Before the next blog team-up begins--yes, there's another one coming--we've got a bit of deck-clearing linkery to get through.
Under the stewardship of Martin Brown, The Factual Opinion completed its latest music countdown, this one being for 1978. An index of all included posts, available here.
You can also catch the latest installment of the Martin Brown/Tucker Stone visual component, otherwise known as Advanced Common Sense, which is now available at comiXology. Or you can watch it right now. If you're digging on it, let us know. If you're not, hey, eat a million dicks and die.
Also available at the comiXology website is the latest edition of Tucker's This Ship Is Totally Sinking column, which is basically a bunch of run-on sentences about why Marvel did a better job making Captain America comics than DC did with making ones about Batman, which is really only something worth getting upset about if you have a lot of free time. Which he obviously does. While you're there, check out Joe "Jog" McCulloch's look at the latest Star Trek film, because it's spot-on accurate and fucking hilarious.
The Television column at TFO continues, with a barrage of season finale riffs, as well as an out-of-leftfield appearance by the famed Abhay Khosla of the Savage Critics. Check the comments section for that one.
In non-us news, former Comic Foundry boss Laura Hudson is up and running over at the all-new comics focused website Comics Alliance, and things seem to be cooking with gas already.
David Brothers and his esteemed PIC Esther Inglis-Arkell will be premiering the first episode of their 4th Letter podcast sometime in the next few days, and while it may not be up yet by the time you read this, David's glance at Naoki Urasawa's Pluto--as well as his five day 100 Bullets image marathon--is. So there's plenty of worth stuff to bide your time with while you wait for the dropping of bombs.
Frank Santoro, who graciously helped out with a recent comiXology column regarding the Cold Heat comic book series, will be bringing his own brand of grow-the-fuck-up, do-better style of comics education to New York in the coming month of June. If it's anything at all like Frank's brilliant lecture at the 2008 Mocca festival, it's pretty much a must-go for any wanna-be cartoonists. Information here.
And there's that. Economist Versus Idiot, you say? Let's talk.
For those who haven't seen or heard about it yet, this recent week saw the debut of the "new" Newsweek. Newsweek's plan--and this isn't an assumption, it's their own words--is to change the scope of their magazine completely, effectively ceding the "cover the world in a week" model of coverage to Time and the internet. Apparently, the current editor in chief is a big fan of the Economist, and is hoping to pursue the model they find so successful, which is one that's less dependent on advertising dollars. The Economist doesn't participate in the sort of low-cost subscription deals you can find for many American magazines, where ten bucks will give you a lifetime subscription to Entertainment Weekly as well as a membership in Save The Children From Braces. They have a smaller subscription base then cheaper magazines, but the higher price offsets the eyeball loss, and the advertising is notably different from what you'd see in cheaper news publications. (And it's clearly geared towards a higher-income base, which is why the Economist always has ads for airlines you've never heard of and hedge funds far beyond your income level.)
The behind-the-scenes plan here was to take the new Newsweek, this week's Economist, and compare the two. That plan fell on the rocks, and it wasn't due to lack of time, which is usually what crushes the Economist feature published here. No, it collapsed because the new Newsweek is, from even the most forgiving standard imaginable, a complete failure. Besides misspellings--understandable on blogs, unforgivable on a publication of that size--the writing is almost universally horrible, with the only exceptions being "The Take", where Newsweek took all six of its regular columnists and smashed them up into a tiny section behind a low-res full-page picture of Dick Cheney. (And you really need to see the picture itself to fully grasp how bad the presentation is--refusing to re-touch images is one thing, that's somewhat admirable, but the Cheney image is blurry and strange, the sort of picture that makes you reach for the Windex before realizing you aren't wearing glasses.) The columns themselves aren't particularly impressive from any 'good learnin' standpoint--Fareed Zakaria remains as dopey as he always is--but at least the writing in "The Take" isn't a slog through misspellings and sentence fragments, a claim the remainder of the magazine cannot make. What makes it even more atrocious is that the mentality behind Newsweek's change is laughably presented as being one where the editors have decided to turn the magazine into a "talking" magazine, the same kind of mix of op-ed and journalism that the Economist presents in both its "Leaders" section as well as its individual columns.
The failure to even hint at that in the magazine is a sight to behold. Besides a strange smattering of news--most of it outdated, even for a weekly--presented in a goofball paragraph section early in the magazine, there is a constant stream of poorly laid out graphic pieces depicting useless garbage like Keifer Sutherland's recent headbutt as being less-dignified than some tasteless joke that Wanda Sykes made at a recent White House function, a crappy bio-piece about Ray Kurzweil that reads like a crazed Wired fanzine, and an article about George W. Bush that, for no discernible reason, starts referring to various US presidents by whatever number they were. (George Bush Sr. becomes 41 and his son becomes 43. Why? Good question.) The less said about the transcription of a conference call between six American Idol contestants, the better. The cover feature, an "exclusive" interview with the current President may not be the most vapid thing involving Obama ever printed, but that's only because you have to include Perez Hilton and TMZ in the competition. It is, however, a shit interview that ends up printing Obama's statement "I don't watch anything on television but sports" in big letters simply because that's the only new piece of information the softball conversation contains. Michael Bloomberg turns in a crap article that reads like a late-night mash note to Obama, there's at least seven pages devoted to Newsweek talking about Newsweek, and the one solid piece of journalism--a five page article on Ugandan psychopath Joseph Kony--is interrupted by four pages of low-rent advertisements and illustrated by a group of photographs that have nothing to do with the article itself, other than the fact that they involve people in Uganda, half of whom aren't even related to Kony or his Lord's Army.
