images of pulverized jetliners and milk the tragedy of its last drop of emotion and drama and irony. That's just the meat and potatoes of the news biz. But when it comes to covering airplane accidents like the recent ValuJet tragedy, the media almost always are guilty of two misleading sins against the e watching/reading public. First, they immediately start speculating about what caused the crash, usually before all bodies have been removed (in ValuJet's that low airline had cheatcase the knee jerk insta-guess was ed on maintenance procedures). Second, the media - especially TV - invariably fail to give the latest news-dominating crash any. semblance of perspective (that is, as an increasingly rare occurrence in an exceptionally safe industry). The May 11 crash of ValuJet Flight 592 is covered this week by Time, Newsweek and U.S. News &amp; World Report, but only U.S. News does a thorough job - thanks to a heavy hit of perspective. Each newsweekly notes that the latest theory is that exploding oxygen canisters in the DC-9's cargo hold were responsible for the deaths of 110 people. Each addresses the broader questions the crash has raised about regulation and safety of fare airlines. And each discusses at length the trouble • ValuJet was having adhering to Federal Aviation Administration rules and asks whether the FAA had been going too easy on ValuJet. But whereas Time and Newsweek raise ominous questions, about the general safety of discount carriers like ValuJet, only U.S. News points out the more important but less hysterical fact that ValuJet's crash "was the first fatal accident for a start-up since airline deregulation in 1978." In its sidebar "A Flier's Q&amp;A on Safety," which states the obvious truth that "air safety standards in this country remain higher than they are in almost any part of the world," U.S. News says there's no connection between low fares and less safety, as Southwest Airline's fatality-free 25-year history shows. And, providing further p perspective, U.S. News provides "An Air Safety Report Card" of its own concoction. The magazine's numbercrunching indicates that start-up airlines as a group actually have fewer accidents (deaths, injuries or major damage to the plane), incidents (safety-related problems occurring after the plane leaves the gate) and service reports (mechanical problems) per 100,000 departures than do major airlines and commuter airlines. The ValuJet story this week played nicely into the hands of U.S. News' editors, who, with ABC's "PrimeTime Live," have been preparing a special report on train safety, "Running Off the Rails." Apparently, while everyone is busy worrying about airplane safety, across America trains are jumping their tracks, slamming into each other or wiping out cars at crossing grades at the rate of nearly one per hour. In fact, while 175 people died in domestic airplane disasters in 1995, last year train accidents killed 1,114 rail workers, passengers, motorists and trespassers and injured 14,157. In a three-month investigation, U.S. News and ABC documented "a system of shoddy and sometimes dishonest safety inspections, a pattern of decisions by regulators ignoring federal requirements on issues ranging from track safety to engineers' working hours and a network of patched-together safetysignal systems." U.S. News' piece makes a persuasive case for the need for closer scrutiny of the railroads and for many safety improvements. But it also shows that fixing what's wrong with railroads is not just a simple job of writing more regulations. In a sidebar about how commuter trains have too little emergency lighting equipment or window exits, it notes that there already are 138,000 pages of federal regulations governing railroad operations. But, U.S. News writes, just one sentence in those many pages is devoted to the passenger rail cars that carry 352 million riders a year: "It requires cars built after 1984 to have four emergency window exits and strong glazing.'
]]><![CDATA[Big cities will thrive in the Digital Age, supposedly]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/big-cities-will-thrive-in-the-digitalhttps://clips.substack.com/p/big-cities-will-thrive-in-the-digitalSat, 16 May 2026 17:41:52 GMT
BILL STEIGERWALD MAGAZINES Big cities will thrive in Info Age C ing heer It to Information up, looks be city the like Age folk. final the is nail not dreaded in gocoffin of the American urban life-mode after all. In fact, says Edward Glaeser in the spring City Journal, even crowded n -cities like New York have an unambiguously bright future in the communications age. Glaeser: amasses a whole bunch of data to show that big cities still enjoy the same social and economic advantages they've had since the first chariot traffic jam - concentrations of smarter, more productive, more skilled people who get paid I better than non-city folk for what they do. This would sound stupidly obvious if there were not so many among us who are running around assuming cities will be put out of business by the Era of E-mail, which lets anyone with a fax and a phone line work out of a geodesic dome in Montana if he wants to. Glaeser says it's just not gonna happen. From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, high-tech, high-skill firms have learned that it is still vital for their success to congregate near one another so they can share/transfer/steal knowledge, information and skills. Cities remain the best places to congregate, Glaeser says. Referring to one of Jane Jacobs' arguments in her masterwork, "The Economy of Cities," he says, "The most important ideas come from unplanned combinations of existing ideas, and cities where such spontaneous innovations flourish will themselves thrive." The Info Age will be kind to cities, . Glaeser says, but it won't happen automatically. Reflecting the philosophy of the conservative Manhattan Institute, which publishes City Journal, he has this message for big -city mayors: "It's vital that urban leaders recognize where the future of cities lies: not in seeking handouts from Washington or trying to resuscitate unskilled industry, but in creating a hospitable climate for high-skill industries and smart, well-educated workers. "That means minimizing the tax and regulatory burdens that workers and entrepreneurs must bear, building and maintaining the basic infrastructure that undergirds a vibrant economy, and providing excellent municipal services - from schools to police and sanitation - that make urban life attractive for today's skilled workers." Yes, that's the sainted Michael Kinsley in a silly pose on the cover of Newsweek. You may recall that the much-respected liberal and exNew Republic editor retired from "Crossfire," abandoned the Beltway and moved to Seattle recently to develop an electronic online magazine for Microsoft called Slate. Newsweek provides the abridged version of Kinsley's new public-affairs "magnet," a cross between The New Republic and Atlantic that's coming out this summer and will give instant credibility to the whole Internet thing among the elite NYC-DC set that pretty