It’s summertime, which for the nation’s big newsweeklies means special issues devoted to random topics.
In a double issue, Newsweek doles out its “Giving Back Awards”: “15 Winners Who Use Fame, Fortune, Heart and Soul to Help Others.” The winners include one journalist, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, one of the smiling faces on the cover alongside Brad Pitt’s. The magazine’s project is “an antidote to bad news and New York cynicism,” as one Newsweek editor put it, while Mark Whitaker reports that “Every reporter who worked on the project was moved by the people they met”; for example, “Claudia Kalb wept after she saw the kids whom Dr. Fred Kaplan treats for a rare childhood disease.”
But if you’re the sort of cold-hearted news junkie who would still prefer to read about a one-legged Taliban fighter, Newsweek‘s “profile in brutality” of Mullah Dadullah Akhund, “a one-legged guerrilla commander in southern Afghanistan who now seems bent on matching or exceeding Zarqawi’s ugly reputation,” does the trick.
“This year’s armed push by the Taliban has been the biggest and bloodiest since they lost Kabul in 2001, and Dadullah is believed to be spearheading it,” Newsweek reports, adding that “For the first time in memory, Taliban guerrillas under Dadullah have succeeded in capturing government installations in the remote south, if only for brief periods.” Recruitment videos show what this guy is capable of: “In one scene, the black-turbaned Taliban commander, posing for the camera in a southern Afghan moonscape, blasts away at an unseen target with a heavy machine gun. … The most revolting footage shows a gang of Dadullah’s thugs slitting the throats, one by one, of six Afghans they accuse of spying for the Americans.”
Dadullah has been known to massacre civilians by the hundreds, and his third in command, Mullah Ghul Agha, told Newsweek that Dadullah’s men fear his anger, too. “He would kill anyone for not obeying orders,” Agha told the magazine in an interview “in an apple orchard on a small farm.” “I certainly would not want to face Dadullah on the battlefield.”
Elsewhere in the magazine, Jonathan Alter has a smart analysis of what Democrats need to do to beat back Karl Rove’s latest “ginning up [of] the slime machine” this summer and fall, while Fareed Zakaria explains “Why We Don’t Get No Respect,” internationally speaking.
While Newsweek celebrates winners of the present, Time takes us back in time nearly 100 years to commemorate a lionhearted titan of the past: Theodore Roosevelt. For its fifth annual “Making of America” issue (and the first issue under new managing editor Richard Stengel), Time produces a sprawling package that covers pretty much everything you’d need to know about the outsized man who “not only remade America,” but “also charmed the pants off everybody while he did it.”
“Roosevelt’s years in the White House were one of those hinges upon which the whole of American history sometimes turns,” Time‘s Richard Lacayo explains in an overview. “Again and again, he framed the questions we still ask. How much influence should the government have over the economy? How much power should the U.S. exert in the wider world? What should we do to protect the environment?” Among the plethora of Teddy stories and graphics, a sidebar on his lingering turns of phrase (“Bully pulpit,” “My hat is in the ring” and “Good to the last drop” among them) and a look back at the unique presidential election of 1912 (in mid-October Roosevelt was shot in the chest but proceeded to give a 90-minute speech anyway) stand out.
Elsewhere, Time conducts a funny Q&A with Imelda Marcos (“[A]ctually that’s my biggest defense: when they opened my closet, they found shoes instead of skeletons”), and publishes a moderately interesting profile of Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran.
Last but not least, we turn to U.S. News & World Report, which gives us a compelling operational account of one of the American military’s battles against Taliban fighters in Afghanistan’s Ghazni Province.
Most of the magazine, however, is devoted to imparting “Secrets to a STRESS-FREE SUMMER,” as the cover tells us. “With that kind of [work-related email and voicemail] seepage, no wonder vacation itineraries begin to resemble work agendas, with every minute made to COUNT, as you CRAM in as much FUN as possible,” Diane Cole writes in her lead story, “Summer Ease.” “But wait (yes, you heard me, WAIT): Don’t those STRESS-inducing CAPITAL LETTERS spell just the opposite of TIME OFF?”
And if THAT doesn’t lower your blood pressure, U.S. News has 25 other pieces that will try.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.