There's nothing newsworthy, at all, about this publication. The idea that it deserves to even be decried for some kind of perceived "liberal bias" misses the point entirely. It's a shitty, poorly written, horribly designed container of low-impact crap. Playing it against the Economist would serve only to make the British publication--which has its own serial problems, not the least of which include its current bend-over-and-take-it stance on financial buyouts, as well as a bloodcurdling infatuation with words no one uses--seem much better than it actually is. Make no mistake: the Economist is a better magazine than Newsweek. But let's put that in perspective: as Newsweek currently stands, so are Rolling Stone, Tiger Beat and Wizard. Anyways, the extra time that the Economist Versus Idiot team devoted to dealing with Newsweek threw the schedule off, and with the holiday schedule looming, the word came down the pipeline that it would be best to hold off. As always, the issue is freely available for the next 51 weeks at the Economist website, and stay tuned this week if the feature is one that interests you. It's tentatively returning to its earlier-in-the-week publication date at this site, both for the sake of timeliness, as well as the fact that the middle-of-the-night Saturday posting schedule is problematic at the best of times. If you're interested in the new Newsweek, god help you, it's on newsstands right now.
I was going to look at that issue of Newsweek, since we have a subscription for some reason (my wife likes it), but she spirited it away to some other room of the house than the breakfast table, which is the only place I read magazines. So I haven't taken a look; apparently it's not worth it, but now I do have a morbid curiosity.
You think Fareed Zakaria is dopey? I've never been less than impressed with him when he appears on the Daily Show, and the articles I've read seem pretty good. Perhaps my lack of knowledge about actual news and discussion of world events is the problem. You should change the title of the column to Economist vs. Idiot (who is still smarter than Matt Brady).
In other Newsweek commentary, it amused me greatly when my grandmother, upon spotting an issue of the magazine, declared it to be very, very liberal. I guess that's what you think when you're a Sean Hannity fan.
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2009.05.24 at 09:32
Work gets Newsweek, so its something I skim thru on Tuesday nights. I can't say I liked the new format much, but I didn't take a close enough look to spot all the flaws you did. Though I'm with Brady, could you expand on that Zakaria = Dopey?
Posted by: LurkerWithout | 2009.05.24 at 15:59
Following on Matt's comment, I think it's funny the Idiot can read the Economist in a week and I...don't fare so well. I'm managing one full issue each month and the commentaries and Leaders for the other weeks. I think your comment about their bend it over and take it on the financial buyouts is spot on, but that's the take in *every* financially minded publication. I mean, it's their paycheck. Back in 2001, when the computer industry was dying, I was up in arms and yelling about how exporting all the programming gigs out of the MidWest was the worst thing ever - basically sounding like every financial journalist right now. So, I give them a pass on that stuff.
Posted by: Kenny | 2009.05.24 at 17:20
Oh yeah, earlier Economist vs Idiot features would be awesome!
Posted by: Kenny | 2009.05.24 at 17:21
O think Advance Common Sense misses the boat by not having Just Dropped In by Kenny Rogers as your theme song. If you're going to do the whole backwards guitar riff thing, might as well go with the classic, nawmean?
Posted by: AERose | 2009.05.24 at 20:37
Eating that comic looks painful.
Posted by: Chad Nevett | 2009.05.24 at 21:01
I don't recommend eating them. I bet it would have been easier to use an old comic, or maybe to have soaked it in water. Either way, i sliced open both sides of my mouth and food tasted shitty for the next couple of days. Lesson learned!
Zakaria: I'll be honest: i like him fine on talk shows, i think he's well-spoken and I find him generally agreeable on the standard political/social type things. But the same could be said of a shitload of columnists, and that's mostly why I don't pay much attention to columnists. I've never found anything he's written to be remotely challenging--it's just comfortable back-pat writing, more of "well, this guy agrees with me on things, isn't that nice, how smart of him to do so."
I guess it comes down to what you look to these people for--the only piece I really liked in this issue of Newsweek was one about how spending your time within a culture of agreement makes one more likely to fall further on the extremist line. If you're a leftist who only reads Huffington, watches Jon Stewart, spends all your time hating on the Fox news channel, doesn't know anybody who voted for Bush, you start to become a bit of a lunatic in the same way that people like Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter are. You lose your perspective, and you lose the ability to actually debate and learn from people who disagree with you. I don't have anything against watching or reading people I agree with on principle--i'm not anti-Zakaria--but I don't find it benefits me much to read him on a regular basis, because I usually just nod along with his general premise and walk away thinking how smart I am. But that's bullshit: I'm not that smart. I'm not that educated. I'm a news-junkie, but I certainly don't know enough to get cocky about it. And the guys I disagree with--those are the ones who get me working to figure out why. I want to have an actual, factual reason why I don't agree with the Economist on a bail-out issue, I don't want to just parrot something I read in Reason. For me, reading guys like Zakaria, guys whose main goal strikes me as a sort of "dumbing down" the news cycle--they make me lazy.
Matt/Lurker: Just to be clear with you two, since you asked: you see how I'm using "i" and "me"? That's because I want to be abundantly clear that this is a totally personal method, it isn't one that I think anybody else SHOULD be doing, I don't think it's the "right" way. This isn't something Nina does, it isn't what my brother does (my brother knows this shit better than me, by far). It's just the way my dad did it, and while that sounds cheesy, it's true: find the smartest motherfucker you don't agree with, and figure out why they're wrong. Do it on your own. Does it prove beneficial to me? I couldn't tell you. I hope so.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2009.05.25 at 01:17
That was incredibly well-said, Stoney. More proof that you're not the idiot you claim to be. Your secret is out!
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2009.05.26 at 00:09
Ooh, sorry about the mouth. You have suffered for your art!
Posted by: NoahB | 2009.05.26 at 07:56