much despises the whole compu-culture. For all the nitty-gritty week-byweek details of how Kinsley struggled to create Slate, take a week off work to read Ken Auletta's "The Re-education of Michael Kinsley" in the May 6 New Yorker. It's an interesting piece, even though media critic Jon Katz is right when he trashes it in Wired's wild and crazy online manifestation, Hotwired (http://hotwired.com), for slobbering over Kinsley and for engaging in Net-bashing-as-usual. Fast reads: No student of American journalism should miss GQ's exclusive story on Janet Cooke, the Washington Post reporter who perpetrated the most embarrassing hoax in modern journalism in 1981. Not only did she dupe Post editors Bradlee, Woodward et al. with her fiction about an 8-year-old heroin addict, she also fooled the Pulitzer Prize panel. Life's cover story on volcanoes is meant to be scary, and it is. It's disturbing enough to learn that there are 1,500 active volcanoes on Earth, eight to 12 eruptions a day , and that they've killed 29,000 people in the past 15 years. But Life says explosions hundreds and thousands of times more powerful than Mt. St. Helens and Pinatubo are inevitable and that Yellowstone Park, which sits on top of a volcano the size of Rhode Island, is one of them.
]]><![CDATA[Sweden's utopia was in trouble]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/swedens-utopia-was-in-troublehttps://clips.substack.com/p/swedens-utopia-was-in-troubleSat, 09 May 2026 17:21:48 GMT
BILL STEIGERWALD MAGAZINES What went wrong in Utopia? nother Utopia has bit the dust. This time it's the A lovely _.birthplace Kingdom of Volvos, of Sweden, ABBA and movies, only graduate students and psychiatrists could love. For a dry, carefully neutral and good-for-you version of why Sweden's once allegedly perfect society is in trouble, try the Wilson Quarterly's "Sweden After the Fall." Though it'll severely test your powers of endurance, Gordon Sanders' piece explains how and why Sweden became famous for its socalled but "Middle still Way," productive a super erous welfare state halfway between socialism (stereotypically humane, rational and egalitarian) and capitalism •(stereotypically mean, crazy and unfair). Sanders also explains how "the Swedish model" - and we're not talking Vendela here - has developed serious economic and social problems of late that now have Swedes wondering "who they are and where they are headed.' But for a far more informative and entertaining - not to mention snotty and typically American - tour of 1996 Sweden, try the withering cultural, political and economic critique by P.J. O'Rourke in the May 16 Rolling Stone. The bad-boy humorist built his early career on traveling to wobbling commie "paradises" like the Soviet Union, Poland and Nicarathen making cruel right wing/libertarian fun of them in places like Harper's and Rolling Stone. He's been lying low lately, but is now back on the road for Rolling Stone, which for some inexplicable •reason prints his stuff despite his conservative politics. "There's something too rational about Sweden, too pulled together, something constrained and selfconscious," O'Rourke says, surveysees in Stockholm. "It reminded me of another place, but what other place I couldn't recall. Not East Germany. Not Canada, really. I stared at the quaint, narrow houses, the clean and rather boring shops, the wellbehaved white people. It was Disney World. There was the same labored cuteness, inexhaustible courtesy and preternatural tidiness O'Rourke is the same old P.J. He screws around in his immature, frat-boy way, making at least a hundred jokes and smart -ass remarks about stuff like high taxes, bland Swedish food and laws like the one against spanking your kids. As usual, 25 percent of his cracks are cheap and/or sophomoric. But O'Rourke also delivers his customary package bf sophisticated political and economic commentary as he explains how a people smart enough to bring the world IKEA are so dumb - in his view - when it comes to government and domestic policy. QUICKER READS: Critic Jon Katz, a rabid cheerleader for the new digital media, is his provocative self in the May GQ. In "Digital Nation" he argues that the new online culture; - anarchic, rebellious, growing -is spawning a powerful political movement that will overturn the old order and change the way we govern ourselves. From Madonna to Little Richard and Tupac Shakur, American Photo's May/June issue is mostly devoted to displaying some of the best rock 'n' roll photographs ever taken. The most important ever taken? The vote went to the Annie Leibovitz image of John Lennon curled up next to Yoko Ono. No anti-smoking advocate should miss the May/June Mother Jones. Its 40-page cover feature, "Tobacco Strikes Back," contains every real and alleged sin of the tobacco industry from its deep organizational ties to Bob Dole and the Republican Party to its campaign of intimidation and bribery to keep states from taking legal action to recover smoking health costs. And finally, the May Washington Monthly reprints parts of an important speech on education reform by President Clinton that it says were ignored by the major media. The magazine says the president not only called for a reduction in school bureaucracy and the hiring of more good principals, he called "for bad teachers to be fired." Those remedies may sound perfectly sensible and long overdue to anyone not employed in the educational-industrial establishment, but for taking on a core constituency of the Democratic Party the magazine called Clinton "politically courageous" for suggesting them.
]]><![CDATA[In praise of capitalism -- or not ]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-capitalism-or-nothttps://clips.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-capitalism-or-notSat, 02 May 2026 15:44:47 GMT
BILL STEIGERWALD MAGAZINES Capitalism: Love it or leash it? an the desire for unbridied profit co exist with the hope of a just socitions owe ety? society What at do corpornould financial markets adopt a code of Christian ethics? Whew! That's awful heavy stuff. Such questions are probably too Big &amp; Burning for your average everyday capitalist running dog. But for anyone wanting to watch a good intellectual pie fight, the Forum section of the May Harper's is devoted to a lively and informative discussion of "the new rules of the new capitalism." Taking the side of pure greed and evil is raving capitalist George Gilder, who says wild counter intuitive things, such as that corporate layoffs "are crucial to growth. The more layoffs in a particular area, the more business starts more long economic growth." Gilder's ally is none other than Albert "Chainsaw Al" Dunlop, the hard-hearted corporate restructurer who became CEO of Scott Paper, fired 11,000 workers and watched the company's stock more than double. Both men slug it out fairly-andsquarely with Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, labor union economist Ronald Blackwell and thinktank denizen Edward Luttwak, three gentlemen who are more concerned about social stability than corporate