Most Monday magazines missed out on the Japan tragedy last week and are focusing on it now. Too bad, of course, that they’re out too soon to cover Libya.
Newsweek Japan coverage is included in an “Apocalypse Now” cover showing a giant cresting wave and also including tsunamis, earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, refolutions and "economies on the brink" as apocalyptic events converging all at once. It also asks, “What the #@%! is next?” in further contributing to what one reader decries inside as the new Newsweek’s declining vocabulary standards. As for the “How Ignorant Are You?” test promoted atop the page, well, I didn’t take it.
Time’s “Special Report” centers on “Japan’s Meltdown” with a weeping woman on the cover, and leaves it at that. The Economist has an illustration depicting “The fallout” and suggests it’s “Time to support the Arab rebels.”
The New Yorker, too, front’s “Japan’s Crisis,” with its “Dark Spring” cover painting depicting a tree with flowers shaped like the international radiation symbol. Besides several Japan-related stories, the cover overlap highlights its “Style Focus,” consisting of “Clash of the makeup moguls,” “Louboutin’s shoe laboratory” and “Spanx for everything.”
New York has a bicyclist on its cover to go with its “Bikelash” theme concerning the city’s battle over bike lanes. “It isn’t about bikes vs. cars, or borough vs. borough—it’s about competing ideas of what, and who, a city is for,” the writer suggests, also wondering, “Is New York too New York for bike lanes?” Other features examine the assault on teachers from both right and left, and “The Real Housewives of Kensington Palace,” i.e., Kate Middleton.
Hollywood Reporter has "Jodie Foster Unedited" on its cover, Foster having just screened her controversial upcoming directorial effort The Beaver at the South By Southwest music/film trade conference in Austin. The film, which concerns a troubled executive who communicates via a beaver hand puppet, has been held back because of star Mel Gibson’s latest legal problems. The Reporter calls Foster and Gibson “the yin and yang of American pop culture” and digs into “her unusual film and devotion” to him. The issue also assesses the impact of Hollywood on the “Japan Crisis” and Facebook’s hand in the “Assault on Netflix.”
Leave it to Billboard to bring up Libya by way of “Behind the Gadhafi Gig Headlines—The Big Money is Back in Coporate Shows” (the story was generated by the activities of Beyonce and other superstar artists, who have lately come under scrutiny for playing high-paying private gigs for the Ghadafi clan). But the cover asks “Is the Music Biz Invited?”—and features a talk with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in observing Twitter’s fifth birthday and its music business implications.
And with all that’s happening in the world, in case anyone’s still interested in all things Charlie Sheen, Entertainment Weekly investigates “the Future of Two And A Half Men.” But that’s inside. The cover story is Castle’s Nathan Fillion, “Geek God.”
--jim bessman
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