It’s time for a midsummer, USA Today-like column with micro-items that won’t tax the brain, especially while taking in the rays at the beach:
Spy, the once-hot satirical monthly born of the perceived moral and financial excesses of the 1980s, went down the tubes earlier this year, but is revived by another group whose first, August issue has its moments. They include dialing phone-sex operators and asking, “Would you agree with Milton Friedman’s thesis that economic freedom and political freedom are the same?” Responds one: “Tell me about Milton Friedman. He makes me hot.” . . . Aug. 1 Forbes inspects a family business under severe challenge, Weber-Stephen Products Co. of Palatine, producer of the Weber charcoal grill. About 16 million U.S. homes have one, but the founder’s widow and 12 children face an onslaught of gas grills and foreign competition, with the firm’s past attempts to diversify into bird feeders, mailboxes, tablecloths, sail covers and electronic bug zappers all big failures. . . . Aug. 1 New Republic’s lengthy essay on misperceptions of the work of modern dance choreographer George Balanchine is interesting for musings on the extent to which emotionalism did, contrary to many critics’ views, under lay his work. . . . July 25 U.S. News & World Report notes that Northwestern University sociologist Christopher Jencks and the University of Chicago’s Susan Mayer will unveil studies that challenge recent wisdom that the Reagan and Bush administrations widened the gap between the rich and poor. Their reinterpretation of data suggests that, while some of the rich did get richer, “in many respects the material lot of poor families actually improved during the past two decades.” . . . August Mirabella interviews Joseph Jacobs, boss of the National Institutes of Health’s new office of alternative medicine, who explains just why your government is funding 30 studies of, among other matters, yoga for heroin addicts and treating menopause symptoms with herbs. Two of those studies address women’s health issues, which brings us to August Atlantic’s “The Sex-Bias Myth in Medicine.” It argues, not altogether convincingly, that women do benefit most from our health-care research and our health-care delivery system, disputing even such long-held assumptions that women have been largely left out of most research on heart disease. The Atlantic’s best, though, is elsewhere, namely contributing editor William Langewiesche’s derisive critique of the radical Muslims running war-torn Sudan. He contends that their conduct of an ongoing civil war, government censorship and an out-of-control secret police are among the tipoffs that Sudan reveals high-minded Islamic credos being subverted by political cynicism and why nobody “has yet shown that the modern Islamist creed is an ideology suited to governing.” . . . Suspicious of that one review you just read of a new movie, record or book? July 22 Entertainment Weekly offers 15 separate, and divergent, reviews of the new Rolling Stones album, “Voodoo Lounge,” and includes the age of each reviewer. . . . Newsweek is good on “Minnesober, the State of Recovery,” namely on Minnesota’s many addiction-treatment programs, which have lured scores of out-of-staters, many of whom stay. . . . Enough of O.J. Simpson lawyer Robert Shapiro’s self-promotion, now including a Richard Avedon portrait in July 25 New Yorker of Shapiro posing with a copy of the New York Daily News with Simpson’s photo on it. Still, the weekly is worth the unrelated Lawrence Wright inspection of an emerging dispute over whether the 2000 U.S. census should expand the traditional, four basic racial categories of white, black, American Indian or Alaskan native, and Asian or Pacific islander, and include one for mixed races. . . . August Parenting explores China’s clearly effective but arguably inhumane population-control policies. It’s a tale of sterilizations, forced abortions, stiff fines and rejections of requests for approval to have a first child simply because the government thinks an area already has enough people.