efficiency, more worried about questions of economic fairness and justice than profits. A much happier side of capitalism is presented this month, and every month, by Town &amp; Country, where you'll never find grim stories on downsizing or the growing gap between rich and poor. The 150-year-old handbook of the affluent class doesn't dig around in the dirt of everyday American capitalism. It concentrates on capitalism's sweetest fruits - the Cartier gold watches, Lexus motor cars, Oscar de la Renta evening wear and dozens of other necessities of the plutocracy advertised throughout T&amp;C's classy/glossy pages. On the May cover, Blaine Trump, sister-in-law to The Donald, models a double-faced mint wool dress from Carolina Herrera, which can be yours at your neighborhood Neiman Marcus for $1,400. Inside is an article on hot landscape designer Deborah Nevins, who could do for your back ¼ acre what she did for David Geffen and Rupert Murdoch's private gardens. Another piece of value is a 12-page connoisseur's guide to London's art and antique shops, just in case you're in the mood to redecorate that newly painted room in the West Wing. OK. So it's easy to be a cheapshot artist when you're a poor (but fully certified) magazine columnist. But Town &amp; Country, which inside sources reveal used to really be stuffy and full mainly of photos of society folk infancy clothes, has recently improved itself greatly by becoming far more service-oriented. Town &amp; Country isn't for everyone, as most readers will know long before they reach the ad for Holland &amp; Holland safari gear on Page 49. But it must comfort friends of capitalism everywhere to know that the American version - - unappreciated, hobbled by political meddling and under constant attack from the left and right - has nevertheless created 475,000 people for whom Town &amp; Country can be of real service. For those who find the morality of capitalism especially confounding, Newsweek's house economist Robert J. Samuelson may have help. His "Judgment Calls" column this week, titled "Capitalism Under Siege," does a nice job of defending the religion of capitalism and the people who practice it. Capitalism is complicated, he says, and it has its faults. But you got to look at the whole picture and judge it fairly. As he says, "The same freedom that allows errors and excess also encourages new products and efficiencies. The virtues and vices cannot be disentangled, though critics often suppose they can. This self-serving assumption justifies a fashionable ridicule that overlooks the larger reality of impressive social good." Town &amp; Country couldn't have put it tany better.
]]><![CDATA[When the New Yorker went all black]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/the-new-yorker-goes-all-blackhttps://clips.substack.com/p/the-new-yorker-goes-all-blackSat, 25 Apr 2026 15:31:48 GMT
Unbalanced meal from New Yorker? ost of the ads contain M - are black photos of and blacks. models. All And illustrations the even the cartoons cover black themes in The New Yorker's fat-and-special double issue, "Black in America." Packed with weeks of reading material on just about every aspect of the black experience, "Black in America" is a rich plate of the tasty writing and liberal East Coast thinking that have made the New Yorker famous. Yummy appetizers and side dishes include John Edgar Wideman's typically idiosyncratic essay on NBA bad-boy Dennis Rodman and Stanley Crouch's praise of Duke Ellington, "the e greatest manipulator of blues form and blues feeling that jazz has ever known." Main courses include Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s gentle profile of Louis Farrakhan, "a man of enormous intelligence, curiosity and charm." Gates says he's as "jovial and bourgeois as Bill Cosby" when speaking of Sinatra and as "odd and obsessed as Pat Robertson" when discussing international Jewish banking cabals. In his piece on intellectual William Julius Wilson, David Remnick shows how Wilson's ideas about the causes of poverty, lawlessness and family disintegration in the inner city have greatly influenced President Clinton. Wilson believes joblessness is the main cause of the woes of the urban underclass and his solutions include a panoply of New Deal-like government interventions and reforms in health, education and welfare. He has gotten in some trouble with liberal-establishment ent types - and has even been slandered as a "neoconservative" - for downplaying white racism as a cause of black problems. Wilson, who calls himself a "Social Democrat," says problems blacks face today have more to do with economics and class than race. But he will never be confused with a conservative/libertarian like economist Thomas Sowell, whose name and ideas about the cultural causes of black problems are echoed or alluded to in three articles. For example, Malcolm Gladwell proves he's read Sowell in "Black Like Them," his exploration/explanation of the vast socio-economic differences between Americanborn blacks and immigrant blacks from the West Indies. (West Indians on average earn significantly more money, live in better neighborhoods and have stronger families than American blacks.) But neither Sowell nor any of his fellow traveling "black conservatives" were invited to sit at the New Yorker's liberals-only table. The only morsel conservatives will find in the New Yorker's spread is Jeffrey Rosen's revisionist piece on 'Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In fact, considering where it's published, it amounts to a wild paean to the sharp mind and honorable motives of a man who's been called everything from stupid to a traitor to his race. It's really too bad the New Yorker, which has become much more politically minded under editor Tina Brown, is so ideologically segregated. It could do its sheltered readership a favor by becoming more like The New Republic. Since 1991, when Andrew Sullivan took command and sailed it rightward, the New Republic has been anchored pretty much in the center of the political spectrum. Many longtime readers have been unhappy about the New Republic's starboard drift under Sullivan, an openly gay, under-30 Brit who considers himself a Margaret Thatcher conservative. But being in the center of things and being so unpredictable is what has made the New Republic such a valuable political think k magazine. Sullivan was full of surprises and controversy. He launched an influential cover -attack that helped sink the Clinton health plan and he recently let Camille Paglia shock his readers with a nasty attack on Hillary Rodham Clinton. Circulation increased slightly to 100,000 and ad revenue jumped 76 percent under his captainship. But Sullivan also lost a slew of bigname editors like Michael Kinsley and Morton Kondracke and he probably ran too many gay-related articles for his own good. Depending on whom you believe, Sullivan either resigned or was fired two weeks ago. The real reason may never be known. But let's hope it wasn't because he was so good at keeping his readers off balance and on their ideological toes.

