In honor of CNN’s new, revitalized, factoid-filled Headline News, it seems only fair to offer bite-sized takes on this week’s world of magazines. My apologies for not including sports scores or celebrity birthdays.
Speaking of celebrities (there’s an adroit, TV-like segue), Aug. 20 People (“His Fight to Get Sober”) and Aug. 20 Us (“Ben’s Secret Battle”) are rather similar takes on actor Ben Affleck going into booze rehab. A critical component of the genre, the utterly banal and unidentified quote, is on wonderful display in Us, with “a source” telling the weekly, “If someone agrees to go to treatment, they know they have a problem.” . . . Another Hollywood tale of fame and excess is found in September Talk, where “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin offers a somewhat more complicated, self-destructive account of his drug excess, and high-handed treatment of colleagues, than has been the conventional line on his travails. . . . If searching for hipness, be informed that consumerism-crazed September Lucky declares that Thai massage leaves you relaxed, stronger, more limber, even taller, and is thus “the rage at spas across the country,” including at the Canyon Ranch SpaClub at the Venetian in Las Vegas, where it’s a mere $125 for 50 minutes. . . . The September issue of maniacally cutting-edge fashion bimonthly Jalouse pays homage to the late Austrian-born designer Rudi Gernreich, who gained international attention with his 1964 topless bathing suit and arguably had an enduring influence on fashion (a retrospective of his work will be staged soon at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia). . . . September On has a potentially helpful effort on the best college-application Web sites, including collegeboard.com, collegelink.com, collegenet.com, collegeview.com and embark.com. Still, this notes that some college administrators are short of exhilarated with a seeming flood of applications via the Web, claiming it’s now harder to figure out which students are actually serious about their school.
All right, the new, new, new Headline News is unavoidable. So, please, be informed that an 81-year-old woman in Kazakhstan has died of a spider bite and the miniscule weather map suggests it will be dry somewhere today.
Elsewhere, Summer Dissent has a good back-and-forth on the state of the Democratic Party between Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the Century Foundation, and Tom Edsall, an ace political reporter at the Washington Post, with the latter accentuating the marked grow in support among well-educated, white professionals who are liberal on abortion, school prayer and other so-called “culture war” issues. Most interesting may be Edsall’s musing on the potential political impact of the growth in the percentage of Americans owning stock, especially if the economy heads south and workers’ views of their corporate employers change and they begin to have far greater mistrust in the business sector. . . . The “special” third anniversary issue of Gear goes the somewhat tired route of the celebrity guest editor, in this case talk host Craig Kilborn, who exploits his momentarily lofty perch to assign himself a phone interview with actress Rachel Ward, who clearly doesn’t have a clue who he is. It’s also worth iconoclastic pro basketball owner Mark Cuban’s grousing about the state of the National Basketball Association. “Do we have a director of marketing?” he wonders.
And Aug. 17 Commonweal crafts a nifty profile on prolific British social anthropologist Mary Douglas, now 80, whose “Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo,” which is in part a look at macabre ritual murders among the Dinka of East Africa, was one of only four books written by women which made a 1995 list of the 100 most influential books since World War II compiled by the Times Literary Supplement.
