The Week: Tiny magazine delivers superior news
I've been getting a lot of my news lately from The Week, a weekly news magazine that offers concise news from all over the world, by mainly reporting from other news sources.
The Week is thin -- about 50 pages -- and doesn't have hefty feature articles and analyses. A typical story covers all the important details in less than a page. They typically tell what happened, then highlight news coverage by other sources, usually alternating sources with differing points of view. The net result is remarkably balanced and objective. The Week covers the rest of the world in more detail than most US publications. They carry summaries of the best columns, talking points, and quotes.
It's not just the news. They go on to cover art, theater, films, music, and books in their "Review of Reviews," assembled from others' reviews. They cover People, Science and Health, Food, Real Estate, Travel, Consumer Gear, Business, and Television.
They have many nuggets I don't see elsewhere. This week in This Week, I learned that ventriloquist Paul Winchell was also an inventor with dozens of patents and was the voice of Tigger and one of the Smurfs; about the "fastest, most lovingly built production car in the world" (the $600,000 Koenigsegg CCR); the top-rated health-care-rating websites; that the number of registered lobbyists in Washington DC has doubled since 2000, to 35,000; that about 40% of math and science grad students in the US are foreigners -- for engineers, the figure is 50%; that birds prefer to poop on white cars, according to a Bristol University study. I read relatively in-depth articles on German soldiers' rights to disobey and on the pain and pleasure at the Tour de France from the book, Lance Armstrong's War.
I've subscribed for about four months now and find myself waiting for the magazine to arrive so I can make sense of the news. I think they admirably live up to their slogan, "All you need to know about everything that matters."
Recent Comments