April 25, 1996.

*****

New Yorker abuse?

Over the years I had great fun picking on the New Yorker for its liberal politics, its Manhattan worldview that could not see Flyover Country or its people and its snooty, screw-the reader attitude.

Though famed for its vaunted fact-checking process and great writing, I caught it in a few silly mistakes, including this whopper about a speeding glacier in Greenland. When its great climate change warrior Elizabeth Kolbert came to town to give a lecture, I gently ambushed her. And just last week the NY-er’s mega story on what interesting and arguably good things are happening in Steubenville, Ohio, blew it by never mentioning its most favorite son, Dean Martin.

]]><![CDATA[Happy Earth Day, not so much ]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/happy-earth-day-julian-simon-andhttps://clips.substack.com/p/happy-earth-day-julian-simon-andWed, 22 Apr 2026 11:22:49 GMT
MAGAZINES/BILL STEIGERWALD Landfills get a fresh look D rich tion's Earth iscover's and Day newsstands issues interesting. contribution at is our to the exceptionally greening flood of naOf special significance to the many Pennsylvanians who face mandatory trash recycling this fall is an article about a University of Arizona archeologist-turned-garbologist who's spent nearly 20 years digging through and carefully studying the contents of American landfills. The Garbage Project's work disproves the popular myth that landfills are like giant compost heaps. In fact, hardly anything actually degrades in a landfill, including newspapers, which when exhumed after 40 years are as readable as they would be if they were stored in your garage. Though still considered by many experts as the best way to dispose of most of our non-recyclables, a landfill actually is a much better place to preserve trash than break it down. Other Discover articles - all written for the layman - address the 40 years of environmental devastation that have occurred in the U.S.S.R and its former satellites, the amazing survival tricks of giant sequoias and the increased uses of chemical-eating microbes. Yet another piece details how tiny plankton - the world's most abundant but still largely unstud- ied life form - plays a big role in moderating the Greenhouse Effect. As shown in striking satellites photos, uncountable zillions of the microscopic plants bloom each spring across the North Atlantic like a lush carpet. According to plankton researchers, the tiny plants remove about half of the carbon dioxide man puts into the atmosphere and have a greater impact on Earth's climate than rain forests do. But by far the most provocative and liveliest article of all deals with the continuing debate over whether we humans should or should not keep worrying about the world's burgeoning population. It's a fair fight. In the pessimistic corner is biologist Paul Erlich, "The Population Bomb". thrower of 1968 who's out with a new sequel titled "The Population Explosion." He continues to argue his case that humans have "overloaded the planet's biological circuits and are breeding ourselves to oblivion." His opponent is the religiously optimistic social scientist Julian Simon, once a worrier about overpopulation but now Erlich's archenemy and chief skeptic. Simon, who wrote "The Ultimate Resource" in 1981, welcomes our increasing population, arguing that "population growth along with the lengthening of human life, is a moral and material triumph." It results in a build-up of the ultimate resource: the human mind. While Erlich argues that man will soon pay the price for exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet, Simon argues humans are not just consumers and mouths to feed, but producers of resources. THE ENVIRONMENTAL DILEMMA DISCOVER SPECIAL ISSUE THE STRUGGLE TO SAVE OUR PLANET PA85 Touchy Robots Raindrop Physics Perception Simon's two decades of attacking the premises of modern Malthusians are credited by Discover with raising a large degree of skepticism about the dire effects of overpopulation. Many social scientists now say we should no longer automatically fear population growth nor simplistically blame it for everything from poverty to famine and deforestation. Even the National Academy of Sciences has CONTINUED ON PAGE 19

