Michael Hirschorn talks to Bob Cohn about why the current age spells doom for Time and Newsweek, but not for The Economist.
In the digital age, with its overabundance of information, the modern newsweekly is in a particularly poignant position. Designed nearly a century ago to be all things to all people, it Chaplin-esquely tries to straddle thousands of rapidly fragmenting micro-niches, a mainframe in an iTouch world. The audience it was created to serve--middlebrow; curious, but not too curious; engaged, but only to a point--no longer exists.
Sandra Tsing Loh packs all of her belongings into a 10-by-10-foot U-Haul storage unit and leaves married life behind
Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing. This was a 20-year partnership. My husband is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don’t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything.
James Parker considers the incoherent enchantments of a scene from The Goblet of Fire
To her global readership, a girl-less Harry Potter, who waves his wand in an erotic vacuum, is no Harry Potter at all. The movie adaptations of her work have served as a sort of time-lapse study of puberty: we’ve seen Harry (played by Daniel Radcliffe) sprout up from a round-faced minor, blinking through the fumes of his latest supernatural act, into a bony young man with the pallor and intensity of an English First World War poet. He’s grown moody, complicated, agonized even. And the closer he gets to sex, the trickier things become.
Paul Starobin, author of the book After America, talks to James Gibney about
the end of U.S. dominance
Will Chileans come to admire Chairman Mao more than Uncle Sam?
Bob Wright explains to Andrew Sullivan how the cruel, provincial gods of ancient Greece became the benign, cosmopolitan deities of today