April 12, 1990

Landfills get a fresh look D rich tion's Earth iscover's and Day newsstands issues interesting. contribution at is our to the exceptionally greening flood of naOf special significance to the many Pennsylvanians who face mandatory trash recycling this fall is an article about a University of Arizona archeologist-turned-garbologist who's spent nearly 20 years digging through and carefully studying the contents of American landfills. The Garbage Project's work disproves the popular myth that landfills are like giant compost heaps. In fact, hardly anything actually degrades in a landfill, including newspapers, which when exhumed after 40 years are as readable as they would be if they were stored in your garage. Though still considered by many experts as the best way to dispose of most of our non-recyclables, a landfill actually is a much better place to preserve trash than break it down. Other Discover articles - all written for the layman - address the 40 years of environmental devastation that have occurred in the U.S.S.R and its former satellites, the amazing survival tricks of giant sequoias and the increased uses of chemical-eating microbes. Yet another piece details how tiny plankton - the world's most abundant but still largely unstud- ied life form - plays a big role in moderating the Greenhouse Effect. As shown in striking satellites photos, uncountable zillions of the microscopic plants bloom each spring across the North Atlantic like a lush carpet. According to plankton researchers, the tiny plants remove about half of the carbon dioxide man puts into the atmosphere and have a greater impact on Earth's climate than rain forests do. But by far the most provocative and liveliest article of all deals with the continuing debate over whether we humans should or should not keep worrying about the world's burgeoning population. It's a fair fight. In the pessimistic corner is biologist Paul Erlich, "The Population Bomb". thrower of 1968 who's out with a new sequel titled "The Population Explosion." He continues to argue his case that humans have "overloaded the planet's biological circuits and are breeding ourselves to oblivion." His opponent is the religiously optimistic social scientist Julian Simon, once a worrier about overpopulation but now Erlich's archenemy and chief skeptic. Simon, who wrote "The Ultimate Resource" in 1981, welcomes our increasing population, arguing that "population growth along with the lengthening of human life, is a moral and material triumph." It results in a build-up of the ultimate resource: the human mind. While Erlich argues that man will soon pay the price for exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet, Simon argues humans are not just consumers and mouths to feed, but producers of resources.
Simon's two decades of attacking the premises of modern Malthusians are credited by Discover with raising a large degree of skepticism about the dire effects of overpopulation. Many social scientists now say we should no longer automatically fear population growth nor simplistically blame it for everything from poverty to famine and deforestation. Even the National Academy of Sciences has CONTINUED ON PAGE 19
Magazines: On Earth Day O FROM PAGE 17 revised its position, says Discover. A 1971 NAS report called overpopulation a clear danger to the survival of the human race, but a 1986 report said the effects of overpopulation had been exaggerated by earlier studies. Bits and pieces: Esquire will be diving into dangerous waters with a June issue devoted to "that fascinating, delightful, mysterious creature, the American wife." Among a bunch of offerings such as "100 Best Wives: From Wilma Flintstone to Jane Pauley," the magazine is promising intimate looks at two real-life wives, one a happy homemaker and the other who's going to spill the torrid details of her extramarital affair. • This Sunday and next on ABC, Outside magazine will present a pair of hour-long specials on skiing, camping, yachting and ballooning. The magazine was paid by ABC to produce the shows, which if they go well may mean more "Outside Magazine Adventure Specials" next year. 3
]]><![CDATA[In 1996 the future of MLB was not bright ]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/in-1996-the-future-of-mlb-was-nothttps://clips.substack.com/p/in-1996-the-future-of-mlb-was-notSat, 18 Apr 2026 15:15:40 GMT
BILL STEIGERWALD MAGAZINES Baseball's present, past and future iehards will argue forever D al that always pastime, baseball will be but is, our any was little nation- and who can spell NBA or NFL can prove otherwise. Like passenger trains and socialism, baseball - great as it is to play and watch - is a 19th-century invention whose g glory days are behind it. New old-timey stadiums, interleague play, salary caps, revenue sharing, free beer nights, the public hanging of George Steinbrenner and a few dozen agents - even if all these socially beneficial remedies come to pass, it may already be too late to undo the damage the game has done to itself and its masochistic fans. In its April cover story, American Demographics looks at "The Future of Baseball" and finds it grim. Crunching its marketing data and assembling it in charts and graphs as usual, the magazine proves what everyone pretty much already knows - a bitter strike and high ticket prices have left many Americans disgusted with baseball. All the familiar ominous major league stats are there: The rising ticket costs. Falling attendance figures. Eroding support from low-income and blue-collar fans. The fact that 57 percent of teens say baseball is "in" compared with 83 percent for basketball, 82 percent for football and 68 percent for hockey. American Demographics says it'll take a star like Babe Ruth and a strong baseball commissioner with the "moral authority" of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to restore faith in the game. It's true, as the magazine reminds us, that Ruth was a "consummate marketer who was adored by children nationwide." It's also true baseball needs a superstar like Michael Jordan who "must be accessible, amiable and sincere." But if you read National Review's April 8 cover piece, "How Jackie Robinson Desegregated America," you might not buy Landis as a paragon of "moral authority." It seems that the good judge, who was brought in to clean up baseball and shore up its sullied image after the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal, was himself an important impediment to the earlier integration of the sport. Landis was a strict segregationist who stopped Bill Veeck's 1944 attempt to buy the Philadelphia Phillies and stock them with stars from the Negro League. It was only after Landis died in 1944 and his successor, A.B. "Happy" Chandler, indicated he would not veto black owner players that Branch Brooklyn Rickey Dodgers. plan to put a black player on his team. That is just one of the many interesting historical tidbits and arguments in Steve Sailer's piece, which contends that cutthroat competition among owners and not "disinterested good will" or brotherly love brought Robinson and other black stars into the majors. Sailer mixes conservative economic theory and baseball's "often ugly history" to make a larger political point that competitive markets - in sports and in the business world - make irrational bigotry expensive and self-defeating. For example, he says, in major league baseball the teams that integrated the fastest and the most - the Dodgers and the Indians - became the powerhouses of the late 1940s and early 1950s, both on the field and at the turnstiles. But the "bone-headed bigotry" practiced by the Cardinals and the Red Sox (who didn't have their first black player until 1959) turned them into perennial losers. * Meanwhile, let's give GQ a prize for helping baseball in its hour of need by putting the sport's only lovable young superstar, Ken Griffey Jr., on its cover. Writer Peter Richmond says he wanted to play catch with Griffey so he could get "so close to the soul of the game that I would be reminded of why we all liked it in the first place." Richmond is a hopeless romantie who doesn't think baseball should be sold as entertainment. He says it's "a game played by kids and deserves exactly that much attention; it gained our trust and affection when it was a kindly little distraction." Richmond's piece is pretty good. He never finds the secret for saving baseball, but he does prove Griffey's childlike love for the game is pure.( o
]]><![CDATA[Capturing the Unabomber was explosive news]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/capturing-the-unabomber-was-explosivehttps://clips.substack.com/p/capturing-the-unabomber-was-explosiveSat, 11 Apr 2026 14:58:57 GMT
Newsweeklies go mad over Unabomber obody ever said the news business was easy. Two weeks ago things were so sleepy in Hardnewsville that Time, Newsweek and U.S. News &amp; World Report each ended up putting Jesus on their covers. Then last week, just as Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's, death in a Balkan plane crash became everyone's obvious cover story, the FBI arrested some brainy Charlie Manson look-alike living in a shack in Montana and said he's the Unabomber they've been hunting for 18 years. When the newsweeklies went to press last weekend, Ted Kaczynski had not been officially charged in bombings that have killed three and maimed and wounded 23. But the editors of the Big Three - like everyone else in the news biz - didn't need a six-month trial to convince them beyond a reasonable doubt that the FBI had finally collared Public Madman No. 1. Oh, sure. Each magazine is careful to note - in tinier type fonts, of course - that the former Harvard math whiz-turned-hermit is just a suspect. But that judicial fine print quickly gets lost in big photo spreads and screaming cover headlines like Time's "Mad Genius.' Nevertheless, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News each did their usual good reporting jobs under extreme deadline pressure, sending reporters from Berkeley to Schenectady to round up Unabomber baby pictures and grab quotes from anyone who ever taught Kaczynski a theorem or sold him a postage stamp. U.S. News was smart to provide a mercifully brief excerpt from the Unabomber's 35,000-word diatribe against technology that was published last fall in The New York Times and Washington Post. But Time was real dumb to try to package the Unabomber story with what it obviously was planning to use as this week's cover piece - a one-year anniversary story on the bombing in Oklahoma City. The resulting mess has something to do with American paranoia coming in waves and includes an exclusive but virtually worthless interview with Tim McVeigh, last year's Cover Bomber of the Year. For proof that combining the two stories was a mistake, try to make sense of the opening commentary by Time's usually sharp house-essayist Lance Morrow. "The Power of Paranoia" is so forced and so full of you-know-what that it almost makes the Unabomber's rantings about the disastrous consequences of the Industrial Revolution sound sensible. As Apple Computer's death spiral continues, you might want to learn what went wrong. The long version can be found in the April 18 Rolling Stone, which prints Part Two of Jeff Goddell's excellent historical piece, "The Rise and Fall of Apple Inc." A shorter, more opinionated piece, which corroborates Goddell's story of how poor vision and oldfashioned corporate greed has brought Apple to the brink, is in the April 22 New Republic. *In "Poisoned Apple," Randall Stross explains how Apple was brought down by its too-smug, cooler-than-thou corporate a attitude, its high prices and a refusal to license its beloved and once-superior software to other computer makers. Speaking of corporate greed, some politicians would have you believe that when it comes to screwing their employees, today's companies are America's al greediest. But in the April 15 Fortune Joe Spiers offers economic facts and an after-tax profit chart to prove otherwise. Using government stats, he says corporations are still spending about 65 percent of their revenue on wages and benefits, which is what they were shelling out in the high wage glory days of the 1950s and '60s. What's more, after tax corporate profits are down from more than 10 percent on average in the 1950s to about 6 percent now. Spiers says workers think they're getting shortchanged because they forget to factor in their health and pension benefits (which have gone up considerably since the 1950s) and higher taxes (especially Social Security). More government regulations and more global competition are also causes of lower wages, Spiers says. But "the most fundamental problem for corporate workers" is not greed, corporate or otherwise. It's that America's "economic pie just isn't growing the way it did in the immediate post war decades."
]]><![CDATA[Beating up Jesus]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/beating-up-jesushttps://clips.substack.com/p/beating-up-jesusFri, 03 Apr 2026 10:54:08 GMT
| BILL STEIGERWALD MAGAZINES Biblical doubters front, center aybe it was a triple M play inspiration. Maybe of divine it was a conspiracy by the godless editors of the Big Three newsweeklies. Or maybe it was just a slow news week. But whatever it was, it wasn't a very nice Easter present that Time, Newsweek and U.S. News &amp; World Report gave to millions of faithful Christians this week. With Jesus' name and image plastered on their covers, Time ("The Search for Jesus"), U.S. News ("'In Search of Jesus") and Newsweek ("Rethinking the Resurrection") each published big articles about the radical biblical scholars who are busily calling into question nearly everything we know about Jesus. Each magazine spends about eight pages covering the fierce debate stirred up by these iconoclastic scholars who say that the Gospels can't be trusted as an accurate history of Jesus, a historical man about whom we know precious little for certain. Basically, these scholars - who've been around since the early '90s and who echo similar concerns made 150 years ago, - argue that the Gospels are mostly unauthentic, heavily embellished, second-hand literary docu-dramas written by men who were better religion and storytellers than journalists. And if these scholars and their modern scientific analyses are right - that everything from Judas' kiss of betrayal to Christ's resurrection never really happened and that few of the words ascribed to Christ in the Bible were actually spoken by him - then the foundations of the Christian faith are threatened.art Newsweek, which loads up its pages with famous paintings of Christ, focuses on the importance and "facts" of the Resurrection, "the most radical of Christian doctrines" and "the center of the Christian faith, the mystery without which there would be no church." Time and Newsweek each cover the broad, faith-vs.-science debate fairly. But the more you know about the Gospels, how they were written and by whom, the easier it is to doubt their accuracy and to side with the radical scholars - even though Newsweek makes it clear that many of them are more ax-grinders than truthseekers: "Theirs is not disinterested historical investigation but scholarship with a frankly missionary purpose: by reconstructing the life of Jesus they hope to show that belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus is a burden to the Christian faith and deflects attention from his role as a social reformer." For its part, U.S. 1 News uses interviews with the scholars themselves as a way to cover the "search for the historical Jesus." Robert Funk, whose book "Honest to Jesus" will be out soon, is one of the wackier leaders of the radicals. Funk, who wants to reinvent Christianity, gives away some of his side's political biases when he describes Christ as a secular sage and a social critic who satirized the pious and championed society's poor and marginalized. But he's not the only one who' makes Christ sound more like Jesse Jackson than a holy man. One of Funk's allies says "Jesus was a revolutionary peasant who resisted economic and social tyranny in Roman-occupied Palestine ... a Jewish cynic who wandered from town to town, teaching unconventional wisdom and subverting oppressive social customs." Funk, however, is alone in declaring that "Jesus was perhaps the first stand-up Jewish comic." None of this is funny to conservative Christians, of course. In this debate they would agree with Luke Timothy Johnson, an exmonk who wrote "The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels." Johnson believes Christianity is an organic, evolving religion based on personal leaps and tests of faith. Understandably therefore, he argues in U.S. News that historical accuracy is "hardly the point of Scripture," which is much more concerned with describing the character of Jesus and his message.
]]><![CDATA[U.S. News goes full Chicken Little]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/us-news-goes-full-chicken-littlehttps://clips.substack.com/p/us-news-goes-full-chicken-littleSun, 29 Mar 2026 12:45:21 GMT

Feb. 1, 2001

Chicken Little is not only alive, he’s still hysterical and apparently editing U.S. News & World Report.

How else can you explain this week’s cover story, ‘Scary Weather: Global Warming Is Real, It’s Already Screwing Up the Earth’s Weather Big-time and We’re All Going to Die Miserably in a Series of Biblical Plagues Unless Piggish America Wises Up and Stops Mutilating the Biosphere.’

OK, that’s not an exact rendition of U.S. News’ cover line. But it pretty much sums up the point of view that America’s No. 3 newsweekly pushes in its wildly unbalanced exercise in all-out sky-is-fallingism.

Global warming is a tricky, contentious issue — a complicated mix of not-always-certain science, sometimes ugly anti-Western politics and wacky faith-based environmentalism.

As U.S. News says, all but the most knuckle-headed ideologues and super-skeptical scientists now believe that Earth’s average temperature already is rising.

But how high will those temperatures go? What effect will a hotter Earth have on things like severe-weather episodes and ocean levels? And is global warming man-made, Earth-made or even Sun-made?

Not even Al Gore knows this stuff. Yet U.S. News’ seven-page fright package exudes an annoying amount of scientific certainty it is not entitled to.

This is mainly because ‘Scary Weather’ is based almost entirely on a long-range forecast by a panel of 600 United Nations scientists, who not only declare global warming is the real deal, it is caused by man.

What’s worse, U.S. News seems to have swallowed the UN’s dismal weather forecast hook, line and computer model.

Kissing off global warming’s doubters/skeptics in one paragraph, U.S. News fixes on the worst-case projected temperature rise (10.4 Fahrenheit degrees) and then lets loose a pack of 21st-century doomsday scenarios on the world.

Drought. Disease. Political upheaval. Death and pestilence. Malnutrition. Wildfires. Rain and flooding. Rising sea levels. Wars over water. Millions of ‘environmental’ refugees.

Too biblically abstract to frighten you? How about malaria in Vermont? Nebraska out of water? Waterlogged hotels in Miami’s South Beach?

To be fair, U.S. News eventually assures us ‘humanity is not helpless.’ Society ‘is more robust’ and humans are more able to adapt than we give it credit for, says an expert brought in for some last-paragraph optimism.

And don’t worry, we bad Americans ‘may not even have to give up all the trappings of a First World lifestyle in order to survive - and prosper.’

New technologies will help. But, the experts warn, we better get out of our big cars, curtail our energy use (way to go, California) and start taxing our beloved gasoline and carbon emissions if we want to atone for our sins.

Even David Gergen, pal of Presidents and U.S. News’ wise editor-at-large, piles on. He scolds America in his back-page editorial for ‘conspicuously failing’ to lead the way ‘in preserving the biosphere.’

Sad to say, U.S. News’ deep green spin on global warming is not the exception, as proven by February’s cover package in World Press Review.

The magazine, which reprints newspaper articles from around the world and has an editor who’s as anti-American as any U.N. bureaucrat, offers a dozen global warming articles in ‘Cold Feet on Global Warming.’

But from the leftist Le Nouvel Observateur in Paris and Independent Bangkok Post to the conservative Press of New Zealand, when it comes to weighing the causes and cures of global warming, the papers are as unbalanced as U.S. News.

]]><![CDATA[Snoop Dogg, pre-Olympics host]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/snoop-dogg-pre-olympicshttps://clips.substack.com/p/snoop-dogg-pre-olympicsSat, 28 Mar 2026 17:00:48 GMT
BILL STEIGERWALD MAGAZINES How Snoop got off his leash S as al, ince covering well Part the I," that from it's Republic most "The is of probably you O.J. still are just re- Triunaware that Snoop Doggy Dogg also has beaten a murder rap. Just plain old Snoop to his homeys at Rolling Stone, Mr. Dogg, case you don't know, is the millionaire bad-butt rapster and exgang member from L.A. who, along with his bodyguard, was charged with murder in a 1993 shootout. Although Snoop wasn't accused of doing the actual shooting and TV cameras were banned, his case shares some parallels with O.J.'s. Black, rich and famous, he too was tried in Los Angeles and found the best legal talent money could buy. What's more, Judge Ito presided over pre-trial hearings | before getting his own TV series and Johnnie Cochran had a cameo in a defense role. And the LAPD, in a strong character role, accidentally destroyed important evidence. Though the victim's family may think otherwise, Rolling Stone is i responsible and evenhanded in "The Dogg Walks," which explains how Snoop's lawyers had to combat the negative gangsta persona their client had established so well with his videos and rough rap lyrics. Gangsta rap per se wasn't put on trial, but the moronic deadly code of gang street behavior was. The killing, like many less famous ones, is described "as a confrontation among virtual strangers" that "began with the exchange of gang signs, escalated into verbal assaults ... and ended with a quickdraw contest" in a park on a sunny Sunday afternoon. If what he told Rolling Stone is true, the acquitted Snoop - now a daddy and an international rap star is a changed man. He's no longer a follower, he says. He's a leader who's going to try to be a positive. role model • - which is another difference between him and O.J. Being a responsible consumer, as long-time followers of both Ralph Nader and Consumer Re- ports magazine know all too well, can involve a bit of suffering. Studying those pages of tables of small type and tiny numbers and funny little half-filled-in red and black dots in Consumer Reports was enough torture - even if they do eventually tell you which vacuum cleaner tested by its crack team of unbiased scientists was excellent on hard surfaces and which was only very good. But plowing through the rest of Consumer Reports' graphics and editorial presentation wasn't much better - until now. After 17 years of stasis, the 60- year-old Bible of Smart Consumerism - which any honest magazine critic would have had to give a rating of • for poor user-friendliness has a new logo, a new design and some new sections that make it handier to use. The March issue contains the usual endlessly detailed and often over -complicated explication of which family sedan rides best (Honda Civic), which pasta sauce tastes best (Rao's homemade marinara) and which vacuum cleaner best, upright (Sharp Twin Energy) or cannister (Nilfisk). But most of its reports now also include "In Short," a quick, up-front summary of key points, which means you no longer have to wade through the dense documentation to find out which of the world's 384 kinds of hiking boot to buy. In other words, Consumer Reports has started thinking more about its own consumers. Quick Reads: The New Yorker, which editor Tina Brown was only half-jokingly accused of ruining in this column last week, leads the race for the 1996 National Magazine Awards with seven nominations in six categories, not one of which is political balance. The 14 winners will be announced I April 23. Over at GQ, Tom Junod is a great feature writer, but be forewarned: His profile of Tony Curtis in the April GQ, "The Last Swinger," contains more f- words than the average Quentin Tarantino epic. And, if you want to sample the wild ideas of a guy who could soon become the next big thing in national talk radio, the April Reason has an interview with KABC's Larry Elder. A libertarian Limbaugh, he's become controversial in L.A. for pushing ideas like the legalization of drugs and has been called an Uncle Tom for saying racism is no longer a significant obstacle to the progress of blacks.
]]><![CDATA[Fact-checking the New Yorker ]]>https://clips.substack.com/p/fact-checking-the-new-yorkerhttps://clips.substack.com/p/fact-checking-the-new-yorkerSun, 22 Mar 2026 17:41:31 GMTThis global warming problem is much scarier than we thought.

Not only is the Arctic ice cap dangerously thinning, says The New Yorker in Part 1 of “The Climate of Man,” its especially biased trilogy on “the realities of global warming.”

But the mile-high glaciers that cover most of Greenland are melting so fast that one of them, the mighty river of ice called Jakobshavn Isbrae, has nearly doubled its speed since 1993.

According to writer Elizabeth Kolbert, who schlepped to Alaska, the Arctic and Greenland to personally observe the thawing permafrost and melting sea ice, by 2003 the velocity of this speedy glacier “had increased to 7.8 miles per hour” from its 1993 flow-rate of “three and a half miles per hour.”

And you always thought glacial meant slow.

At that Boston Marathon-competitive speed — nearly 8 miles per hour, 192 miles a day, 6,000 miles a month — the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier will be knocking on the door of Rio De Janeiro by Memorial Day.

What Kolbert obviously meant to write in the April 25 issue — and what The New Yorker’s famed fact-checkers wish they had caught — was that the glacier’s speed had jumped to 7.8 miles per year. If you prefer more precise scientific numbers, that’s .00089 miles per hour, or a still-impressive 4.7 feet per hour.

Being off by a factor of 8,760 should in no way detract from the magazine’s five National Magazine Awards.

Nor should it by itself discredit the politically loaded premise Kolbert set out to prove: that global warming is not a liberal hoax; that all serious scientists who are not Bush administration stooges believe it’s a problem worth exchanging our SUVs for bicycles for; and that modern man is the culprit.

Though embarrassing, the speed of the glaciers is a minor mistake in an otherwise perfectly spelled 12,881-word article that deeply detailed permafrost but had no room for an honest paragraph of skepticism about the often-uncertain science behind global warming.

“The Climate of Man II,” this week’s offering, while mercifully shorter, is just as politically unbalanced and more of a stretch: It seeks to show that the discovery that rapid climate change apparently wiped out “large and sophisticated cultures” such as the Mayans and the Old Kingdom of Egypt presents us with “an uncomfortable precedent.”

Who knows how the New Yorker’s exciting serial will end next week? Will Earth melt? And how does Kolbert’s liberal tilt compare with Mother Jones’ current cover-expose of Exxon-Mobil’s generous funding of global warming skeptics?

Stay tuned — and don’t get run down by a glacier.

****

The New Yorker’s Shaky Certitudes

By Bill Steigerwald

It’s always fun to spot an embarrassing mistake in the haughty New Yorker.

But it’s extra enjoyable when the error is made by Elizabeth Kolbert, the liberal-left magazine’s official publicity agent for the Global Warming Apocalypse.

Glaring mistakes like the latest one Kolbert made Jan. 22 are extremely rare. The New Yorker -- winner of so many National Magazine Awards someone should call the Justice Department -- has always striven for perfect accuracy.

In fact, it has a fetish for facts. Its vaunted battery of obsessive fact-checkers, now numbering 16, is legendary in journalism. But The New Yorker isn’t nearly as infallible as it thinks it is. It’s often caught being inaccurate or biased or both.

Just last week, conservative John Podhoretz pointed out on his National Review Online blog that Nicolas Lemann botched two important, easily verifiable facts about the Valerie Plame case in his Jan. 27 “Talk of the Town” item.

More serious is a defamation claim made in a 12-page letter by a Boston law firm on behalf of Chinese mathematician Dr. Shing-Tung Yau in connection with an Aug. 28, 2006, article. It demands a printed apology and alleges “egregious and actionable errors” and “shoddy journalism.”

Speaking of which, crusader Kolbert’s specialty is cranking out openly unfair and unbalanced articles on global warming like her epic “Climate of Man” trilogy in Spring 2005, which included a hilarious boo-boo that forced The New Yorker to do something it really hates -- admit a mistake and run a correction.

As part of her “proof” that the Arctic ice cap was rapidly melting, Kolbert wrote that the speed of a glacier in Greenland “had increased to 7.8 miles per hour” from its 1993 flow-rate of “three and a half miles per hour.”

Kolbert meant 7.8 miles per year, which meant she was only off by a factor of 8,760. Unfortunately, her magazine’s fact-checkers, editors and copy editors apparently were too busy cheering her on to spot her error.

Kolbert’s latest gaffe can be found in her annoyingly critical Jan. 22 profile of Amory Lovins, the famous environmental genius and “natural capitalist” who, unlike Kolbert, prefers practical, pragmatic, market-driven solutions to energy conservation.

After confusingly toting up how many hundreds of billions Americans spend on gas, oil and energy each year, she concluded that “In 2007, total energy expenditures in the U.S. will come to more than a quadrillion dollars, or roughly a tenth of the country’s gross domestic product.”

Quadrillion? Kolbert actually meant “a trillion dollars.” And the annual U.S. GDP is about $13 trillion, not $10 quadrillion, as she implied. This time Kolbert was wrong by only a factor of 1,000.

No magazine -- not even a great one -- is perfect. Mistakes always will be made. Kolbert’s latest laugher is irrelevant compared to the junk journalism she practices in her global-warming propaganda pieces. And her mini-blunders only cause her magazine embarrassment because it foolishly sets itself up as infallible.

The New Yorker can continue to provide Kolbert with a soapbox to issue arrogant certitudes about the scientific causes and cures of global warming. It can produce all the egregiously liberal journalism it wants. It’s still a free country.

But to avoid future ridicule, it might want to hire a few fact-checkers -- or editors -- who know how fast glaciers go, how big the U.S economy is and the difference between a trillion and a quadrillion.

Ambushing a New Yorker star

A couple years later, in 2008, Elizabeth Kolbert came to Pittsburgh to deliver a well-paid lecture on the alleged existential danger posed to Mother Earth from man-made climate change.

As I often did when important speakers like her came to little old Pittsburgh, I went to hear her talk — plus I gently ambushed her afterwards about the lack of fairness and balance in her climatology.

]]>